RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/joe-biden-and-the-51-spies-of-2020-hunter-laptop-new-york-post-russia-disinformation-73072839?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Why is public trust in American institutions, including the press, in free fall? One reason is the revelation last week that the Biden for President campaign helped to organize the open letter that spread disinformation about Hunter Biden’s famous laptop computer on Oct. 19, 2020.

The House Judiciary and Intelligence committees released portions of a deposition transcript exposing the origins of the statement from 51 former U.S. spies declaring that Hunter’s laptop had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” The admission came from Mike Morell, former deputy CIA director under Barack Obama. The letter served its political purpose of giving the media and Joe Biden the opening to dismiss the New York Post’s laptop scoop as Russian disinformation. (The letter and the names of the 51 signers can be read nearby.)

It turns out the Biden campaign was behind the letter. Mr. Morell told Congress under oath that he received a phone call from Antony Blinken on Oct. 17, 2020—three days after the Post published emails from Hunter’s laptop. Mr. Blinken was then a senior adviser to the campaign and is now secretary of State.

According to a letter the House committees sent to Mr. Blinken last week, Mr. Morell said the call was “couched as simply gathering Morell’s reaction to the Post story,” yet it “set in motion the events that led to the issuance of the public statement.”

Committee question to Mr. Morell: “Prior to [Mr. Blinken’s] call, you—you did not have any intent to write this statement?”

Mr. Morell: “I did not.”

The letter says Mr. Morell also “explained that the Biden campaign helped to strategize about the public release of the statement.” Mr. Morell says he then contacted an aide to former CIA director John Brennan to say “the Biden campaign wanted the statement to go to a particular reporter at the Washington Post first and that he should send the statement to the campaign when he sent the letter to the reporter.”

https://amgreatness.com/2023/04/22/the-garland-blinken-and-morell-morass/

Doubtless your mother used to tell you to count your blessings. It was good advice. Your situation may be bad. In the case of the United States, things indisputably are bad, and worsening. You know that. But look on the bright side. Merrick Garland, the first American Gothic attorney general of the United States, is a partisan horror show, withholding real protection from Supreme Court justices who are threatened by violent criminals even as he stigmatizes as “domestic terrorists” parents who criticize their local school boards and orders the FBI to conduct dawn raids on critics of the regime. He is a horrible man and a dangerous partisan hack, the very instantiation of the two-tier application of the law that has made such a mockery of justice during Biden’s tenure. 

But look on the bright side. Garland will soon be gone. And remember, he almost made it to the Supreme Court. Obama nominated him in the waning days of his administration. But Donald Trump had other ideas and—let’s give credit where credit is due—Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) made sure that Garland’s nomination got lost when Republicans held the majority. I am no fan of McConnell’s, but I try to remember to say a little prayer for him whenever I list my intentions. By scotching Garland’s ascension to the Court, McConnell did the country a huge favor. 

I say Garland will “soon” be gone. Most of my readers will assume I mean on or about January 20, 2025, when the next Republican president assumes office. 

It might take that long. But recent developments have me wondering whether he might make his congé even earlier.

A few days ago, it was reported that an unnamed, senior IRS special agent was seeking whistle-blower status in connection with the ongoing investigation of First Son Hunter Biden, who has serious tax problems. 

According to a letter from the agent’s lawyer to several House and Senate committees, the agent laid out multiple examples of “preferential treatment and politics improperly infecting decisions and protocols that would normally be followed by career law enforcement professionals in similar circumstances if the subject [i.e., Hunter Biden] were not politically connected.” The agent’s allegations also “contradict sworn testimony to Congress by a senior political appointee” and “involve failure to mitigate clear conflicts of interest in the ultimate disposition of the case” against Hunter Biden.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/04/getting_off_the_roller_coaster_to_bondage.html

Life right now feels like that moment when your roller coaster car begins slowing down near a terrifying peak, and your line of sight finally captures the precipitous plunge lying ahead.  Americans know that what happens next won’t be enjoyable except in that perverse way when abject terror floods the body with adrenaline.  Majorities or near-majorities expect imminent economic disaster, global war against nuclear-armed foes, and civil war here at home.  If that’s “progress,” then it’s long past time to turn the country around.  Yet that’s the thing with roller coaster rides: even if we hit the brakes now before cresting the summit, our downward acceleration is guaranteed — in one direction or another.

It’s not as if the ruling class’s “cult of expertise” provides any comfort.  We have a president who long ago lost his marbles, a vice president who succeeded in the political profession by excelling in the oldest one, a secretary of defense committed to promoting men in dresses, a health bureaucracy pumping citizens full of experimental drugs, a Treasury Department endlessly printing money, a Commerce Department prioritizing inflation-inducing “green” windmills over real economic growth, a homeland security chief dedicated to keeping the nation insecure, and a national police force that treats half the country as “domestic enemies.”  It’s almost as if whoever installed these yahoos into the highest positions of authority wanted obvious “fall guys” for when everything, well, falls down.

The Gateway Pundit recently ran an article reminding readers of an ominous analysis from a private intelligence outfit predicting a seventy-percent decline in America’s population by 2025.  That Deagel Corporation forecast released less than a decade ago shocked a lot of people at the time, but in an age when Farmer Gates and Doom Fauci continue to promise incoming pandemics worse than COVID, the World Economic Forum’s human sacrifice cult insists on widespread energy poverty and famine, and U.S.-NATO plays Russian roulette for fun and profit, apocalyptic population drops no longer seem so unimaginable from the top of this globalist roller coaster.  (Morbid side question: If Deagel’s devastating prophecy proves right, will climate cultists still insist that only global government and micromanaged markets can save the world from destruction?  Arg, of course they will; even after killing off 95% of the planet, A.I. clones of Klaus Schwab, George Soros, and Barack Obama will still be blaming the remaining 5% for “hate” crimes, global warming, and “white supremacy.”  Hustlers can’t ever give up the con.)

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/04/communism_is_libertys_mortal_enemy.html

In a December 26, 1955 article in Time magazine, George Meany of the AFL-CIO warned Americans that

[t]oo many in the free world fail to see the real nature of Communism as the mortal foe of everything that we hold dear, of every moral and spiritual value. Too many are still prisoners of the illusion that Communism is, historically speaking, a progressive system  [or] … extreme liberalism temporarily making bad mistakes. Actually, Communism … is an anti-social system in which there are embedded some of the worst features of savagery, slavery, feudalism and life-sapping exploitation manifested in the industrial revolution of early-day capitalism.

Meany forcefully asserted that

[t]oo many in the free world seem to have lost their capacity for moral indignation against the most brutal inhumanities when they are perpetrated by Communists. It is painful, but we must face the cruel facts of life. It is disturbing to me that many people in our country who call themselves liberals … never find the time to utter a word of condemnation against the Communist imperialist destruction of the national independence and democratic rights of hundreds of millions of people in Europe and Asia.

It was unfathomable to Meany that liberals could not perceive that “communism is the deadliest enemy of liberalism.”

With great prescience, Meany recognized that “[t]he conflict between Communism and freedom is the problem of our time.  It overshadows all other problems.  This conflict mirrors our age, its toils, its tensions, its troubles and its tasks.  On the outcome of this conflict depends the future of all mankind. I pray that … we of the free world can muster the moral courage and total strength to preserve peace and promote the freedom of the men and women of every continent, color and creed.”

In January of 1956, Meany took aim at the American business community when he explained that “[s]omehow or other, many in our American business community are not sufficiently alert to the danger of world Communism[.]”  Meany urged American business “not to let the prospect of monetary profits blur your vision.  Know your enemy.  Don’t help him.”

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/american-crisis-walter-russell-mead-via-meadia

EXCERPT:

We are also an American society. That is, we share characteristics with other countries in the Americas like Mexico and Brazil that set the countries of our hemisphere apart from countries in Europe, Asia, and Africa. Like many other American countries, the United States has more ethnic, cultural, social, and religious diversity than most European countries. The turbulent history of the hemisphere has left its mark on many American societies, where levels of crime, inequality, and violence are extraordinarily high by world standards. At the same time, our cultural roots are more Anglo and Protestant than most of our fellow American states, giving us much in common with countries like Australia, New Zealand, the U.K., and of course Canada. As is the case throughout the Western Hemisphere, our intellectual classes and social elites have historically looked to Europe for aesthetic and intellectual values, while much of our population has had little knowledge of or interest in European history and culture. Serial waves of immigration, the latest and largest of which is taking place now, have reshaped American politics and culture, while leaving many of the essential elements of the national character largely unchanged.

Most of the time, however, our national conversation fails to do justice to the rich complexity of our national life. There are some outstanding exceptions both on the left and the right of American political discourse, but the quality of too much of our national conversation, mediated as it often is by cable news and social media, is too superficial, too one-sided, and too polarized to address the real issues in American life. That would be dangerous enough in ordinary times, but we live in demanding times. The disruptive economic and social consequences of the information revolution combine with the decadence and decay of the midcentury American model of regulated industrial democracy to plunge American society into a maelstrom of interconnected economic, social, racial, political, cultural, and ideological crises.

Between the domestic upheavals in American society, the international turmoil at a time of renewed great power competition, and global threats ranging from nuclear war to climate change, many Americans feel angry, frustrated, and afraid. To make matters worse, America’s leadership class has lost its way, and too many of the politicians, intellectuals, artists, educators, and religious leaders who ought to be pointing the way forward are locked into stale ideologies and failed institutional models, lacking the vision required to move up to the next stage of American life.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/vivek-ramaswamy-files-lawsuit-against-world-economic-forum_5209770.html?utm_source=partner&utm_campaign=TheLibertyDaily

Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy is suing the World Economic Forum (WEF) for affiliating him as one of its “Young Global Leaders,” despite rejecting the request and repeatedly asking to be removed from its list of members.

“I fundamentally disagree with the WEF agenda,” Ramaswamy said in a post on Twitter Tuesday. “I’ve been one of the biggest crusaders in our country against it. They named me a ‘young global leader’ when I explicitly said no. Now it’s time to hold them accountable for it.”

Ramaswamy argued that the organization of global elites also listed other young and successful business leaders on the forum without their consent.

In a poll initiated by the 37-year-old businessman-turned-politician, he asked his 456,000 followers to vote on whether they think he should sue the WEF, with over 29,000 Twitter users responding to it. The result showed a whopping 90 percent in favor of filing a lawsuit against the organization, which is headquartered in Geneva.

In a statement on Wednesday, Ramaswamy formally announced that he’s filing a lawsuit against the WEF, saying it’s time to hold the organization accountable “for creating the false illusion of affiliation” in order to undermine its adversaries.

“Our Founding Fathers fought the American Revolution to declare independence from the Old World monarchy,” Ramaswamy said. “That old monster now rears its head again in the form of WEF’s agendas including ‘stakeholder capitalism’ and the ‘Great Reset.’ That’s why I’ve been one of the most vocal crusaders in America against WEF.”

According to the New York Post, citing the lawsuit, Ramaswamy filed it in a court in Cincinnati, Ohio, on Wednesday and is seeking only nominal damages of $2,500.

The lawsuit, per the Post, reads: “The WEF seemingly exploited this false and manufactured affiliation with Mr. Ramaswamy to undermine his credibility as a critic of the World Economic Forum and its objectives.”

“This is an organization that does a lot of wrongs and I’ve opposed it publicly and believe it should be held accountable,” Ramaswamy told the paper. “The WEF has a radical worldview that rejects the principles America was founded on. I’m not interested in being a ‘global citizen.’ I’m an American.”

Ramaswamy, an entrepreneur who founded and leads biopharmaceutical company Roivant Sciences, appeared on the WEF’s 2021 list of Young Global Leaders (YGL) before his name was pulled from the website, an archived version shows.