RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/new-york-times-turns-blind-eye-to-violence-in-miami

As the trial of officer Derek Chauvin for the death of George Floyd begins, downtown Minneapolis has already boarded itself up, though the verdict is months away.

Unlike the fencing that arose around Washington following the January 6 Capitol riot, the Minneapolis precautions are fully justified. Indeed, the bollards and barricades will grow denser as the verdict nears but will still prove inadequate if Chauvin is not convicted of murder.

A firestorm would engulf the city and the nation that will dwarf the riotous destruction of 2020. No trial of a police officer to date has been preceded by the anti-police sentiment and admonitory violence seen over the last year. It is improbable, therefore, that the Chauvin jury will vote to acquit, whatever evidence the defense presents.

In the unlikely event that Chauvin is acquitted, however, the New York Times recently provided a preview of how it and the rest of the mainstream media will cover the ensuing riots. Earlier this month, Miami Beach endured anarchic behavior from an influx of spring break tourists.

Shootings and street brawls triggered stampedes. People hit one another with bar glasses and chairs. More than 100 guns have been confiscated. Officers trying to disperse large, illegally gathering crowds were assaulted with rocks and bottles. Commercial property was destroyed. Restaurant customers walked away from their meals without paying. At least one hotel shut down its food service, unable to protect its employees and patrons. Police made over 350 felony arrests and twice as many misdemeanor arrests.

And in the most serious crime, two spring breakers from North Carolina drugged a 24-year-old woman from Pennsylvania and raped her while she was passed out, according to the confession of one. The two assailants left her semi-nude and unconscious in her hotel room, stealing her phone and wallet for good measure. Apparently confident in their immunity from the law, they used her credit cards throughout Miami Beach for subsequent purchases. A few hours after the two rapists walked out of her hotel room, hotel staff found her dead there.

It is a virtually inviolate rule that if police crack down on disorder involving black people, the New York Times will accuse the police of racism. This rule held regarding the Miami Beach festivities. The Times covered the chaos only to criticize Miami officials’ anti-black bias.

Faced with rising mob mayhem, Miami’s mayor declared an 8:00 p.m. curfew for Saturday, March 19. It was universally ignored. The streets were impassable; thousands of people stuck around. The city declared a state of emergency. Police officers in riot gear tried to disperse the crowd with pepper balls, to minimal effect.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/corporate-americas-big-lie-11617315583?st=sahl3jgmexpu4nw&reflink=article_email_share

Corporate chieftains last year criticized Donald Trump for denying his re-election defeat. So it’s quite a spectacle to see them actively spreading the left’s own big lie about elections.

According to Delta CEO Ed Bastian, there is only one reason Georgia passed a voting reform: to suppress the votes of black Americans and other minorities. Georgia’s Republican Legislature used the “excuse” of voter fraud to “make it harder for many underrepresented voters” to “exercise their constitutional right to elect their representatives,” Mr. Bastian wrote this week in a memo to employees.

Mr. Bastian has plenty of company in the C-suites. Some 72 black executives, including the CEO of Merck and a former CEO of American Express, signed an open letter calling on corporate colleagues to fight “undemocratic” and “un-American” GOP efforts across the states to “assault” the “fundamental tenets of our democracy.” Coca-Cola, Microsoft and Apple chimed in, and dozens more are readying outraged press releases.

Nancy Pelosi couldn’t be more thrilled. Democrats and the activist left have long honed their techniques for intimidating corporations. They successfully pressured companies into withdrawing contributions from free-market groups, into embracing a climate-change agenda, into refraining from political contributions, into adopting new “social” investment criteria.

Enlisting corporate America to help peddle a patently false narrative is their biggest success by far. The left spent last year using litigation and political pressure to alter and weaken election standards across the country. Democratic lawmakers and the Biden administration moved swiftly to cement this effort with a federal takeover of state election law, the bill known as H.R.1.

Its enactment is still no sure thing, so the left is trying to block election-reform efforts at the state level. Central to this campaign is the dishonest claim that Republicans are launching these efforts only because they lost the White House and because they want to cripple the minority vote. Activists have spent weeks threatening companies that didn’t join them with boycotts, protests and the label of “Jim Crow racists,” and companies have complied.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/03/biden_left_with_egg_on_his_face_as_facts_of_capitol_riot_wind_through_courts.html

Democrats have been bloviating for months now about an “insurrection” and a ‘threat to democracy’ in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. They’ve razor-wired up the Capitol and deployed tens of thousands of unsmiling National Guard troops, making the capital of the free world look more like Kinshasa, Yamoussoukro, Damascus, or Cairo. Joe Biden called it an “existential” threat to the U.S., trying to go Sartre on us. Democrat narrative-maker (and creative writing major) Ben Rhodes, according to MSNBC claimed:  “The Jan 6th insurrection was a ‘terrorist attack on the heart of American democracy.’”

Which presumably should have offered some pitched battles, explosions, blood in the streets, heads on pikes, mobs with torches, and lots and lots of guns, the way other people’s insurrections do.

Nope, the miserable event was nothing but a pumped-up crowd upset about election fraud, with a few bounders, and a situation that got out of control with an inadequate Capitol police guard allowing, or even inviting them, to come in to the Capitol to yell about it.

This occurred as Congress formalized the presidential vote for Joe Biden, in an election where all signs point to a lot of ballot fraud.

The rest was just protest theatre, plenty of arrests, lot of trespassing, some vandalism, lots of selfies posted conveniently for prosecutors on social media, lots of tattling, and no question as to how the outcome was going to turn out. There were five deaths, four of unarmed protestors, including one who was shot at close range in the neck by an unnamed Capitol police officer, and one of a police officer who was quickly cremated amid shifting stories, and a mendacious New York Times report, with inflammatory claims about the circumstances of how he died. That’s since been discredited, leaving them with egg all over their faces.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/03/31/radical-new-rules-for-post-america/

There are 10 new ideas that are changing America, maybe permanently.

1) Money is a construct. It can be created from thin air. Annual deficits and aggregate national debt no longer matter much.

Prior presidents ran up huge annual deficits, but at least there were some concessions that the money was real and had to be paid back. Not now. As we near $30 trillion in national debt and 110 percent of annual GDP, our elites either believe permanent zero interest rates make the cascading obligation irrelevant, or the larger the debt, the more likely we will be forced to address needed income redistribution.

2) Laws are not necessarily binding anymore. Joe Biden took an oath to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” But he has willfully rendered federal immigration laws null and void. Some rioters are prosecuted for violating federal laws, others not so much. Arrests, prosecutions, and trials are all fluid. Ideology governs when a law is still considered a law.

Crime rates do not necessarily matter. If someone is carjacked, assaulted or shot, it can be understood to be as much the victim’s fault as the perpetrator’s. Either the victim was too lax, uncaring and insensitive, or he provoked his attacker. How useful the crime is to the larger agendas of the Left determines whether a victim is really a victim, and the victimizer really a victimizer.

3) Racialism is now acceptable. We are defined first by our ethnicity or religion, and only secondarily — if at all — by an American commonality. The explicit exclusion of whites from college dorms, safe spaces, and federal aid programs is now noncontroversial. It is unspoken payback for perceived past sins, or a type of “good” racism. Falsely being called a racist makes one more guilty than falsely calling someone else a racist.

4) The immigrant is mostly preferable to the citizen. The newcomer, unlike the host, is not stained by the sins of America’s founding and history. Most citizens currently must follow quarantine rules and social distancing, stay out of school and obey all the laws.

Yet those entering the United States illegally need not follow such apparently superfluous COVID-19 rules. Their children should be immediately schooled without worry of quarantine. Immigrants need not worry about their illegal entry or residence in America. Our elites believe illegal entrants more closely resemble the “founders” than do legal citizens, about half of whom they consider irredeemable.

5) Most Americans should be treated as we would treat little children. They cannot be asked to provide an ID to vote. “Noble lies” by our elites about COVID-19 rules are necessary to protect “Neanderthals” from themselves.

Americans deserve relief from the stress of grades, standardized testing, and normative rules of school behavior. They still are clueless about why it is good for them to pay far more for their gasoline, heating, and air conditioning.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/stephen-kruiser/2021/04/01/the-morning-briefing-lol-words-dont-mean-anything-and-everything-is-racist-now-n1436586

There is so much to learn about ourselves, society, and history if we just put aside our privilege and pay attention to the ongoing, probably drug-induced, fictional account of reality that leftists are writing these days.

Everything in their telling of the story is different than what most have learned, feel, or see in front of us. I occasionally think that the progs are visiting from a parallel dimension and sharing accounts of what things are like in their worlds. Turns out they are all living here. They’re just experiencing things differently.

Miserably, mostly.

We’ve known for a while now that the Left rejects absolute truth and objective reality. They probably hate apple pie too, but that’s going to require further research.

The current state of the leftist collective fever focuses on creating permanent divisions among people that go above and beyond the ones that already exist. Yes, we’re often a terrible species, but they’d like us to find new reasons to hate each other and ourselves.

A great way to do that is to just start making stuff up.

Matt had a couple of posts yesterday that perfectly illustrated how the Left is working overtime to convince people that white supremacy and racism permeate, well, everything.

The first one had to do with a dictionary arbitrarily redefining words to mean something other than what they actually mean:

Merriam-Webster has recently updated its definition of what it means to be racially color-blind. And, in a nutshell, it means it’s impossible to not be racist.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/kamalas-husband-hosts-virtual-passover-hell-daniel-greenfield/

After twenty minutes of dead air, Biden’s Virtual Passover got underway. Biden, who can only be counted on to remain coherent for short stretches of time before launching into a random tirade, only showed up briefly.  And that was the only good thing about Virtual Passover.

Virtual Passover, like the Biden administration, makes no sense. But the Biden administration can’t be expected to ruin every aspect of our lives, without also ruining Passover.

Kamala Harris had been delegated to take over the border crisis, and so her husband, Brentwood entertainment lawyer, Douglas Emhoff, took over the job of ruining Passover.

Dubbed a “Virtual Passover Celebration”, it was not a celebration, it had nothing to do with Passover, but it was virtual. The one thing that the Biden administration can be relied on is to be virtual. And by being virtual, to offer nothing real. Passover wasn’t going to change that.

Hosted by “Second Gentleman Douglas Emhoff”, also known as the father of Kamala’s obnoxious stepchildren, his scripted speeches proved that everything he knows about Judaism he learned from leftist anti-Israel radicals and late night reruns of The Nanny.

Emhoff started out by touting Sharon Brous and IKAR.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/04/01/nancy-pelosi-the-real-insurrectionist/

The power hungry Democrats want to rule rather than govern.

The media are aglow with news that two U.S. Capitol Police officers are suing Donald Trump for inflaming, encouraging, inciting and directing a riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6. It fits their narrative. But this doesn’t and therefore gets no coverage: The real insurgent is the speaker of the House.

Two days after the regrettable events at the Capitol, which no serious or honest person would call an insurrection, Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi called U.S. Army Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Her objective was to strip Donald Trump of his constitutional executive authority. She followed up the call with a letter to her power-hungry Democratic colleagues:

This morning, I spoke to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley to discuss available precautions for preventing an unstable president from initiating military hostilities or accessing the launch codes and ordering a nuclear strike. The situation of this unhinged president could not be more dangerous, and we must do everything that we can to protect the American people from his unbalanced assault on our country and our democracy.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/here-come-the-biden-taxes-11617231225?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

So much for the illusion of cost-free spending blowouts. The bill for President Biden’s agenda is coming due, starting with Wednesday’s proposal for the largest corporate tax increase in decades. Can we finally drop the pretense that any of this is moderate or unifying or bipartisan?

Mr. Biden’s corporate tax increase alone is more than $1.5 trillion over 10 years, with another $1.5 trillion coming soon on individual income and investment. That’s about $300 billion a year, or 1.36% of GDP each year, assuming U.S. GDP of $22 trillion. Dan Clifton of Strategas Research Partners compares that to Bill Clinton’s 1993 tax increase of 0.4% of GDP, making the Biden increase the largest since 1968.

***

Mr. Biden’s corporate increase amounts to the restoration of the Obama-era corporate tax burden, only much more so. The GOP tax reform of 2017 was designed to fix a corporate tax system that was uncompetitive and convoluted. Companies paid taxes in countries where they earned the income, but then again if they returned the money to the U.S. Trillions of dollars piled up overseas. Remember the string of corporate “inversions” when CEOs moved their headquarters overseas?

Those inversions all but ended after 2017 as reform lowered the top corporate rate to 21% from 35% and moved the U.S. closer to a territorial tax system in which income is taxed where it is earned. Mr. Clifton calculates that companies repatriated $1.6 trillion from overseas to the U.S. from 2018-2020, which they deployed for a variety of useful economic purposes. The repatriation total three years before reform: only $495 billion.

https://asiatimes.com/2021/04/biden-2-3-tn-boondoggle-is-no-challenge-to-chin

Democrats would hike corporate taxes without restoring the R&D incentives that the Trump tax cut eliminated.

President Joe Biden’s proposed $2.3 trillion spending package unveiled March 31 should have come a day later, as an April Fool’s exercise.

Labeled an infrastructure package, it offers just $447 billion for transportation infrastructure over eight years. That’s less than a quarter of the most widely accepted estimates for the US infrastructure deficit.

On February 21, Biden told a group of US senators, “If we don’t get moving, [the Chinese] are going to eat our lunch. They’re investing billions of dollars dealing with a whole range of issues that relate to transportation, the environment and a whole range of other things. We just have to step up.”

Biden might as well instruct Secretary of State Blinken to ask the Chinese if they want fries with that.

Most of the $2.3 trillion will buy votes rather than infrastructure, including $400 billion for “elder and disability care,” $213 billion for “green and affordable homes,” $174 billion for electric vehicles, $137 billion for “school and childcare infrastructure,” $100 billion for “job training” and so forth.