RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/will-gop-let-biden-nominate-an-extremist-irs-boss-to-terrorize-americans/

Biden’s illegal Inflation Increase Act has prepped the IRS to act as a weapon of political terror. But it needs someone at the top to run the machine.

Here’s the stage being set.

Looming Leadership Void at I.R.S. Raises Concerns Over $80 Billion Overhaul – New York Times

Former commissioners warn that delays in nominating a new commissioner raise the prospect that transformation efforts will fail.

You know the kind of transformation they have in mind.

Last month, we were told that the Biden regime had narrowed its list of candidates. And based on the track record, we’re likely looking at a Warren person, someone with a background in advocating political crackdowns on conservative organizations and finding new ways to bend the tax code to pursue leftist agendas. As a plus, it’s likely to be a woman and a member of a minority group.

Now, Commissioner Rettig is officially stepping down.

The Treasury Department on Friday announced the departure of IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig, an appointee of former President Trump whose term is set to end in mid-November.

Before Congress approves a new permanent IRS head, the agency will be headed by deputy commissioner Douglas O’Donnell as acting chief, the Treasury said.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/10/26/sacheen-littlefeather-and-the-rise-of-the-race-fakers/

When Sacheen Littlefeather died earlier this month, obituaries celebrated her as a brave Native American activist who dared to take on the Hollywood establishment. Since then, she has been exposed as an imposter.

Littlefeather achieved international fame and notoriety at the 1973 Academy Awards, when she refused an Oscar on behalf of Marlon Brando. Dressed in buckskin and with traditional hair-ties, she denounced the American film industry’s treatment of Native Americans. At the time, the audience was outraged and her speech was booed.

By the time Littlefeather died, America had changed substantially. No one in Hollywood would dare boo an activist in this way for making allegations of racism. Had she delivered the same speech today, she would have been applauded. In fact, just last month, the Academy organised an ‘evening with Sacheen Littlefeather’. And it issued a formal apology for the ‘unwarranted and unjustified abuse she received’ following her 1973 speech.

Now, after her death, members of her family have come forward to tell the world that Littlefeather has no Native American ancestry. It turns out that her birth name is Marie Louise Cruz. She was born to a white mother and a father of Mexican descent.

Littlefeather’s case is not a one off. In the US and Canada it has become fashionable to fake a Native American or First Nations identity. And in Australia, there has been an explosion of white people identifying as indigenous.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/10/28/elon-musk-and-the-great-fear-of-free-speech/

So he’s done it. The richest man in the world and self-styled ‘free-speech absolutist’ has taken over Twitter. The bête noire of illiberal liberals has got his hands on social media. Cue meltdown. Listening to the woke set you’d be forgiven for thinking that the gates of hell had been flung open and every manner of evil and blasphemy will now pour forth. Twitter could become a ‘soap box for hate speech’, fretted one media outlet yesterday. It really is extraordinary how much some people fear freedom.

Elon Musk hinted at his takeover of Twitter with a real-life pun. ‘Entering Twitter HQ – let that sink in!’, he tweeted on Wednesday, alongside a vid of him bringing a literal sink into the Twitter offices. But the Twitterati don’t need hammy rich-geek humour for Musk’s conquering of Twitter to ‘sink in’. The horrifying prospect of a Musk-run social media, of a tad more liberty online, of women being allowed to call men men, and of Trump being let loose once more to fire off spicy tweets, has been sinking into their minds since this was all first floated a few months ago. Twitter could become a ‘cesspool of hate speech and disinformation’, whimpered a writer for the New York Times in April. Cesspool! You say ‘freedom of speech’, they hear ‘cistern for the storage of human shit’.

‘The bird is freed’, Musk tweeted following his $44 billion takeover. He has reportedly started turfing out the old guard. Apparently the boss, Parag Agrawal, is gone, as are other chief execs. And even though he’s made it pretty clear that he’s not so absolutist on free speech after all – Twitter ‘obviously cannot become a free-for-all hellscape’, he said yesterday – still the freedomphobes are petrified. Musk’s ‘idea of “free speech”’ will help to ‘ruin America’, says a frantic writer at the New Republic this week. ‘The fascists will take over’, apparently. There you have it – freedom is fascism.

The most striking thing about Musk and Twitter is the demented reaction to it. Musk himself is not going to singlehandedly restore the hard fought-for liberty to utter. It will take more than online ventures by a contrarian billionaire to turn back the tide of censorship, cancellation and social shaming for wrongthink that have become such a key and horrid feature of Anglo-American political life. Musk’s plan for Twitter is sensible, not revolutionary. It is ‘important to the future of civilisation to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence’, he said in his note of reassurance to advertisers yesterday. That town square should not be a ‘hellscape’, he said, where ‘anything can be said with no consequences’. A town square, you say? With people talking? Fetch my smelling salts.

Who could possibly be affronted by such a polite, classical-liberal vision? And yet affronted people are. Loads of them. Hysterically so. Their dread of Twitter without moderation is intense. ‘Twitter without content moderation… means lies and disinformation will overwhelm the truth’, says that New Republic piece. We’ve come a long way since John Milton’s 1644 cry against the censorship of the press: ‘Let Truth and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worst in a free and open encounter?’ Today’s woke set did. In their eyes truth will always be bettered by bullshit in an open clash. If only they knew how much this told us about the corrosion of their own faith in humankind, about the decay of their trust in ordinary people and our capacity for reason and goodness, I think they’d stop saying it.