RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2024/12/30/devin-nunes-reemerges/

2024 proved to be the year of the reemergence of many once and unfairly pilloried public figures.

Elon Musk weathered nonstop attacks on his X social media platform. Furor escalated over his newfound 2024 Trump advocacy—even as he ended 2024 with his iconic Tesla brand still the best-selling car in six states and the most popular electric vehicle in the entire nation.

Tesla’s rising stock prices ensured by year’s end that Musk was by far the richest man in the world with a net worth of well over $400 billion. His recyclable SpaceX Super Heavy starship rocket booster mesmerized the nation as it returned to the launch pad to be caught by a huge mechanical arm.

After January 6, 2021, the media swore that Donald Trump was supposedly washed up. He left office with a 34 percent approval rating. Over nearly the next four years, Trump would face 91 felony indictments and be liable for over $400 million in assorted fines.

Now he is a reelected president. Former oppositional world leaders traipse to Mar-a-Lago to seek his approval even before his tenure begins. His erstwhile critics at home are scurrying about in disarray.

The Trump-hating media who swore Joe Biden was “sharp as a tack” and “fit as a fiddle” are mostly discredited and are, for now, still bleeding audiences. And Trump’s chief political adversaries, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and the Obamas are increasingly either unpopular or irrelevant—or both.

Yet one unremarked-upon return is that of former Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), who, after 20 years of representing Central California in Congress, retired on January 1, 2022, from the House to become CEO of the newly formed Trump Media & Technology Group, tasked to oversee its social media platform, TruthSocial.

Nunes has regained public attention over the last two weeks after Trump appointed him to become chairman of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board, which oversees the conduct and performance of America’s intelligence agencies.

And once more he too is the target of tired residual left-wing venom, as a “pugnacious Trump loyalist” in the words of the New York Times.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/21-house-dems-demand-biden-aid-black-klansman/

18 members of the Congressional Black Caucus, along with Rep. Rashida Tlaib and two other non-black members, signed a letter asking Biden to exonerate America’s first black Klansman.

The letter does not mention that Marcus Garvey had allied with the KKK, admired Hitler, told his followers to read Mein Kampf and declared, “what the Negro needs is a Hitler.”

It also does not mention that Garvey had himself in mind for the job, that the self-proclaimed “Provisional President of Africa” wore imaginary military uniforms and sent his thugs to beat up black civil rights leaders before being expelled in disgrace after defrauding his followers.

Or that the charges of mail fraud that 21 House Democrats want to exonerate Garvey from were brought at the urging of black civil rights leaders of the day who demanded federal intervention.

House Democrats are not the first to argue that Garvey was railroaded.

After the trial, Garvey claimed that he had been convicted because of his allegiance to the KKK. In buffoonery worthy of Candace Owens, he argued that the judge (who was actually a Christian, but who Garvey falsely claimed was Jewish) believed that “I hated and was opposed to the Jews, because of my alleged membership in or connection with the Klu Klux Klan.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/another-biden-parting-outrage/

Just recently, the White House announced that President Joe Biden commuted the sentences of 37 of the 40 prisoners, all murderers and some multiple murderers, on federal death row. (Yes, while most death penalty cases are handled by the states, the federal government has a death row for violators of federal crimes.) Biden commuted the federal prisoners’ sentences from death to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

In a statement, Biden claimed to be acting out of principle and conscience. He plainly said he did not want the federal government to execute anyone, and he specifically did not want the next president of the United States to allow the federal government to execute anyone. He never mentioned who that president might be, but he was referring, of course, to President-elect Donald Trump.

“I am more convinced than ever that we must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level,” Biden said. “In good conscience, I cannot stand back and let a new administration resume executions that I halted.”

It is hard to believe, but even in such grave matters of law and conscience, Biden’s decision was all about Trump.

Biden is planning his last trip as president next month. It will be to Italy, where he will meet Pope Francis at the Vatican. The pope recently prayed that the sentences of death row prisoners in the United States “be commuted or changed.” Vatican News also reported, “Anti-death penalty activists and associations have been imploring President Biden to use his clemency powers before he leaves office to spare the lives of about 40 federal death row inmates who are at peril of imminent execution when the next president takes office.”

The pope, of course, speaks from a religious perspective. His position is consistent; he wants all death penalty prisoners to be spared. But Biden was not so consistent, because while he commuted the sentences of 37 prisoners, he left death sentences in place for three: Dylann Roof, who murdered nine people in a Charleston, South Carolina, church in 2015; Robert Bowers, who murdered 11 at a synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018; and Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who killed three and injured more than 200 in 2013.

Biden decided that Kaboni Savage, convicted of murdering 12 people, including a family of six in a firebombing, deserved mercy, while Roof, Bowers and Tsarnaev did not. Biden decided that Ricardo Sanchez and Daniel Troya, convicted of murdering a young mother, father and their 4- and 3-year-old boys, deserved mercy, but Roof, Bowers and Tsarnaev did not. Biden decided that Jorge Avila-Torrez, convicted or raping and murdering two girls, age 8 and 9, and later murdering a 20-year-old woman, deserved mercy, but Roof, Bowers and Tsarnaev did not.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/12/jimmy-carter-was-a-terrible-president-and-an-even-worse-former-president/

The truth is that historians have not been harsh enough.

A popular narrative surrounding the legacy of Jimmy Carter is that as president he was a victim of unlucky timing that impeded him politically but that he excelled during his long post-presidential career. The reality is that he was a terrible president but an even worse former president.

Carter’s true legacy is one of economic misery at home and embarrassment on the world stage. He left the country in its weakest position of the post–World War II era. After being booted out of office in landslide fashion, the self-described “citizen of the world” spent the rest of his life meddling in U.S. foreign policy and working against the United States and its allies in a manner that could fairly be described as treasonous. His obsessive hatred of Israel, and pompous belief that only he could forge Middle East peace, led him to befriend terrorists and lash out at American Jews who criticized him.

A former governor of Georgia who had little charisma and national name recognition when he began campaigning for president, Carter ended up in the White House as a fluke. He presented an image as an honest, moderate, and humble southern Evangelical Christian outsider — an antidote to the corruption of the Watergate era. He also benefited from the vulnerabilities of the sitting president, Gerald Ford.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/12/the-shamelessness-of-ta-nehisi-coates/

Recognition of what Coates is really up to — in The Message and elsewhere — should chasten those who have long treated him as the moral conscience of the West.

None of the many criticisms leveled at Ta-Nehisi Coates seem to land. Coates has made a fool of himself in his new book, The Message, and the tour promoting it, with TV and podcast appearances (including one in which he suggested that he, too, would have been tempted to raid Israel, rape women, and burn children alive if he grew up in Gaza) that would spell the end of nearly anyone else’s time in the limelight. Who can take seriously a man whose career was built on profound musings about race now observing that black Israeli soldiers — many of whom are Ethiopian Jews who have sought refuge in Israel — “would, in America, have been seen as ‘white’”? Is that what we have landed on? “White” just means the guy with the gun? The bad guy?

That’s where Coates has settled, which ought to make anyone who previously treated his musings on American racism as gospel question their own judgment. Yet, his TV appearances and media profiles keep coming, and his reputation seems likely to remain intact. He hardly seems moved to consider that perhaps he may have bitten off more than he can chew in pronouncing his judgment on one of the world’s most vexing conflicts after a short junket to Israel and the Palestinian territories, all of which he calls “Palestine.”

More onTa-Nehisi Coates

Black Critics Shake Their Heads at Ta-Nehisi Coates

The man is like the Dunning-Kruger effect incarnate — yet he acts as though he really has an irreproachable sense of moral discernment. After CBS host Tony Dokoupil was accused of racism and put through the sensitivity-training ringer for civilly pointing out that Coates’s book was extreme and thoroughly misleading, Coates kept mum. Perhaps it would be too much to ask Coates to stick up for Dokoupil by publicly admitting that Coates had pretended to analyze the Israeli/Palestinian conflict by amplifying conspiracy theories about the Jewish state. But a certain kind of public intellectual, committed to honest grappling with the world’s complexity, might have been tempted to tell Dokoupil’s tormentors to back off because the whole exchange was within the bounds of normal argument. He didn’t do that either. Honest grappling is not Coates’s commitment, attested to most of all by The Message, the publication of which affirms that for Coates, shamelessness remains the name of the game.

Shamelessness is one thread running through Coates’s short but eventful stint as the darling oracle of race-obsessed Americans. It did not begin with The Message. There’s a shamelessness to insisting with a straight face that white Americans are engaged in an ongoing race war against black Americans when the most basic facts that might prove such a claim actually point the other direction. (There is no race war, which you could have figured out by the amount of time Coates spends mind-reading in Between the World and Me, for which he won several awards.) There’s a similar shamelessness to hearing Dokoupil point out that Coates’s book about a region has completely ignored the eliminationism animating one side of a conflict and responding, yeah, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.

Most of what you need to know about The Message is that it’s a whole lot more of that: warning readers against the “elevation of complexity over justice” — as if that isn’t the consummate false choice, as if justice is self-evident and straightforward — and assuming that readers will pretend this is profound and not an incredible insult to their intelligence.

But merely calling Coates a shameless grifter misses the point. More important questions situate Coates in the context of a movement whose adherents allow him to get away with — indeed, get famous for — unserious drivel. Why are Coates and his writings impervious to criticism? How has he avoided consignment to laughingstock status?