RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18505/metropolitan-opera-discrimination

The law of New York and many other jurisdictions prohibits employment discrimination based on national origin. Anna Netrebko’s firing would seem on its face illegal. Had she been born in the Donbas region of Ukraine instead of across the border in Russia, she would not have been fired even if she had refused to condemn the war or Putin.

She did condemn the war but refused to condemn Putin personally. If she had, she would be endangering her family, friends and her own ability to ever return safely to her homeland.

Netrebko is an Austrian citizen, but her country of origin is Russia.

“Forcing artists, or any public figure, to voice their political opinions in public and to denounce their homeland is not right…. I am not a political person…. I am an artist and my purpose is to unite people across political divides.” — Anna Netrebko, quoted in The New York Times, March 2, 2022.

“She’s damned if she does, and damned if she doesn’t.” — Simon Morrison, Princeton Professor of Music, The New York Times, April 1, 2022.

[W]e want artists to speak out — when we agree with what they are saying. But in this age of quickly changing criteria for cancellation….

I had planned to see the Metropolitan Opera’s production of Turandot staring Anna Netrebko. But the Met fired her on the ground that she is Russian and did not sufficiently condemn Vladimir Putin for waging war in Ukraine. She did condemn the war, but refused to condemn Putin personally. If she had, she would be endangering her family, friends and her own ability to ever return safely to her homeland. Netrebko is an Austrian citizen, but her country of origin is Russia.

https://thefederalist.com/2022/05/05/meet-the-shady-left-wing-group-targeting-scotus-justices-and-their-families/

A shadowy left-wing group operating under the moniker “Ruth Sent Us” is asking activists to target Supreme Court justices who may overturn Roe v. Wade with demonstrations at their private homes.

On Thursday, the group published the alleged home locations of the six conservative justices who heard Mississippi’s request to return the abortion debate to the states by overturning the 1973 decision. A February draft opinion leaked to Politico on Monday revealed five out of the six, Justices Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett, Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, and Neil Gorsuch, were planning to vote to overturn the Roe decision with Chief Justice John Roberts remaining undecided. Each of their homes is targeted for protests between now and Wednesday.

“Our 6-3 extremist Supreme Court routinely issues rulings that hurt women, racial minorities, LGBTQ+ and immigrant rights,” reads the group’s website. “We must rise up to force accountability using a diversity of tactics.”

Stipends are being offered to artists who join the march. Payment and compensation were also offered to protesters who came to Washington to disrupt the constitutional proceedings at the Senate to confirm Brett Kavanaugh in 2018.

The organizing group’s leadership remains concealed on its website, even though it uses a .us URL. Websites with a .us URL are unusual, and according to Wired in 2005, new registrants could not include privacy protection in .us domain name purchases. RuthSent.us, however, redacted information related to its owners’ purchase. Another online domain tool, “WHOIS,” revealed the name Sam Spiegel as its registrant along with a P.O. box.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2022/05/05/durham-scores-huge-victory-against-hillary-camp-and-fusion-gps-n1595364

The trial of former Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann will take place soon, and on Wednesday, special counsel John Durham scored a huge pre-trial victory.

Sussmann’s lawyers fought Durham’s efforts to secure documents from the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign that they claimed were protected by attorney-client privilege. Durham argued that the Clinton campaign couldn’t shield materials based on attorney-client privilege when the materials they were trying to hide were widely distributed to third parties.

A federal judge in Washington, D.C. agreed with Durham and has decided to compel the production of the documents in question.

Durham had accused the Democratic National Committee, Hillary for America, and Fusion GPS of withholding and/or redacting documents and communications that incriminate Sussmann.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/05/roe-ruling-making-protest-lawful-again/

On Wednesday, Matthew Graves, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, announced criminal charges against another American related to the events at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Joshua Colgan of Maine entered a set of open doors that afternoon and walked around the building; he exited shortly thereafter. Capitol Police officers standing near the entrance did not attempt to block or arrest Colgan or hundreds of other protesters at the time who were unaware they were committing any crime.

Nonetheless, Graves charged Colgan with four misdemeanors including “parading” in the Capitol building. Graves’ office is in the process of prosecuting at least 800 people and counting for their involvement in the four-hour disturbance that occurred 16 months ago.

After he took over the office last fall, Graves changed the official name of the investigation from “Capitol breach” to “Capitol siege.” His prosecutors routinely request—and receive—prison sentences for those who plead guilty to the “parading” charge, a petty offense never before applied on such a broad scale.

As Graves presumably cheered his success in rounding up yet another Trump supporter, his wife was leading a rally outside the Supreme Court to protest the draft ruling that would overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that legalized abortion nationwide. Fatima Goss Graves, head of the far-left National Women’s Law Center based in D.C., told a group of pro-abortion demonstrators on Wedneday afternoon that “abortion care is a matter of equality, dignity, and freedom in this country and that will never change.”

The night before, Graves, who has a history of making anti-Trump, anti-Republican remarks, participated in an emergency conference call with other activist groups and warned they must “engage in ways that we may not have thought we would have had to in our lives.” In a tweet that same evening, Graves called the draft ruling a “shameful and insidious attack on those who face discrimination” and insisted she would “not let up.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/05/biden-so-many-muslims-are-targeted-violence-and-raymond-ibrahim/

Day by day, it seems that the ruling class and their media mouthpiece are dedicated to one principle: find problems where none exist and ignore real problems that are in desperate need of attention.

Consider the words of U.S. President Joe Biden, spoken during Eid al-Fitr with Muslims at the White House on May 2. He said:

[T]oday, around the world, we’re seeing so many Muslims being targeted with violence. No one, no one should discriminate against oppressed or be oppressed for their religious beliefs…. Muslims make our nation stronger every single day, even as they still face real challenges and threats in our society, including targeted violence and Islamophobia that exists.

Now, let’s briefly parse these surreal claims:

[T]oday, around the world, we’re seeing so many Muslims being targeted with violence.

Where are the statistics for this claim? Rather, what we’re used to seeing is Muslims targeting non-Muslims with violence. According to one tally, for example, during just this last Ramadan, or basically the month of April 2022, Muslims launched 177 terror attacks “in the name of Islam” that murdered 1,086 people. Again, that’s just during one month—Islam’s “holiest” month. The same tally finds that there were zero attacks and zero deaths by non-Muslims operating under the name of their religions.

No one, no one should discriminate against oppressed or be oppressed for their religious beliefs.

Of course, everyone agrees with this—except, apparently, the one group that Biden was speaking to and presenting as “oppressed,” namely, Muslims: systematic discrimination and oppression are endemic to the Muslim world, and that’s because systematic discrimination and oppression are integral parts of the religion of Islam and codified in sharia.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-myth-of-biden-the-uniter/

When the president was asked yesterday about the Roe v. Wade leak, he ranted about how the “MAGA crowd” was “really the most extreme political organization that’s existed in American history.”

First of all, does any sentient human really believe that conservatives took up pro-life cause — one that Biden himself championed in the past — in 2015? Candidate Trump had to do a lot of work to allay social-conservative fears over his inconsistent position. This was the entire impetus for releasing a list of potential SCOTUS nominees.

Anyway, Biden, a unifer at heart, noted many in media, had largely avoided such charged rhetoric. This, too, is a myth. It’s Biden who recently said that chasing moderate legislators into bathrooms to pressure them into supporting his agenda was just “part of the process.” It’s Biden who said that supporters of voter-ID laws are backing “21st-century Jim Crow.” He’s the one who calls Republicans “authoritarian” and claimed that we’re “facing the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War. That’s not hyperbole, since the Civil War.” It is hyperbole. It is hyperbole most of the time.

Biden has been a run-of-the-mill hyperpartisan demagogue for a long time. Watch some of his cringeworthy speeches on the Senate floor in the 1980s. Biden has been smearing judicial nominees for decades. When Biden accuses Republicans who disagree with him of “betting against America” or Mitt Romney — Mitt Romney — of wanting to put black Americans “back in chains” he is fueling paranoia, not comity. Biden’s “unity” talk, as it was with his old boss, Barack Obama, is little more than a pseudo-patriotic appeal meant to pressure Republicans into capitulation.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/05/high-noon-usa-bruce-thornton/

“It looks like this year’s midterm elections will be the showdown between the “woke” tyrants and the defenders of freedom.”

Since the Sixties the Left has been expanding its influence throughout our nation and its institutions. But decades earlier communism had already established a foothold in the U.S. starting in the early 20th century. Even the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 only briefly checked this process. But history’s repudiation of a totalitarian political order––one fundamentally opposed to the Constitution’s protection of individual freedom and unalienable rights––could not uproot decades of leftist transformation of America.

Indeed, the last 20 years saw the Left reinvigorated by the rise of “woke” ideology and its anti-Constitutional agenda. The Biden administration and its hubristic policies and glaring failures increasingly look likely to ignite a backlash. The showdown between the “woke” Democrats and freedom-loving Americans, whatever their party, is coming in November, and will decide whether the Left has succeeded in “fundamentally transforming America.”

The principles, however, for “woke” leftism were laid down a century ago in the rise of progressivism. Like communism, progressivism favors centralized, concentrated power administered by government bureaucracies and agencies staffed by “experts” who know better than the sovereign people how best to run their lives.

But this ideology conflicts at every point with the Constitution, which balances, checks, and disperses power so that citizens are free to manage their lives, their families, and their businesses as they see fit, checked only by Constitutionally compliant laws created by Congress, whose members are accountable to the citizens who put them in office.

https://thefederalist.com/2022/05/04/as-roe-hangs-in-the-balance-an-ugly-class-blindspot-distorts-abortion-discours/

The political establishment’s class blindspot is on full display in conversations about abortion, and the discourse on Justice Samuel Alito’s leaked draft opinion in the Dobbs case is no exception to this rule. Support for abortion increases with income and education levels. Pollsters use many questions to gauge public opinion on abortion—from support for Roe to support by trimester to general morality—but wealthier Americans tend to be more supportive across the board.

The left is correct that wealthy women in a post-Roe world will be able to get abortions with greater ease than women in lower income brackets: they can afford travel, childcare, and time away from work more easily. But as a demographic, they’re also more supportive of abortion, so the argument that overturning Roe is an attack on the working class is not sound.

It’s true, as The New York Times wrote in 2019, that “[w]omen getting abortions today are far more likely to be poor than those who had the procedure done 20 years ago.” The Times also notes, “About half of women who had an abortion in 2014 were below the poverty line, with another quarter very close to poverty.”

But Gallup data from 2021 found that respondents asked whether abortion was “morally wrong,” “morally acceptable,” or “depend[ent] on the situation” were more supportive as yearly household income increased. This tracks with education level as well, as you can see in the screenshot below.

Above the $100,000 income threshold, 63 percent of people said abortion was morally acceptable and 32 percent said morally wrong. Below the $40,000 threshold, those numbers were almost reversed. Only 38 percent of respondents said it was morally acceptable while 55 percent said it was morally wrong. This pattern is consistent among Gallup’s recent research on the question.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/04/losing-the-people-then-change-the-rules/

Court packing—the attempt to enlarge the size of the Supreme Court for short-term political purposes—used to be a dirty word in the history of American jurisprudence. 

The tradition of a nine-person Supreme Court is now 153 years old. The last attempt to expand it for political gain was President Franklin Roosevelt’s failed effort in 1937. FDR’s gambit was so blatantly political that even his overwhelming Democratic majority in Congress rebuffed him. 

Yet now “court packing” is a law school cause célèbre. It is hailed as a supposedly quick fix to reverse the current 5-4 conservative majority. 

Recently, a rough draft of an opinion purportedly overturning the Roe v. Wade decision that had legalized abortion in all 50 states was leaked to the media by someone inside the court. 

That insider leak of a draft opinion was a first in the modern history of the Supreme Court. It violated all court protocols. Yet it was met with stunning approval from the American Left. 

The leaker either intended to create a preemptive public backlash against the purported court majority in the hope that one or two justices might cave and switch under pressure—or to gin up the progressive base to fend off a likely disaster in the November midterm elections.   

The recent leak, however, is consistent with a left-wing assault on the Court that has intensified over the last five years. Democrats have gone ballistic ever since George W. Bush and especially Donald Trump’s appointees solidified a conservative majority. 

During Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings in 2018, protestors stormed the Senate chambers in protest. The Left rallied behind the now-convicted felon Michael Avenatti, who publicized crazy, wildly untrue charges about a teenaged Kavanagh.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/05/05/the-american-mushroom-cloud/

The left’s reaction to anything that doesn’t go its way becomes louder, shriller and more hysterical by the day, if not the hour. Its response to the alleged draft of a Supreme Court ruling that would overturn Roe v. Wade landed like a cruise missile with a hot warhead. But that’s the way today’s Democrats operate. Counterattack any and every event that threatens their agenda by scorching as much earth as possible.

There are plenty of candidates for the most hinge-free response to the draft. But before we go further, we’d like to highlight Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren descent into madness. Watch the video with the audio muted. Does her body language, the spasmodic gesturing, the pointed finger remind anyone of a 20th century figure whose speeches we’re used to seeing in black-and-white newsreels?

Heaven help us.

Warren’s fevered tirade clearly shows we have reached the point that the left has decided that policy will not be made like sausage but through tantrum, intimidation, and riot. If the Supreme Court doesn’t rule its way, then the Court is illegitimate, stolen and therefore has to be destroyed to save itself from making incorrect rulings. As John Daniel Davidson so eloquently noted for The Federalist, “whenever the left feels they have lost control of an institution, they try to destroy it.”

But what should we expect given the childish outbursts and lawlessness following the 2016 election of Donald Trump? The Antifa riots and violent Black Lives Matter mobs that were tacitly approved, and in some cases supported, by the Democrats? And a hard-left press that strangled its last shred of credibility by trafficking the Russian dossier it new was fake, and then insisting in the most maniacal ways imaginable that only it can determine what is acceptable speech in the U.S.?