RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thefederalist.com/2022/08/22/mike-pence-is-wrong-doj-and-fbi-rot-spreads-way-deeper-than-garland/

The former veep is still trying to sound reasonable by saying the GOP shouldn’t criticize the FBI — but the bureau is saturated with political bias that must be expunged.

When it comes to the way the deep state regime is at war with Republicans, former Vice President Mike Pence’s No. 1 priority is showing that his main concern is to keep playing the “good cop” to the “bad cop” of former President Donald Trump. 

Speaking in New Hampshire last week, Pence characteristically tried to have it both ways over this unprecedented attack on norms that the incident represented. After vaguely calling for transparency, Pence said:

I also want to remind my fellow Republicans that we can hold the Attorney General accountable for the decision that he made without attacking the rank and file law enforcement personnel at the FBI. The Republican Party is the party of law and order. Our party stands with the men and women who serve on the thin blue line at the federal, state, and local levels. These attacks on the FBI must stop. Calls to defund the FBI are just as wrong as calls to defund the police. The truth of the matter is we need to get to the bottom of the matter and let the facts play out, but more than anything else, the American people need to be reassured of the integrity of our justice system.

Conservatives are justifiably venting outrage over the banana republic-style raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home by FBI agents acting on the orders of Attorney General Merrick Garland. But the soft-spoken Pence thinks the priority is to reassure the administrative state that Republicans won’t be unreasonable in their pushback against attempts to delegitimize opposition to the Biden administration. 

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/real-motivation-fbi-raid-mar-a-lago/?utm_source=Spectator+World+Signup&utm_campaign=

I write  after the FBI, without warning, raided Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s home in Palm Beach. According to Trump, agents even broke into his safe and made off with who-knows-what documents. They also rifled through Melania Trump’s wardrobe. Maybe they were looking for classified lingerie. Who knows?

As many commentators pointed out immediately, this assault on a former president of the United States by what amounts to the Democratic Party’s secret police was unprecedented. Never before in our history has a former president been subject to the mafia-busting, terrorist-crushing might of state police power directed by the opposing party.

That’s just in our history, though. Elsewhere the story is not so cheery. In many countries, using the power of the state to persecute and harass one’s political opponents is business as usual. Trump got it right when he noted that such “weaponization of the Justice System” and “prosecutorial misconduct” had hitherto been the province of “broken, Third-World countries,” not America.

https://www.city-journal.org/trump-derangement-wont-end-trump

Several days before the 2016 presidential election, the comedian-cum political commentator Bill Maher made an extraordinary admission to his audience. In the past, he said, he’d heaped derision on Republican candidates and officeholders like George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney, portraying them as extremists. “We attacked your boy Bush as if he was the end of the world,” he told former presidential speechwriter David Frum, “and he wasn’t.” Maher spoke of giving President Obama $1 million to defeat Romney because he feared him so much. But “Mitt Romney wouldn’t have changed my life that much,” he admitted in 2016. For years, Maher said, liberals like himself had been “crying wolf” about Republicans, including “honorable men” like Bush and McCain. But the 2016 election, and Donald Trump, were different. “Once fascists get power, they don’t give it up,” Maher said, as he pleaded for votes against Trump.

It’s not clear how much of Maher’s audience was persuaded by his confession, but we know that far more people voted for Trump than the political establishment imagined possible—so that many voters must have discounted the same kinds of claims made against Trump as just more “crying wolf.” Six years later, Trump is a defeated ex-president, but still very much on the minds of liberals. If Trump is a fascist, he’s been an ineffective one, given that he claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him—not what you’d expect a dangerous autocrat to let happen. His own behavior in the wake of that loss, and especially his words and actions around the events of January 6, were unpresidential, to say the least, and even the partisan congressional hearings that have often seemed more like a show trial than a serious inquiry have reminded the country how disturbing Trump’s behavior was, and how serious his character flaws remain. But the political establishment has itself in the ensuing years often acted as autocratic as they accuse Trump of being—most recently, in the FBI raid on Trump’s Florida home.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/08/the_new_epidemic_of_selfsilencing_plagues_america.html

A new study by the Populace organization revealed the obvious: that Americans are “self-silencing” — people saying what they think others want to hear rather than what they truly feel.

People often reshape their privately held views to conform to what they think their group believes, despite that assessment frequently being inaccurate. This causes the illusion of consensus.

The following are two of the most significant revelations from the study:

Four times as many Democrats say Corporate CEOs should take a public stand on social issues (44%) than actually care (11%).
On Education, one in three Democrats think parents should have more influence over public school curriculum, however, only one in four dares to say it publicly.

In the current climate, it is the left that is championing the idea of groupthink which they claim is the only ‘appropriate’ way of thinking.

Under the guise of being woke, the left is ‘canceling’ dissenters and rendering them outcasts, often by inventing claims of bigotry. Wokeism that claims to emanate from empathy is merely a euphemism for totalitarianism.

It is hence essential to revisit the principle of free expression which is the core tenet of Democracy.

This includes the right to opine without repercussions i.e. the right to offend, insult, satirize, and ridicule.  The result is obscene, hateful, abhorrent, and shocking ideas may be expressed.

But personal taste can never ever be the criteria for the expression of ideas.

The reason being what is hateful to one may be compelling to another. What is bigoted to one may be a fresh perspective to another. What is obscene to one may be artful to another. What is lewd to one may be hilarious to another. What is blunt and blatant to one may be hard-hitting to another. What is repulsive to one can be riveting to another.  

https://amgreatness.com/2022/08/21/the-worst-and-the-stupidest/

Elites have always been ambiguous about the muscular classes who replace their tires, paint their homes, and cook their food. And the masses who tend to them likewise have been ambivalent about those who hire them: appreciative of the work and pay, but also either a bit envious of those with seemingly unlimited resources or turned off by perceived superciliousness arising from their status and affluence. 

Yet the divide has grown far wider in the 21st century. Globalization fueled the separation in a number of ways. 

One, outsourcing and offshoring eroded the rust-belt interior, while enriching the two coasts. The former lost good-paying jobs, while the latter found new markets in investment, tech, insurance, law, media, academia, entertainment, sports, and the arts making them billions rather than mere millions. 

So, the problem was one of both geography and class. Half the country looked to Asia and Europe for profits and indeed cultural “diversity,” while the other half stuck with tradition, values, and custom—as they became poorer. 

The elite found in the truly poor—neglecting their old union-member, blue-collar Democratic base—an outlet for their guilt, noblesse oblige, condescension at a safe distance, call it what you will. The poor if kept distant were fetishized, while the middle class was demonized for lacking the taste of the professional classes, and romance of the far distant underclass.

Second, race became increasingly divorced from class—a phenomenon largely birthed by guilty, wealthy, white elites and privileged, diverse professionals. For the white bicoastal elite, it became a mark of their progressive fides to champion woke racialism that empowered the non-white of their own affluent class, while projecting their own discomfort with and fears of the nonwhite poor onto the middle class as supposed “racists,” despite the latter’s more frequently living among, marrying within, and associating with the “other.” 

The net result was more privilege for the elite and wealthy nonwhites, more neglect of the inner-city needy, and more disdain for the supposedly illiberal clingers, dregs, deplorables, chumps, and irredeemables.