RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/05/bidens-thug-government/

The Democrats don’t care about politically motivated violence, American institutions, or the Constitution.

If Democrats and other Trump obsessives are really wondering why much of the country couldn’t care less about the Capitol riot, they need look no further than the Biden administration’s disgraceful response to the criminal leak of a draft Supreme Court opinion in the Dobbs abortion case, and to the intensifying threats from the radical Left that endanger the justices, their families, and the Court as an institution.

It is worse than a nonresponse. It is worse than a reckless response. The Biden administration and Democratic Party activists are complicit in the extortionate, norm-busting, burn-it-down id of the woke progressivism they extol.

It is thug government.

I thought President Trump should be impeached over January 6. I still do. Because they can’t help themselves, Democrats corrupted the impeachment. Rather than conducting a competent investigation and crafting impeachment articles that met the moment, they put impeachment in the service of their racialist demagoguery. The impeachment was not so much an attack on Trump, who emerged unscathed. It was an attack on Trump supporters and Republicans generally, who were smeared as white-supremacist domestic terrorists. Congressional Democrats also laid the foundation that would enable progressive activists to file legal actions against Republican lawmakers who supported Trump’s fraudulent “Stop the Steal” gambits in Congress and the courts — seeking their disqualification as “insurrectionists” under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.

To the contrary, Trump should have been impeached on two grounds. First, the “Stop the Steal” con job — based on scant evidence of election fraud, patently absurd legal theories, and such artifices as the presentation of phony Trump elector slates as if they were legitimate alternatives to the authentic Biden slates certified by the states at issue — was a willful undermining of the states’ constitutional authority over presidential elections. It was thus a profound betrayal of the president’s core duty to defend the Constitution and execute the laws faithfully.

Second, the president was derelict in failing to use his executive powers and his influence over his supporters to oppose and end an uprising at the seat of government. Far from protecting the Capitol, members of Congress, and the vice president, the president swerved between provocative rhetoric that further endangered them and inaction when he could have short-circuited the mayhem by swiftly calling for the rioters to stand down, and backing those words with firm enforcement action.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/who-funds-the-campaign-to-smear-and-pressure-elon-musk

Elon Musk’s maybe-impending purchase of Twitter is being treated not as a mere business acquisition but as a kind of twilight battle over the fate of the American experiment. Maybe there was a time when hypothetical and probably minor changes to the terms of service of a social networking website could be seen as an eminently survivable event, without any larger implications for long-established rights and customs like free speech. But those days are gone now, as evidenced by yet another high-profile, strong-arm effort by a weirdly open combination of private and public powers acting in unison to taint or scuttle the Twitter sale.

On May 3, a trio of so-called “advocacy groups” sent a letter to Twitter’s major corporate advertisers, including image-conscious and regulation-sensitive heavyweights like Coca-Cola and Disney, urging them to pull their business from Twitter if Musk proves unwilling to censor speech on the platform to those organizations’ satisfaction. “Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter will further toxify our information ecosystem and be a direct threat to public safety,” began the missive, distributed under the letterhead of Media Matters for America, Accountable Tech, and UltraViolet, and co-signed by another two dozen groups, including the Women’s March, Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, and NARAL Pro-Choice America. These groups are promising to mobilize their activists, and whatever other resources they might have, to punish companies that will stick by Twitter if it junks its pre-Musk content moderation regime. The pitch was a simple one: Nice store you got there. It would be a shame if someone threw a rock through your window.

Musk seemed to take the not-so-subtle threats of brand damage and possible federal regulation as a challenge. “Who funds these organizations that want to control your access to information? Let’s investigate …” Musk suggested on Twitter. But while the question showed moxie, its scope was also clearly too limited. Better to ask: What function do these “advocacy groups” serve? And for whom?

https://openthebooks.substack.com/p/the-ongoing-concern-of-the-state?s=w

The following is an abridged version of a talk delivered on Wednesday, April 20, 2022, during the question and answer portion of an OpenTheBooks.com virtual event. Videos, media, and other speeches are available at YouTube/OpenTheBooks.

QUESTON:

Dr. Hanson, You and I are both native Californians. So looking at California, do you think we’ve lost the state? Or do you have any strategy advice to reverse this current downward trend set up that we have, and bring some success to us? Just in the state of California.

ANSWER — VICTOR DAVIS HANSON:

California is sort of like a prodigal son. We’ve all had members of our family that we love, and we grew up with and we thought they were stable, and then they take drugs or they get wayward, they get in trouble, but we don’t disown them. Well, we don’t move away from them. We try to work with them and hope they can find redemption.

I think that’s what we’re doing in California.

So, there isn’t one Republican statewide officeholder. Republicans only have 11 of 53 Congressional seats. The rest are Democrats. Both houses of the state legislature have super majorities (Democrats). The ninth federal appellate court is the most liberal in the nation. So, they got what they wanted; the left did.

The Left got what they wanted.

https://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2022/05/06/protests-at-supreme-court-justices-homes-are-crimes-n1595691

If you’ve never been to Goochland, Virginia, you’re missing out.

In Goochland, there is a large residential facility with free medical care, free college courses, and wellness programs for visitors, including “thinking for a change.”

You might just win a free trip if you follow through on the threat to “protest at Supreme Court Justice’s homes.” The Virginia Correctional Facility for Woman in Goochland awaits anyone who acts out their rage and shows up out of control at a Supreme Court Justice’s residence in response to the unethical and unprecedented leak of a draft opinion in the Dobbs abortion case.

The people of Virginia have decided that it is a crime to protest at a Virginian’s home.

Virginia Code Section 18.2-418 states:

It is hereby declared that the protection and preservation of the home is the keystone of democratic government; that the public health and welfare and the good order of the community require that members of the community enjoy in their homes a feeling of well-being, tranquility, and privacy, and when absent from their homes carry with them the sense of security inherent in the assurance that they may return to the enjoyment of their homes…

In other words, civil society benefits by keeping homes about family, friends, and peace and not clowns in Handmaid costumes. If you show up and protest a Supreme Court Justice near their home, you are committing a crime in Virginia.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/06/after-horrific-scotus-leak-justices-must-plow-ahead-and-overturn-roe/

The scandalous leak of a full draft of Justice Samuel Alito’s five-justice-strong majority opinion in this term’s marquee Supreme Court case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, is an event without precedent in the Court’s history. 

If Alito’s coalition holds, the leaked majority opinion, a February-dated first draft whose authenticity has been confirmed by Chief Justice John Roberts, would represent the culmination of a half-century of pro-life efforts to overturn 1973’s Roe v. Wade atrocity. Roe, which was the Court’s worst decision since 1857’s Dred Scott v. Sandford due to the cases’ similar fundamental lies about human anthropology and human dignity, should have been overturned in 1992’s Planned Parenthood v. Casey. 

It wasn’t. On the contrary, pro-lifers were deigned to by a relativistic Court plurality, which mused in Casey: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe and of the mystery of human life.” Now, at long last, after an unconscionable 63 million unborn children have been snuffed out in the womb since Roe, the Court in Dobbs seems poised to do what it could not do in Casey: declare the moral and legal illiteracy of Roe‘s central holding of a constitutional “right” to abortion.

Poised, that is. It is premature to celebrate; pro-lifers have been burned far too many times before. Furthermore, votes can still flip even at this late hour, as anyone with a long enough memory to recall the chief justice’s flip-flop in the 2012 Obamacare case, NFIB v. Sebelius, can attest. 

And that leads us to the leaker, whose identity is surprisingly still unknown as of this writing.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-new-intimidation-game-11651869753?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

Five years ago the Journal’s prescient Kim Strassel published “The Intimidation Game” about the political left’s bare-knuckled attempts to silence conservatives. Now the so-called progressives who run much of the American government are encouraging or condoning efforts to bully the Supreme Court into political obedience.

Today Ms. Strassel writes:

The liberal response to Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade was as predictable as it was substance-free. Forget any discussion about the legal reasoning in the case. Or any soul-searching as to how Democrats came to face a 6-3 conservative high-court majority. Or any internal debate about how the party might craft an agenda that resonates with the public, so that it can maintain its hold on power and begin the process of reshaping the court.
Instead, Democrats proposed to burn every Washington institution down. Party leaders and activists openly attempted to intimidate the justices, hoping to change the outcome.

The unapologetic effort to bring political pressure to bear on the judiciary is shocking even to some media folk. Here’s the transcript of an interview T.J. Holmes of ABC News conducted this week with Rep. Karen Bass (D., Calif.) after Justice Alito’s draft opinion was leaked:

Mr. Holmes: Congresswoman, the Chief Justice called this an egregious breach, this leak. What should happen to the person who leaked this? It might not rise to the level of a criminal act, but–but it’s not just that this was a leak. This was a leak in this particular case, at this particular moment. What should happen to the person who leaked this?