RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18810/self-interest-politics

“Government is itself an art,” wrote the late US Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, “one of the subtlest of the arts. It is neither business, nor technology, nor applied science. It is the art of making men live together in peace and with reasonable happiness.”[1]

Of course a leader should be able to do both – “making men live together in peace and with reasonable happiness” – but what if there are leaders or the people around them who are, as Frankfurter noted, “those who pursue self-interest through politics”[2]?

As previously asked on these pages, are union moguls, lobbyists and advisors, power players and profiteers trying to do end runs around US election laws (here and here) and the Constitution (here and here)?

Anonymous “dark money” groups are still trying to “shape” our elections without disclosing where the money is coming from.

According to Bloomberg News, “‘Dark money’ helped pave the way for the Biden campaign” – to the tune of $145 million.

Big Tech has just been found to have been acting as a “state agent” of the federal government in curtailing free speech with which the government did not agree. Twitter just settled a lawsuit by the journalist Alex Berenson after he showed the court that orders to Twitter to ban him had come from the White House.

https://bda1776.substack.com/p/the-politics-of-gutting-and-rebuilding?utm_source=email

Wrap Up Time

It’s time to wrap up our gut-and-rebuild discussion.  I apologize for the delay, but August happens.  Also, before we get back to it, I published a column in yesterday’s Epoch Times that’s a small taste of what I’ve got coming.  Watch this space after Labor Day for an essay series on America’s spiritual crisis and the new religion of Wokeism.

To get back on track, our basic theme here is that America is in deep trouble.  We live in a world far too complicated and interconnected to navigate without relying upon experts and institutions.  Yet all of our important institutions and most of our experts are corrupt.  In other words, we have to trust them but we can’t trust them.   That’s bad.

As things stand, our corrupt institutions seem to be pushing us towards totalitarianism.  If that push generates enough of a backlash, we could end up with two violent factions—one fighting for the totalitarianism and one fighting against it.  That thought makes me—and I hope you—unhappy.  I’m not a fan of either thought control or violence.  I think both are worth avoiding.  These days, that sort of attitude can earn you a reputation as a hard-core right winger.  That’s bad, too.

The only workable remedy is thus to develop superior institutions and experts.  Given how badly most of them have already rotted, however, the only way forward is to gut them, reuse what we can, and rebuild from the ground up.  We’ve explored some of what that would mean in the public sector and some of what it would mean in the private sector.  Now we’re down to the last piece: The role of electoral politics.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/how-democrats-inflation-reduction-act-delivers-five-winning-issues-gop

The FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago was a reckless political stunt meant to show the left that Attorney General Merrick Garland will keep the heat on former President Donald Trump. It was unprecedented, seemingly unnecessary, and infuriating to the millions who saw the heavily armed agents’ 10-hour search vividly spotlighting our uneven application of justice.

The raid was also incredibly stupid. Among other things, the furor completely overshadowed passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, which Democrats are hawking as President Joe Biden’s greatest legislative accomplishment.

Combined with photos of the Biden family – complete with compromised son Hunter Biden — jetting off  for a lavish vacation at a mansion owned by a rich Democrat donor, the White House political messaging machine appears, as usual, clueless.

If Biden couldn’t stick around to sign his big bill, how important could it be?

On the other hand, diverting attention from the Inflation Act could prove a blessing for Democrats, and for President Biden. The bill is riddled with pitfalls – at least five — for the president’s party, giving Republicans much campaign fodder for the months ahead. 

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18809/trump-double-standard

The American Civil Liberties Union, which has repeatedly challenged the constitutionality and applicability of the Espionage Act to anti-government activities by left-wing radicals, is strangely silent when the same overbroad law is deployed against a political figure whose politics they deplore.

Then there is the manner by which Trump loyalists have been treated when they were indicted. Several have been arrested, handcuffed and shackled, despite not having been charged with crimes of violence and despite the absence of evidence that they were planning to flee… [M]ost other comparable defendants are simply notified of the charges and ordered to appear in court. Yet despite this apparent double standard, the left has been silent.

U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland commendably stated that the Justice Department is dedicated to the “evenhanded application of the law.” But recent applications of the law suggest otherwise. “Due process for me but not for thee” seems to have replaced the equal protection of the law as the guiding principle.

Perhaps the most glaring manifestation of the double standard currently at work is the different approach taken to the alleged mishandling of classified material by Trump, on the one hand, and former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, on the other hand. No wide-ranging search warrants were sought for Clinton’s home, where private servers were apparently kept and subpoenaed material even possibly destroyed.

Equal justice for Democrats and Republicans must not only be done; it must be seen to be done. There must be one law, and one application of law, for all comparable acts and persons. There must also be one standard of civil liberties — and complaints about their violation — by principled civil libertarians.

This unacceptable double standard is so widespread that it endangers the rule of law and the historic role of neutral, non-partisan civil liberties that protect it from partisan weaponization.

Civil liberties require a single standard without regard to party, ideology or person. The right of Nazis to their despicable free speech must be protected with the same vigor as the right of Salman Rushdie. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in particular, and good civil libertarians in general, used to live by that creed. That is what makes them different from special pleaders who limit their advocacy to those who agree or identify with them. This great tradition — that led John Adams to defend the hated British soldiers who were accused of the Boston massacre and led the old ACLU to defend the right of Nazis to march through Skokie, Illinois — has not been evident when it comes to the treatment of Donald Trump. A double standard has been manifested in a number of ways.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18779/fauci-common-sense

To insist that grown adults lack the ability to make consequential life choices is to insist that they be infantilized for the rest of their lives.

Parents have every right to balance the costs of missed educational opportunities for school-aged children against the risks of illness. American adults are entirely qualified to judge for themselves whether masks, gloves, or full body hazmat suits are necessary for day-to-day existence. And individual Americans are intellectually capable of determining whether they wish to be injected with novel mRNA vaccines. To insist that grown adults lack the ability to make consequential life choices is to insist that they be infantilized for the rest of their lives.

To believe Americans cannot, or should not, make their own health decisions is to steal from them their personal agency and render them completely dependent upon government directives. Such a system elevates bureaucratic authority and enslaves the citizen to the State. That type of total government control is the hallmark of authoritarian and totalitarian societies. It has absolutely no place, however, in any nation that regards itself as a bastion for personal freedom.

COVID-19 mitigation czar and mask scold Dr. Anthony Fauci recently bemoaned Americans’ increased reluctance to “adhere” to public health restrictions. Blaming “fatigue,” “political divisiveness,” and “social media misinformation and disinformation,” the good doctor seemed quite upset that Americans no longer readily comply with every policy recommendation coming from his office. Where officials command and citizens comply, however, “expert” opinion smothers personal choice. That is hardly the American way.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/08/15/its-inevitable-trump-will-be-indicted/

A few days after federal agents stormed Donald Trump’s castle in Palm Beach last week, Judge Beryl Howell berated a man from Georgia for his involvement in the Capitol protest on January 6, 2021.

“Listening without question to political rhetoric that leads to serious offenses, criminal conduct, is not an excuse when you’re standing in a court of law,” Howell told Glen Simon, a Trump supporter who pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct on restricted grounds. “You’ve got to use your common sense and your own sense of who you are and how you’d like to conduct yourself as an American citizen before just blindly doing what a political figure says.”

Howell then sentenced Simon to eight months in prison.

The “political figure” to whom the judge was referring is President Trump. And Howell is not just any judge; she is the chief judge of the D.C. District Court that is overseeing at least 850 criminal cases related to the Capitol protest. 

Appointed by Barack Obama in 2010, Howell does not disguise her partisan leanings or her contempt for Trump supporters. Howell describes the four-hour disturbance on Capitol Hill as “criminal activity that is destined to go down in the history books of this country.” She has scolded prosecutors for not bringing harsher charges in January 6 cases while insisting the hundreds of thousands of Americans who protested Joe Biden’s election that day had no legitimate grievance. She urged the government to set damages to the Capitol at $500 million rather than the accurate figure of $1.4 million in order to significantly boost restitution fines against January 6 defendants.