Buy American - bring order back to American streets
And:
I did not hear Trump's speech on Saturday May 30, because I was engaged with family nor did I know he was going to speak so we also did not tape it but I am told it was a great speech, one of his best, and I would encourage all to listen and decide for yourself.
In far too many instances these are the same political leaders who were unprepared to cope with COVID 19. Time will tell
And:
Darkness Falls
A little noticed decision that could have significant repercussions. Can concerns for public health lead to the suspension of worship? Your thoughts?
When Merkel joins Xi and Putin because Trump is being challenged by events there will be future consequences that will not bode well for democracies. Your thoughts?
Beijing’s latest policy choices represent an across-the-board defiance of U.S. pressure. Last week, one of China’s most senior military officials, Gen. Li Zuocheng, gave a chilling speech in the Great Hall of the People: “If the possibility for peaceful reunification is lost,” he warned, “the people’s armed forces will, with the whole nation, including the people of Taiwan, take all necessary steps to resolutely smash any separatist plots or actions.” Beijing has always claimed the right to use force to block Taiwan’s independence. It is, however, unusual for such a senior military official to threaten the island so explicitly.
Whatever happens in the election, the U.S. administration next year will face a problem even more daunting than the intellectual challenge of crafting a national strategy for an increasingly dangerous time. It will have to convince the world that this time, America really means what its president says.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Donald Trump speech - YouTube
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++IIt is fairly evident most Democrat mayors and governors, for whatever reason, were unable to effectively confront the anarchists, looters and rioters and totally lost control of their states and cities. Some still remain in that position. Perhaps their belief in PC'ism nonsense backfired and has bitten them in the derriere or perhaps they are doing everything they can to prevent Trump's re-election and are slow walking their resistance against those engaged in rioting etc.
I am willing to be persuaded and lean in the direction that Democrat hatred of Trump knows no bounds.
The fact that anarchists, looters and rioters come in all colors does not excuse breaking laws unless we now believe order is unlawful. Peaceful protesters who lose control lose their right to protest and believing they must be patronized is wrongheaded. Mobs engaged in destruction cannot take over nor should they be tolerated.
After a semblance of peace returns to our streets these same pathetic politicians ,who lost control, because they failed to act responsibly, will be the same ones asking for tax payer money to cover the losses they allowed to occur. It will happen and Trump would be a fool to respond to their hypocrisy.
Meanwhile, State's Rights also implies State's Responsibility. When civil rights of citizens were ignored and they were abused simply because of their color and former enslaved status, it became past the time to mend our ways and America finally responded. When those resisted the implementation of the new laws they were met with force. Eventually most Americans adjusted, embraced the rightness of the changes and America moved forward.
The recent riots represent a step back but it should not be interpreted as a willingness to return to the past and anyone who thinks returning to the past is an acceptable message would be wise either to rethink and change their decision or find another nation where they will feel more comfortable living because their prejudicial ideas will be tolerated.
The collapse of the rule of law across the country, intensified by Antifa radicals, is terrifying.
Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of the bestseller The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture.
Savagery is spreading with lightning speed across the United States, with murderous assaults on police officers and civilians and the ecstatic annihilation of businesses and symbols of the state. Welcome to a real civilization-destroying pandemic, one that makes the recent saccharine exhortations to “stay safe” and the deployment of police officers to enforce outdoor mask-wearing seem like decadent bagatelles.This particular form of viral chaos was inevitable, given the failure of Minneapolis’s leaders to quell the city’s growing mayhem. The violence began on Tuesday, May 26, the day after the horrifying arrest and subsequent death of George Floyd. On the night of Thursday, May 28, Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey ordered the city’s Third Police Precinct evacuated as the forces of hatred, distinct from legitimate forms of protest, descended upon it for a third day in a row. The building was promptly torched, sending a powerful sign that society would not defend its most fundamental institutions of law and order.On Friday, May 29, Minnesota governor Tim Walz explained his reluctance to mobilize the National Guard as an unwillingness to seem “oppressive.” Naturally, he apologized for his white privilege—“I will not patronize you as a white man without living [your] lived experiences”—and explained the feral violence as an understandable response to racial injustice: “The ashes are symbolic of decades and generations of pain, of anguish, unheard.” Few arrests were made after five days of rampant crime.The media, visibly exhilarated by this latest explosion of black rage, had its own explanation for the chaos: people were outraged that the officer who had kept his knee on Floyd’s neck for a sickening eight-plus minutes had not yet been arrested and charged. But when that arrest came, along with murder and manslaughter charges after a lightning-fast investigation by the district attorney, the anarchy continued—not just in Minneapolis but across the country, intensfied by Antifa radicals.Political leaders elsewhere have been just as reluctant to use the necessary force to quell the violence. New York mayor Bill de Blasio called on police to use a “light touch” in response. New York governor Andrew Cuomo coolly predicted on Sunday, May 31, during his now absurdly irrelevant daily coronavirus press conference, that the violence would continue. “The explosion we saw last night we’ll probably see again tonight,” he said—obviously confident in his own physical safety, if not the safety of the rest of the state’s residents.The attacks on local law enforcement were already happening out of sight of TV cameras before the most photogenic scenes of arson and the stomping of squad cars started showing up on network and cable news. On Tuesday, May 26, and Wednesday, May 27, Chicago residents surrounded and threw bottles at Chicago Police Department officers trying to arrest gun suspects. One suspect was the likely perpetrator of a shooting that had just hit a five-year-old girl and two teenage boys. The other had just thrown his gun under a car; the cop-haters tried to free him from the squad car. No surprise that Saturday night, downtown Chicago was plundered.This pandemic of civil violence is more widespread than anything seen during the Black Lives Matter movement of the Obama years, and it will likely have an even deadlier toll on law enforcement officers than the targeted assassinations we saw from 2014 onward. It’s worse this time because the country has absorbed another five years of academically inspired racial victimology. From Ta-Nehisi Coates to the New York Times’s 1619 project, the constant narrative about America’s endemic white supremacy and its deliberate destruction of the “black body” has been thoroughly injected into the political bloodstream.Facts don’t matter to the academic victimology narrative. Far from destroying the black body, whites are the overwhelming target of interracial violence. Between 2012 and 2015, blacks committed 85.5 percent of all black-white interracial violent victimizations (excluding interracial homicide, which is also disproportionately black-on-white). That works out to 540,360 felonious assaults on whites. Whites committed 14.4 percent of all interracial violent victimization, or 91,470 felonious assaults on blacks. Blacks are less than 13 percent of the national population.The national media have been insisting on the theme of the allegedly brutal Minneapolis police department. They said nothing as black-on-white robberies rose in downtown Minneapolis late last year, along with savage assaults on passersby. Why are the Minneapolis police in black neighborhoods? Because that’s where violent crime is happening, including shootings of two-year-olds and lethal beatings of 75-year-olds. Just as during the Obama years, the discussion of the allegedly oppressive police is being conducted in the complete absence of any recognition of street crime and the breakdown of the black family that drives it. Once the violence began, any effort to “understand” it should have stopped, since that understanding is inevitably exculpatory. The looters are not grieving over the stomach-churning arrest and death of George Floyd; they are having the time of their lives. You don’t protest or mourn a victim by stealing oxycontin, electronics, jewelry, and sneakers.Fittingly, the ideological handmaiden of this violence—academia—has already sprung into action. The chancellors and presidents of Harvard, the University of Arizona, the University of Pennsylvania, and Yale, among others, released statements over the weekend assuring their black students of their schools’ commitment to racial equity, in light of the George Floyd death—an event wholly unrelated to the academic. No college leader denounced the violence.UCLA’s chancellor Gene Block, as well as the school’s $400,000 a year Vice Chancellor for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion and a parade of deans, announced that the Office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion and the school’s legions of Equity Advisors would be coming up with new programs for “virtual reflection spaces” in which to “humbly acknowledge the pain.” The school’s Resources for Racial Trauma would be beefed up. The academic diversity bureaucracy has now been given a whole new excuse for existence and can be assured that it will escape the cost-cutting chopping block, even as universities beg the federal government for more coronavirus bailout money.The great philosophers and poets of the West—from Aeschylus and Euripides, to Shakespeare, Hobbes, and the American Founders—understood the chaos and lust for power that lurk beneath civilization. Thanks to the magnificent infrastructure of the rule of law, we now take stability and social trust for granted. We assume that violence, once unleashed in the name of justice, can easily be put back in the bottle.It cannot.It was a signal accomplishment of both politics and science to banish humanity’s millennia-long fear of darkness. That city dwellers are now re-experiencing that fear with each fall of night is a measure of how rapidly we are losing our hard-won progress.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
It wasn't just religious liberty that Chief Justice Roberts strangled
BY ANDREW C. MCCARTHY, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR —
THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL
The big story is even bigger than it appears to be at first blush.
Close to midnight on Friday, while rioters used the killing of George Floyd as a pretext to set America aflame, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a 5-4 ruling that declined to enjoin the states of California and Illinois from restrictions on communal worship imposed due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Most startling was that Chief Justice John Roberts not only joined the court’s four left-leaning justices (Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan) in declining to uphold religious liberty. Roberts also wrote a brief opinion explaining his decision.
That opinion is an eye-opener. Roberts accords the right to worship no deference by virtue of its being a fundamental liberty expressly protected by the First Amendment. We are to see it as an activity like any other activity, commercial or social, the pros and cons of which technocrats must weigh in fashioning regulations. The opinion, moreover, champions the power of government officials to dictate to the people who elect them without “second-guessing by an unelected federal judiciary” — exactly the power that the Bill of Rights, and the incorporation jurisprudence by which the court has applied much of it to the states, are meant to deny.
This is truly remarkable because it is so gratuitous.
As Amy Howe explains at Scotusblog, both states had asked the justices to stay their hands because the cases were essentially moot. That is, the restrictions that worshipers in Southern California and Chicago were protesting either had been superseded by less stifling (though still objectionable) regulations or were about to be lifted (albeit without a guarantee that objectionable regs would not then be imposed). The Supreme Court could have summarily declined to issue an injunction, with no further comment and without prejudice to the right of churches and members of their congregations to challenge any new restrictions. Between the fact that the cases were not ripe for resolution, and the fact that the Supreme Court rarely issues injunctions (as opposed to stays that merely suspend matters temporarily), the justices simply could have sidestepped this one. That approach would have been consistent with the court’s usual and prudent reluctance to rule on weighty constitutional questions unless it is truly necessary.
So knowing there was no need to do this, Roberts willfully waded into the maelstrom. Why would he do that?
It is inconceivable that the chief justice does not know the Trump Department of Justice (DOJ) has mobilized in defense of civil liberties. At first, DOJ’s Civil Rights Division intervened in religious liberty cases. It has enjoyed success in pressuring municipalities to relax some offensive restrictions, principally contending that governments run afoul of the First Amendment when they discriminate against free-exercise rights — subjecting houses of worship to more adhesive conditions than are applied to commercial and other activities.
Since then, DOJ has begun expanding its push into the realm of economic regulation. This is a tougher row to hoe for federal authorities because states are supreme in regulating intrastate commerce. Governors get a wide berth so long as they avoid discriminating against constitutionally protected interests or activities. Attorney General William Barr, nevertheless, has argued that protecting individual liberty is a constitutional imperative. Thus, the DOJ has admonished against burden shifting, theorizing that it is not an American’s burden to prove that his or her job is “essential.” Instead, it is the state’s burden to show that a job — a person’s livelihood — cannot be performed reasonably safely in the absence of the restrictions the state chooses to impose.
Just yesterday, the Justice Department filed a statement of interest supporting a lawsuit by Michigan businesses that claim Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s restrictions are “arbitrary and irrational.” In announcing the action, Civil Rights Division chief Eric Dreiband proclaimed, “The Constitution permits appropriate state and local government restrictions to protect the health and safety of Americans, but it does not permit arbitrary limits that limit the right of all people in our country to be treated equally and fairly by the government.”
Chief Justice Roberts’s Friday night opinion appears to put a harpoon in that anti-discrimination theory.
In rejecting the religious liberty claim, Roberts counters that it is not a matter of unlawful discrimination if different things are regulated in different ways. Religious gatherings, he rationalized, are being restricted like gatherings that are physically similar, such as lectures, concerts, theater productions and spectator sports. He conceded that less intense restrictions have been imposed on other activities, such as shopping, banking and laundering. But that, he insists, is because of salient differences in the way they are conducted: small groups, no extended proximity, and so on.
But wait a second. What about the constitutional pedigree of religious exercise? That was the point pressed by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, in a brief dissent joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch. (Justice Samuel Alito also opposed the denial of First Amendment relief but did not join Kavanaugh’s dissenting opinion.)
Moreover, what about our fundamental right to property, our need to work and our obligation to take care of our dependents? Not the court’s job, Roberts says:
“Our Constitution principally entrusts the safety and the health of the people to the politically accountable officials of the States to guard and protect. ... When those officials undertake to act in areas fraught with medical and scientific uncertainties, their latitude must be especially broad. Where those broad limits are not exceeded, they should not be subject to second-guessing by an unelected federal judiciary, which lacks the background, competence, and expertise to assess public health and is not accountable to the people.” [Citations and internal quotations omitted.]
The Justice Department may think the economy-crashing restrictions imposed by blue-state governors are irrational. By the chief justice’s lights, though, it “seems quite improbable” that the Supreme Court would find unconstitutional the actions of state and local officials wrestling with “a novel severe acute respiratory illness” which has “killed ... more 100,000 people nationwide,” and as to which “there is no known cure, no effective treatment, and no vaccine.”
There is no recognition, in Roberts’ rendering, that there is another side to this equation — a side where 400 times the number of people who’ve died have lost their jobs, millions of them facing ruin. The stubborn message: Don’t expect the court to help you, you’re the ones who elected these people; if you don’t like what they do, un-elect them. If you’ve elected social engineers who say the Bill of Rights is above their pay grade, that’s your problem.
The justices are happy to order that abortion must be available, to decide which couples (or perhaps throuples) must be permitted to marry, and to dictate what’s ever next in the ceaseless march of progressive, organic “libert
Former federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at National Review Institute, a contributing editor at National Review, and a Fox News contributor. His latest book is “Ball of Collusion.” Follow him on Twitter @AndrewCMcCarthy.”
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Sharpton and Jackson are not the only shakedown artists.
I am willing to chip in a dollar and return the shackles I have kept all these years . Are you?
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Black Entertainment Television founder Robert Johnson say $14 TRILLION of reparations should be paid to black people for slavery
· Robert Johnson, the founder of Black Entertainment Television (BET) says the government should pay trillions of dollars for reparations to black people· Johnson called reparations the 'affirmative action program of all time' and believes it would go some way to help reduce racial inequality· He said they are important because it would demonstrate that white Americans acknowledge 'damages are owed' for the injustices created by slavery· Slavery officially ended with the ratification of the 13th Amendment in 1865
The World Waits Out Trump
The belief in Beijing, Moscow and Berlin is that the U.S. can no longer lead the globe.
By
As a beleaguered Trump administration struggles with an unprecedented surge of domestic challenges, foreign leaders friendly and otherwise are re-calibrating their strategies for coping with an unconventional administration embroiled in turbulence. It now looks as if China, Russia and Germany have decided how to handle President Trump through November. Berlin will ignore him; Moscow and Beijing will take advantage of U.S. distraction.
For Russia, this means overlooking its own economic problems and the coronavirus pandemic to step up its engagement in the Libyan civil war. For its part, the Chinese leadership seems to believe that it is impossible to conciliate Mr. Trump, but that there is also little to fear from him. An economic crisis worse than 2008, the greatest surge in racial and political dissension since 1968, and a presidential election likely to test America’s strife-filled political climate—no Chinese leader, least of all Xi Jinping, could be expected to ignore opportunities like these.
That threat came against the background of an escalating crisis in Hong Kong, where the Chinese Communist Party’s threat to impose new national-security laws on the city has generated global concern over the future of the “one country, two systems” approach that allowed Hong Kong to flourish after Britain’s departure in 1997. For Taiwan, Beijing’s apparent open contempt for previous pledges about two systems combined with open threats of war in the event of a Taiwanese declaration of independence demonstrates the party’s determination to gain full control over the island.
The CCP’s response to threatened U.S. sanctions on Hong Kong was also ominous. According to Western news reports, China has apparently told state-owned enterprises to halt some purchases it agreed to make as part of its Phase One trade agreement with the U.S. More American steps on Hong Kong will bring more trade retaliation, sources warned.
At the same time, Beijing is stressing tensions with India. It is making new territorial claims on the disputed frontier even as Chinese troops dig into positions on the Indian side of the line of control that separates the countries’ forces.
If the U.S. and its allies want a confrontational relationship, Beijing says, they can have one. China is not deterred.
Meanwhile, German Chancellor Angela Merkel blew up Mr. Trump’s plan for a high-profile demonstration of Western unity by declining his invitation to a June Group of Seven summit at Camp David—now postponed to September—citing pandemic-related concerns. Together with her decision to join French President Emmanuel Macron in promoting a massive aid package for the fragile Covid-hit southern economies in the Eurozone, a clear pattern emerges: As the world crisis intensifies, Germany’s priority will be the European Union. The president is not exactly irrelevant to Berlin’s thinking. But the German sense seems to be that there is little to gain by trying to work with Mr. Trump and little to lose by ignoring him.
The president’s critics will pounce on his inability to coordinate a united allied response to Chinese and Russian provocations as further proof of his inability to achieve constructive results in foreign affairs. They will not be entirely wrong, but this story has more characters than Donald Trump. The problem isn’t only that Russia, China and Germany don’t see much point in trying to reach agreements with the current president. They likely believe that the triple threat of the pandemic, economic crash and civil unrest in the U.S. will promote an American withdrawal from global issues no matter who wins in November.
Recent events reinforce a beliefs in many foreign capitals that U.S. society has entered a period of dysfunctional chaos and that the American political system is no longer capable of providing consistent leadership in international affairs. As each president dedicates himself to the destruction of the previous executive’s policies, what Mark Twain said about New England’s weather begins to look like a description of American foreign policy: If you don’t like it now, just wait a few minutes.
