RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/28/as-the-big-lie-about-sicknick-persists-alleged-attackers-languish-in-jail/

On August 26, 2020, Kevin Phomma was arrested in Portland for assaulting several police officers with bear spray during that city’s nonstop siege by Antifa and Black Lives Matters protesters. Phomma and others surrounded the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility, blocked traffic, and fought with law enforcement.

In a press release announcing his arrest, the Justice Department said, “Phomma doused several officers with pepper spray while they attempted to arrest him. Once in custody, officers discovered the pepper spray was in fact a powerful bear deterrent pepper spray.”

Phomma, 26, also had a three-inch dagger in a sheath strapped to his left hip. He was charged with a dozen counts ranging from civil disorder—a felony—to unlawful use of mace. He appears to contribute little to society except for his skills as a professional protester.

A few days after his arrest, Phomma was released on bail. His trial is still pending; his lawyers claim the civil disorder charge is “a vestige of opposition to civil rights for Black Americans.” (He does not appear to be black.)

While Phomma roams free, acting as the aggrieved party rather than the aggressor, the two men who allegedly sprayed officer Brian Sicknick with a chemical irritant on January 6 are not so lucky.

George Tanios and Julian Khater were arrested in March and accused of “attacking” Sicknick with a chemical spray; the indictment, not coincidentally, was filed just a few weeks after the initial account of Sicknick’s death—the murder-by-fire-extinguisher story—was exposed as a lie.

Desperate to sustain the lie that a police officer was killed by bloodthirsty Trump cultists on January 6, the media and Democrats quickly pivoted to the idea Sicknick died from an allergic reaction to the bear spray. Tanios and Khater, who traveled together to hear Donald Trump’s speech that day, face four charges of using and carrying the “dangerous and deadly weapon” on January 6.

Unlike Kevin Phomma, one charge filed against Tanios and Khater is “assault on a federal officer with a dangerous weapon.” Unlike Phomma and his accomplices, Tanios and Khater also are charged with conspiracy for allegedly pre-planning the assault on a federal officer.

Also unlike Phomma, neither man has been able to post bail; a federal judge last month agreed with Joe Biden’s Justice Department to keep the pair behind bars awaiting trial. D.C. District Court Judge Thomas Hogan, a Reagan appointee, even rejected a $15 million bond package backed by 16 relatives of Julian Khater—an amount three times higher than the court-ordered bail for Harvey Weinstein, as one reporter noted.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2021/05/28/a-terrifying-omen-for-america-under-biden-becomes-even-worse-n1450432

A new portent of doom for the U.S. economy and the Democrats led by President Joe Biden hit the presses on Friday — a key measure of inflation in the month of April proved worse than expected. This, combined with persistently high unemployment numbers coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic, bodes ill for the recovery and should jolt Americans out of their complacency with the Biden administration’s profligate spending.

The core personal consumption expenditures index, which officials at the Federal Reserve consider to be the best indicator of inflation, rose 3.1 percent in April, above the 2.9 percent that economists predicted, the Commerce Department reported on Friday, CNBC reported. In March, the index only rose 1.9 percent.

The index captures more price movements across a variety of goods and services and is generally considered a wider-ranging measure for inflation than the Labor Department’s consumer price index, which accelerated 4.2 percent last month.

The Fed considers 2 percent to be healthy, although it will allow the price index to grow in the interest of promoting full employment. Unfortunately, unemployment remained above 6 percent in April despite economists predicting that it would dip below 6 percent.

This persistent unemployment should not surprise Americans who are familiar with the Democrats’ $1.9 trillion blue pork bill masquerading as a “COVID-19 relief” stimulus. Only 8.6 percent of the funding went directly to combatting the pandemic, while hundreds of billions went to blue-state bailouts. The bill also sent $1,400 checks to individuals, and extended the $400/week “enhanced” unemployment benefits.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/jews-cant-let-the-u-s-turn-into-europe/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first

A few days ago, New York governor Andrew Cuomo sent extra state patrols to Jewish neighborhoods after a rash of attacks, including the beating of a man by a mob in midtown, a brick flying through the windows of a kosher pizza store, and “protesters” spitting at and threatening restaurant patrons. I had initially missed the story. Since anti-Jewish attacks in Brooklyn aren’t primarily the work of white supremacists, the incidents don’t garner widespread attention.

No matter. I’d suggest Jews go out and arm themselves to deter these kinds of assaults, but, of course, New York makes that extraordinarily difficult. And we shouldn’t exaggerate the circumstances — hate crimes are still rare and the United States is perhaps the safest place for Jews.

That said, it would be a tragedy if we were on a European trajectory. There, the kinds of lies and smears now being normalized and spread by likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and other progressives on the floor of Congress have manifested in harassment and violence against Jews. Nearly a quarter of the French, for instance, believe in some Jewish conspiracy theories. Nearly half of the French say that Zionism is a plot for world domination. Much like American progressives, the European Union helps fuel this animosity by singling out the Jewish state for endless and nearly exclusive reprimand, while at the same time ignoring the atrocities around the world.

In Europe, few Jewish organizations are left to push back against these currents. Indeed, in the United States, Jewish organizations — the cowardly ADL and others — also largely exist to mollify leftist partisans and crusade for progressive causes. These places are populated by people who exhibit bravery by putting triple parentheses around their Twitter handles; the kind of people who work harder to cancel Tucker Carlson than expose the spread of blood libels by elected officials. These are the kind of people who propose American Jews take off your yarmulkes, as they must in Paris suburbs. “It pains me to say this,” Aaron Keyak, Joe Biden’s head of Jewish engagement during the campaign and transition, recently tweeted, “but if you fear for your life or physical safety take off your kippah and hide your magen david. (Obviously, if you can, ask your rabbi first.)” In 2020, Keyak blamed Trump for anti-Semitic attacks, saying, “We see how Trump has been remarkably weak on anti-Semitism and has endangered Jews by making us all less safe.” Today, he has no idea why it’s happening.

https://www.city-journal.org/lionel-trillings-warning

In 1950, literary critic Lionel Trilling published a collection of essays called The Liberal Imagination. It contained a presciently devastating critique of modern American liberalism’s grasp of reality. Liberalism, he wrote, “drifts toward a denial of the emotions and the imagination”:

The world is a complex and unexpected and terrible place. . . . It is one of the tendencies of liberalism to simplify, and this tendency is natural in view of the effort which liberalism makes to organize the elements of life in a rational way. . . . We must understand that organization means delegation, and agencies, and bureaus, and technicians, and that the ideas that can survive delegation, that can be passed on to agencies and bureaus and technicians, incline to be ideas of a certain kind and of a certain simplicity: they give up something of their largeness and modulation and complexity in order to survive.

By “imagination,” Trilling didn’t mean the ability to invent. He meant the ability to resist simplistic, reductive, and morally gratifying explanations of reality and to see the painfully immense complexity of truth and perspective that is at the heart of life.

Consider a few test cases of the efficacy of the liberal imagination. Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene recently wrote in a Tweet that a grocery store chain allowing its vaccinated employees not to use masks so long as they wore a logo on their shirts was “just like the Nazi’s [sic] forced Jewish people to wear a gold star.” Denunciations of Greene for making such an unhinged analogy swiftly followed. Yet with a little complexity, a little modulation, and a little context, you might arrive at the conclusion that Greene is crazy like the proverbial fox. Perhaps she intuits that in American politics, celebrity almost guarantees success as a political candidate, and that notoriety is the quickest route to celebrity. But why ruin all the fun? Greene and her adversaries are linked arm in arm in a thrilling race to the bottom.

There are Holocaust analogies, and then there are Holocaust analogies. Recently, CNN fired Rick Santorum, the network’s token conservative pundit, for saying elsewhere that the U.S. was founded on “Judeo-Christian values” and that its colonists and settlers “birthed a nation from nothing. I mean, there was nothing here. I mean, yes we have Native Americans, but candidly there isn’t much Native American culture in American culture.” Callous? Sure, but Santorum was not denying American Indians’ death and destruction at the hands of white settlers. He was carelessly stating facts that were nevertheless historically accurate—America was founded on Judeo-Christian values; and American culture doesn’t owe much to Native American culture, if by “culture” he meant the organized expression of thought and feeling.