RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2022/08/12/american-stasi/

Monday’s shocking images of police sirens blaring outside Mar-a-Lago, former President Donald Trump’s magnificent Palm Beach, Florida, estate, will not soon be forgotten.

Much has already been said and written about the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago that precipitated those sirens: “outrageous,” “unprecedented,” a “crossing of the Rubicon” moment. Regrettably, all of that is true. The siccing of the national law enforcement apparatus to execute a pre-dawn raid on a top partisan rival—especially when that rival is the head of state’s predecessor and perhaps-likely future opponent—is a contemptible act of raw political bloodlust. It is an act far more befitting a crumbling hellhole like Venezuela, or a third-world country in sub-Saharan Africa, than it is the land that was to be, per Benjamin Franklin’s alleged quip, “a republic, if you can keep it.”

America, it seems, won the Cold War only to see its own federal law enforcement/national security apparatus morph into a version of the old East German Stasi—and barely three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, to boot.

Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Thursday “press conference,” remarkably defensive and defiant in tone, did not dispel any concerns or assuage any critics. (Those critics, incidentally, include even former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang and disgraced former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.) The scuttlebutt is that Trump was hoarding deeply secretive, classified information deep in the bowels of Mar-a-Lago, in violation of the Presidential Records Act. But the back-and-forth between the National Archives and Trump’s personal legal team surrounding the boxes of material, entirely routine for an ex-president when it comes to things like establishing a presidential library, was by all accounts unfolding amicably: A subpoena was issued this spring, Trump’s lawyers were cooperative and archivists had already recalled 15 boxes earlier this year.

Furthermore, the Presidential Records Act isn’t even a criminal statute, and probable cause for the violation of a criminal statute is the necessary precondition for a magistrate to sign off on a search warrant. As the case may be, the magistrate who signed off on this particular warrant, Bruce Reinhart, is a Jeffrey Epstein-connected ex-defense attorney who just so happened to donate thousands of dollars in 2008 to then-presidential candidate Barack Obama. Go figure.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/08/the_bs_lies_and_hoaxes_just_keep_on_coming.html

The bullsh*t, lies, and hoaxes just keep on coming, courtesy of leftist politicians, media, academia, and our now politically weaponized government institutions.

To wit: failing and flailing CNN just admonished other media outlets not to call the FBI’s raid on Mar-a-Lago a raid. Instead, they encouraged them to call it a “judge-approved search.” That makes it sound as if the dozens of armed Federal Bureau of Inquisition Investigation agents were given the okay to go find Waldo. Instead, they apparently cracked a safe and rummaged through the former First Lady’s closet during their nine-hour scrutinizing of former President Trump’s home. After forcing Trump’s lawyers to stay outside and asking Mar-a-Lago employees to turn the CCTV cameras off (a request which they, rightfully and thankfully, denied).

“Judge-approved search?” Yes, and let’s call pedophiles “minor-attracted persons.” Oh, that’s right; some on the left already do. Why not call criminals “justice-involved individuals?” Oh yeah, they do that, too. Did CNN react with such credibility and restraint when covering Trump’s actions and statements? Did CNN’s reporters go out of their way to use words designed to defuse controversy and give Trump the benefit of the doubt when characterizing his intentions? What a bunch of B.S.

Example number two: speaking in the White House East Room recently, President Biden said: “I just want to say a number. Zero. Today, we received news that our economy had zero percent inflation in the month of July. Zero percent.” Huh? That’s a flat-out lie. The annualized inflation rate did dip slightly in July, but only to a still historically high 8.5%. Memo to President Biden: 8.5 is more than zero. Zero is your IQ.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/08/the_tragic_irony_of_the_rushdie_stabbing_at_chautauqua_.html

I started getting texts Friday morning from people on the scene at the Chautauqua Institution in Western New York, one from my sister-in-law, an ER nurse at a nearby hospital: “Salman Rushdie was stabbed at Chautauqua, flown to Erie, could not get bleeding stopped.” I know the area well. I have a summer home in Chautauqua (pronounced sha-TAWK-wa.) County, the site of my 2000 novel, the then futuristic 2006: The Chautauqua Rising.

A celebrated writer, the 75-year-old Rushdie has been living under a fatwa since February 14, 1989, the day that Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini decided that Rushdie’s novel, The Satanic Verses, was “blasphemous against Islam.” He was a regular visitor to the Chautauqua Institution. The fact that Rushdie would be stabbed at Chautauqua is perversely and tragically ironic.

In the way of background, a Methodist minister founded the institution on Chautauqua Lake in 1874. It served as a campground meeting for summer school teachers and proved popular enough that by century’s end, traveling “chautauquas” were bringing progressive enlightenment to citizens around the nation.

I set the climatic scene of 2006 at the institution itself. The book tells the tale of a grassroots “rising” that anticipated the Tea Party insurgency of 2009-10 and the MAGA movement of more recent years. When I wrote the book I was unaware that a quiet insurrection was brewing on the institution grounds. A group known as Chautauqua Christian Fellowship (CCF) had emerged to correct the Institution’s political and theological leftward drift.

The same year that my novel was published, 2000, the institution accelerated that drift by selecting the Rev. Joan Brown Campbell to be its director of religion. A longtime apologist for Fidel Castro, Campbell had made news the year before her appointment by orchestrating the forced return of Elian Gonzalez to Communist Cuba. At the time of Campbell’s retirement in 2013, one of her woke acolytes toasted Campbell, saying, “When Janet Reno is looking for someone really tough to get on the [Elian] case you have some sense of whom we are dealing with here. Don’t Mess With Joan.”

Upon her arrival at Chautauqua, Campbell embarked on two contradictory missions, one public, one private. Publicly, she championed “interfaith dialogue,” specifically an outreach to Muslims known as the “Abrahamic Initiative.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-low-can-gutter-politics-go-post-traumatic-stress-disorder-democrat-attack-ad-treatment-mental-health-herschel-walker-senate-11660309595?mod=MorningEditorialReport&mod=djemMER_h

Mr. Walker, a retired National Football League running back, is the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in Georgia and author of “Breaking Free: My Life with Dissociative Identity Disorder.”

My former wife, Cindy, and I gave a TV interview in 2008 to share our story—not about the glory days of football but about the pain of my mental-health struggles and their effect on our marriage. It was uncomfortable to bare our souls like that. Mental illness carried more of a stigma back then. It was hard to admit you needed help and even harder to get it.

She helped me through the hardest time of my life. Because our story ultimately was one of healing, forgiveness and redemption, I knew that if we came forward, we could convince others that there is no shame in asking for help. I hoped we would help people who were struggling and maybe even save a few lives.

I think we did. That interview was part of my life’s mission to advocate for mental-health awareness and treatment. I wrote a book about my experience—every painful detail. I visited military bases around the world to deliver the message that seeking treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder isn’t a sign of weakness but of self-awareness and strength. I met with youth groups and mental-health organizations. I continue to do everything I can to end the stigma. I always say I would much rather listen to a friend talk about his struggles than go to his funeral.

Now I’m running for office, and my struggle has become the subject of a dishonest attack ad. Produced by a group that calls itself the Republican Accountability Project and supports my Democratic opponent, the ad uses clips of the 2008 interview in which my former wife describes things I did when we were married and my mental health was at its worst.

https://spectatorworld.com/book-and-art/the-attack-on-salman-rushdie-is-an-ominous-warning/

The news coming from New York State that the author Salman Rushdie has been stabbed onstage is both frightening and grim.

It is frightening because, without full details of how seriously injured Rushdie has been, it is tempting to fear the worst. Media reports initially suggested that Rushdie was well enough to walk off stage, but the news that he has been transported by air ambulance to a hospital after being stabbed in the neck suggests his injuries are severe. It is grim because any violence being done to a public figure is abhorrent, but in the case of Rushdie, it is almost inevitable that this particular incident has been occasioned by one of the most notorious cause celébrès that has ever been seen in the publishing world, namely the publication of The Satanic Verses in 1988.

When the book was published, Rushdie was already an established literary novelist, a Booker Prize winner for Midnight’s Children, whose every book was making waves in both British and American publishing. It was therefore either a bold or provocative move to write a novel that led to Rushdie being accused of blasphemy. A fatwa was declared upon him at the beginning of 1989 by Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran, which began a tidal wave of violence that included Rushdie’s Japanese translator being murdered, his Italian translator being seriously injured and his Norwegian publisher being shot. There was even a massacre in Turkey, resulting in the deaths of 37 people, and the intended target, Rushdie’s translator Aziz Nesin, only escaped death because his would-be assailants were unable to recognize him.

Leaving aside the literary merit of The Satanic Verses — it is not Rushdie’s most accessible, though certainly his most discussed — it represents a truly vile step for totalitarian thought that an author could be forced into hiding from his would-be killers, as Rushdie was for many years.

https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/the-white-house-privately-demanded

Alex Berenson

Biden Administration officials asked Twitter to ban me because of my tweets questioning the Covid vaccines, even as company employees believed I had followed Twitter’s rules, internal Twitter communications reveal.

In a White House meeting in April 2021, four months before Twitter suspended my account, the company faced “one really tough question about why Alex Berenson hasn’t been kicked off from the platform,” a Twitter employee wrote.

The employee recounted the meeting discussion afterwards on Twitter’s internal Slack messaging system. The message, and others, make clear that top federal officials targeted me specifically, potentially violating my basic First Amendment right to free speech.

The First Amendment does not apply to private companies like Twitter. But if the companies are acting on behalf of the federal government they can become “state actors” that must allow free speech and debate, just as the government does.

Previous efforts to file state action lawsuits against the government and social media companies for working together to ban users have failed. Courts have universally held that people who have been banned have not shown the specific demands from government officials that are necessary to support state action claims.

https://justthenews.com/government/courts-law/garland-wray-clam-trump-search-after-information-free-all-ongoing-jan-6-probe

By John Solomon and Natalia Mittelstadt

Stoic like a judge delivering a verdict from the bench, Attorney General Merrick Garland declared Thursday he was playing things by the book and wouldn’t talk about the raid and ongoing investigation of former President Donald Trump.

“The Department of Justice will speak through its court filings and its work,” he said, declining to answer any of the multitude of questions Americans have, except that he approved the Monday raid on the 45th president’s home and doesn’t object to releasing the search warrant.

Garland, however, was hardly as tight-lipped about the other major ongoing investigation that has consumed his department: the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.

In testimony, speeches and news interviews he has talked expansively about the nature of the probe, the forced collections of evidence and who and how many are being investigated — even as many defendants have not yet had their day in court.

Usually, it is taboo for federal prosecutors to talk about anything related to grand juries. But in his one-year anniversary speech, Garland gave the total number of grand jury subpoenas and search warrants executed, the amount of video footage collected, and the number of electronic devices seized through warrants and subpoenas. It was a rare moment of transparency in an evidence collection process normally shrouded in the same secrecy as the raid on Trump’s home and office.