RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2018/08/13/berkeley-free-speech-why-liberal-gave-up-college/

A liberal explains why he gave up on Berkeley

There were seven men climbing the hillside, through thickets of sagebrush and lupine, through groves of oak and pine. Finally they came to an outcropping of rock, which they scaled. From there, they could see the bay, rippling in the afternoon light. Two ships were out there, heading for the open waters of the Pacific. The glorious moment called for recognition; Frederick Billings, a Vermonter who’d come west during the Gold Rush, supplied the grace note, in the form of a verse from George Berkeley, the 18th-century English philosopher: “Westward the course of empire takes its way.” That was how Berkeley, Calif., got its name.

I wasn’t there, obviously, but my imagination pulled me like a tide to that moment during the three years I spent in Berkeley with my wife and two children. I am a terribly plodding runner, but nevertheless an avid one. Daily I huffed up those very same hills, and looked at that very same bay, and filled with the very same wonder of those men 152 years ago. This was especially so when fog obscured the skyscrapers of San Francisco, effacing the human element, leaving only you and water, the tops of hills, the milky, cloud-covered sky.

But this was fantasy. Below, the frontier settlement of 1866 was no longer. Descending back to town always left me coated in a thin film of dread. I was sinfully sour with my wife and children, perfectly graceless with the in-laws who had wholly funded our move from New York to California. By the time I realized that I hated the place, it was with tremendous relief, as when a spouse realizes that a marriage has run its course even as her counterpart cluelessly makes vacation plans. But it would take a rather long while to figure out why, and what that irreducible antipathy had to do with liberalism — Berkeley’s and my own.

Bishop Berkeley would prove a prescient namesake for this Northern California city that has made its sibling across the bay, San Francisco, seem staid by comparison. Berkeley was a subjective idealist who argued that there was no world apart from the world each one of us experienced. “To be is to be perceived,” he famously postulated. Today’s popular injunction to “live your truth” is the simpleton cousin of Berkeley’s insight that there wasn’t any other truth to be lived.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/07/30/americans-need-clear

The Department of Justice last week released copies of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant applications that James Comey’s FBI used to begin electronic surveillance of Carter Page, a former Trump campaign advisor. While much of the FISA warrants were heavily redacted, it’s clear the FBI used the politically motivated Steele dossier as the primary basis for their applications.

Understand what that means: a piece of partisan propaganda funded by the Democrats, compiled by an ex-British spy, filled with “intelligence” that has never been corroborated, let alone sourced, was used to justify spying on a U.S. citizen, on U.S. soil, in violation of his Fourth Amendment rights. This behavior has more in common with Communist Russia and KGB tactics than with anything traditionally associated with our constitutional republic—though this shouldn’t be surprising with Commie-lover John Brennan’s fingerprints all over this entire process.

Understand, too, that James Comey admitted under oath that in January 2017, when he was briefing President-elect Trump on the truly sensational parts of the dossier, the FBI director described the document to Trump as salacious and unverified. Yet the Steele dossier was used three more times to justify continued surveillance of Page.

http://thefederalist.com/2018/07/30/facts-behind-trump-tower-meeting-incriminating-not-trump/

According to “sources with knowledge” talking to CNN—whatever that means—Michael Cohen is prepared to tell Special Counsel Robert Mueller that Donald Trump knew in advance about the June 9, 2016 Trump Tower meeting between Don Jr. and Russians. The president still denies knowing about that meeting beforehand.

Don Jr. was emailed by a British music promoter, Rob Goldstone, who promised that the Russian “crown prosecutor” had information that would “incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia.” When the meeting took place, in walked two Russian nationals, Rinat Akhmetshin and Natalia Veselnitskaya, who proceeded to talk to Don Jr., Jared Kushner, and others about how Americans could once again adopt Russian children, if only the Magnitsky Act were repealed. Eyes surely rolled, and the meeting was ended. Kushner even messaged his assistant to try to come up with an excuse to leave the meeting early.

For those who belong to the religious cult of Trump-Russia collusion, this meeting is prima facie evidence of the Trump campaign colluding with Russia to rig the 2016 election. One of the sacraments of this cult is that its adherents wake up every morning and hope that on this day, just maybe, Trump will finally be done away with. CNN is of course central to this practice.