RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2022/02/16/hillary-finally-responds-to-durham-bombshell-calls-it-a-fake-scandal-n1559864

According to a motion filed Friday by Special Counsel John Durham, lawyers for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign allegedly paid a technology company to “infiltrate” servers that belonged to Trump Tower and, later, the Trump White House “for the purpose of gathering derogatory information about Donald Trump.”

“Trump & Fox are desperately spinning up a fake scandal to distract from his real ones. So it’s a day that ends in Y,” Hillary tweeted on Wednesday. “The more his misdeeds are exposed, the more they lie.” Hillary included a link to an article from popular culture and fashion magazine Vanity Fair, which she claims debunks the allegations because that’s the best she could come up with after five days.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/02/16/hillary-clintons-greatest-masterpiece/

Hillary Clinton’s never-ending shenanigans in 2015-2016 could be summarized as an attempted slow-motion coup. 

Four years of national hysteria, a divided nation, and dangerous new tensions with Russia were some of the wages of Clinton’s machinations.

Clinton hired a British national and ex-spy, Christopher Steele, to compile dirt on her election opponent, Trump. She hid her likely illegal campaign payments to him through at least three paywalls—the Democratic National Committee, the Perkins Coie law firm, and the opposition research firm Fusion GPS. 

Partisans in the FBI helped her, by variously spying on minor officials affiliated with the Trump campaign, like George Papadopoulos and Carter Page. To expedite its improper surveillance, a corrupt FBI hierarchy presented fraudulent documents to a FISA court that authorized the illicit surveillance. 

Clinton’s orbit of former subordinates and friends seeded the lies in the dossier throughout the Department of Justice, the FBI, and the CIA. 

During the Trump transition, the FBI also tapped into the communications of national security advisor designate General Michael Flynn. The illegally leaked surveillance put an end to his service to the Trump Administration and ruined his life. 

The country went through 22 months and $40 million in legal expenses under special counsel Robert Mueller to investigate the Clinton-inspired Russian collusion hoax.

When it was all over, Mueller’s “dream team” found no such actionable Trump-Russian collusion.