The Globalist Targeting, De-banking and De-personing of Nigel Farage

Neil Oliver’s monologues each week are even more critical in the intellectual pushback as the thoughts and monologues of Tucker Carlson.  Neil articulates the issues and reaches an audience thirsting to understand just how corrupt the systems are that flow from the globalist and corporatist constructs.

Behind all the disparate institutional machinations, the larger objective of globalism and nationalism continue to present the most direct reference point of the conflict.  Just as Donald Trump represents this dynamic clearly in the United States, within Europe UK political figure Nigel Farage has been the tip of the spear confronting globalism and representing the face of British nationalism.

As a result of this dynamic almost every multinational and corporate EU institution has attempted to destroy Nigel Farage.  The latest example comes from the banking system in the U.K which has told Mr. Farage he will not be permitted to engage in banking, finance or commerce.  Neil Oliver takes this example and puts the larger context into his monologue.  WATCH:

X22, And we Know, and more- July 3rd

 

Biden Bribery Wheeze is like the Russia Collusion Delusion

by Roger Kimball for American Greatness 

Like many of my acquaintances, I feel alternately despondent and outraged by the unfolding story of the Bidens’ Excellent Bribery Adventure.  

The despondency comes from the bitter recognition that, notwithstanding the veritable tsunami of commentary that has accompanied the story—a tsunami to which I have contributed myself—we are probably months if not years from getting to the bottom of this fish pond. After all, it’s alleged that Hunter Biden and his enablers set up a complex series of shell companies—at least 20 of them by some counts—that will make following the money a forensic nightmare. Remember, the Big Guy himself, challenged about the allegations by a reporter, scoffed, “So where’s the money?” Good luck tracing it. 

Adding to the despondency is the likelihood that, if and when we do get the whole story, it will be too late. Now, at long last, we know, as well as any contingent historical event can be known, what happened with the Russia Collusion Hoax. There was no collusion, at least not involving Donald Trump. Nope. The whole $40 million, multi-season entertainment starring Robert Mueller was a complete fabrication thought up, organized, and paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and approved in the Oval Office by B. Obama himself.  

We know that now, but it doesn’t matter. Old news. “What difference at this point does it make?” At the moment, we are floundering around in that stygian darkness that Hegel deplored in the Phenomenology when he alluded to Schelling’s philosophy as an undifferentiated “night in which all cows are black.” Hegel was right about Schelling, too, which is not to say that his own contribution to human wisdom added much to the sum total of articulate clarity. 

Which brings me back to my opening sentence. I am not really sure that this story is “unfolding” in any common sense of that word. These last weeks have seen a breathless cataract of commentary, with whistleblowers named and unnamed vying with a prevaricating U.S. Attorney who either did or did not have “ultimate authority” in the disposition of the case. Someone, probably, is lying or at least economizing expertly on dispensing the truth, but who? 

Many wags compared David Weiss to Bill Clinton who, when asked whether he was still involved with Monica Lewinsky, famously said “it depends on what the meaning of the word is is.” I, if somewhat grudgingly, had to admire Clinton’s sophistry. There is a reason that he is so successful a pol. He is, as Saul Bellow said of a character in Humboldt’s Gift, “smooth as a suppository.”  

The point is that, despite the abundance of commentary, this story to date is burdened with too much stasis to have achieved the status of “unfolding.” So far, anyway, and notwithstanding the near daily revelations and deposits of innuendo, the Biden Bribery Wheeze is like the Russia Collusion Delusion in its onion-like structure. Peel back a layer, reveal another prime actor in the saga, and you discover it’s all just another false floor underneath which previously undiscovered chambers and hallways lurk, populated by fresh actors in an ever-expanding roster of dramatis personae. 

Indeed, I thought about structuring this column as sort of a play, leading off with a list of the characters. But then I realized that I could not always reliably say who was playing what role and so gave it up. Still, the scene from the beginning of The Pickwick Papers kept recurring to me. Mr. Blotton says he regards Mr. Pickwick as a “humbug.” Mr. Pickwick angrily demands to know whether the Rt. Honorable gentleman called him a humbug in its ordinary or “common sense.” No, no responded Mr. Blotton, he had “merely considered him a humbug in a Pickwickian point of view.” Well, that was all right then, rejoined Mr. Pickwick, and peace and amity reigned once more among the members of the Pickwick Club. 

That’s what our masters in Washington hope will happen. The public, confronted by this wall of fog, this maze of he-said, she-said volley of charge and counter charge, will tire of the subject and move on.  

Except maybe they won’t. It is, from one point of view, amusing that Hunter Biden should expense his ration of prostitutes, deducting $100,000 of the crispest from his taxes for such “consultants.” But then the glaring spectacle of our two-tier system of justice can so quickly tip over into something more infuriating than amusing.  

I don’t know where the truth lies in the Biden Bribery Saga. I can but speculate. The more I speculate, the angrier I become. Why? Some things are known not because they are proved in a court of law but because of the stench they leave behind. The machinations of the Biden Crime Family (to adopt Rudy Giuliani’s apt sobriquet) smell to high heaven. What will the upshot or outcome be? No one knows yet. Had I not been disappointed so often before when presented with cases of patent corruption, I’d say the results would include fresh indictments for Hunter and impeachment for Joe Biden. Yes, I know that conclusion is utopian, but the fact that it is only further fires my sense of outrage. It is some consolation to know that I am not alone. 

Democrats Baseless Lies Are Responsible For Today’s Divisiveness

by Carpe Diem for American Greatness

For as long as I can remember, the Democratic Party has claimed to be a champion for all Americans, particularly for the working class, minorities and for those who are considered marginalized, oppressed or downtrodden.

But somewhere between fighting to keep slavery alive (Andrew Johnson); deliberately reducing the number of black civilian employees from the federal workforce and airing a film that glorified the Ku Klux Klan at the White House (Woodrow Wilson); throwing Japanese Americans into internment camps during World War II (Franklin Delano Roosevelt); promoting a culture of government dependence, poverty and fatherlessness (Lyndon Johnson);  creating racial tension by declaring cops racist—leading to further destruction of our inner cities, while mocking legitimate concerns of disgruntled blue collar midwesterners frustrated by decreasing wages, lack of employment opportunities—and an opioid epidemic hollowing out their communities (Barack Obama); the intentional failure to enforce our country’s immigration laws, contributing to a four decade high of inflation by spending trillions of taxpayer dollars on Democrat pet projects that mostly help special interest groups, referring to roughly half the country as violent extremists and weaponizing the Department of Justice—to throw his leading political rival in prison (Joe Biden); it seems fair to say the Democratic Party has fallen well short of being a champion for anyone, except for its own desperate attempt to stay in power at any and all costs.

For a party that abhors the Founding Fathers and seeks to delegitimize their contributions, rejects and regards the principles of the Constitution as meaningless, and regularly criticizes the country for failing to live up to its stated goal of forming a more perfect union, perhaps it might be time for the Democratic Party to look itself in the mirror.

The entirety of the Democratic Party platform in 2023 is predicated on fear mongering and based on easily verifiable lies about the Republican Party. It typically sounds something like this: Republicans want to make it harder for minorities to vote, they only want to give tax breaks to the wealthy, they’re banning books and ignoring inconvenient aspects of American history, they don’t want poor kids to be able to go to college, they’re anti-immigration, they want to deprive Americans from receiving healthcare, they don’t believe trans people exist, they don’t think women have a right to make their own medical decisions, and police are writ large racist and randomly hunting down black people, etc.

Not a single one of those absurd claims, which are promulgated regularly in the pages of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other leftist propaganda outlets has one iota of credibility. But that hasn’t prevented Democrat politicians, Hollywood, academia and the legacy media from repeating these erroneous charges into ad nauseum.

Take, for instance, the ridiculous claim that Republican led states like Georgia want to make it harder for minorities to vote. Considering that the Peach State just set a record for voter turnout in the Midterms—in which over one million people voted—Republican leaders did a pretty poor job of discouraging citizens from casting their ballots.

It is hardly discriminatory to require every single American to present a valid form of ID that clearly verifies who the individual is. Nothing about that is inherently racist, but it certainly is racist to imply that black people for some reason either do not have an ID, or do not possess the means to obtain a driver’s license. If the DMV is suddenly denying licenses to black people—one would imagine the Biden DOJ would have started an investigation.

But I digress.

What about the Democrats’ fallacious charge that Republicans only want to give tax breaks to the wealthy? Once again, that is simply not borne out by any shred of evidence.

An analysis of IRS tax data showed that the Trump tax cuts disproportionately benefited those earning less than $50,000 per year. Those with an adjusted gross income (AGI) of $15,000 to $50,000 saw an average tax cut of 16 percent to 26 percent in 2018, while those who earned $50,000 to $100,000 received a tax break between 15 percent to 17 percent.

Those earning between $100,000 to $500,000 in AGI saw their personal income taxes decrease by around 11 percent to 13 percent and no one with an AGI of at least $500,000 received an average tax cut above 9 percent. The average tax cut for those in income brackets starting at $1 million was less than 6 percent.

In other words, under Trump’s tax plan, the more money an individual earned, the higher their income was effectively taxed. But don’t let the facts get in the way of the Democrats narrative.

How about the Biden White House’s specious claim that Republicans are banning books and refusing to teach about slavery? In reality, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis removed books from libraries and classrooms in 23 school districts across the state that contained pornographic content and other types of violent and inappropriate material. One would think the Democrats would be fine with keeping pornography away from elementary schools, but apparently not.

Furthermore, under statute, s. 1003.42(2)(f), F.S. It is a requirement for Florida schools to teach African American history. But teaching students about slavery is different from segregating a classroom along racial lines into groups of evil white “oppressors” and “oppressed,” groups, while pontificating to seven year olds that America remains an irredeemably racist country. Sadly that remains the Democrats preferred view of this country.

What about the now irrelevant Bernie Sanders and his ilk who claim Republicans don’t want poor kids to be able to go to college. For starters those from upper income families would have likely benefited more than lower income households if Biden’s failed attempt to unconstitutionally cancel billions of dollars of student loan debt had passed—so it would not have even helped those who it was intended to benefit.

Second, not everyone wants to go to college, but for those who do wish to go, the taxpayers should not be subsidizing those who obtain useless degrees in topics like feminist, gender and sexuality studies, which will almost certainly lead to graduates becoming dumber, while remaining unemployed without any tangible skills.

How about the Democrats’ sophist charge that Republicans are anti-immigration? In reality they’re not against immigration, they’re against illegal immigration! It is not compassionate to let millions of unvetted migrants pour across our country, while they suppress our wages, overwhelm public resources, commit violent crimes, and traffic in drugs and humans. It is not a serious argument to justify support for illegal immigration by proclaiming that migrants are more willing to do jobs other Americans are less likely to want to do. There is nothing humane about failing to secure our southern border or treating citizens from other countries better than we treat our own.

What about the Democrats who foolishly claim Republicans want to deprive Americans from receiving healthcare? The reality is, socialized healthcare is a disaster that will cause millions of Americans to lose their healthcare plans, while lowering the quality of care. It will almost certainly raise the cost of coverage and increase wait times. Just ask all the Canadians who would rather spend money and travel to the U.S. so they can be treated for cancer or surgery sooner.

How about the Democrats who claim that Republicans don’t believe trans people exist? For starters, anyone can identify as whatever they want, but that does not make it reality. I can go around telling people I’m a giraffe, but I do not have the right to compel people to believe me. Second, when the delusions of a small group of people threaten the competitive nature of women’s sports, and can lead to inappropriate locker room interactions, that is when the charade should immediately end. The Democratic Party has long claimed to care about empowering women, but lately they seem to be more interested in empowering men who say they are women.

What about the Democrats who claim Republicans don’t think women have a right to make their own medical decisions? Most of the American public supports a 15 week ban on abortion—which means most people are in favor of protecting the innocent life of an unborn child—while also ensuring the safety of the mother. Unfortunately, the Democrats do not view an unborn child as a human, even if it has a heartbeat. The party that supposedly cares about human beings supports abortion on demand, up until and including the birth of a child. That does not seem too charitable.

How about the Democrats false claim that police are writ large racist and randomly hunting down black people? This is simply not borne out by the data. There is zero evidence that black people are killed by police at a higher rate than white people are. In fact the evidence shows that a police officer is 18 ½ more likely to be killed by a black male, than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer. but that hasn’t stopped Democrat demagogues from repeating the lie anyway to further divide the country for political gain.

So which groups benefit from Democratic policies?

Outside of Democrat special interest groups, the president’s corrupt son, and our chief adversaries around the world, I can’t think of anyone. But it’s clearly not me or you.

Do children living in inner cities who attend failing public schools controlled by Democrat teachers unions who wanted to keep them home during COVID? How about those living in high crime areas where the police are nowhere to be found after Democrat politicians spent years defaming and defunding them? How about Jewish communities, who have faced a rise in antisemitic attacks, while Democrat politicians consistently side with Israel hating terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah? What about the Asian community that the Democratic Party now penalizes for scoring too high on standardized exams in order to achieve a more “equitable” racial quota. How about those who support pro-life groups? How about everyday Americans who have been crushed by Bidenflation and the Left’s war on American energy production? What about those who did not want to lose their job or business—due to their refusal to take a COVID vaccine that does not appear to work the way the “health experts” told us it would.

The Republican Party is far from perfect, but the Democratic Party is plain evil.

Léon Gautier: Last French D-Day fighter dies aged 100

 

The last surviving member of a French commando unit that helped to repel Nazi Germany's invasion of western Europe has died aged 100.

Léon Gautier was part of the D-Day landings in 1944 - when Allied forces invaded Normandy in France during the biggest sea invasion in history.

He was among only a small number of French nationals to take part in the deadly eight-day battle.

Gautier later called war a "misery" that "ends with widows and orphans".

Regional Mayor Romain Bail described Gautier as "a local hero whom everybody knew" and who was "an ardent defender of freedom".

Gautier was born in Rennes, in France's north-western Brittany region, and enlisted in the French navy as a teenager soon after World War Two began, as he was too young to enter the army.

He escaped to Britain in 1940 before Adolf Hitler's forces swept through much of western Europe, including France.  

In London, Gautier joined the Free France movement, which maintained a government-in-exile and military that coordinated with the Allies against Nazi Germany.

He fought in Congo, Syria and Lebanon, before joining a unit of marine riflemen known as the Kieffer commandos, which trained in the Scottish Highlands.

They were the only French fighters to participate in D-Day.

During the Battle for Normandy, more than half of Gautier's unit of 177 Frenchmen were killed.

The D-Day landings, which involved soldiers from many other Allied countries, began an attack that lasted for 11 months. It eventually led to the defeat of Nazi Germany and the liberation of occupied Europe.

Later in life, Gautier settled in the Normandy port town of Ouistreham, and became a campaigner for peace.

"Not all that long ago... I would think perhaps I killed a young lad," he said in an interview with Reuters news agency in 2019, when he was 96 years old.

"Perhaps I orphaned children, perhaps I widowed a woman or made a mother cry... I didn't want to do that. I'm not a bad man."  

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-66091649    

Why Judges Need the Anchoring Truths of Natural Law, Not Just Conservative Legal Philosophy

In his new book, Hadley Arkes explains that conservative judges enamored by originalism and textualism might find themselves abandoning moral reasoning in the process.

posted by Michael Hayes at The Federalist 

The end of June brings with it the end of the Supreme Court’s 2022-2023 term, a point during which court-watchers reflect on the high court’s decisions. Recently, conservatives have reflected on the court’s rulings with a feeling of satisfaction, knowing that a majority of originalists and textualists on the bench will keep the court from drifting too far from this country’s Constitution and its laws.

But one conservative scholar has pointed out a potential failure of originalism and textualism. Hadley Arkes, the Edward N. Ney professor of jurisprudence and director of the James Wilson Institute on Natural Rights and the American Founding, explains that conservative judges enamored by originalism and textualism might find themselves abandoning moral reasoning in the process.

That is, they might make the same mistake that pragmatist judges like Oliver Wendell Holmes did a century ago. Holmes famously speculated “whether it would not be a gain if every word of moral significance could be banished from the law altogether.” According to Holmes, moral reasoning distracts us from the “path of the law.”

If we are to be good jurists, judges, and advocates, we must stick to the path of the law — we must stick to the business of predicting what government will tolerate or sanction in particular social circumstances. The morality of acts or omissions, Holmes explains, is a separate question; it is a tangential spur, a byway apt to lead one away from the path of sound jurisprudence.

For over a century, American jurisprudence followed Holmes’ path. We have worked to exorcize substantive morality from the work of the lawyer and judge. While litigants and jurists frequently invoke concepts of procedural morality — i.e., fairness — they have been reluctant to invoke objective moral norms as they litigate and adjudicate. Even in the most fraught culture-war disputes, judges — especially conservatives — are quick to sidestep moral questions in favor of procedural debates or positivist textualism.

Arkes Advises a Course Correction

To all those traveling down Holmes’ path, Arkes displays a “Wrong Way” sign. Arkes argues in his new book that moral reasoning is neither out of bounds nor out of reach for the American jurist. This new volume, Mere Natural Law: Originalism and the Anchoring Truths of the Constitution, presents Arkes’ case against the positivism outlined by Holmes, as well as the shortcomings of the positivist textualism popular among conservative judges.

Mere Natural Law is a collection of essays illustrating a few simple propositions. First, certain moral principles — the “anchoring truths” of natural law — are part of good jurisprudence. Second, judges (even lawyers!) can readily grasp these anchoring truths. Third, the U.S. Constitution presupposes the axiomatic and accessible nature of these truths. And fourth, 20th- and 21st-century American jurisprudence (especially within conservative circles) unnecessarily neglects these anchors.

Once we remind ourselves of the truth of these first principles, Arkes contends, we can step off the path marked off by Holmes — we can turn off the relativistic, positivistic, historicist road to nihilism.

The Fight for Anchoring Truths

Arkes lays out some of the elementary principles of natural law that are foundational to jurisprudence (and Constitutional interpretation) in an easy, conversational style. Using vignettes and anecdotes to color his argument, Arkes contends that certain propositions are fundamental to any just regime and that the Constitution’s framers understood them as such. A few he mentions include: 

• The human person, i.e., the creature that law aims at protecting, is constituted of males and females.
• We cannot hold people blameworthy or responsible for acts they were powerless to effect.
• Good is to be done and evil is to be avoided.

According to Arkes, these propositions are axiomatic. Jurists should not ignore them just because they cannot be found in the text of the Constitution or the laws. After all, they serve as the foundation for the Constitution and the laws themselves. By returning to these anchoring truths, Arkes maintains, judges can develop a healthier jurisprudence informed by right reason. 

I worry whether we have traveled down Holmes’ path for so long that we are caught in deep, well-worn ruts from which escape will be extremely difficult. Arkes’ light and enjoyable prose at times downplays the challenge we face when attempting to incorporate these foundational principles into contemporary legal debates.

The fact that humans are biologically male or female carries no normative weight in a culture of expressive individualism. Holding groups responsible for events outside their power (e.g., historical racial injustices) is undeniably in vogue. And when goodness amounts to nothing more than the object of individual desires or “value judgments,” substantive moral debate is nothing other than a battle of wills.

Arkes insists we can always grasp basic principles of morality. But as St. Thomas Aquinas points out, sin, concupiscence, and society’s vices can blind us to their reality.

This worry is not a knock on Arkes’ book. It is full of insightful commentary on contemporary American jurisprudence and its unfortunate departure from that of the founding generation.

And Arkes addresses the critique often posed against his approach to natural law jurisprudence: How are lawyers and judges supposed to use natural law reasoning in their day-to-day work? By drawing from legal precedent, Arkes provides examples of natural law reasoning in action, which can serve as models for contemporary and future jurists to emulate.

Unlike the search for statutory or constitutional “intent,” “purpose,” or “pragmatic effect” found in other approaches to juridical interpretation, judges should interpret all law through the lens of natural law. In the same way that a Catholic theologian ought to read Holy Scripture through the lens of the life of the church, the legal scholar ought to read the Constitution and law through the lens of natural law, without which law could not exist. Natural law jurisprudence does not require us to “read into” the law foreign, extrinsic principles; it requires us to read the law attuned to its moral foundations.

Recovering from Relativism

Another of the book’s highlights is Arkes’ attack on relativistic approaches to freedom of speech and religion. Arkes calls us back to a time when we understood that speech and religion were aimed at truth. Exercises in speech and religion could thus be restricted for sufficient justification if they do not advance that goal. An immoral act does not get a pass simply because it is prescribed by a religion, and harmful, vulgar speech does not get a pass simply because it is speech.

Arkes’ push for substantive morality within freedom of speech and religion jurisprudence will likely unnerve some conservatives. Conservative judges have taken pride in “value-neutral” approaches to questions of law and jurisprudence. This neutrality, they hope, will permit substantive moral debate within democratic and popular avenues and prevent unelected judges from imposing their vision of morality on society writ large. And they know that preventing morals-based restrictions on speech and religion especially matters when the reigning morality is actively hostile to conservatism.

When the morality of progressivism replaces the morality of natural law, subjecting speech and religious freedom to substantive moral requirements is a recipe for the suppression of conservative religion and speech. In a world where moral condemnation of sexual sins in itself is considered a harm; where it is hate speech to claim that physiological facts have more normative value than psychological states; where seeking equality before the law is white supremacy — why should we weaken the few protections we have?

One answer is to note that courts are already invoking moral claims — and even “natural law” — to justify, for example, a natural right to abortion. In other words, leftists invoke substantive (though mistaken) morality in order to support their jurisprudence and achieve their favored policy outcomes.

Lawyers and judges have shown a willingness to venture off Holmes’ positivist, amoral path. Unless they correct course with reference to the anchoring truths that Arkes mentions in his book, American jurisprudence may wander even further from the Constitution and its underlying moral foundation.

If we want to safely steer ourselves back onto the path of prudence and right reason, we need something we can rely on for guidance. Arkes redirects our attention to the anchoring truths at the foundation of law, which we can use (to mix the metaphor) as navigational stars as we correct our course.

WATCH: Race Hustler Elie Mystal Calls Clarence Thomas a 'Mutilated Version of a Black Justice' as Joy Reid Laughs

Mike Miller reporting for RedState 

Question: What do you get when put The Nation’s justice correspondent Elie Mystal together with MSNBC host Joy Reid? Answer: A race hustler’s dream come true. The rest of us might call it Democrat racism on steroids; black liberals’ attacks against black conservatives are among the most brutal of all.

Reid, every bit the agitator extraordinaire as Mystal, trotted out the “justice correspondent” on Friday’s race-baiting episode of The ReidOut to decry the Supreme Court’s Thursday-Friday finale, which included the long-overdue downfall of affirmative action. But Mystal being Mystal, his comments quickly degenerated into an attack against Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, who Mystal not only called a “mutilated version of a black justice but also suggested Thomas is his white wife’s puppet.

Did I mention that Reid smirked and laughed as Mystal spewed his racist bilge?

In reference to the court’s conservative-majority decision in the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard case, Reid kicked off the festivities:

[Y]ou’re a lawyer. In his concurrence, [Thomas] claims the that Freedmen’s Bureau Act, which created the Freedmen’s Bureau, you know, that was supposed to rematriculate former [sic] enslaved people, who all of whom, 100 percent of whom were black, back into society, he said oh, that was a colorblind statute. How could the Freedmen’s Bureau, Elie Mystal, be a colorblind statute? Make that make sense.

Stop the tape. That wasn’t what Justice Thomas said. What he did say was (emphasis, mine):

Importantly, however, the Acts applied to freedmen (and refugees), a formally race-neutral category, not blacks writ large.

No matter. Mystal was only interested in smearing Thomas:

It’s color-blind if you’re like Clarence Thomas and your whole ideological perspective involves gouging out your own eyes. Like— and that’s what Thomas is. Like he is such a mutilated version of a black justice that he is able to make these proclamations that, well, just fly in the face of law and facts, right?

I’m going to go out on a very safe limb and guess two things. First, Justice Thomas knows at least as much about blind justice and the U.S. Constitution as does Elie Mystal. Second, Mystal and Reid are incapable of color blindness, much less blind justice. Like all racists, baiters only see the world through the filter of skin color.

Mystal then took his final shot at Thomas with all the condescension he could muster (emphasis, mine):

So this is the history that Clarence Thomas ignores, and that’s why he’s so — and that’s why he’s so fabulist about all of the stuff that’s in his concurrence. He just— he’s just, like, plucked out his own eyes and he doesn’t want to see anything that Ms. Ginni tells him he shouldn’t be able to see. That’s where he is in his head space right now.

The irony is neither Elie Mystal nor Joy Reid could carry Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas’s colorblind jockstrap. [Sarc, of course— barely.]

Let's Take a Moment to Appreciate Clarence Thomas' Three Decades on the Supreme Court

posted by Duke at RedState 

After an eventful and historic end to the Supreme Court 2022-2023 term, I think it might be time to take a moment and simply appreciate the current Senior Associate Justice, Clarence Thomas. If you recall, he was nominated by George H.W. Bush in 1991, and coming up at the end of October this year, he will have served a total of 32 years on the High Court.

What a damn fine run it has been.

I know that doing an overview of Thomas’s time on the court usually would include his controversial confirmation process that was spearheaded by former Sens. Joe Biden and Ted Kennedy, but I don’t want to dwell on that. Instead, I would like to focus on the fact that he has been on the court for over three decades, and only the good Lord knows how much longer this country will be blessed to have him giving his opinion on the large and important cases of the day.

This thought occurred to me as I was perusing the Salem/Townhall universe and came across a post by our colleague  Spencer Brown over at TownHall: Clarence Thomas Opinion in Affirmative Action Case Is a Work of Art 

In his usual style, Justice Thomas traces the history of the United States and its citizens’ ongoing efforts to pursue a more perfect union — efforts that haven’t always been smooth and have, at points, failed to move the country forward. Still, Thomas shares his optimism that America will continue to become a better place, all while excoriating the left’s “equity” agenda.

“The solution to our Nation’s racial problems thus cannot come from policies grounded in affirmative action or some other conception of equity,” Thomas writes. “Racialism simply cannot be undone by different or more racialism. Instead, the solution announced in the second founding is incorporated in our Constitution: that we are all equal, and should be treated equally before the law without regard to our race,” he adds. “Only that promise can allow us to look past our differing skin colors.”

My colleague here at RedState, Sister Toldjah, also wrote about Thomas’s scorching opinion in the UNC case. She went over his verbal bombing of his colleague Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissenting opinion.

Accordingly, JUSTICE JACKSON’s race-infused world view falls flat at each step. Individuals are the sum of their unique experiences, challenges, and accomplishments. What matters is not the barriers they face, but how they choose to confront them. And their race is not to blame for everything—good or bad—that happens in their lives. A contrary, myopic world view based on individuals’ skin color to the total exclusion of their personal choices is nothing short of racial determinism.

JUSTICE JACKSON then builds from her faulty premise to call for action, arguing that courts should defer to “experts” and allow institutions to discriminate on the basis of race. Make no mistake: Her dissent is not a vanguard of the in-nocent and helpless. It is instead a call to empower privileged elites, who will “tell us [what] is required to level the playing field” among castes and classifications that they alone can divine. Post, at 26; see also post, at 5–7 (GORSUCH, J., concurring) (explaining the arbitrariness of these classifications). Then, after siloing us all into racial castes and pitting those castes against each other, the dissent somehow believes that we will be able—at some undefined point—to “march forward together” into some utopian vision. Post, at 26 (opinion of JACKSON, J.). Social movements that invoke these sorts of rallying cries, historically, have ended disastrously.

Unsurprisingly, this tried-and-failed system defies both law and reason. Start with the obvious: If social reorganization in the name of equality may be justified by the mere fact of statistical disparities among racial groups, then that reorganization must continue until these disparities are fully eliminated, regardless of the reasons for the disparities and the cost of their elimination. If blacks fail a test at higher rates than their white counterparts (regardless of whether the reason for the disparity has anything at all to do with race), the only solution will be race-focused measures. If those measures were to result in blacks failing at yet higher rates, the only solution would be to double down. In fact, there would seem to be no logical limit to what the government may do to level the racial playing field—outright wealth transfers, quota systems, and racial preferences would all seem permissible. In such a system, it would not matter how many innocents suffer race-based injuries; all that would matter is reaching the race-based goal.

This may seem like a bit of an odd observation about somebody who has been doing his job for almost 32 years. Yet it seems that in the past couple of years, Thomas has been getting to stretch his legs a little bit and has hit his stride in his role on the court.

Some might not know that beginning around 2006, the Justice went almost a decade without asking a question in oral arguments. That has changed now, and he does frequently question those appearing before the court and is not shy about showing his hand at what he thinks of a case. This has been a pleasant addition to his writings over the years.

I wrote the other day about how important it is to get quality judges nominated and confirmed, but I also think that it is important to recognize the gift we have of who we have serving right now. Thomas has led the charge, I believe, both publicly and behind the walls of the Justices’ chambers to argue his view of adherence to the Constitution.

That matters not only for the cases that were just handed down but also for a roadmap of who future Presidents should look to as role models of people to nominate. The three Justices that Donald Trump nominated during his four years as President have given Justice Thomas some chances to write some brilliant majority opinions, and it has been well worth the wait to see horrible decisions like Roe v. Wade bite the dust.

I hope Justice Thomas has many more years driving the progressive wing of politicians and their ilk crazy and will continue to serve the nation’s High Court as he has for the past three decades.

Records Suggest Top NIH Official Squashed Lab-Leak Theory For Fauci, Used Personal Email To Hide It

Shawn Fleetwood reporting for The Federalist

Records recently obtained by House Republicans indicate a senior official with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) downplayed the Covid lab-leak theory at the behest of Anthony Fauci.

On Thursday, Rep. Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, the chair of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, sent a letter to Dr. David Morens, the NIAID director’s senior scientific advisor, demanding “all documents and communications from Dr. Morens’ personal email and cellphone related to eight, unique COVID origins publications” and any correspondence between Morens and individuals “involved in the COVID origins investigation and narrative.”

“Documents in possession of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic … suggest that you may have used your personal e-mail to avoid transparency and the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), potentially intentionally deleted federal records, and acted in your official capacity to disparage your fellow scientists, including by encouraging litigation against them,” Wenstrup wrote.

Included in Wenstrup’s letter is an email suggesting that Fauci — who until December was NIAID director and has dismissed the theory that Covid-19 leaked out of the Wuhan Institute of Virology — instructed Morens to speak with major media in an apparent attempt to downplay such a hypothesis. According to the records, on July 29, 2021, Morens wrote: “But today, to my total surprise, my boss Tony [Fauci] actually ASKED me to speak to the National Geographic on the record about origins. I interpret this to mean that our government is lightening up but that Tony doesn’t want his fingerprints on origin stories.”

National Geographic published an article featuring Morens’ remarks nearly two months later on Sept. 13, 2021, in which he claimed, “There is a progenitor virus out there somewhere, and we should look for it,” but that “at some point, it crosses over from doing due diligence to wasting time and being crazy.”

“We may have seen that point already,” Morens added.

Emails included in Wenstrup’s letter also show Morens allegedly evading open record requests by using a private email address to correspond with colleagues. In a Sept. 9, 2021, email sent to several coworkers and EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak, for example, Morens reportedly wrote: “I try to always communicate over gmail because my NIH email is FOIA’d constantly.”

“Yesterday my gmail was hacked, probably by these [gain-of-function] -ssholes, and until IT can get it fixed I may have to occasionally email from my NIH account,” Morens wrote. “Don’t worry, just send to any of my addresses and I will delete anything I don’t want to see in the New York Times.”

As Helen Raleigh previously reported at The Federalist, EcoHealth Alliance is a nongovernmental organization that from 2014-2020, sent “more than half a million dollars’ worth of U.S. government grants, including those from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) with Anthony Fauci’s approval, to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to conduct gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses.” When concerns began mounting in early 2020 that the Covid-19 pandemic could have potentially resulted from a Wuhan lab leak, Daszak quickly dismissed the hypothesis as a “conspiracy theor[y].”

Earlier this year, however, the Energy Department sent a memo to the White House and Congress declaring “the Covid pandemic most likely arose from a laboratory leak.”

Morens also apparently used his official position to smear scientists he disagreed with and even went as far as to encourage legal action against them. In a Sept. 9, 2021, email exchange with a scientist, Morens apparently smeared two doctors, claiming they were “harmful demagogues” and “NOT experts.” Two days prior, when referencing an Intercept report titled “New Details Emerge About Coronavirus Research at Chinese Lab” in an email to Daszak, Morens told the EcoHealth president he should “not rule out suing these -ssholes for slander.”

Wenstrup notes that while the alleged email was sent from Morens’ personal account, it included the acronyms for the government agencies and offices he worked for in his email signature.

In addition to communication records, the House subcommittee is also requesting Morens appear for an in-person interview on Aug. 2.