RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/facebook-trump-board-lifetime-ban-jonathan-turley

The decision of the Facebook board to uphold the decision to ban former President Donald Trump but reconsider his lifetime ban may seem transparently convenient for many. However, there is precedent. 

One of my favorite trial accounts is from Ireland, where an Englishman accused an Irishman of stealing a pair of boots. The guilt of the defendant was absolutely clear but the Irish jury could not get itself to rule for the Englishman. Instead, it acquitted the Irishman but added a line, “We do believe O’Brien should give the Englishman back his boots.” Case closed.

Few people thought that, after expanding the censorship of political figures like Trump for years, Facebook could ever summon the courage to declare itself wrong in the ban first imposed on Jan. 7, 2021. Instead, the board ruled that it was absolutely right to suspend Trump but it may want to reconsider the permanent ban given the absence of any objective standard to support it. So Trump will still get the boot for now.

It may be too harsh to expect anything more from a board that literally monitors one of the world’s largest censorship programs. 

Facebook, Twitter and other companies now openly engage in what they like to euphemistically call “content modification.” The decision reflects the convoluted logic of censor’s free speech review board. The company – and the board – start from the assumption that it can and should censor views deemed “misinformation” or dangerous. The starting position therefore is that censorship is justified and that content neutrality is dangerous.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/as-things-fall-apart-people-seem-to-lack-all-conviction_3801729.html?utm_source=partner&utm_campaign=RCP

The American poet Delmore Schwartz (1913–1968) had a number of good one-liners.

His mot about existentialism, for example, is hard to beat: “Existentialism,” he said, “means no one else can take a bath for you.”

Given the level of pretension that surrounded the French-German import, and given its dour currency in the academic stock market at the time, that deflationary observation was just the thing.

Schwartz’s comment seized upon something essential in that school of philosophy—its radical individualism—and then gave it a comic twist. Not the Heideggerian “Dasein,” whose essence is “being-unto-death,” but a nice warm bath that is yours and yours alone. It was nicely done.

Another comment by Schwartz has special relevance to our own situation. I mean his observation that “Even paranoids have enemies.”

I reckon that Rudy Giuliani can savor the truth of that apothegm. Likewise, Victoria Toensing. Both were raided by Joe Biden’s secret police, the NKFBI, last week.

Ditto Paul and Marilyn Hueper.

The Alaska couple were enjoying a little sleep-in on April 28, when “a dozen armed FBI agents kicked down their front door in an investigation associated with Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s stolen laptop.”

The agents, with guns drawn, handcuffed the couple and interrogated them for nearly three hours.

The Huepers, you see, had been in Washington, D.C. on Jan. 6 for the big Trump rally.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/05/our_country_was_founded_by_geniuses_but_its_being_run_by_idiots.html

The eminently quotable Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana said sometime back: “Our country was founded by geniuses, but it’s being run by idiots.”  I heartily agree, and the problem is not self-correcting.  

The principles behind the formation of America’s government were and are exquisite, but the American government, like all forms of government, is corrupt as hell.  This isn’t an extraordinary statement.  Exquisite things often break, and even the noblest of institutions become distorted over time until the original purposes for their creation are eclipsed (and often contradicted) by the personal motives of the men running those institutions into the ground.  

This phenomenon is apparent anywhere there is power. 

John O’Sullivan, a senior policy adviser for Prime Minister Thatcher, wrote a short essay thirty years ago that should have made freedom-minded conservatives rethink any lingering attachments to institutional authorities.   

He asked a question we often ask ourselves: how is it that almost all institutional bodies — whether governmental agencies or purportedly “nonpartisan” scientific academies or even religious groups and charities — transform over time into left-leaning entities?  In grappling with what might seem inexplicable, he corralled three insights about organizational behavior: (1) Robert Michels’s Iron Law of Oligarchy asserting that all forms of organization, regardless of how democratic their foundations, will come to be run by an elite group of people; (2) Robert Conquest’s Second Law stating that every organization behaves as if “headed by secret agents of its opponents”; and (3) O’Sullivan’s very own First Law positing that “[a]ll organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.”  In other words, Michels tells us that the key to understanding any institution is its leadership, not its charter.  Conquest argues that the leadership will always have objectives at odds with the organization’s intended purpose, if for no other reason than that the leadership’s continued employment and future power paradoxically depend upon never completely succeeding.  And O’Sullivan takes this insight farther by noting that the type of person who staffs such organizations tends to disdain private profit and the historic composition of Western civilization’s free-market culture.  

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/federal-biden-inquisitors-lloyd-billingsley-0/

Last week, Jill Sanborn, assistant director of the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division, told lawmakers that James Hodgkinson “intended for the shooting to be his final act on Earth,” when he attacked Republican lawmakers on June 14, 2017, nearly killing Rep. Steve Scalise. According to Sanborn, Hodgkinson knew  “he would likely be killed,” a tacit acknowledgement that the FBI had indeed classified the attack as “suicide by cop,” not an act of terrorism.

“I am not aware of the rationale,” Sanborn told lawmakers. “I was not in my seat at the time, so I would have to get back to you on the specifics of what the rationale was.” In the seat of acting FBI director at the time was Andrew McCabe, a Clinton crony and major player in the Russia hoax. McCabe did not testify about the rationale for calling the attack suicide by cop. 

“If it were to happen today, we would open it as a domestic terrorism case,” Sanborn testified. DOJ assistant attorney general Brad Wiegmann told legislators that James Hodgkinson was a domestic terrorist, nearly four years after the FBI failed to do so. All told, it was quite a performance from the FBI-DOJ duo. 

Hodgkinson, a supporter of Bernie Sanders, carried a list of Republican lawmakers and belonged to a Facebook group called “Terminate the Republican Party.” Hodgkinson purchased an SKS rifle, a Russian or Chinese made precursor to the AK-47, and practiced his marksmanship. Hodgkinson also recorded a video of the field where Republican lawmakers played baseball. 

On June 14, 2017, as the Republicans practiced, Hodgkinson opened fire, seriously wounding Rep. Steve Scalise and Zack Barth, an aide to Rep. Roger Williams. The Sanders supporter then engaged the Capitol Police in a gun battle, not what one would expect from someone out to commit suicide by cop. That absurd designation recalls an episode from the composite character president David Garrow described in Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama.