RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/01/why_preserve_a_world_order_without_freedom.html

Senator Lindsey Graham desperately wants more money and weapons for Ukraine.  Recently standing in Kyiv alongside two (other?) Democrat senators — one who repeatedly lied about his service in Vietnam and another who repeatedly lied about President Trump being a Russian spy — Graham demanded American tanks on the ground immediately.  “World order is at stake!” he declared.  Something serious must be at stake over there; having thrown over a hundred billion dollars to a nation that was known universally as one of the most corrupt in the world before Russia crossed its borders last year, the U.S. government has become “pot committed” to a European war, whether financially struggling Americans care or not.

Just what is this “world order” that keeps Ol’ Lindsey up at night?  Surely he means some combination of American hegemony, military dominance, dollar-denominated financial supremacy, and command over the vaunted “rules-based international system” so-called Western leaders love to defend.  You never hear anything about the importance of defending Western rights and liberties, though, do you?  Senator Graham-nesty isn’t worried about protecting America’s borders.  He says absolutely nothing about securing Westerners’ freedoms from threats of tyranny.  Why?

Because America has relinquished its status as “leader of the free world.”  That is not because dementia-addled Joe Biden is merely a figurehead under the unelected Deep State’s control.  It is because there is no “free world” right now — at least not within the jurisdiction of political governments.  The political persecution of J6 protesters for “thought crimes,” the authoritarian COVID-1984 lockdowns and mandates, and the confirmation through the “Twitter Files” that the U.S. government is heavily invested in censorship and public manipulation all make this damning statement soberingly clear.

Friedrich Hayek warned in The Road to Serfdom, “We shall never prevent the abuse of power if we are not prepared to limit power in a way which occasionally may prevent its use for desirable purposes.”  American independence and the U.S. Constitution embraced this principle.  The “American experiment” was not devoted to creating a vast administrative State in which the expertise and benevolence of “public servants” would usher in a future Utopia.  “Once the principle is admitted that it is the duty of the government to protect the individual against his own foolishness,” Ludwig von Mises observed, “no serious objections can be advanced against further encroachments.”  Arguing otherwise has been the fool’s gold of both idealists and tyrants for millennia.  “Freedom is indivisible,” Mises argued.  “As soon as one starts to restrict it, one enters upon a decline on which it is difficult to stop.”  The American system broke with tyrannies of the past, and for doing so, an unelected, mercurial, deceptive, and vicious Deep State has spent decades breaking the American system.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/01/is_america_at_its_worst_economic_point_since_the_great_depression.html

Biden and the Democrats have been boasting about the economic wonders he and his administration have performed with their modernizing, equitable, diverse, green energy economic policies. However, E.J. Antoni, a research fellow at The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis, says that the devil is in the details—and the details behind the latest GDP report show that ordinary Americans are in the worst economic condition they’ve been since the Great Depression.

RNC Research (a very good Twitter feed, despite the RNC’s dismal performance in other areas) assembled a few clips showing Biden’s economic boasts:

In Bidenland, economically speaking, everything is hunky-dory. And maybe that’s true because Biden’s family has become fabulously wealthy, as have all the people surrounding him. It’s a very rosy view from up there, in the Oval Office.

It’s less rosy where real people live. Writing at Fox Business, Antoni says that the Fed’s most recent GDP (“gross domestic product”) report contains within it terrible news about America’s flailing economy.

What Democrats like is that the report shows that the economy is still growing, albeit slowly: “The latest numbers from the Bureau of Economic Analysis show that the U.S. economy grew by 2.9 percent in the fourth quarter of last year, and 2.1 percent for 2022.” However, despite some growth, says Antoni, “economic growth is slowing down.”

https://justthenews.com/government/security/new-member-house-intelligence-committee-calls-security-damage-assessment-biden

Rep. Austin Scott (R-Ga.), one of the newest members of the GOP-led House Intelligence Committee, is calling for a national security damage assessment on the Biden family, following the discovery of classified documents at multiple locations connected to President Biden.

“I think so,” Scott responded when asked Thursday on the John Solomon Reports podcast whether such an assessment should be made. “I would also tell you that the difference I see is that the Biden documents were in an area where other people clearly had access to them. And I have serious questions about the amount of wealth that the Biden family has.”

The Democratic president has been under increased scrutiny since the recent disclosures about such documents being found at his Delaware home and in an office he used after serving as vice president.

Biden, at least since his successful 2020 presidential bid, had been under scrutiny regarding whether he profited or stood to profit from son Hunter Biden’s questionable overseas business negotiations including those with China. 

“I just don’t I don’t see how you accumulate that much making $175,000 a year,” Scott said about the president’s personal wealth. “I guess he made a little more as vice president, maybe $300,000 a year. But I don’t see how you accumulate that the type of wealth that he has.”

The FBI last August ceased classified document from former President Trump’s Florida home. And Vice President Mike Pence announced this week that a sweep of Indiana home had turned up such materials. 

Scott said that all people with classified documents need to be held accountable. 

https://nypost.com/2023/01/26/the-mike-pompeo-speech-on-chinas-influence-on-us-universities-that-mit-killed/

“Pompeo says that American schools that are “hooked on the CCP’s sugar must go into rehab.”Frankly I think a lot of institutions — including some of our financial institutions — should join them there. In the end it´s about whose side you are on. It would be good to know that American universities were on America’s side — for once.”

It’s always the way with political memoirs that everyone sifts them for the high-grade gossip. So it is with Mike Pompeo’s memoir, “Never Give an Inch” released this week. Media reports have understandably focused on the former CIA director and Secretary of State’s opinions on Donald Trump, John Bolton, Kim Jong-Un and a bunch of other folks.

But as is often the case, one of the biggest stories in the book has so far been overlooked.

When Pompeo was Secretary of State he took probably the most hawkish view any American official has yet taken towards the Communist Party of China. In a speech in October 2019, he told an audience of business-people (many of whom made money in China) that the Communist Party of China is “a Marxist-Leninist party focused on struggle and international domination.” He couldn’t be more correct. But something that happened afterwards proved his point.

As Pompeo relates it, he wanted to give a major speech on China and especially the way in which the CCP is distorting universities and other research institutes inside the United States. Not just by funding these institutions, and directing their research, but by trying to turn Chinese students into agents of the communist regime. It’s a crucial subject and was high time that an American official made such an intervention.

The speech was scheduled to take place at MIT, which had previously held an MIT-China Summit in Beijing sponsored by Chinese tech companies including ones that are now under sanctions for providing technology to crush human rights in China.

But shortly before the speech MIT said they couldn’t host the US Secretary of State after all. A strange move, no? Well according to Pompeo he picked up the phone and spoke with the president of MIT, Rafael Reif. And Reif claimed that there was no way that the speech could go ahead because of the risk of offending Chinese students. By MIT’s own data in 2021-22 a full 25% of international students at the university were from China.