This is Backwards

And it’s disappointingly so, although not that surprising in the increasingly Leftist bias of The Wall Street Journal‘s news page writers.

Israel launched its war against Hamas in Gaza after the Hamas-led October 7 attacks in southern Israel, in which approximately 1,200 people were killed and around 250 taken hostage.

No. Hamas launched the war with that attack and butchery; Israel has been responding and defending itself against that terrorist instigated and continuing war, a war that Hamas leadership has repeatedly said is intended to destroy Israel utterly.

The WSJ management team needs to clarify this with the writers in the news outlet’s news room. The error is blatant enough to be closely approaching being anti-Israel and, more broadly, antisemitic.

Reparations

In the movement to demand reparations for past…mistreatment…of blacks, one group of Americans stands out for its absence from the collection of groups from which reparations for demands are made.

One group of Americans forced our Civil War over its demands to preserve a State’s “right” to keep slaves.

One group of Americans, in the era after our Civil War, enacted gun control laws that kept newly freed blacks and their white supporters disarmed and helpless against the depradations and atrocities inflicted on them by the Ku Klux Klan, an invention of that same group of Americans.

One group of Americans passed Jim Crow laws to deprecate, if not block outright, black Americans’ ability to vote in our elections.

One group of Americans enacted minimum wage laws explicitly to keep blacks from migrating north to compete for jobs on the basis of the wages they were willing to accept.

One group of Americans demanded an end to, and today simply seeks to ignore, our Constitution and its protections for all Americans, including blacks.

One group of Americans practices identity politics with the explicit intent of keeping black Americans separated from the rest of us Americans.

That group of Americans is the Progressive-Democratic Party and its pre-Obama administration ancestor, the Democratic Party.

I wonder why that group of Americans are exempted from demands to pay reparations.

What Happens…

…when government is the definer of a citizen’s, or of citizens’, rights? One outcome is illustrated by this particular enumeration of rights granted by Government:

The Fundamental Rights and Obligations of Citizens

Citizenship
Voting requirements
Freedom of speech, press, assembly
Religious freedom
Freedom of person
Freedom from insult
Inviolability of the home
Privacy of correspondence
Right to petition the state
Right and duty to work
Right to rest
Protection of retirement
Protection of old, ill, disabled
Right to and duty of education
Right to pursue art, science
Equal rights for women
Protection of marriage and family
Protection of Chinese while overseas

That list of Government-created and -granted rights is then followed and superseded by this:

When exercising their freedoms and rights, citizens of the People’s Republic of China shall not undermine the interests of the state, society or collectives, or infringe upon the lawful freedoms and rights of other citizens.

What Government giveth, Government taketh away. In the same breath in this case. As is apparent from that last clause, this is what the constitution of the People’s Republic of China does.

This is the risk we run as we allow to our government increasing authority to define our needs, our purposes—our rights.

Disingenuous TikTok Arguments

The law requiring ByteDance to divest TikTok entirely or have TikTok banned from the US is in front of the DC Circuit Court, and there are at least two arguments that TikTok is making that are…misleading.

The first is this one:

Never before has Congress silenced so much speech in a single act.

No speech is being silenced. Only a particular outlet—TikTok—used by the People’s Republic of China intelligence community is being acted against. That outlet would remain available were ByteDance to wholly divest TikTok, which ByteDance and the PRC, on their own initiative, refuse to do. There also are a plethora of speech pathways for precisely the same speech desires besides TikTok. ByteDance’s/PRC’s decision to let TikTok be closed will have no impact on speech.

The second is this one:

Our constitutional tradition leaves no room for the government to stop Petitioners from expressing their ideas through the editor and publisher they have chosen. The government could no more prohibit a freelance journalist from publishing in a magazine of her choice; forbid an actor from working with a particular director; or tell a musician what studio he can record in.

Of course, no one is making any prohibition of this. The decision to leave TikTok available to the freelancer (or any other journalist), the actor, or the musician is entirely in the hands of ByteDance and the PRC government. It’s their decision to refuse to let TikTok be divested that would deny access to TikTok.

“Will No One Rid Us of this Troublesome Candidate?”

If you see Republicans/Conservatives in a restaurant, do not give them a moment’s peace. Come up in their faces.

Running Conservative politicians out of restaurants.

Extremist MAGA.

Extremist Republicans.

Republicans are semi-fascists.

Murder attempts against Republican Congressmen practicing baseball.

Overt threats against originalist/textualist Supreme Court Justices.

Murder attempts against Supreme Court Justices.

Overt lies about the troublesome candidate—e.g., would sign nationwide abortion ban, would cut Medicare.

Manufactured desire to put blacks back in chains.

Openly false fact “checking.”

He’s a threat to democracy.

The list of these lies and smears and assault-encouraging rhetoric by Progressive-Democratic Party politicians, by the press, by the Left in general goes on and on.

The deliberate attempt to divide Americans from each other and to pit Americans against each other began in earnest with ex-President Barack Obama (D) and his openly expressed contempt for flyover country Americans, and it has been exploded by Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden and his Vice President and Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris with their extremist MAGA distortions and abortion lies.

And now we have the second assassination attempt of Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump.

A second attempt that comes against the background of President Biden and his DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ refusal to increase Trump’s Secret Service security after the first attempt.

This is what the Progressive-Democratic Party politicians’ carefully divisive and inflammatory rhetoric has wrought. And will continue to wreak.

These two attempts to murder a political rival, even if they’re only attempts to murder a politician who happens to be a political rival, are reason enough to elect Trump. It’s time to demonstrate to the Left that they cannot dictate to us average Americans who our political candidates will be, much less who we will elect to represent us.