RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2024/05/30/our-revolutionary-times/

Sometimes unexpected but dramatic events tear off the thin veneer of respectability and convention. What follows is the exposure and repudiation of long-existing but previously covered-up pathologies.

Events like the destruction of the southern border over the last three years, the October 7 massacre and ensuing Gaza war, the campus protests, the COVID-19 epidemic and lockdown, and the systematic efforts to weaponize our bureaucracies and courts have all led to radical reappraisals of American culture and civilization.

Since the 1960s, universities have always been hotbeds of left-wing protests, sometimes violently so.

But the post-October 7 campus eruptions marked a watershed difference.

Masked left-wing protestors were unashamedly and virulently anti-Semitic. Students on elite campuses especially showed contempt for both middle-class police officers tasked with preventing their violence and vandalism and the maintenance workers who had to clean up their garbage.

Mobs took over buildings, assaulted Jewish students, called for the destruction of Israel, and defaced American monuments and commentaries.

When pressed by journalists to explain their protests, most students knew nothing of the politics or geography of Palestine, for which they were protesting.

The public concluded that the more elite the campus, the more ignorant, arrogant, and hateful the students seemed.

The Biden administration destroyed the southern border. Ten million illegal aliens swarmed into the U.S. without audit. Almost daily, news accounts detail violent acts committed by illegal aliens or their surreal demands for more free lodging and support.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/05/protect-womens-sports-from-transgender-inclusion/

Allowing boys to compete as girls will harm women’s sports. But many activists believe their feelings and the feelings of transgender athletes are more important.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published by several Louisiana newspapers that are part of the Gannett-owned USA Today Network, then removed because it did not meet Gannett’s “editorial standards.” We are republishing it so that readers can judge its argument for themselves.   

Many players on the New Orleans Pelicans probably feel like a kid inside when they’re on the basketball court. They might even miss their days of dominating middle-school basketball tournaments, instead of squaring up against the giants in the NBA.

No one, however, would think it was fair if Zion Williamson joined a youth basketball league simply because he identified as a twelve-year-old. No middle-school boys could stop Williamson from getting to the basket, and they’d probably end up injured if they tried.

Men and women don’t compete for the same reasons. Yet transgender activists want athletic institutions to ignore these obvious physical differences so transgender athletes can feel included, even if it hurts biological girls in the process.

From middle-school gyms to NCAA swimming pools, activists seek to force women and girls to compete against biological men and boys. These activists claim it is a “myth” that transgender athletes have an advantage, but most Americans know this is untrue and unfair.

Starting in the womb and continuing through puberty, men develop physical advantages that help them outperform women in competitive sports. On average, men are taller and have higher bone density than women. When controlled for height, women also have 15 percent smaller hearts and 12 percent smaller lungs than men’s.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/05/the-tawdriest-political-dirty-trick/

Alvin Bragg has pulled it off.

If anything has been established in the courtroom the past couple of weeks, it’s that Alvin Bragg doesn’t have much of a legal case. But he doesn’t need one.

The legalities matter here only insomuch as they provide a veneer over an audacious political trick that has kept a major-party presidential candidate off the campaign trail for several days a week, and may — within days — give his enemies a political cudgel to use against him until November.

What’s the Latin for “specious legal case in service of frankly political ends”?

It’s true that if Trump gets off on a hung jury, it will play as a major victory and vindication for the Republican candidate, yet he still won’t be able to get back the time or resources he’s wasted fighting this case.

Even the most hard-bitten, cynical political operative would have been hard-pressed to imagine a way to keep an opponent off the campaign trail entirely. Rummaging through an opponent’s garbage, stealing his debate-prep materials, distorting his record in lavishly funded negative ads — all that looks amateurish compared with abusing the criminal-justice system for political ends the way Alvin Bragg has.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-cat-is-out-of-the-bragg/

Listening to the prosecution summation by Joshua Steinglass, it is quite amazing how explicitly the state is relying on violations of FECA as the “other crime” that Donald Trump was allegedly concealing by causing his business records to be falsified.

It is impossible to draw any conclusion other than that Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg knew that, as a state prosecutor, his enforcement of federal law would be incredibly controversial since he has no such authority; the federal agencies that do have such authority investigated Trump and opted not to prosecute; and to get this prosecution done, Bragg is simply making up his own version of federal law.

Bragg had the collusion of Judge Merchan, who allowed the state to get away with not putting the “other crime” in the indictment, and rejected defense attempts to force him to provide explicit disclosure pretrial. Prosecutors hid in the tall grass until summation and are now emphatically describing Trump as having blatantly violated federal campaign law.