RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2022/02/17/the-real-pandemic-n1560170

In a Nov. 19, 2021 address to Hillsdale College, its president Larry Arnn identified the three factors recognized by the Constitution as the natural rights of human beings: the right to earn a living, the right to raise our children, and the right to participate in government.

“These facts about nature,” he pointed out, “were well known during the American Revolution … It was the interference with the colonists’ natural rights by that former ruling class that led to the American Revolution.” Such interference, he argues, is occurring today on both a national and global scale.

Nationally, a bureaucratic colossus has taken control of regulative governance, as evidenced by the collective response to the COVID-19 virus: the isolation of the nation’s citizenry via lockdowns, a form of house arrest; the virtual destruction of the economy; and the collusion between Big Pharma, major corporations, government, medical agencies, mainstream media, and the education establishment. This vast and nefarious consortium has nullified what Arnn enumerated as the basis of life in a democratic polity— the three fundamental rights which the COVID mandarin class has stripped from its citizenry.

The right to make a living has been ruthlessly and severely compromised. As is well known, small business has been decimated and millions of people thrown out of work or driven into bankruptcy. Whether this was part of a deliberate plan or a poorly thought-through strategy for dealing with the pandemic is an open question—but suspicions ramify. The vaccine mandates have only exacerbated the disaster.
The right to raise their children as parents see fit has been overridden by government edict and/or agency control. Children, who are effectively immune to the virus, are forced to wear masks in order to attend school and are being injected with entirely unnecessary and potentially harmful vaccines. Witness, too, the imposition of Critical Race Theory on school curricula by school boards and government fiat across the nation. In my own country, Canada, Bill C-4 prohibits what is called conversion therapy, making parents’ concern about transgender indoctrination of their children and intervention in the process a criminal offense. In all such cases, the state insists on acting in loco parentis, reducing parents to the status of daycare operators.
The right to participate in government has been stifled by oppressive and unnavigable bureaucracies whose regulative incontinence has closed almost every avenue of individual involvement in the apparatus of governance. Political authority has become both unrepresentative and unaccountable. Indifference to citizen opposition regarding policy measures and legislative enactments is the official version of a barricaded street.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2022/02/17/hillary-campaign-is-now-panicking-over-durham-probe-n1560091

On Thursday, attorneys for Michael Sussmann, the lawyer from Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign who was charged last year with lying to federal agents, filed a motion to dismiss Special Counsel John Durham’s case against him, reports the New York Post. The lawyers called the matter “extraordinary prosecutorial overreach.”

Sussmann’s legal team insists that he didn’t make false statements to the FBI and that he’s being targeted on a technicality. Sussman voluntarily approached FBI agents in Sept. 2016 to “pass along information that raised national security concerns.” Instead, Sussman came to them with bogus information linking the Trump Organization and the Kremlin-linked Alfa-Bank.

“He met with the FBI, in other words, to provide a tip. There is no allegation in the indictment that the tip he provided was false. And there is no allegation that he believed that the tip he provided was false,” Sussman’s lawyer’s motion reads. “Rather, Mr. Sussmann has been charged with making a false statement about an entirely ancillary matter — about who his client may have been when he met with the FBI — which is a fact that even the special counsel’s own indictment fails to allege had any effect on the FBI’s decision to open an investigation. Allowing this case to go forward would risk criminalizing ordinary conduct, raise First Amendment concerns, dissuade honest citizens from coming forward with tips, and chill the advocacy of lawyers who interact with the government.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/02/a_president_so_bad_that_even_his_base_is_disgusted_with_him.html

Drew Magary is a San Francisco columnist who comes at politics from a place far, far along the leftist spectrum. He is the radical base that drives the modern Democrat party. On the Venn diagram mapping out my political views and Magary’s, however, there is one point of intersection: We both think of Biden as a failed president. That’s good for my side of the aisle and very, very bad for Magary’s.

Margary’s essay is entitled “Joe Biden is a lousy president.” In it, you’ll find phrases such as this: “Joe Biden is out of excuses.” “In many ways, it feels as if Biden’s presidency is already over.” “All this begs the question: Does Joe Biden even know he’s president? Does he give a s—t?” “He’s uninterested….” “He’s shown no ambition….” “I am sick to death of this….” “It’s not merely that Biden has been a lousy president; it’s that I’ve seen nothing to suggest that he’ll STOP being lousy.” “I briefly had high hopes for Joe Biden, and that’s on me.”

I think we conservatives can agree with every one of those statements. Where the opinion piece starts having that funhouse mirror feel is learning that, aside from being as disgusted as conservatives about Biden’s Afghanistan pullout fiasco, every one of Magary’s complaints comes about because he feels that Biden has failed as a leftist.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/hillary-clinton-responds-to-durham-investigation-laments-conspiracy-theories/

Former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton again on Thursday repudiated as a phony scandal the recent revelation that operatives connected to her campaign allegedly spied on the Trump administration as part of an effort to cook up a Russia-collusion narrative.

During her keynote speech for the 2022 New York State Democratic Convention, Clinton said Durham’s findings are a “right-wing lie” meant to serve as a distraction from Trump’s own scandals.

“And we can’t get distracted. Whether it’s by the latest culture war nonsense or some new right-wing lie on Fox or Facebook. By the way, they’ve been coming after me again in case you might have noticed. It’s funny, the more trouble Trump gets into the wilder the charges and conspiracy theories about me seem to get,” she said.

“So now his accountants have fired him and investigations draw closer to him and right on cue the noise machine gets turned up…” she added. “Fox leads the charge against me, counting on their audience to fall for it again. They’re getting awfully close to actual malice in their attacks.”

Special counsel John Durham is currently trying to get to the bottom of the extensive Trump/Russia probe launched by the Obama administration that spanned into the Trump administration, consuming the press and public for two years.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/race-essentialism-at-wapo/

The Washington Post has a feature story about the influence of longtime Democratic house member Jim Clyburn. Clyburn, you may recall, was consequential in saving Biden’s candidacy during the Democratic primaries in 2016. An endorsement from the South Carolinian congressman carried great weight in such a divided field and helped to solidify Biden as the choice of party moderates and the choice of African-American voters, many of whom are now the party’s moderate voters.

Clyburn has apparently been frustrated in his inability to influence personnel choices by the administration, though the article says his words still carry great weight. The subject turns to the Supreme Court, and Clyburn’s push for Biden to nominate U.S. district judge J. Michelle Childs, who Clyburn believes better represents the values of people in his state. Childs is the product of public universities, whereas the current favorite of progressive commentators is Ketanji Brown Jackson, with a background from Harvard.

If you know how to read between the lines, there’s a lot of interest in this story as it gets to the class conflict within the Democrat Party. Traditionalists like Clyburn really are more moderate and pragmatic and speak to a certain important segment of the party. But ascendant progressives, who reflect the party’s generational tilt toward the elite, want something else.

https://www.newsweek.com/americas-ruling-regime-doesnt-fear-disinformation-it-fears-truth-opinion-1679940

In Joe Biden’s America, attempting to cancel Joe Rogan is just counter-terror policy.

This is because our ruling class—in the name of “defending democracy”—classifies those who question the regime on any matter of consequence as a threat to the homeland, and pledges to pursue them accordingly.

Our ruling elites have engaged in an overt war on wrongthink masquerading as a domestic counter-terror mission since at least January 6, 2021.

As part of this effort, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) recently issued a speech-chilling National Terrorism Advisory System Bulletin. It claims the United States is in a “heightened threat environment fueled by several factors, including an online environment filled with false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories, and other forms of mis- dis- and mal-information.”

Among the greatest contributors to the current “threat environment,” according to the bulletin, is the “widespread online proliferation of false or misleading narratives regarding…COVD-19.

It would appear the Biden administration considers the ivermectin-hocking, tequila-swigging, Bernie Sanders-supporting Rogan to be public enemy number one on this issue.

Shortly after hosting dissenters from COVID orthodoxy including Drs. Peter McCullough and the then-recently deplatformed Robert Malone on his podcast, Rogan found himself the subject of a cancel campaign contrived by washed-up musicians, non-medical doctors and corporate media whose ratings he has crushed.

But it wasn’t just these parties out for blood.

No less than the president of the United States, his press secretary and surgeon general contributed to the anti-Rogan jihad, calling for war on COVID “misinformation and disinformation.”

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2022/02/17/the_checkered_past_of_the_fbi_computer_contractor_who_spied_on_trump_816761.html

Long before FBI computer contractor and Clinton operative Rodney L. Joffe allegedly trolled Internet traffic for dirt on President Trump, he mined direct-marketing contact lists for the names and addresses of unwitting Americans to target in a promotional scam involving a grandfather clock.

Not just any clock, mind you, but a “world famous Bentley IX” model, according to postcards his companies mailed out to millions of people in the late 1980s claiming they’d won the clock in a contest they never entered. There was just one hitch: the lucky winners had to send $69.19 in shipping fees to redeem their supposedly five-foot mahogany prize.

Tens of thousands of folks forked over the fees, only to discover the grandfather clock that arrived was nothing as advertised. It was really just a table-top version made of particle board and plastic and worth less than $10. Some assembly was required.

The scheme generated thousands of complaints, sparking federal and state investigations. Joffe and his then-California partner, Linda M. Carella, were eyed by federal postal authorities and several state attorneys general for allegedly operating a multi-state mail-order scheme. Joffe settled several state lawsuits by agreeing to refund hundreds of thousands of dollars mainly to elderly victims, according to several published reports at the time.

Joffe and his attorney did not respond to requests for comment. But in a phone interview, Carella told RealClearInvestigations that Joffe ran the operation. “I was just the secretary, the receptionist,” Carella, 76, said from her home in Florida, where she is now retired. She did say she picked up the returned postcards and checks from mailboxes.

Carella said she quit after the investigation: “I said I don’t want anything more to do with this … I have not seen Rodney since then.” But Joffe pressed on with his direct-mail marketing business before packing up for Arizona a few years later. Federal and state tax lien records reveal Joffe — who also sent out mailers for skin care and other beauty products — owed more than $110,000 in back taxes on his property in Los Angeles in 1995.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/who-are-those-techies-who-spied-on-trump-clinton-2016-election-durham-data-fusion-gps-joffe-11645139606?mod=opinion_featst_pos1

The usual suspects are already circling the wagons around the techie “experts” who spied on Donald Trump. If their defense feels tired, it’s because we’ve been through it before. It’s Christopher Steele all over again.

Special counsel John Durham destroyed the last shreds of Mr. Steele’s credibility last year, proving that the paid-for-hire spook had relied on fabrications for the infamous dossier the Federal Bureau of Investigation used in its Trump probe. The special counsel is now dismantling that other big claim of Trump-Russia “collusion”—the Alfa Bank narrative. The wonder is that the press and others are stepping up for another humiliation—when the disturbing actions of the creators of the Alfa narrative are already so easy to document, and in their own words.

The Alfa story came to life in October 2016, when Franklin Foer of Slate was gulled into writing that a largely anonymous “benevolent posse” of “computer scientists,” “spurred by a sense of shared idealism,” had discovered data showing secret communications between the Trump Organization and Russia-based Alfa Bank. Cybersecurity professionals instantly ridiculed the data as nonsense, and the FBI dismissed it, but the liberal media kept it alive. In October 2018, the New Yorker’s Dexter Filkins devoted a 7,600-word panegyric to the “self-appointed guardians of the Internet” who continued to flog the claims.

In recent court filings, Mr. Durham explains that these tech experts—including Rodney Joffe, formerly of Neustar, Inc.—were in cahoots with the same crew as Mr. Steele, using the same playbook. They worked with Democratic lawyers at Perkins Coie and opposition-research firm Fusion GPS, with the goal of dredging up “derogatory” information on Mr. Trump that would please “VIPs” in the Clinton campaign. The techies did so, the Durham indictment says, in part by mining protected internet data that had been supplied to a government contractor—allowing them to snoop on the White House as well as Trump Tower and Mr. Trump’s Manhattan apartment.