RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2022/12/26/what-did-nancy-pelosi-know-and-when-did-she-know-it/

The January 6 select committee finally released its long-delayed report late on December 23 after most Americans had happily turned away from politics to enjoy the Christmas weekend with family and friends. The Friday night news dump, a common tactic when government officials want to bury something controversial, was not exactly a vote of confidence in the panel’s ultimate work product.

As expected, the bulk of the 845-page document spun a well-worn tale that portrayed Donald Trump as the sole villain in a so-called “insurrection” the committee wants us to believe was engineered to keep him in the White House. Page after page included dramatic interpretations of snippets from witness testimony intended to bolster the committee’s preconceived conclusions.

Analysis of how law enforcement and intelligence services failed to prepare for the “attack,” a promise made by the committee in its original sell job to the public, is buried in a relatively brief appendix at the end. And despite confirmation the government was aware violence might occur—the FBI used a threat tag, “CERTUNREST2021,” purportedly to categorize in advance information related to January 6—federal and local agencies did not prevent what the Biden regime branded a terror attack comparable to 9/11. (FBI Director Christopher Wray’s name is not mentioned once in the report and it appears unlikely he sat for a transcribed interview.)

Even so, in the face of extensive evidence that those agencies were on high alert, committee members still faulted Trump: “Few in law enforcement predicted that the President of the United States would incite a mob attack on the Capitol, that he would send them to stop the joint session knowing they were armed and dangerous, that he would further incite them against his own vice President while the attack was underway, or that he would do nothing to stop the assault for hours,” the report dishonestly stated.

Another official who escaped accountability in the report is House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the lawmaker mainly responsible for protecting Capitol grounds. Committee members avoided any criticism of Pelosi, instead allowing her to write the foreword. (It’s also unclear whether committee investigators interviewed the speaker.)

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/12/die_on_the_road_to_global_tyranny.html

Francis Fukuyama claimed, dubiously, that we are witnessing the end of history, with the universalization of liberal democracy as the final form of human government.  Yet we live in a world of worrisome pendulum shifts.  Republican congressional leaders disprove Fukuyama’s claim as they celebrate their stunning betrayal of the American people by supporting the passage of the $1.7-trillion McConnell-Schumer omnibus bill.  Rather than protect America’s southern border and comply with Congress’s constitutional duty, this bill moves the country farther to the left by explicitly funding a “woke” identity group supporting LGBT indoctrination in elementary schools, abolishing ICE, and defunding the police.  At the same time, this bill hands more power to a federal government dedicated to the preposterous claim that America is systemically racist.

This explosive proposition is aided and abetted by several additional contentions.  Dangerous contentions include claims that enforcing the United States Constitution fairly and equally, administering laws without focusing on visual identity, and advancing merit rather than identity-based preferences are forms of unconscious racism.  Such claims flourish because our overlords ignore the observation that truth is no defense against fools determined to believe lies.

Elites’ hysterical claims verify René Girard’s observation that concern for victims overwhelms modern culture and signals a genuine exhaustion of all other sources of authority.  Elites’ vulgar claims regarding race also ignore evidence showing that Asian-American women surpass white men in weekly earnings, as well as data showing that Syrian-Americans, Korean-Americans, and Filipino-Americans had significantly higher median household incomes than whites.  They also have higher test scores, lower incarceration rates, and longer life expectancies.  Indeed, African-born black women had higher earnings than U.S.-born white women.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/san-francisco-dying/

You may have heard the phrase, “Get woke, go broke.” It has become a common phrase in the past few years, mainly because it keeps proving itself true.

San Francisco is a prime example of the death spiral going broke puts cities, businesses, and people into.

The city has long been a bastion of liberalism. When it became fashionable after the death of George Floyd to defund the police, the city jumped at the chance. The people elected a prosecutor who was willing to allow criminals to go free.

This led to police resigning and crime in the city skyrocketing. Not only did violent crime rise, so did public drug use and homeless encampments because no one would enforce those laws.

The citizens and some government officials suddenly realized that police were needed. Politicians tried to refund the department as citizens called for police to enforce the laws.

The problem was the city has slipped into the death spiral. Even as politicians tried to pull it back, the crime problem led to citizens and companies leaving the cities in droves. San Francisco now has some of the lowest office occupancy rates in the country, “thanks to the tech companies that make the city’s lifeblood retreating to remote work, San Francisco has seen residents move to the suburbs – pushed also by rising crime,” the Daily Mail reported.

This has reduced the tax base, which means there is less money available to fund cities programs and services.

To compensate, programs and services will need to be cut or taxes raised. Both of which will drive more people from the city, leaving behind those most in needs of programs and less likely to be contributing much to the city’s coffers through taxes.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/12/27/twitter-americas-founders-and-free-expression/

Donald Trump’s declaration that he would run for president again in 2024 made me recall his previous tempestuous soap opera relationship with Twitter and “fake news.” And now we are living through the beginning of what could be an equally tempestuous soap opera triggered by Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. After all, the left has decided that with Twitter no longer under its control, it now prefers a “hands around the neck of Twitter” approach rather than a “hands off Twitter” approach. It makes it worth revisiting the relationship between Twitter, and the constitutional freedoms of expression America’s founders guaranteed citizens for insight.

If we applied the same standards America’s founders applied to speech and the press to current media that did not then exist, there would virtually never be a time to acceptably deny Americans’ those freedoms. And that remains true even for Twitter or when “fake news” or “disinformation” is invoked as justification. However, as a recent Orange County Register editorial put it, “Maintaining a commitment to free speech and resisting the temptation to suppress  contrary points of view is especially hard without an appreciation for why freedom of speech is important.” Let us consider that issue more closely.

The Constitution included freedoms of speech and the press because our founders knew freedom of expression was necessary to maintain liberty. They repudiated restrictions on the press because they remembered that colonial printers had been licensed, but licenses could be revoked and printers imprisoned (e.g., Benjamin Franklin’s brother, James). At the time, newspapers were the primary means of public communication, so they were insulated from political extortion from those who didn’t like what they printed. However, what was emphasized was freedom of expression, not the particular medium of expression used. If radio, TV and the internet existed in the 1770s, the principle behind freedom of the press would have been expressed more broadly.

To see this, you need only consider some of our founding generation’s own words, and those of their predecessors who greatly influenced their beliefs.