RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-vindictive-spirit-of-st-louis-11595373104?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

By now all America knows Mark and Patricia McCloskey from the video showing the St. Louis couple holding legal firearms as they defended themselves and their home from a crowd of protesters trespassing on their property. A politically motivated prosecutor on Monday charged the couple with unlawful use of a weapon.

The felony count is because they pointed their weapons at protesters. Mr. McCloskey said he did so because he was “scared for my life,” and that of his wife. No shots were fired. Yet now prosecutor Kim Gardner is charging them on grounds they made the trespassers fear for their safety.

The good news is that there’s been plenty of official blowback. Missouri Gov. Mike Parson tweeted that “We will not allow law-abiding citizens to be targeted for exercising their constitutional rights.” He has promised a pardon if they’re convicted. Attorney General Eric Schmitt is working to get the case dismissed, noting that, in addition to the U.S. and Missouri constitutions, Missouri law recognizes the “castle doctrine.” This allows residents to use force against intruders, including deadly force, based on self-defense and the notion that your home is your castle.

https://www.newsweek.com/america-fast-becoming-woke-theocracy-opinion-1518938

Wokeism is fast becoming the new state religion.

Should it overtake our government, in making identity politics paramount it will unmake any semblance of a unifying American identity.

In so doing, it will serve as the ultimate tool of cynical, radically leftist power-grabbers, who will be dividing and conquering under the guise of a fraudulent virtue, justice and morality.

The Woke’s core views have been bubbling up from elite classrooms to the commanding heights of society for decades. The idea that America is a deplorable, irredeemable nation, marked by and rooted in racism, sexism, imperialism and the like, is not new. Nor is the idea that racism, and its manifestations, beginning with slavery, and then pervading every other part of our “system,” drives all disparities in society—disparities that must be “fixed” with reverse racism.

What is different is that now such views have been legitimated by the authorities and mainstreamed in our culture. If you dare to challenge them, you are liable to end up excommunicated from American life—canceled. After all, dissenting from the Woke orthodoxy makes you a racist.

Consider some of the signs that indicate the fast-accelerating ascent of Wokeism.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/free-speech-dying-college-campuses/

FIRE and like-minded groups are here to help.

 T he Bill of Rights is an essential component of the American founding, helping to ensure that the people determine their government, and not the other way around. For centuries, these provisions have been lauded as the brilliant political philosophy of prudent Founders — indeed, as the only thing standing between the citizenry and a potential tyranny.

One would not know this from spending extended time on a college campus. What are constitutional freedoms to the nouveaux liberals? The subtle instruments of oppression of Dead White Males. What is it to engage in civil discourse — an activity protected by the Bill of Rights — that is contrary to the established doctrines? A heartless, malicious exercise intended to strip away the dignity of the oppressed through the guise of “truth-seeking” and “thought-experimenting.” What matters to these activists, reared by the forces of Marxist social theory, isn’t liberty or freedom — it’s power.

Anecdotally, I can speak to a disturbing event that happened over this past month at Harvard. A friend of mine recently posted a comment to a group chat for the Harvard class of 2023: “UPenn seems to be letting the majority of students come back.” A perfectly innocuous thing to say. But a harsh response immediately followed: “The way in which you all have the privilege to ignore the crises that are affecting the world right now. Coronavirus. White Supremacy and Anti-Blackness. . . . It actually sickens me that you all perpetuate and participate in these asinine conversations when you know we aren’t going back to campus.” My friend attempted to defend herself, asking, in essence: How can you think to shame me for asking a perfectly innocent question? You know nothing about my background, what I’ve been through, or my beliefs.

. https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/07/21/cancel_culture_and_the_historical_illiteracy_that_fuels_it_143757.html

Amid the debate over America’s monuments, a new poll reveals that an overwhelming majority of voters disapprove of the removal of historic statues perceived by some as offensive. The poll, which equally surveyed registered Democrats and Republicans, showed that 74% of respondents agree with President Trump that monuments should not be removed.

It remains unclear how the controversy will affect the November election. Already, this summer has been upended by an extraordinary series of events, including the ongoing public health crisis and protests in response to the tragic death of George Floyd. What began as an outcry against abuses by police has led to unprecedented soul searching about the issue of race in America, including the propriety of statues honoring the nation’s former leaders.  There are understandably strong feelings over the display of statues that honor leaders of the Confederacy, but the recent indiscriminate destruction of statues and monuments resembles a dystopian plot line about suppressed history and silenced dissenting voices.

Understanding the current cultural context is key to understanding the controversy surrounding America’s statues. Defacing and vandalizing public memorials are the latest manifestation of the “cancel culture” that seeks to punish individuals for past actions or views ranging from unjust to merely out of step with today’s prevailing zeitgeist. Recently, this illiberal crusade instigated the outing of Boeing Communications Chief Niel Golightly, who resigned after a colleague complained about a 1987 article he wrote arguing that women should not serve in combat. Despite Golightly’s change of view, Boeing forced him out.

Others, including comedians, politicians, and even pastors have had to scramble to atone for whatever landed them outside the good graces of the cultural elite. While the cancel culture movement is problematic for many reasons, the latest trend to “cancel” historical figures especially underscores the consequences of historical illiteracy.

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-left-is-now-the-right

In August, 2005, Rolling Stone sent me to cover a freak show. In a small Pennsylvania town called Dover, residents contrived to insert a sentence about teaching “intelligent design” into the curriculum, and fought for its right to do so in an extravagantly-covered trial in the “big city” capital of Harrisburg.

Dover’s school board president, Alan Bonsell, was a fundamentalist who believed God shaped man from dust. It was said Bonsell would stand at his window at night, wondering, as he gazed at the stars, at the intervening hand of God. “If you can’t see that, you’re just not thinking clearly,” he said. His wife supposedly told him he looked like Chuck Norris.

The bureaucratic atmosphere Bonsell presided over was not kind to the eggheads trying to teach. When the head of the district’s science department, Bertha Spahr, begged the board not to promote “intelligent design,” listing past Supreme Court decisions about religion in classrooms, another fundamentalist board member named Bill Buckingham – an ex-cop who wore a lapel pin in the shape of both a Christian cross and an American flag – shouted her down. “Where did you get your law degree?” he snapped. Author Laurie Lebo in the book The Devil in Dover described what happened next:

Neither Nilsen nor Bonsell spoke up to address Buckingham’s rudeness to the thirty-year veteran teacher. Spahr pulled back, shocked, and then sat down without saying a word.

It was after this meeting in October, 2004 that a passage about teaching “gaps/problems in Darwin’s theory” was inserted into the curriculum. The science geeks fought back, however, and roughly a year later I sat in a packed courtroom with overeducated reporters from all over the world who came to gape at the spectacle of rural ignorance showing its rump in an American courtroom.

When a Christian attorney named Robert J. Muise tried to cross-examine the smooth-talking Superstars of Science who’d flown in from places like Brown and Harvard to denounce “intelligent design,” journos murdered their thesauruses looking for new words for “hayseed.” The chuckling press section felt like front row of a comedy club.

Dover’s failed school board rebellion inspired multiple books, law review articles, and films, including a Nova doc that won a Peabody award. For decades, whether in Arkansas or Texas or Louisiana, every time even a small group of fundamentalists tried bullying teachers via this stacking-the-school-bureaucracy trick, northern press heathens would descend in mammoth numbers. Especially in 2005, which felt like the dawn of a new thousand-year reign of Bushian conservatism, liberal audiences jumped at any opportunity to re-create the magic of one of their foundational knowledge-over-superstition parables, the Scopes Monkey Trial.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/portland-riots-trump-constitution-law-andrew-mccarthy

“[H]e shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” The Constitution says that’s the president’s job, but we’re not hearing much about that from the chattering classes.

We hear plenty of bloviating from the media-Democrat complex, dutifully masquerading the rioting in Portland as “mostly peaceful protest.” And there is no shortage of faux outrage over President Trump’s purported trampling on state sovereignty by dispatching federal agents to address the mayhem.

But we don’t hear much about the Constitution … including from politicians, such as Senator Rand Paul, R., Ky., who are wont to pose as constitutionalists.

The provision quoted at the top of this op-ed is from Article II, Section 3. It imposes on the president of the United States the duty to execute federal law.

The Constitution says the president shall perform this obligation. We’re not talking about an option or something he may do or not do as he sees fit. It is a solemn duty. It is what being the chief executive is all about.

The president has two principal, closely related responsibilities: to provide for national security and to see that the laws are enforced.

The latter duty very much includes the protection of federal property and the execution of laws Congress has constitutionally enacted to address violent crime.

https://nypost.com/2020/07/20/fbi-knew-collusion-was-a-nothing-burger-but-kept-fake-scandal-alive-anyway/

‘We have not seen evidence of any individuals affiliated with the Trump team in contact with [Russian intelligence officers].”

How much wasted time on pointless investigations could have been prevented had Peter Strzok, then one of the FBI’s top counterintelligence officials who was spearheading the bureau’s Trump-Russia investigation, said this publicly one month into President Trump’s term?

But no, it was a private note by Strzok, for consumption within the FBI, to debunk a Feb. 14, 2017, New York Times article. The news story, a compilation by five of the Times’ top reporters, working four unnamed sources (the usual “current and former American officials”), claimed that members of the Trump campaign had “repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials” before the 2016 election.

This was false. Just as important, the FBI knew it was false.

But we, the American people, only know that now, in 2020, because Strzok’s notes were finally made public on Friday.

The Times article centrally identified former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort as a key adviser in communication with Kremlin spies. Strzok, however, countered that the bureau was “unaware of any calls with any Russian government official in which Manafort was a party.”

Significantly, the Times report was part of a tireless campaign of government leaks, mostly from current and former intelligence operatives (undoubtedly from officials who either worked in agencies still teeming with Obama holdovers or left government after serving the Obama administration).

The story was published just after the firing of Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser. As part of the Trump transition, Flynn had engaged in perfectly appropriate contacts with Russia’s ambassador to the United States, but had been publicly portrayed as if he were a clandestine agent working for Moscow against the country he’d bled for as a decorated US Army commander.

The narrative of “Trump collusion with Russia” was pure fiction. The public officials who peddled it to a voracious anti-Trump press had to know it was bunk. Yet they fed the beast anyway, regardless of the cloud this created, regardless of how much it harmed the administration’s capacity to govern.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/07/what_the_coronavirus_numbers_are_telling_us.html

There are lots of numbers flying around about the coronavirus, so here is a brief attempt to put some context to them. 

The United States daily new case volume rose to the mid 30,000 range in April, then started a slide to about half that level in mid-May. Since then, there has been a steep rise, to the mid 70,0000 level last week, down a bit this weekend to the low 60,000 level. The distribution of cases among the states has also changed. In the first surge, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Louisiana were hardest hit. In the last 6-7 weeks, Florida, California, Texas, Arizona, Georgia, South Carolina, and a few other states in the southeast have had the highest volumes, though a large number of states have rising numbers. 

The fear surrounding the virus is, of course, most associated with its death toll. The daily number of new deaths reported is far lower now, even with the much higher daily new case levels, than at the peak of daily deaths two to three months ago. Daily deaths were regularly in the 2,000 range or higher, reaching 2,500 per day, and dropped to the 500-750 per day range in June. They are up a bit now to close to 1,000 on some days, with higher death tolls in the most severely hit states, likely to increase more since there is a lag between positive testing results and deaths associated with the new cases.  

This country has the highest caseload in the world, and one of the highest caseloads in the world compared to population.  But as far as deaths, many countries have higher death rates per million people than we do. In addition, there is the case fatality rate: deaths divided by positive cases. The US case fatality rate has dropped steadily for several months, from about 6% to below 4%. Death numbers are lagged, as indicated already, but back in April, new deaths were on some days 6-10% of new positive cases. The last few weeks, that percentage has been about 1-2%.  The US case fatality rate is far lower than many other countries, including our developed world peers in Europe.