RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/columbia-university-protesters-israel-hamas-palestine-nypd-nemat-minouche-shafik-0f6feba4?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Protesters across the country these days claim they are fighting for the rights of Palestinians but show contempt for the rights of those whose lives they disrupt. On Thursday Columbia University President Minouche Shafik had enough. When the protesters who set up a “Gaza solidarity encampment” on the university’s South Lawn ignored repeated warnings to leave, she called in the New York Police Department to have them removed.

Ms. Shafik waited too long to address the problems festering on her campus, and her move came only after she was grilled by Congress on antisemitism on Columbia’s campus. But give her credit for acting. In a statement she explains that the protesters ignored multiple warnings that they were violating university policies.

Other leaders should take heed—especially the Democrats and progressives who run America’s cities and most institutions. In recent weeks similar protests have shut down San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, blocked access to Chicago’s airport and interrupted Congressional hearings. They even crashed a fundraiser in New York to heckle President Biden, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

It is hardly surprising that the most progressive cities have seen the most protests. No surprise, either, that among those arrested at Columbia Thursday was Barnard student Isra Hirsi, daughter of anti-Israel Rep. Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.). An unbowed Ms. Hirsi tweeted that, in addition to Columbia’s divestment from Israel, she and her fellow protesters are demanding “FULL amnesty for all students facing repression.” Naturally.

Ms. Hirsi and the other protesters are fully entitled to express their view that Israel is pursuing genocide in its war with Hamas. But what the country saw Thursday at Columbia wasn’t about free expression. As President Shafik pointed out, the protest was about disrupting campus life for everyone else and creating “a harassing and intimidating environment for many of our students.” It’s the same for protests designed to prevent others from commuting to work, catching a flight or getting to class.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/04/20/the-lefts-repressive-tolerance/

As one watches hundreds of Columbia University students march through New York demanding an end to the state of Israel and the removal of all Zionists from their presence; as one watches Loyola University’s “Anti Racism Center Fellow” demand that “all you ugly ass little Jewish people” “get the f*ck out of here;” as one watches NPR retaliate against the internal watchdog who called it out for its radical leftist bias and then watches as the watchdog’s (now former) colleagues turn on him and insist that he is a liar, two things are worth keeping in mind. First, these are all the fruits of the “tolerant” left, the people who insist that “diversity is our strength” and that narrow-mindedness is the most heinous sin of all. Second, the “tolerant” left’s manifest intolerance is not an accident, nor is it an example of hypocrisy. It is, rather, intentionally and lucidly undertaken. It is the purposeful and unapologetic manifestation of an ideology that the left adopted decades ago in its remorseless pursuit of cultural and political hegemony.

Once upon a time, the American Left was—at least in theory—thoroughly dedicated to the ideas of free speech and free expression. The leftist students of the University of California, Berkeley, spent years protesting and agitating for an end to speech codes, making their campus the home of the “Free Speech Movement.” The American Civil Liberties Union fought tooth and nail to enable neo-Nazis to exercise their First Amendment rights to march through Skokie, Illinois.  The left rallied around pornographer Larry Flynt in his fight against Rev. Jerry Falwell, who sued Flynt for libel over a crass parody. Leftists loved free speech and wanted everyone, everywhere, to enjoy its inarguable benefits. Or so they said.

The catch is that while the American Left professed a deep and abiding affection for the idea of free speech, it never really cared about that idea at all. Indeed, it never really cared too much about any ideas. One thing that has always distinguished the American Left from its European counterparts is its complete disinterest in theories and philosophy and its attendant obsession with power and the tactics necessary to achieve it.  What little philosophical thought the New Left did absorb in the 1960s was that which reinforced its non-intellectual origins and aims. “The Port Huron Statement”—the New Left’s founding charter (and a document bought and paid for by the United Auto Workers union)—was not, as it is often described, a statement of “ideas.”  Rather, it was a statement of strategies—strategies for achieving and maintaining power.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2024/04/17/impeachment_whistleblower_was_in_the_loop_of_biden-ukraine_affairs_that_trump_wanted_probed_1024937.html

The ‘whistleblower’ who sparked Donald Trump’s first impeachment was deeply involved in the political maneuverings behind Biden-family business schemes in Ukraine that Trump wanted probed, newly obtained emails from former Vice President Joe Biden’s office reveal.

Eric Ciaramella: Privately expressed shock — “Yikes” — at linking U.S. aid to firing a prosecutor probing the firm paying Biden’s son. But he kept mum publicly, so was he really shocked?
Harvard University/Davis Center

In 2019, then-National Intelligence Council analyst Eric Ciaramella touched off a political firestorm when he anonymously accused Trump of linking military aid for Ukraine to a demand for an investigation into alleged Biden corruption in that country.

But four years earlier, while working as a national security analyst attached to then-Vice President Joe Biden’s office, Ciaramella was a close adviser when Biden threatened to cut off U.S. aid to Ukraine unless it fired its top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, who was investigating Ukraine-based Burisma Holdings. At the time, the corruption-riddled energy giant was paying Biden’s son Hunter millions of dollars.

Those payments – along with other evidence tying Joe Biden to his family’s business dealings – received little attention in 2019 as Ciaramella accused Trump of a corrupt quid pro quo. Neither did subsequent evidence indicating that Hunter Biden’s associates had identified Shokin as a “key target.” These matters are now part of the House impeachment inquiry into President Biden.

“It now seems there was material evidence that would have been used at the impeachment trial [to exonerate Trump],” said George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, who has testified as an expert witness in the ongoing Biden impeachment inquiry. “Trump was alleging there was a conflict of interest with the Bidens, and the evidence could have challenged Biden’s account and established his son’s interest in the Shokin firing.”

Ciaramella’s role – including high-level discussions with top Biden aides and Ukrainian prosecutors – is only now coming to light thanks to the recent release of White House emails and photos from the National Archives.

The emails show Ciaramella expressed shock – “Yikes” is what he wrote – at Biden’s move to withhold the $1 billion in aid from Kyiv, which represented a sudden shift in U.S. policy. They also show he was drawn into White House communications over how to control adverse publicity from Hunter taking a lucrative seat on Burisma’s board.

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=d08064d2fc

You are undoubtedly familiar with many efforts of the fascist left to use its control of government offices, bureaucracies, and other institutions to delegitimize and silence mainstream conservative speech: things like the Censorship Industrial Complex, otherwise known as pressure by government functionaries to induce social media platforms to shut down wrong think on topics ranging from Covid to climate change to Trump; de-monetization of perfectly reasonable sites like PJ Media or Watts Up With That; the political prosecutions of presumptive Republican nominee Trump, including locking him in a courtroom to prevent him from campaigning; and many more such.

This week along comes a new and quite extreme instance that you may have missed. A European group called the National Conservatives scheduled a two-day conference for Tuesday and Wednesday in Brussels. The signature issue of the National Conservative movement is immigration, which they want to restrict; but beyond that their Conference appeared to feature a wide range of voices from Europe’s right, including some prominent elected officials. Examples of speakers were Nigel Farage of the UK (one of the leaders of the Brexit movement, and now leading a political party in the UK called the Reform Party, that looks likely to win significant seats when the next election is held); Suella Braverman, a Conservative MP in the UK, and recently, if briefly, the Home Secretary (which is one of the top cabinet positions); Eric Zemmour of France, head of a political party called “Reconquête!”, and winner of about 7% of the votes in the last presidential election; and Viktor Orban, current (and since 2010) Prime Minister of Hungary.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/inflation-hits-the-drive-through

You don’t need to be a close follower of economic data to know that food has gotten more expensive. The sticker shock at the grocery store and the anecdotes on social media reflect the truth: food prices at groceries and restaurants have increased by more than 25 percent in the last four years. That’s more than overall inflation (about 20 percent) and slightly more than average wage growth (about 24 percent). The Wall Street Journal recently reported on USDA data showing that Americans are now devoting more than 11.3 percent of their disposable income on food, the highest percentage in 30 years. While other food-spending measurements show a slightly smaller rise than the USDA’s, Americans are certainly spending more on food than they were immediately before the pandemic.

The data contain one puzzle, though: Americans don’t seem to be cutting back on dining out. Eating at restaurants is rightly considered something of a luxury; the more frugal way to consume food, generally, is to prepare it yourself. As the USDA shows, Americans are spending less of their income on groceries today than they were 30 years ago, even with recent food-price increases. At restaurants, however, Americans on average are spending quite a bit more of their income than they were three decades ago—well over 5 percent today versus about 4 percent in the early 1990s.

To understand this development, some historical perspective is useful. The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Expenditures Survey tracks household spending on goods and services back to 1901. Over the course of the twentieth century, BLS reports that households cut the portion of their income spent on food from over 40 percent to about 10 percent. That remarkable change left Americans with much more money to spend on other things, both luxuries and necessities.

The BLS lumps together grocery and restaurant spending for most of its past data but separates the two from 1984 onward. The more recent data also allow us to focus on specific demographics, such as middle-class families (the middle 20 percent of earners in this dataset). In the mid-1980s, middle-class Americans spent about 7 percent of their gross income on food at restaurants, and about 10 percent on groceries. By the late 2010s, these numbers had fallen to about 5 percent on restaurants and 7.5 percent on groceries, similar to the numbers from 2022 (4.6 percent on restaurants and 8.4 percent on groceries).

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/nypd-arrests-more-than-100-protesters-including-ilhan-omars-daughter-at-anti-israel-protest-on-columbia-campus/

New York City police arrested 108 anti-Israel protesters on Columbia University’s campus on Thursday after the university’s president asked law enforcement to step in and break up the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment.”

NYPD officers in riot gear arrived on campus Thursday afternoon, more than 30 hours after the protest began, and warned protesters to disperse several times before they began making arrests for trespassing. Two protesters were charged with obstruction of governmental administration in addition to trespassing, city officials said at a news conference.

“These arrests were made without incident, and we will now let the rest of the criminal-justice system run its course,” police commissioner Edward Caban said during a news conference on Thursday evening.

Isra Hirsi, the daughter of progressive representative Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.), was among the protesters who were arrested.

Mayor Eric Adams said police “ensured that there was no violence or injuries during the disturbance.”

“Columbia University students have a proud history of protest and raising their voices,” Adams said during the news conference. “Students have a right to free speech — they do not have a right to violate university policies and disrupt learning on campus.”

Asked why the Columbia sit-in was not considered a peaceful protest, Adams said “a peaceful protest is not in violation of city laws” or on public property.

“I know the conflict in the Middle East has left many of us grieving and angry,” he added. “This is a painful moment for our city, for our country, and for the globe. New Yorkers have every right to express their sorrow, but that heartbreak does not give you the right to harass others, to spread hate.”

https://tomklingenstein.com/the-legal-arsenal-of-the-group-quota-regime/

Editor’s Note: Lawfare, the weaponization of law against political opponents—both public figures and ordinary citizens—is now a mainstay of the Left’s political strategy. T.J. Harker, an attorney and former federal prosecutor, explains how the law itself has become the power mechanism of the present revolutionary threat, and illuminates how fully this new order has already supplanted the old American Constitution. From woke prosecutors to political disbarments to judicial activism, the group quota regime and the legal apparatus are now indistinguishable in large swathes of the country.

This essay was originally published in The American Mind under the title “The Regime v. America.” In the weeks since its release, at the end of a lengthy and expensive trial, a California Bar Court officially recommended that John Eastman be disbarred.

The American legal system was a thing of beauty. Refined across centuries and emerging from the precedence of millions of common law cases, by the end of the last millennium it had become the envy of the world. Serving both a dispute resolution and truth-seeking function, it channeled the violent passions of human nature into a controlled medium. It then subjected those passions to standardized procedures (the rules of evidence and civil or criminal procedure) to yield judgments that commanded the respect of the parties and the public. 

The American rule of law sustained our capacity for self-governance. The legal system midwifed the most sophisticated property rights regime in the world, improved our collective reasoning faculties, balanced the imperative of change with the demands of tradition, and settled disputes of trivial insignificance as well as controversies of monumental importance. The system functioned so well that most Americans never even thought about it. And it commanded such astonishing respect that virtually everyone obeyed its commands in even the most partisan contests. 

But today, sophisticated regime mandarins in Big Law, government, and non-profit activist organizations seek to pervert our legal system by hacking it. They warp its dispute resolution and truth-seeking function to one that advances and sustains their grip on power, delegitimizing that grip in the process. This is known as lawfare. Its variants include access denial, weaponized defamation law, weaponized criminal law, misuse of federal and state agencies, subversive professional licensing requirements, and “adversarial inversion.” 

https://nypost.com/2024/04/17/us-news/bill-maher-says-the-us-has-passed-the-rubicon-slams-dearborn-michigan-death-to-america-rally/

“Real Time” host Bill Maher said it’s time to draw the line when it comes to chants of “Death to America” on American soil.

On Friday’s “Overtime” segment on YouTube, Maher addressed the protesters in Dearborn, Michigan, who shouted “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” during an International Al-Quds Day rally earlier this month.

“Can I talk about American propaganda? Because there was a rally in Dearborn, Michigan, it’s a large Muslim population, [there were] chants of ‘Death to America.’ I feel like we’ve passed something here,” Maher said.

“The left has gotten mad at me for many years for talking about Islam. I try not to do it too much because I know it makes them go crazy, and I’ve made my point. But it needs to be talked about now. When you start chanting ‘Death to America’ in America.”

In a conversation with guests Piers Morgan and British journalist Gillian Tett, Maher pointed to quotes from anti-Israel activist Takek Bazzi, who headlined the hour-long rally in front of the Henry Ford Centennial Library in Dearborn.

In video shared by the Middle East Media Research Institute, Bazzi tells the crowd at the event that the “Death to America” chants were in honor of former Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/throw-the-anti-american-left-under-the-bus/

You’re likely to hear a lot about the polls showing that Americans are growing impatient with Israel. Democrats and their media allies seem to have concluded that this sentiment will grow along a straight-line trajectory until a majority have become intractably hostile toward Israel’s defensive war against Hamas. But straight-line trajectories are inherently fallacious. They take no account of exogenous events, such as, for example, Iran’s brazen, multilayered missile and drone attack on Israeli population centers. Indeed, even before that attack, Democratic and media elites had already internalized a misreading of this war and voters’ perceptions of it.

For example, a Pew Research Center poll from late March showed that, while the public is growing weary of watching Israel zealously prosecute its right to self-defense, those same voters also understand that Israel’s casus belli is just while Hamas’s is not. That survey found that only 15 percent of respondents believe that Israel’s reasons for fighting Hamas are “not at all” or “not too” valid. By contrast, 49 percent of respondents don’t believe that Hamas’s aims or cause are valid. Although 34 percent said Israel’s conduct on the ground in Gaza is “completely” or “somewhat” unacceptable, the October 7 massacre that begat this war was seen as an “acceptable” response to Israel’s actions by precisely 4 percent of American adults. Nearly three-quarters of the Americans surveyed rejected the notion that the barbarity unleashed on 10/7 was a legitimate response to the conditions that prevailed in the Gaza Strip.

This dichotomy is something on which America’s center-left elites should reflect amid their ongoing efforts to coddle and mollify what can only be described as a pro-terrorism constituency.