RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/irs-whistleblower-hunter-biden-probe-gary-shapley-joe-biden-bc42321d?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

One thing for readers to look for on Friday is what and where they read about Thursday’s testimony by a pair of Internal Revenue Service whistleblowers. Their claims, under oath at a House Ways and Means hearing, are newsworthy and politically explosive.

We’ve heard enough whistleblower tales over the years to be skeptical about claims that can be exploited by partisans, which is one reason we’ve been cautious about reporting the second-hand accounts about the IRS investigators from House Republicans. We wanted to see specific claims from specific individuals, and on Thursday we did.

Our Kimberley Strassel recounts some of the highlights from the testimony nearby. The details are shocking if true because they charge political interference and favorable prosecutorial treatment in the IRS probe of Hunter Biden. President Biden’s son agreed to a deal this week to plead guilty to two minor counts of failing to make proper tax payments.

But agent Gary Shapley claims his IRS unit recommended more serious felony charges based partly on what he described as a scheme to hide payments from Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company that hired Hunter as a consultant and board member. Mr. Shapley claims U.S. Attorney David Weiss was blocked from pursuing those charges, which the Justice Department denies.

Mr. Shapley also recounts that his team obtained a July 30, 2017 WhatsApp message from Hunter Biden to Henry Zhao, a Chinese businessman. The testimony says Hunter wrote:

“I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled. Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight. And, Z, if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction. I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/06/22/the-toughest-job-in-d-c-transcribing-bidens-remarks/

Watching President Joe Biden try to make his way through a speech is painful enough. Reading a transcript of it is worse. Not just because Biden’s words are even more confusing in print, but because you start to feel a strong sense of pity for the person responsible for figuring out what he is trying to say, how much of it to transcribe verbatim, and which facts to correct.

We looked through Biden’s remarks from just this month and found 15 instances where the transcriber felt compelled to make corrections on things the president said.

Here’s an example from one 11-minute speech he gave over the weekend in Palo Alto.

Forty million — 40 million Americans already drinking water that thousands of farmers rely on for — for integration [irrigation].  And 40 million count on that river and so do the farmers….

Folks, flood mitigation: $3.5 million [billion] to reduce or eliminate the risk of repetitive flood damage to buildings, plus $1 billion in funding mitigation measures to increase community resilience, like supporting adaptations of hazard-resistant building codes

And maybe most important, I’ve committed by 2020 [2030], we will have conserved 30 percent of all the lands and waters the United States has jurisdiction over and simultaneously reduce emissions to blunt climate impacts.

Other examples from this month as they appear in the official White House transcripts:

“Mary Robinson [Barra], the Chairman of the Board of General Motors …”
“Instead, I signed into law the Bipartisan Safers [sic] Community Act, which you’ve referenced several times today …”
“Last summer, I had the honor of bestowing the Presidential Meda- — Medal of Freemon [sic] — Freedom on distinguished Americans …”
“The ticket seller, SeatGreek [SeatGeek], is also set to give customers the option of seeing all-in, upfront prices …”
“And I’m pleased we’re also joined by x-pay [sic] — xBk, a small venue in Des Moines, Iowa, that’s going be using all upfront pricing for its hundred events at — a year as well …”
“Let me tell you, the Inflation Reduction Act includes $369 billion to comat [sic] — combat climate change …”
“We made clear — they made clear that we’d rather th- — they’d rather threaten the default of the U.S. economy than cut or get rid of, for example, $30 billion in taxpayer subsidies to oil companies who made $200 million [sic] last year — billion.  I said ‘million.’  Billion dollars last year …”
“When we were at the G7, we talked about — one of the meetings was — they used to call the Build Back Better World. It’s not that now. It’s the PIII [PGII] — P-triple-I [sic] …”
“At the G7, it was originally called Build Back Better World, but we were talking about — there’s a new PPI [PGII] — anyway — an industrial policy that we’re all signed on to …”
“As Commander-in-Chief, I was proud to have ended the ban on transgester [sic] Americans — transgender Americans serving in the United States military …”
“And finally, this executive order means more resources, especially when it comes to improving military families’ access to quality, defendable [dependable], and affordable — affordable childcare …”
“This could have been the week that a catastrophic — catastrophic devault [sic] — default happened …”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-tyranny-of-the-clerks/

The Framers of our Constitution were well-versed through experience and history in the dangers of tyranny. Their education in Classical history and literature familiarized them with the political theory and practice of the world’s first constitutional governments like democracy and republics. Their European influencers like Montesquieu and David Hume were similarly trained. From these sources, and their own take on their experiences with King George III, the Framers learned that concentrated and centralized power ultimately leads to tyranny–– the degradation of civil liberties, freedom, and equality.

One form of despotism, however, they could not have anticipated is our modern tyranny of the clerks, the functionaries in hypertrophied government bureaucracies that degenerate into instruments of political factions to be used against rivals. For over a century the Constitution has been weakened and compromised by these unaccountable, mostly anonymous bureaucracies––as the excesses of federal agencies over the last seven years are now making obvious.

The idea of technocracy or rule by “experts,” of course, was not unknown in antiquity. Plato’s famous utopia in the Republic (c. 375 B.C.) imagined a state run by cognitive elite “guardians” created by covert eugenic marriages, and trained for five decades in philosophy and virtue. Subsequently the idea of the “philosopher king” remained a staple of political fantasy all the way down to Marxism’s “vanguard” of the elite intelligentsia who could discern what Marx called the “inner but concealed essential pattern” of economics and history.

But Plato’s ideal has always encountered the problem that Roman satirist Juvenal identified: “Who will actually guard the guardians?” Such utopian notions foundered on the empirical reality of a flawed, irrational, universal human nature driven by “passions and interests.” And one of the most dangerous and destructive is the lust for power that seldom is sated, and always craves more.

That tragic realism, an inheritance from both our Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman cultural traditions, was also shared by the Founders. As historian Walter A. McDougall writes, “[A]ll Federalists believed human nature was flawed . . . envisioned no utopias, put little trust in republican virtue, and believed the only government liable to endure was one taking mankind as it was and making allowance for passion and greed.” Hence the Constitution’s structure of divided, mutually checking balanced powers.

The progressives at the turn of the 20th century, however, believed that the Constitution was an anachronism based on outmoded beliefs like mankind’s flawed nature. Progressives like Woodrow Wilson and Herbert Croly, in contrast, argued that new “sciences” such as economics, sociology, and psychology had made obsolete tradition, faith, and history as guides to human nature––and Darwinism’s “natural selection” had shown that human nature, rightly guided by technocrats, similarly could progress beyond the old realist view of it as flawed and unchanging.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/06/21/america-wakes-up-to-woke/

Wokeness was envisioned as a new reboot of the coalition of the oppressed. 

Those purportedly victimized by traditional America would find “intersectional” solidarity in their victimhood owing to the supposed sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, and other alleged American sins, past and present. 

The so-called white male heterosexual victimizing class was collectively to be held responsible for their sinful triad of white “rage,” “supremacy,” and “privilege.” 

Class considerations became passé. The Duchess of Sussex, and the billionaires Oprah Winfrey and LeBron James, shared grievances against all whites, whether they hailed from Martha’s Vineyard or impoverished East Palestine, Ohio. 

A bicoastal elite would draft the woke agenda and the oppressed would follow as ordered. 

That top-down blueprint would embrace massive multibillion-dollar reparations to blacks. 

In lockstep, all victims would rally around a Green New Deal that mandated high energy costs to discourage consumption of fossil fuels. 

The new transgender canon mandated three sexes. Sex is socially rather than biologically determined. And there is a large, oppressed, and transgender population: this presents the next great civil rights struggle for America. 

Historical wokeism lodged a list of grievances against the supposedly flawed American past. Indicting the dead required statues to be toppled. Names had to be changed. Histories were to be rewritten. Even the foundational date of America was to be reconsidered and altered. 

Yet, the rainbow fabric of woke is now fraying—and for a variety of reasons. 

For one thing, woke took off after the perfect storm of the COVID pandemic, the devastating lockdown, the 120 days of violent rioting and looting following the death of George Floyd, and years of endemic Trump Derangement Syndrome. Most of those catalysts are waning. Temporarily unhinged Americans are slowly reviving. Millions of the comatose are waking up to normality—and don’t recognize their own country. 

Two, woke is retrogressive, reactionary, and anti-civilizational. Decriminalizing the legal code, defunding the police, failing to apply norms to the homeless population, and destroying meritocracy have all hollowed out our major cities. 

San Francisco was a far cleaner, safer, and kinder city 20, 40, or 80 years ago than it is today. 

A woke FBI, Pentagon, or airline industry becomes a matter of life and death. 

Three, in modern America, class is now a far more accurate metric of oppression than race or gender. 

It is one thing to restrict fossil fuel development if you are in the upper one percent income bracket, quite another if you commute 50 miles a day in a used car. If there are to be reparations, why include Eric Holder or Al Sharpton, but not indigent Hispanics, Asians, and poor whites? 

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/06/leftist_rage_against_courthouse_artist_claiming_he_made_trump_too_handsome.html

In courthouses where cameras aren’t allowed, the courthouse artist produces the image of record.

Which is why assorted leftists exploded in rage at the bland, courthouse drawings of William Hennessey, Jr., who up until now has said that his work rarely draws any attention.

According to Jack Montgomery at the National Pulse:

Leftists raged at an obscure sketch artist following Trump’s arraignment in Miami, seething that the former president looked too young and handsome in his courtroom drawings.

 “The courtroom sketch artist, William Hennessy [J]r., is far too kind to [Donald Trump],” wrote one Twitter user.

 “His pastel drawings make the pig look at least 20 years younger and 90 pounds thinner.”

 “Any chance you can whip up a quick indictment for false depiction of an indicted grifter?” wrote another, tweeting at a parody account of Jack Smith.

Some Twitter users went so far as to link Hennessy’s Facebook page and encourage others to harass him.

 “Yo Bill, why trim 70lbs off Trump? Just weird. Do you privately think of him as a trim superhero?” demanded one person on a Facebook post.

The first thing this little ragefest tells us is that leftists have too much time on their hands, using their hours here on earth to complain about somebody else’s courthouse artwork. Montgomery’s piece has the drawings here.

The second thing this tells us is that leftists set a great store on how someone looks. They’re all in on looks-ism, despite their bony finger pointed at others for the same thing.

The third and most important thing this says is that hand drawn sketches, which was all the leftists got out of this trial, are not easily manipulated the way photographs are. That the leftists raged about Trump’s pictures being too handsome for their expectations brought to mind that had the pictures been photos instead of drawings, they would have been able to manipulate them into unflattering photos, what what with a plethora of inexpensive photo editing tools on the Internet. They could have reddened Trump’s face, as 60 Minutes once did to Trump’s advisor, Steve Bannon, to make him look like a drunk. Or, they could have given Trump a five o’clock shadow and painted some sweaty beads on his face to discredit him, the way once-vice president Nixon was discredited with those features during his debates with then-politician John F. Kennedy on television. They could have made Trump dirty, or pasty-pale, or back-shadowed, or better still, upshadowed, to get the image of Trump they wanted, and of course, made him look guilty or sleazy or dishonest to the casual observer. They could have Photoshopped in handcuffs or a bright orange jumpsuit, which is what they’ve slavered for for years. They can’t do that to even a reproduction of a drawing on the Internet, because the picture would simply be not true.