RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/rolling-the-dice-on-chaos-the-supreme-cou

T here’s one thing we’ve forgotten to mention about political intimidation of the Supreme Court. It works.

On the right, and among those who respect history, tradition, and stability, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Court-packing gambit is remembered as a welcome rejection of radicalism: At the pinnacle of his influence, the most powerful president of the 20th century could not prevail on his scheme to expand the Court and fill it with like-minded, politically willful progressives, even though his party controlled both houses of Congress by decisive margins.

Yet, on the left, and especially among Alinskyites schooled in the extortionate leveraging of power, the Court-packing threat is remembered as a triumph. It provoked the famous “switch in time that saved nine”: Fearful that FDR would follow through and destroy the Court’s standing as a rule-of-law institution, the Court — led by Justice Owen Roberts — dramatically shifted, upholding the New Deal it had been stalling, and ushering in the foundations of progressive governance.

Credible Court-packing threats by the Left intimidate moderate, politically minded justices, exactly as they are meant to do.

Duly cowed by today’s Court-packing threats, Chief Justice John Roberts has steered the Court into a possible disaster that has been foreseeable (and foreseen) for weeks. Last night, the justices made clear that they will not resolve state voting-law disputes prior to next Tuesday’s election. They will roll the dice on chaos, and all its potentially ruinous ramifications — not just for the country but for the Court.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16704/russian-disinformation

One must also consider the “arguments” about the “evidence” of Russian disinformation. First off, we have unending “investigations” by various bodies and persons who are not qualified to investigate a price check at Wal-Mart. Here, I speak of persons like Adam Schiff or the members and staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Second, we have the “tv experts.” These folks are usually the former heads of the agencies and departments that are actually guilty of the subversion and sedition that got us to this point. Think of John Brennan giving his expert opinion on the innocence and honor of James Comey. When any of these characters (and paid CNN contributors) invokes Russian disinformation (usually quoting each other), you know they are lying. Period.

Of course, anyone who asks questions about any of the logical disconnects and fallacies of any alleged Russian disinformation campaign must be on Putin’s payroll. Ask a question? Sure “comrade,” go ahead!

It is terribly important to be reminded of all these things just a few days before the election. You should go to your polling place in-person and “vote angry.” You’ve been lied to – savagely – for nearly four years. Go ahead and take your electoral revenge.

We have been subjected to four years of large parts of the US government shrieking about Russia and the threats posed by that country to the safety of our republic. How did so many miss their own serial treasons, in concert with the Soviet and Russian governments, dating back to 1917? Let us refresh our recollections of how so many Americans reframed history and disinformation. Some of the following may be “lost history” to you, but that is okay, because we definitely need some reminders before election day.

FDR himself personally schmoozed Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs Maxim Litvinov in the White House and acknowledged the USSR diplomatically for no US advantage whatsoever in November of 1933. When Litvinov returned to his embassy from the White House, he openly mocked FDR’s naïveté and gullibility to his staff.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/masks-are-a-distraction-from-the-pandemic-reality-11603927026?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

Dr. Ladapo is an associate professor at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine.

A hallmark of Covid-19 pandemic policy has been the failure of political leaders and health officials to anticipate the unintended consequences of their actions. This tendency has haunted many decisions, from lockdowns that triggered enormous unemployment and increased alcohol and drug abuse, to school closures that are widening educational disparities between rich and poor families. Mask mandates may also have unintended consequences that outweigh the benefits.

First, consider how the debate has evolved and the underlying scientific evidence. Several randomized trials of community or household masking have been completed. Most have shown that wearing a mask has little or no effect on respiratory virus transmission, according to a review published earlier this year in Emerging Infectious Diseases, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s journal. In March, when Anthony Fauci said, “wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better” but “it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think it is,” his statement reflected scientific consensus, and was consistent with the World Health Organization’s guidance.

Almost overnight, the recommendations flipped. The reason? The risk of asymptomatic transmission. Health officials said mask mandates were now not only reasonable but critical. This is a weak rationale, given that presymptomatic spread of respiratory viruses isn’t a novel phenomenon in public health. Asymptomatic cases of influenza occur in up to a third of patients, according to a 2016 report in Emerging Infectious Diseases, and even more patients had mild cases that are never diagnosed. Asymptomatic or mild cases appear to contribute more to Covid-19 transmission, but this happens in flu cases, too, though no one has called for mask mandates during flu season.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/sarah-hoyt/2020/10/27/how-the-left-is-using-americans-empathy-and-decency-to-destroy-us-n1097734

A lot of people are upset and worried about how easy it was for the various state governments to perform illegal takings on the population by preventing businesses from operating or from operating normally for months on end, in the absence of an immediate and pressing emergency.

Yes, I know COVID-19 was presented as an immediate and pressing emergency. But presenting it as such doesn’t make it so.

Yes, it is dangerous, mostly to the very elderly and severely immune-compromised. Yes, it behooves a civilized society to protect those people.

Which we didn’t do. Instead, we treated the virus as though it were uniformly dangerous and just as likely to kill the family’s four-year-old as grandma. We closed schools (and re-opened a number of them as daycare centers), selectively closed stores (because apparently, the virus is far less dangerous in pot dispensaries than in bookstores, say), mandated ridiculously low occupancy for restaurants (anyone who has dined out in both NYC and anywhere out West knows that in the West our tables are already “distanced”) and generally set our hair on fire and ran around screaming that it hurts.

Which it very well should, because stupidity should hurt. Most Democrat-controlled states in fact seem to have gone out of their way to “make it hurt,” including Governor Newsom’s insistence that Californians not celebrate Thanksgiving.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2020/10/no-sanity-no-kumbaya-no-quarter/

“Perhaps once there was a possibility of civil intercourse with those on the Left but no longer, not with the crazies in full command of what laughably sees itself as the ‘progressive’ side of politics. Gender-confused men competing against women, renewables rorters as prophets of green salvation, foes of free speech — there can be no common ground with that lot.”

I briefly caught the Hollywood actor Matthew McConaughey being interviewed on Fox News the other day. Heard him say that whoever won the election he hoped Americans would come together. He seemed from the brief bit I saw to be much less radically progressive than his peers. But he’s obviously a dreamer. There is no coming together. There is no possible rapprochement between the loonies that now occupy the political Left and sensible people. As a sensible person myself, or so I like to think, let me make my position crystal clear by way of illustrations.

Last week on the Alan Jones Show, Mark Latham revealed instructional videos teaching teachers in NSW how to corrupt the minds of schoolchildren by teaching them that their sexual identity is a “social construct.” Hey, your willies or vaginas are just in your minds, don’t you know? Moreover, disgustingly, teachers are being advised to keep any expressed gender confusion among little Bills and Jills — and why wouldn’t they be confused attending school these days — under wraps from their parents, lest those old fogies don’t understand.

I have nothing in common with people who perpetrate or support this kind of child abuse and I have no intention of ever giving them the time of day. Where to go now? There are so many examples. Let’s go to the really inane, to rich American footballer Colin Kaepernick and his latest delusional call for the abolition of police forces and prisons: “Another world is possible, a world grounded in love, justice, and accountability, a world grounded in safety and good health, a world grounded in meeting the needs of people. Abolition now.”

It is hard to know where to start in commenting on this utopian tripe. Luckily, I don’t have to, the wonderfully sensible and articulate Heather Mac Donald did it on the Tucker Carlson Show. I will pick out just a few phrases but you should, let me reiterate should, watch the whole 4½ minute clip. She is wonderfully direct and uncompromising. Male conservative commentators could learn a thing or two.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/the-left-doesnt-fear-amy-coney-barrett-it-fears-the-constitution/

The rest is noise.

Nothing threatens the progressive project more than the existence of a Supreme Court that adheres to the Constitution. It’s really that simple.

That’s what the tantrum over Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation is all about. The notion that the same Democrats who shelved the judicial filibuster and now threaten to destroy the separation of powers with a Court-packing revenge scheme — the same people, incidentally, so fond of smear-drenched confirmation hearings — are sticklers for process or decorum is simply ludicrous.For one thing, no norms have been undone by the confirmation of Barrett. If Democrats won a Senate majority in 2016, Merrick Garland would already be ensconced in the Supreme Court, election or no election. Many of the same Democrats now feigning outrage over Barrett’s confirmation, including Joe Biden, argued back then that it was the constitutional duty of the Senate to take up a vote. Our living constitution apparently offers contradicting directions from one election to the next.

If Trump had nominated Garland to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Democrats wouldn’t have any problem placing him on the Court — not even on November 2. Liberals act as if they are imbued with a theological right to dictate not only the terms, but also the nominees, of confirmation hearings whether they win or lose elections.

And when you’re under the impression that the system exists solely to facilitate your partisan agenda, something will seem “broken” every time you lose. When Barack Obama was unable to pass his agenda after 2010, the system suffered from “dysfunction.” How many times did we hear that term? But now that Democrats are in the Senate minority, employing the very same tools to slow the president, we must “fix” the Electoral College, the Senate, and, most recently, the Supreme Court. If Democrats win back the presidency in 2020, the opposition will no longer be “resisting,” it will be “obstructing.” The filibuster will need fixing again. The media will again obsess over the problem of “gridlock.” History’s trajectory arcs left, and everything else is just an impediment.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-american-experiment-is-on-life-support-11603728139

‘Death to America!” is a common refrain from antifa rioters from Portland, Ore., to Kenosha, Wis. Children are in the streets calling for the country’s destruction while mobs of college kids trash public spaces, filming themselves as though part of a performance-art spectacle. Neither political party has been willing or able to end this anarchy. Extremism becomes more entrenched in American politics with each passing day.

These acts of violence encapsulate five decades of neo-Marxist indoctrination in American schools, colleges and universities. The left’s “long march” through the institutions is all but complete. Extreme intolerance has now replaced the liberal notion of negotiated compromise that is the sine qua non of democracy. America’s young, especially those raised in middle-class or affluent homes, have been so brainwashed that they no longer notice how absurd it is to call for the eradication of their own nation-state, and to do so in the lingo of Iran’s mullahs.

Their ignorance of history is the hallmark of the current crisis. Few seem able to grasp the complex, often painful, but on balance grand story of America—one that is an example of what a people committed to individual freedom can achieve. Instead, they have been indoctrinated to reduce American life to a racial binary of whites vs. “people of color.” It’s much like the communist binary of the bourgeoisie vs. the proletariat that the Bolsheviks used to seize power in 1917, with millions perishing in the totalitarian Soviet experiment that followed.

The violence suggests that tribalism based on group identity is poised to succeed the larger national community that for more than two centuries has protected and expanded freedom around the world. The American nation-state is a unique experiment, unparalleled in history: a political project that grew from an established Anglo colonial settler culture, and that forged a distinct national identity strong enough to acculturate the many ethnic groups that have immigrated, while preserving a strong sense of its unitary creed.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/jeff-reynolds/2020/10/26/whos-really-to-blame-for-the-riots-in-american-cities-pt-2-with-michael-yon-n1084277

Leaders in American cities have spent most of 2020 deflecting blame for the violent riots that have dominated them. Much of the finger-pointing has focused on Proud Boys, Patriot Prayer, and other right wing groups. These groups have formed over the past half decade as a response to the chaos caused in Portland, along with many other large American cities, by radical leftist groups like Black Lives Matter protests, riots led by antifa and By Any Means Necessary (BAMN), and other militant marxist groups utilizing black bloc tactics to disrupt American free society.

But what are these right wing groups? Are they fascists, white supremacists, and defenders of the systems of racism endemic to America’s core, as alleged by the Left? Are they the dreaded militias hell bent on domestic terrorism? How do they compare to antifa, BLM, or BAMN?

Michael Yon, a war correspondent who has covered insurrections all over the globe, came to Portland in September to gather intelligence on the civil unrest in the streets. This is part two of his conversation with PJ Media, in which he describes his investigation into the right wing groups that have sprung up to oppose antifa and BLM and their black bloc tactics to create chaos and destruction across the Pacific Northwest.

Part One: How Close Is the U.S. to Civil War? A War Correspondent Is in Portland to Find Out

“Groups like Proud Boys,” Yon said, “form in these vacuums when you feel like the government is not doing their job, and you fear for the lives of your family, yourself, you fear for your community being burned down. That’s when militias form everywhere. That’s what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan, and it’s happened in America. Our whole country was formed on militias.”

https://www.city-journal.org/anarchy-in-new-york

After Attorney General William Barr designated New York, along with Portland and Seattle, as “anarchistic” cities, Gotham mayor Bill de Blasio expressed outrage. He characterized it as a political attack on “black and brown cities”—though Portland and Seattle are two of the whitest cities in the nation—and denied that New York is remotely lawless or otherwise anarchic. Now the mayors of the three jurisdictions, facing the loss of federal funding, have sued the administration, calling the designation false and illegal.

It’s true that New York City wouldn’t be confused for Tegucigalpa or Mogadishu. And its violent crime rate, while soaring, is still much lower than that of Baltimore or St. Louis, for instance. But comparing New York today with the New York of even a few years ago makes clear that the city is undergoing a serious fracturing of civic order—one trending toward further disintegration.

One late summer Sunday morning, Demetrius Harvard, a 30-year old Bronx man, stood on a subway platform in Greenwich Village and methodically threw construction material onto the tracks. Bystanders tried to stop him, and someone even went into the train well to remove the debris, but Harvard persisted in his sabotage. Eventually, he succeeded in derailing an uptown A train, injuring several passengers.

You had to read to the end of tabloid news reports to get the real story. Two weeks earlier, in the same neighborhood, Harvard had tossed a steel bench through a bus window. He was arrested, charged with criminal mischief, and immediately “ROR’d”—released on his recognizance—with no bail.

This cycle is now all too common in New York, where public order and safety have been buffeted by chaotic forces. Criminal-justice reform at the state level removed bail as an option for all but the most heinous charges. Locally, the NYPD has stopped enforcing many quality-of-life laws. The city council passed a law forbidding cops from applying pressure to the chest or back of an arrestee while trying to handcuff him, on the premise that this tactic is tantamount to asphyxiation; officers dealing with a resisting suspect would thus potentially face assault charges if they attempt to restrain him with vigor.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/democrats-barrett-demagoguery/

The high stakes of this Supreme Court confirmation brought out the worst in Senate Democrats.

A fter their floating of the Court-packing notion proved unpopular, and after their redefining of the meaning of “packing” proved unpersuasive, congressional Democrats and the Biden campaign have settled on a new stratagem to confront the confirmation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. They now warn that they will visit future “consequences” on the country but do not specify what those consequences will be.

This is mainly saber-rattling out of frustration over being unable to stop Barrett’s appointment. To repeat what I pointed out two weeks ago, Democrats do not appear to have the votes they would need to eliminate the filibuster, which is what it would take to expand the Court and pack it with progressive activist justices. Yet, with Election Day just a week away and control of both the executive and legislative branches hanging in the balance, Democrats cannot afford to depress the turn-out of hard-Left voters (particularly the young, who are notoriously unreliable in terms of converting their Democratic Party sympathies into actual votes).

In addition, Democrats can see that their demagoguery has a paralyzing effect on Chief Justice John Roberts. Last week, Roberts joined the Court’s three remaining liberals to block the Court’s review of the Democrat-controlled Pennsylvania supreme court’s rewriting of state election law. The state judges ordered that Pennsylvania’s election board must continue counting mail-in and absentee ballots for three days after Election Day. Worse, it must presume that any late-arriving ballots should count unless there is ironclad postmark proof that they were mailed after the deadline — which will necessarily result in the counting of votes that were not submitted until after the election was supposed to be over (i.e., ballots submitted after the national media have reported voting results).