RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/

Watching the political Establishment freak out over twenty Republican members of Congress voting their own consciences in the election for House speaker has been hilarious.  Karl Rove, Dan Crenshaw, Sean Hannity, and just about anyone else whose sinecure and preeminence depend upon religious devotion to Washington’s status quo sounded like little Greta Thunberg whining, “How dare they!”  Oh, my goodness, some congressional representatives took it upon themselves to vote as they believe their district constituents would desire and not as the Uniparty nobles who insist on ruling the nation from their petty thrones demand.  Whatever shall we do if this lowly democratic spirit sweeps the land?

This is what’s wrong with the People’s House, where it is still occasionally possible to elect an iconoclast unbeholden to the Leviathan’s palace guard despite mail-in ballot fraud and outside money operations distorting local races: sometimes a freethinking heretic shows up in the nation’s capital with the beastly notion that a vote is more than ornamental pageantry garnishing a foregone conclusion.  Weren’t these Republican holdouts properly instructed that Kevin McCarthy is the Uniparty’s man?  An empty vessel of mediocre intellect and flaccid beliefs, Kevin is surely the only Republican who can lead the House!  We must bring McCarthyism back to Washington, or D.C. will become home to the right-wing nuts!

What a spectacle this whole affair has been.  Pretend President Biden and Senate Republicans agree: forcing the world to watch American legislators partake in repeated democratic votes without devolving into bloodshed (despite the anger management issues of Mike Rogers) is so embarrassing.  It is much more elegant when ballots can be printed, signatures forged, and elections certified according to the wishes of the ruling elites.  The appearance of democracy in the absence of it is ideal.  The practice of actual democracy would bring the whole government’s house of cards crashing down!

https://amgreatness.com/2023/01/08/a-rendezvous-with-rwanda/

“Despite being Black, he [Rep. Byron Donalds] supports a policy agenda intent on upholding and perpetuating white supremacy.”—Representative Cori Bush (D-Mo.)

“Larry Elder [former candidate for governor of California] is the Black face of white supremacy. You’ve been warned.”—Erika Smith, Los Angeles Times columnist

America is an increasingly multiracial society. Despite its early history of slavery and racial segregation, and ongoing bias and tensions, the United States remains one of the few contemporary multiracial constitutional systems that have actually worked. Yet recently few have appreciated that achievement.

Usually multiracial nations and empires—Yugoslavia, the former Soviet Union, the Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires—require some level of coercion incompatible with a democratic constitution to force calm. Brazil, India, Lebanon, Nigeria, and Kenya  may be currently multiracial democracies in theory, but in fact they are often sectarian and tribal cauldrons.

In most such places, pride, solidarity—and even safety—are only found through common religious, ethnic, and racial bonds that become all-encompassing. The individual’s primary allegiance to each particular warring group inevitably becomes incompatible with every other’s overriding loyalties.

The United States is insidiously nearing that abyss. It has all but renounced its old commitment to the melting-pot, and a “content-of-our-character” ideal of assimilation and integration within a common culture. But as we obsess on race and accordingly separate, do we really know the final consequences of what the diversity/equity/inclusion tribalism actually entails?

The first rule of tribalism is that the racial or ethnic collective superimposes solidarity over the individual, who then becomes a mere cog in racial-political wheel. Conservatives such as Larry Elder or Byron Donalds become especially despised as examples of successful individuals who reject tribal labels and loyalties. Are LeBron James, Senator Tim Scott (R-S.C.), and Representative Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) all to be black comrades first and quite different individuals second—if at all? In the same manner, do Adam Schiff, Devin Nunes, Donald Trump, and Mark Milley all share identical and overriding loyalty to “whiteness,” to the degree that we forget about their individual personalities?

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/how-the-fbi-hacked-twitter-lee-smith

After journalist Matt Taibbi published the first batch of internal Twitter documents known as the Twitter files, he tweeted that the company’s deputy general counsel, James Baker, was vetting them.

“The news that Baker was reviewing the ‘Twitter files’ surprised everyone involved,” Taibbi wrote. That apparently included even Twitter’s new boss, Elon Musk, who added that Baker may have deleted some of the files he was supposed to be reviewing.

Baker had been the top lawyer at the FBI when it interfered in the 2016 presidential election. News that he might have been burying evidence of the spy service’s use of a social media company to interfere with the 2020 election, is rightly setting off alarm bells.

In fact, the FBI’s penetration of Twitter constituted just one part of a much larger intelligence operation—one in which the bureau offshored the machinery it used to interfere in the 2016 election and embedded it within the private sector. The resulting behemoth, still being built today, is a public-private consortium made up of U.S. intelligence agencies, Big Tech companies, civil society institutions, and major media organizations that has become the world’s most powerful spy service—one that was powerful enough to disappear the former president of the United States from public life, and that is now powerful enough to do the same or worse to anyone else it chooses. 

Records from the Twitter files show that the FBI paid Twitter nearly $3.5 million, apparently for actions in connection with the 2020 election and nominally a payout for the platform’s work censoring “dangerous” content that had been flagged as mis- or disinformation. That “dangerous” content notably included material that threatened Joe Biden and implicated U.S. officials who have been curating the Biden family’s foreign corruption for decades.