RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/04/24/__trashed-3/

Maybe insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. But insanity is also whatever the California Legislature is doing at any given time. The most recent example? A reparations bill that would establish the California American Freedmen Affairs Agency has sailed through the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Senate Bill 1403, one of at least 14 reparations bills introduced in the Legislature, cleared the committee by a 8-1 vote two weeks ago, confirming one more time that lawmakers have descended into madness. Unless they regain their wits, reparations will break the state.

But a return to reason is unlikely. Even though California was not a slave state, the Democratic side is all in. This was obvious in 2020 when they established a task force to study reparations.

“It appeared to me that the legislators were violating a fundamental rule of governance: Never create a commission to ‘study’ a controversial problem unless you are relatively certain that you’re going to want to follow its recommendations,” University of San Diego School of Law professor Gail Heriot wrote Monday on Instapundit. Yet it was clear “from the start” that the task force “appeared to be stacked in favor of reparations.”

There’s a lot of political mileage to be gained for lawmakers in blue states who glom onto progressive initiatives that make no sense to centrists and exasperate conservatives and libertarians. Nowhere is this more true than in California, where bad ideas are birthed and then surge across the country, infecting other Democratic citadels. In terms of rank, reparations might be the worst of them all.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/campus-free-speech-first-amendment-columbia-protests-palestine-israel-hamas-3ff5092d?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Universities are supposed to be places where students and faculty can debate politics and other subjects without fear or censure. As the anti-Israel protests spread at Columbia, Yale, Harvard, New York University and elsewhere, however, progressives are claiming that any restriction on the protesters is a violation of free speech.

That isn’t true, and it’s important to understand why. Under its “state action doctrine,” the Supreme Court has ruled that the First Amendment applies to government actions toward citizens. It doesn’t apply to private citizens or institutions except in rare instances when they are acting as government agents.

As University of California, Berkeley law school dean and ardent liberal Erwin Chemerinsky explained recently to anti-Israel students who wanted to protest on his lawn, his property is “not a forum for free speech.”

As a private university, Columbia has the right to set its own rules on speech as part of a contract to teach or study at the school. It does so in a way that is consistent with a public institution’s obligations under the First Amendment. Here’s what Columbia’s Rules of University Conduct say about protests: “Every member of our community . . . retains the right to demonstrate, to rally, to picket, to circulate petitions and distribute ideas” and to “express opinions on any subject whatsoever, even when such expression invites controversy and sharp scrutiny.” The code of conduct protects speakers’ rights even when “ideas expressed might be thought offensive, immoral, disrespectful, or even dangerous.”

Sounds good. But Columbia’s code of conduct says a person violates the rules who “engages in conduct that places another in danger of bodily harm,” or “uses words that threaten bodily harm in a situation where there is clear and present danger of such bodily harm.”

Columbia’s anti-Israel encampment and protests have included physical intimidation of Jewish students and antisemitic declarations. In October 2023, 100 Columbia professors signed a letter defending students who had flooded the campus in support of Hamas’s “military action” on Oct. 7. Columbia has every right to restrict speech or actions that threaten other students.

Protesters also don’t have a “right” to assemble on school property to disrupt the functioning of the university or intimidate students on the way to class. Even at a public university, all these rules would constitute reasonable restrictions on the time, place and manner of speech.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/04/22/war-by-affirmative-action/

“Third-party managed proportionality, accompanied by the banality of “both sides are at fault,” is not morality but pretentious amorality—as well as a sure prescription for endless war.”

Why does Biden play Iranian poker with American and Israeli lives?

Answer? He envisions war sort of like affirmative action, in which the less accomplished belligerent is allowed all sorts of concessions for the sake of equity.

Israeli and American military capability, and particularly their missile defenses, are seen as unfair, almost like high achievers’ top SAT scores that are seen as unearned and used to privilege some over others and therefore must be countered or dropped.

Given Iran’s and its surrogates’ incompetence, the administration, then, must extend the theocracy some allowances “to level the playing field.” Biden believes in an equality of opportunity in war, when an aggressor does its best to attack or indeed destroy a defender, who in turn does its own best to retaliate and achieve victory.

Instead, the Biden administration sees war leading to equality of result as something to be waged “proportionally,” especially when the power attacked is stronger and Western while the attacking aggressor is weaker and non-Western. The method, then, is to restrain the western power and give repeated chances for the non-western aggressors to catch up.

As a result, the Biden administration’s strategic attitude toward Iran ignores Iranian intent and agendas. So it does not respond fully to its acts of aggression and thereby almost rewards the incompetence of Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis without consideration of their murderous aims.

Americans are thus baffled that Biden has not responded to some 170 or more attacks on U.S. installations in the Middle East by Iranian-backed terrorists in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon. But in his calculus, Americans “can take the hit” due to their superior defenses—appeasement that only assures more hits.

Thus, other than a few apparently acceptable wounded or dead, there is no need for disproportionate responses to reestablish deterrence and end such opportunistic attacks. Such calculus in the Biden team’s mind would be “over the top,” perhaps “unfair,” or even “medieval.” And yet, it certainly would stop all such aggression quickly and warn aggressors not to touch a single American.

After the successful but mostly demonstrative Israel April 19 retaliatory strike against the Iranian anti-aircraft missile batteries at Isfahan, Biden cautioned Israel “to take the win” and apparently not to rub in the fact of Iranian incompetence, much less stage a follow-up and much greater response.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/04/the_world_s_leaders_including_biden_must_learn_the_lesson_of_passover.html

Tonight, at sunset, Jews across the world will celebrate Passover, something they’ve been doing annually for around 3,500 years. The holiday commemorates the miracle (and gift) of God leading the Jews out of slavery in Egypt. This was the world’s first slave revolt and led to God’s handing down the moral laws that are the backbone of the Judeo-Christian faiths. But the Passover story also tells us something important about the nature of tyranny, and the world’s governments, from Biden on down, would do well to heed that lesson.

The story of Passover appears in Exodus, the second book of the Old Testament. It explains that 400 years after Egypt took in the Israelites (i.e., today’s Jews) who were escaping a famine in Canaan (modern Israel), a new Pharaonic line had taken the Egyptian throne and enslaved the Israelites.

The Pharaoh on the throne at the time the narrative begins was so hostile to the Israelites that he ordered the slaughter of all newborn Israelite boys. The mother of one of those newborn boys successfully hid him in a basket on the Nile, where one of Pharaoh’s daughters found him, named him Moses, and raised him as a Prince of Egypt.

Because his older sister had stayed near the basket and become his nurse, Moses knew he was an Israelite, not an Egyptian. When the adult Moses saw an overseer cruelly treating a slave, Moses killed the overseer and fled to Midian. There, he became a shepherd and married a priest’s daughter.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/04/black_wars_of_liberation_come_to_america.html

Secretary of State Antony Blinken recently appointed Zakiya Carr Johnson as the State Department’s Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer.

Her mission, according to Blinken, was to help build a workforce that reflects America.

Given that Blinken has previously promoted a politically correct agenda, for example, suggesting that employees avoid gendered terms such as manpower and mother, this comes as no surprise. Blinken justified this diversity effort in terms of national security, saying, “We will continue to pursue this mission aggressively, because recruiting, nurturing, and promoting the most capable workforce possible is critical to our national security.”

Since Blinken knew of Johnson’s earlier State Department service, he further added, “previous work promoting entrepreneurship and access to opportunity for underrepresented populations, as well as her commitment to inclusive leadership make us stronger, smarter, and more innovative.”

Yet, despite the Secretary’s heartfelt endorsement, critics condemned Johnson’s openly anti-American, anti-white statements.

She called America a “failed historic model” and demanded the destruction of tradition “at every juncture” on the altar of antiracism“ and “we live and work within systems… deeply rooted in patriarchy and colonialism and racism and otherism.” She also considers herself a feminist but with a racial twist who “embraces a ‘feminist’ leadership style, but one that “counter[s] White-centered feminism trends and narratives.”

Predictably, white supremacy was singled out for special ire, “We cannot have equity without dismantling structural racism, patriarchy and heterosexism … It will start with movements … that compel us to ask … uncomfortable questions. What does inclusion mean for example, if White supremacy remains intact?”

Johnson’s appointment will not strengthen America’s national security let alone attract capable job applicants to government service. More likely, the racialization of State Department hiring will sabotage recruitment and interject racial animus into decision-making. Moreover, since most State Department employees have job security through civil service-like protections, and are not political appointees, if Trump defeats Biden, actual personnel changes will be minimal.  

What could possibly drive her hatred of America?    

Johnson’s loathing of white society reflects her indoctrination in the anti-colonial, black nationalist ideology that increasingly dominates the thinking of educated American blacks. She is yet one more “beneficiary” of American higher education.