RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/devon-archer-testimony-transcript-house-oversight-hunter-biden-joe-biden-ukraine-a21915bc?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

As soon as Devon Archer’s closed-door sitdown with the House Oversight Committee ended Monday, New York’s Daniel Goldman emerged to give the Democratic spin: President Biden’s conversations with his son’s business partners were innocent discussions about the weather or other niceties. That was exposed as false on Thursday when the committee made the complete transcript public.

Mr. Archer is a former business partner of Hunter Biden and served with him on the board of Ukrainian energy giant Burisma. Mr. Archer described the value-added that Hunter brought to the business as the “brand,” which was the Biden name. When Hunter put his father on speakerphone with his business clients, “there was [a] brand being delivered.”

He further clarified that it was Joe Biden “that brought the most value to the brand.” In other words, Hunter was selling his father’s power in Washington. That is what Burisma was paying for, and it looks like it got its money’s worth. “Burisma would have gone out of business if it didn’t have the brand attached to it,” Mr. Archer said.

Joe Biden famously bragged of his role in using $1 billion in U.S. aid to get Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin fired during his December 2015 visit to Kyiv. Mr. Archer says Mr. Shokin, who was investigating Burisma, was not “specifically on my radar,” and that he was spun a tale how of Mr. Shokin was actually “good for Burisma.” But he also said he wasn’t on the phone with Hunter, Burisma owner Mykola Zlochevsky and Burisma exec Vadym Pozharski when they “called D.C.” after a meeting in Dubai to discuss how Washington might alleviate the pressure on them.

All of this underscores Joe Biden’s horrendous judgment in blending his son’s business with his duties as Vice President. Mr. Biden was the Obama Administration’s point man for Ukraine, which was fighting Russia’s first invasion, and he can’t claim ignorance about his son’s dealings.

https://victorhanson.com/the-u-s-is-in-real-decline-no-kidding-part-one-energy/

There is proverbially a lot of rot in any great nation, which accordingly can endure a lot of self-induced damage.

But has the U.S. exhausted its reserves? Britain after World War I denied that its empire was doomed and its standard of living unsustainable. The Soviet Union was in decline gradually, then abruptly by 1989 became doomed. In the fourth century AD, Rome had established a modus vivendi of incorporating non-Romans into the empire, defending its borders, and tamping down on corruption. A century later, the Western empire collapsed from internal decay and tribal invasions across the Danube and Rhine.

Affordable energy had been America’s strength. We are still the largest combined natural gas and oil producer in the world—but determined to forfeit that advantage on the world stage and at home damage the viability of the middle class.

We were once the premier nuclear-generated power nation as well. No longer. Joe Biden and his surrogates on the state level have systematically waged war on fossil fuels, precluding even the reasonable idea that oil, gas, and coal can serve as necessary transition fuels over the next half-century, guaranteeing the American standard of living until the advent of viable alternative and renewable energies.

The only time Biden focuses on oil and gas is before a midterm or general election, when he hurriedly will either drain more of the strategic petroleum reserve or showboat a few more new federal energy leases.

A state like California has the highest taxed and the costliest electricity in the continental United States, mostly as a result of bragging that it is self-sufficient in daytime electricity production due to massive and heavily subsidized solar and wind farms. Yet it keeps mum that after dark it must import equally large amounts of fossil-fuel-generated power from neighboring states.

One of the most bizarre developments during the Biden years has been the complete exemption given massive and growing Chinese coal use, coupled with the furor over domestic natural gas production and use.

Think of the logic: we coax and ignore our Chinese enemies who are hell-bent on record dirty coal use, while hectoring the mostly now green American public on their supposedly toxic use of clean-burning natural gas—as if we could persuade 1.4 billion Chinese to cease burning coal by showing them that 330 million Americans can sacrifice by not burning natural gas.

Here again is the ancient bureaucratic principle in play of focusing on the misdemeanor of the law-abiding, as a way to square the utter inability to deal with the felony of the law-breaking.

https://victorhanson.com/23776-2/

And on the pedestal these words appear:“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.Percy Shelley, “Ozymandias”

I say America is in serious trouble because the Left has attacked systematically all of the U.S.’s great strengths and advantages on the world stage. It apparently thinks it must dismantle the old America before it can create a “new” America, something like a European Union state, only far more radical and volatile.

One, we were the only multiracial constitutional state that had avoided the tribalism and violence of the Balkans, a Rwanda, or the Middle East. Europe, for all its public grandstanding about ecumenicalism, has yet to have a black president or prime minister. The idea that a Barack Obama could become a Russian or Chinese citizen and reach similar pinnacles of political power is absurd. (And for that matter, include Mexico and much of Asia and Latin America.)

Yet race relations in the U.S. are at a historic low. More than 50 years of affirmative action have morphed into woke extremism, or the idea of racially separate graduations, dorms, workshops, and safe spaces. When working out, keeping a reasonable weight, camping, or showing up on time are now deemed racist, then there really is no more Civil Rights movement which has instead descended into caricature.

The more minorities reached parity with, or exceeded the income of, the majority population, the angrier and more volatile racial relations became. The operative principle seems to be something like “Before we can have racially blind relations in the 21st century, we must first make up for the racism, largely in the South, of the prior two centuries by similarly fixating on race, but in reverse fashion of granting preference to nullify past bias.”

No one dares talk about the violence of the inner city that makes 19th-century Dodge or Tombstone seem tame in comparison. No one discusses the utter failure of the inner-city schools or the need for intact families and omnipresent fathers to ensure any chance at parity. Instead, there is apparently the notion that if blacks appear in 50 percent of television commercials, such ecumenicalism will magically either curb gunslinging on Saturday nights in Chicago, or improved math scores in the Detroit or Baltimore public schools.

Why do we obsess over the supposedly suggestive illiberal themes of Jason Aldean’s, “Try That In a Small Town,” when rap and hip-hop for decades have institutionalized violent misogyny, homophobia, violence against the police, anti-Semitism, and blanket anti-white lyrics?

Orwellian censorship, coupled with deplatforming, cancel-culture, ostracism, and shadow banning, make any reasonable discussion of race taboo. The Left—instead of the old 1960s agenda of integration and assimilation—leveraged race and tribalism to create permanent constituencies, nursed on grievance and victimhood, and expectant of endless government redress and largess.

https://victorhanson.com/two-sets-of-laws-for-two-americas/

Two sets of laws now operate in an increasingly unrecognizable America.

Consider the matter of unlawfully removing and storing classified papers.

Donald Trump may go to prison for removing contested White House files to his home.

So far Joe Biden seems exempt from just such legal jeopardy.

But as a senator and Vice President with no right, as does a president, to declassify files, Biden removed and, as a private citizen kept for years classified files in unsecure locations.

Biden’s team strangely revealed the unlawful removals after years of silence.

It did so because the Biden administration found itself in the untenable position of prosecuting the former president for “crimes” that the current president committed as well—albeit far earlier and longer.

Impeachable phone calls?

Donald Trump was impeached by a Democratic House for delaying foreign aid until the Ukrainian government guaranteed that Hunter Biden and his family were no longer engaged in corrupt influence peddling in Kyiv.

In addition, the Left charged that Trump was targeting Joe Biden, his possible 2020 rival.

Yet Biden, with impunity, bragged that he had fired a Ukrainian prosecutor looking into his own son’s schemes by promising to cancel outright American foreign aid.

And the Biden administration’s Justice Department is now targeting Trump, currently the frontrunning challenger to Biden in 2024.

Election denialism?

https://www.thefp.com/p/a-racist-smear-a-tarnished-career-suicide?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Kike Ojo-Thompson, a diversity trainer in Toronto, was explaining to her class of 200 or so public school administrators that Canada is a much more racist country than the United States.

“Canada is a bastion of white supremacy and colonialism,” Thompson said to a sea of nodding heads squeezed into Zoom. “The racism we experience is far worse here than there.”

It was April 26, 2021, and Thompson was leading attendees through a session on systemic inequity.

Thompson acknowledged that this might be hard for Canadians to accept, explaining that Americans “have a fighting posture against, at least, the monarchy. Here we celebrate the monarchy, the very heart and soul and origins of the colonial structure.”

It was at that point that Richard Bilkszto, the principal of Burnhamthorpe Collegiate Institute and Adult Learning Centre, put his hand up. (Burnhamthorpe is a high school that caters mostly to students in their twenties who previously dropped out.) Bilkszto had trained in the United States, he was a devout progressive, and he was mystified by Thompson’s comments.

“I just wanted to make a comment about the Canada–U.S. thing, a little bit of a challenge to it,” Bilkszto offered.

Listen to Kike Ojo-Thompson’s claims about Canada in the DEI session here:

And Bilkszto’s challenge to her claims here:

Citing Canada’s public schools, tax regime, and socialized healthcare system, and no doubt drawing on his own experience teaching in a predominantly black high school in Buffalo, New York, he said: “We’re a far more just society.”

There was a momentary silence. None of the other attendees waded in.

Then Thompson, who is black, laced into Bilkszto, who is white.

“What I’m finding interesting is that, in the middle of this Covid disaster, where the inequities in this fair and equal healthcare system have been properly shown to all of us. . . you and your whiteness think that you can tell me what’s really going on with black people—like, is that what you’re doing, ’cause I think that’s what you’re doing, but I’m not sure, so I’m going to leave you space to tell me what you’re doing right now,” she said.

Bilkszto shut up.

That seemed like the end of that.

In fact, it was just the beginning of Bilkszto’s harrowing, two-year descent into an ordeal of public shaming and isolation that ended only when he took his life last month.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/catherinesalgado/2023/08/02/fbi-finds-200-victims-in-two-week-child-exploitation-operation-n1715567

Soon after mainstream media mocked anti-child trafficking movie “Sound of Freedom” as a QAnon conspiracy theory, a report has come out that the FBI found 200 sex trafficking victims and over 125 suspects during just a couple weeks of a child exploitation operation. Indeed, child exploitation is a severe and increasing problem, not a conspiracy theory.

Libs of TikTok provided a nice visual of multiple leftist outlets that denigrated or scoffed at “Sound of Freedom’s” exposé of child sex trafficking, from NPR to Rolling Stone to CNN:

Stopping child trafficking and exploitation shouldn’t be a politically partisan or divisive issue.

Related: Advisor: Trump Will Reinstate Title 42 to Fight Child Trafficking on Day One

Of course, the problem of child sex trafficking is anything but a “QAnon” “fantasy fit,” despite what the mainstream media claimed. And the latest confirmation of this sobering truth is a report that the FBI found 200 sex trafficking victims and over 125 suspects during just two weeks of a child exploitation operation, “Operation Cross Country.”

NBC News reported Tuesday:

The FBI found 200 sex trafficking victims and more than 125 suspects during a two-week child exploitation operation in July, federal officials said Tuesday…

The FBI-led initiative in partnership with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) “focused on identifying and locating victims of sex trafficking and investigating and arresting individuals and criminal enterprises involved in both child sex and human trafficking,” federal officials said.

This work should be a major priority for the federal government. Instead, the Biden administration’s disastrous border policies are actually facilitating trafficking!

The Asservo Project’s Joe Sweeney, who rescues victims of child exploitation and educates children and adults about the problem, noted in recent exclusive comments to PJ Media that the rise of social media exponentially exacerbated the problem of child exploitation. “This [human trafficking] is a global humanitarian crisis of modern-day…currently it’s over 50 million people…that are believed sold into slavery globally, boasting a $150 billion enterprise,” Sweeney told me. He also said, “The United States is the biggest consumer — and producer, at times — of child pornography in the world.”

That’s very disturbing. How did a country that was founded on the principle of liberty become a major fueler of the child exploitation crisis?

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/08/elites_cannot_hide_from_the_consequences_of_their_actions_.html

In classical Greek mythology, hubris is a fatal flaw that inevitably leads to tragedy.  No matter how admired the hero, any mortal who dares to behave like a god is punished in the end.  Mankind never seems to learn this lesson.

The “elites” of every generation delude themselves into believing that they are superhuman and inherently different from those they consider beneath them.  They are not.  Whatever afflicts ordinary people will eventually come for those who build extravagant sanctuaries intended to rival Mount Olympus.

No “elite” ideology has caused as much suffering as communism for a simple reason: it is a false doctrine that feeds on hubris.  “Communism begins where atheism begins,” Marx wrote.  It permits “elites” to deify themselves.  Because of that delusion, it remains a “spectre” that still “haunts” the world.  

Wherever Marxism has reared its ugly head, it ultimately brings death and desolation.  Wherever communist “elites” believe that they can rule over a land of peasants while remaining safe and secure behind castle walls, those barriers eventually prove as fragile as any Potemkin village constructed from empty promises and outright lies. 

No matter how many hundreds of millions of lives socialism and communism have destroyed, Western “elites” remain enamored of Marxism.  Any system that eliminates private property for all but the aristocratic few and cultivates a slavish devotion to the State is attractive to arrogant human beings who believe it is their birthright to control others.

The “spectre of communism” haunting the world today comes in the form of the World Economic Forum’s “Great Reset” or the United Nations’ planned technocratic tyranny.  It exists wherever one group of “experts” believes it has the moral prerogative to tell everyone else how to live and what to do.  Vladimir Lenin argued both that “medicine is the keystone of the arch of socialism” and that the “establishment of a central bank is ninety percent of communizing a nation.”  Together, central banks and global health authorities are the gateway drugs for communism.