RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.jns.org/is-biden-taking-lessons-from-lady-aoc/

U.S. President Joe Biden began his Earth Day speech at Prince William Forest Park in Virginia on Monday by singling out a few prominent climate-change figures in attendance. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, who introduced him, was one of them.

“You know, I learned a long time ago: Listen to that lady; listen to that lady,” he said. “We’re going to talk more about another part of the world, too, real quickly.”

It doesn’t take a genius to guess what region he had in mind. AOC—as the member of his party’s radical “Squad” is familiarly known—has been vocal in her demand that Biden suspend all aid to Israel over the “genocide” it’s committing in Gaza.

When the president said that he and she would be discussing this topic “real quickly,” he was hinting at a meeting that was to take place after the event. Indeed, when it was over, he, AOC and Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Ed Markey (D-Mass.) flew together to the White House, where the four buddies who share an aversion to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were seen entering the Oval Office.

Before they hopped on the Marine One helicopter and headed to D.C., Biden was stopped by reporters. “Do you condemn the antisemitic protests on college campuses?” one asked.

Echoing the question in his answer, he replied, “I condemn the antisemitic protests; that’s why I’ve set up a program to deal with that. I also condemn those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians and how they’re being …”

It’s not unusual for Biden to trail off, mid-sentence. But in this case, he may have decided against completing his outrageous statement.

https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/useless-biden-cant-help-but-botch-his-response-to-campus-antisemitism/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=top-stories&utm_term=first

EXCERPT

When asked about antisemitic protests on college campuses, Biden just had to add a condemnation of “those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians and their — how they’re being—” and of course he couldn’t finish the sentence. Sure, Biden doesn’t like the harassment of Jewish students, but he feels obligated, in the same breath, to offer a parallel and equally strong denunciation of “those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians.” You see, not understanding the plight of the Palestinians is every bit as bad as attempting to stab a young Jewish woman in the eye with a flagpole.

Heaven forbid that anyone listening conclude that the explosion of antisemitism on college campuses in this country is a uniquely insidious and dangerous problem that must be addressed immediately. No, no, the president of the United States must announce, at every opportunity, that the Palestinians have it just as bad, too.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2024/04/23/anti-israel-protesters-gather-sen-schumers-home-demand-u-s-stop-arming-israel/

Hundreds of anti-Israel protesters gathered outside of Sen. Chuck Schumer’s (D-NY) home in Brooklyn, calling for the United States to “stop arming Israel.”

Video footage posted to X showed what appeared to be hundreds of protesters gathered in the street outside of Schumer’s home for a “Seder in the Streets” on the second day of the Passover Jewish holiday.

A seder is a Passover holiday meal, which includes songs, stories, reading, and eating special foods, along with other traditions. For those who live in Israel, it is held on the first night of Passover, but for those outside of Israel, it is held on the first two nights of Passover.

Jewish protesters gathered outside of Schumer’s home were reportedly from groups such as the Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) chapter in New York City, If Not Now, and the New York chapter of Jews for Racial & Economic Justice, according to a post on X by JVP NYC.

Protesters gathered were reportedly demanding that the U.S. stop sending weapons to Israel as it continues its war against Hamas.

Officers from the New York Police Department were captured on video telling protesters outside of Schumer’s home that they were “blocking vehicular traffic” and would be arrested for disorderly conduct if they did not “move and get onto the sidewalk.”

Protesters could be heard chanting, “Stop Funding Genocide.”

https://tomklingenstein.com/the-rule-of-law-depends-on-john-eastman/

Editor’s Note: America is in the midst of a cold civil war. On the one side are the defenders of our constitutional regime. On the other is a revolutionary enemy: the group quota regime, which has turned our own legal system into one of its primary weapons, lawfare. When someone runs afoul of the group quota regime, he can expect lawfare to be inflicted on him with all the viciousness appropriate to wartime. 

This is what happened to John Eastman, an attorney who has been ruthlessly persecuted by the enemy for the crime of providing legal advice to President Trump amid the contested 2020 election. As Mark Pulliam writes, the questions at stake here are foundational ones; the rule of law, and the rights of citizens. These are threatened in this war. Whether the group quota regime triumphs over the American regime may well hinge on whether this lawfare is allowed to stand.

The rule of law depends on the even-handed application of laws—thus, the blindfold on statues depicting Lady Justice, derived from the Roman figure Justitia. In our adversary system of justice, a legacy of the Anglo-Saxon common law system brought to our shores by colonists from England, the resolution of legal disputes requires the zealous representation of litigants by attorneys and an impartial—or “neutral”– decisionmaker. Legal scholars have described the adversary system as a keystone of individual liberty and due process of law. The indispensability of legal representation, even in unpopular causes, has been a pillar of American jurisprudence since 1770, on the eve of the American Revolution, when John Adams courageously undertook the defense of British soldiers accused of murdering five colonists in the so-called Boston Massacre.

As we shall see, this historical episode, which legal journalist Dan Abrams has called the “most important case in colonial American history,” provides a stark contrast to travails resulting from the representation of President Donald Trump by California attorney John Eastman, who is facing disbarment, criminal prosecution, and other forms of retribution for providing legal advice to an unpopular client in connection with the controversial 2020 presidential election. How times have changed. 

Adams, a leading patriot and a lawyer, risked his family’s livelihood and incurred the considerable opprobrium of his fellow Bostonians because he believed that everyone—even the hated Redcoats–was entitled to a fair trial.

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.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/america/2024/04/the-getting-of-donald-trump/

Forgive the foggy memory, for I can’t quite place the sign that announced in carefully painted white-on-black block letters just a single word, ‘BELIEVE’. Tennessee or Kentucky maybe, because the road it was beside wound through narrow valleys and hillsides waiting winter-naked for the first green sheen of the northern spring. And there it was, on the other side of a low fence fronting a roughly cleared plot, this handmade testament to … what exactly? This was in the South, albeit only just below the Mason-Dixon line, where churches large and small are regular as milestones along the way and almost as common.  Around the next turn, no doubt, there would be another little billboard instructing the passerby where belief is best invested, with Jesus or the Bible seeming most likely. But there was nothing, no second sign to deliver the expected one-two punchline. Just ‘Believe’, and that was that.

Until an oncoming 18-wheeler switched the focus to evasive driving and self-preservation, it was a riddle to occupy for a mile or two the thoughts of a solitary motorist. What species of rustic obsessive would go to such trouble and for what purpose? Today, though, with some seven months to run before the 2024 election and a criminal trial like no other getting under way, belief for the sake of believing seems almost to make sense. To abandon the comfort of delusion would mean chewing over some deeply unpalatable truths, not least about the full machinery of the law being deployed in the selective and unprecedented prosecution of one man, a former president and current White House contender.

But believe what you want to believe. Everyone is doing it, and why not? Your ‘truth’ is as valid as that of the next they, zim or zey. If the facts disagree, if the evidence contradicts, well there’s the handy expedient of not really being required to care too much. You have your belief and that’s enough. An eager willingness to believe the unbelievable, it’s all that’s needed anywhere and everywhere. The more what is obvious and unhidden goes unremarked and unquestioned, the better for a troubled nation’s peace of mind, at least in the short term.

At the New York Times such belief demands what is unfolding in a southern Manhattan courtroom be painted as a triumph for American fair play, as laid out in a recent editorial built upon a believer’s ‘truth’ that, as usual, simply isn’t true:  “Donald Trump, who relentlessly undermined the justice system while in office,”  the editorial begins. No examples of Trump’s alleged perfidy, no names or cases are cited, and certainly there is no mention of the many harassing and vexatious lawsuits brought against Trump, for that might ruffle what the Times prefers to perceive and present as a moral crusade in which its editorial voice speaks for all the noble traditions of courtroom probity and decorum. Trump, the leader column assures the core readers its authors know are equally eager to believe, “is enjoying the same protections and guarantees of fairness and due process before the law that he sought to deny to others during his term.”