RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/article/on-race-and-crime-a-counterfactual-narrative

The shooting of a teen-ager in Kansas City, Missouri, has added “knocking on the door while black” and “existing while black” to the list of activities that allegedly put blacks at daily risk of their lives in white supremacist America. Meantime, the actual configuration of interracial violence is assiduously ignored.

On April 13, 2023, at around 10 P.M., 16-year-old Ralph Yarl went to the wrong address in a Kansas City residential neighborhood to pick up his younger brothers. Yarl rang the doorbell, summoning the 84-year-old homeowner, Andrew Lester, from his bed. Lester, who lived alone and who appears from photographs to be in the early stages of dementia, grabbed his handgun and went to the door. He became “scared to death,” he told the police, when he saw the larger Yarl pulling at the exterior storm door handle. (Yarl denies trying to open the door.) Lester shot Yarl, once in the head and once in the arm, through the storm door. Thankfully, Yarl will likely survive the horrifying attack.

Every news outlet that covered the shooting led with the race of Yarl and of Lester. Yarl was inevitably identified as a “Black” teenager and Lester as a “white” homeowner. The Kansas City district attorney validated the race narrative. The shooting had a “racial component,” the prosecutor said, without offering evidence. (The DA has charged Lester with assault in the first degree because the potential maximum sentence—life in prison—is higher than that for attempted murder.)

President Biden weighed in with his usual trope about black parents living in daily fear for their children’s lives in racist America. “Last night, I had a chance to call Ralph Yarl and his family,” Biden tweeted. “No parent should have to worry that their kid will be shot after ringing the wrong doorbell.” For once Biden left out “black,” but his formula by now is so routine (“Imagine having to worry whether your son or daughter came home from walking down the street, playing in the park or just driving a car,” as “Brown and Black parents” have to do, Biden asked in his 2023 State of the Union address) that he doesn’t need the descriptor to get his racial message across. Biden invited Yarl to visit the White House when he had recovered.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/04/25/its-fairy-dust-the-proud-boys-case-goes-to-jury/

A marathon January 6 trial besieged by scandal, controversy, and acrimony is now in the hands of a Washington, D.C. jury. After nearly four months of back and forth, the government and defense attorneys made their final pitch during closing arguments this week in the multi-count case against five members of the Proud Boys.

The drama surrounding the trial, both inside and outside the courtroom, is worthy of a Netflix series: shocking revelations of numerous FBI informants, deleted government evidence, outbursts from the bench, colorful defense attorneys, last-minute accusations of an assault on police, a mysterious “attack plan” sourced to a former intelligence operative, and concerns over a jury stalker, to name a few.

At the center of the drama are innocent men held behind bars awaiting trial as the January 6 Select committee conducted televised hearings portraying the Proud Boys as one of the masterminds behind a “domestic terror attack” the Biden regime compares to 9/11.

Unfortunately, the public heard none of the proceedings firsthand as the D.C. courthouse refuses to allow call-in access for jury trials. (Props to Roger Parloff at Lawfare for his blow-by-blow coverage on Twitter.)

The Proud Boys trial is the most consequential January 6 trial to date for both the Justice Department and Donald Trump. The government devoted an untold amount of resources and manpower to the case. The former president loomed large as prosecutors frequently cited his September 2020 debate remark for Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” as a call to action. (More on Trump’s legal jeopardy related to the outcome of the trial in Friday’s column.)

Ethan Nordean, Zachary Rehl, Joseph Biggs, and Dominic Pezzola have been incarcerated under pretrial detention orders since early 2021 on various counts, including conspiracy and obstruction of an official proceeding. By the time jury selection began in December, the defendants had been in jail for almost two years awaiting trial.  Rehl, Pezzola, and Biggs are military veterans with no criminal history. (Biggs is a Purple Heart recipient.) Enrique Tarrio, the group’s leader, was arrested on similar charges in March 2022.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-war-on-humanity/

The hallmark of modernity is metaphysical materialism: the notion, as atheist Daniel Dennett put it, that “there is only one sort of stuff, namely matter––the physical stuff of physics, chemistry, and physiology––and the mind is somehow nothing but a physical phenomenon.” The consequences of proclaiming that immaterial reality––mind, soul, God––doesn’t exist has been the rise of antihumanism, the stripping from people of their transcendent worth, and the reduction of them to a “sort of stuff” in the world, to be studied, understood, reshaped, and ultimately controlled like any other bit of matter.

Our world increasingly over the last two centuries has seen not just man’s eternal inhumanity to man, the result of our destructive, immutable passions and impulses that have made history, as Edward Gibbon put it, “little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.” Now there’s antihumanism, a much more subtle danger, always cloaked in claims of progress and improvement in human affairs that are brought on by science, a pretension that has made it much more destructive.

Robert Zubrin writes in Merchants of Despair that “the founding prophet of modern antihumanism,” is Thomas Malthus and his 1798 An Essay on the Principle of Population. Malthus claimed that any population always grows geometrically larger than its food supply, a hypothesis which ignored the creative ingenuity of people. Worse were the consequences of his theories when applied to the real world.

For example, falsely believing that Ireland was overpopulated, the British government allowed this food-exporting island to spiral downward into famine partly because, as Malthus himself said, many agreed that “a great part of the population should be swept from the soil.” Over a million Irish died of starvation and diseases caused by malnutrition.

Thirty years later, the same policy of neglect in India contributed to a famine that killed as many as 10 million people, again because of the Malthusian fallacy that, as Sir Evelyn Baring told Parliament, “Every benevolent attempt made to mitigate the effects of famine and defective sanitation serves but to enhance the evils resulting from overpopulation.”

The same antihuman sentiments and amoral logic characterized the work of neo-Malthusian Paul Ehrlich, whose 1968 book The Population Bomb predicted hundreds of millions dead from mass starvation by the 1970s, and the disappearance of England by the year 2000. And like Malthus, Ehrlich proposed illiberal and inhumane interventions like involuntary sterilization, which China later imposed on millions of its people with its “one-child” policy. In 1977, Ehrlich co-authored a book, Chelsea Follet writes, that proposed “a program of sterilizing women after their second or third child,” and discussed “adding sterilants to drinking water or staple foods.”