RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2022-4-28-another-progressive-policy-disaster-homelessness-in-san-francisco

Three and a half years ago, in November 2018, the good people of San Francisco enacted by a referendum called Proposition C a new special corporate payroll tax which would raise multiple hundred million dollars per year for the specific purpose of finally and once and for all solving the problem of homelessness. During the run-up to that referendum, in October 2018, I had two posts discussing Proposition C, the nature of the progressive thinking behind it, and its prospects for success. On October 26 it was “The Morality Of Our Progressive Elite”; and on October 30 it was “More On The Morality Of Our Progressive Elite.”

Toward the end of that second post, I posed this question: “[What are] the prospects that San Francisco’s new $300 million might actually reduce the population deemed ‘homeless’?” My answer was: “Right around zero.”

In the intervening three plus years, I have from time to time checked back to see how it was going with San Francisco’s great project to end homelessness. But up until now I haven’t been able to find good information. Among other issues, the implementation of the new tax was delayed for two years by litigation. However, the information drought on this subject has now ended. On April 26 the San Francisco Chronicle ran a big feature article on the subject, with the headline “Broken Homes” (behind paywall). On April 28, that article was then reviewed and commented on by Steven Hayward at PowerLine (“California’s Ongoing Suicide Attempt”), and by Erica Sandberg at the City Journal (“San Francisco’s Housing First Nightmare”).

And the answer is: The results are far, far worse than mere failure to reduce the population deemed homeless. Since 2018 San Francisco’s spending on the homeless has soared by approximately a factor of four. But meanwhile the number of people deemed homeless has increased by somewhere between 47% and more than 250% (depending on what data you believe for the number of homeless in SF back in 2017). And, at least if you accept the Chronicle’s current reporting, the conditions under which the homeless live have seriously deteriorated. It is an epic disaster of progressive public policy.

How could everything have gone so terribly wrong?

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2022/04/the-left-brained-compulsion-to-buy-bridges/

Conservatives have had a tough time of it in recent years. We’ve been confronted daily by claims that make absolutely no sense at all, on everything from climate to race, and we are asked—even by some fellow alleged conservatives—to accept all of it as completely tickety-boo.

Most of these claims, of course, emerge from a cultural Left that is dominant in the media and inner-cities but is scorned throughout regional areas in Australia, the US, UK and Europe.

This scorning is for a very sound reason. People who live in Australia’s regions, with and including Aboriginal Australians, know that Dark Emu author, Melbourne University’s Melbourne Enterprise Professor in Indigenous Agriculture and self-declared Aborigine Bruce Pascoe is not, in fact, Aboriginal.

Rural and semi-rural American folk who live far from the elite-infested east and west coasts, and who often run their own businesses and farms, know that running up huge debts will send them bankrupt. So they are aware that President Joe Biden’s massive spending will likely do the same to the entire US.

On the point of rural/urban divides, the Associated Press recently reported that the Democrat brand is

so toxic in the small towns 100 miles north-east of Pittsburgh that some liberals have removed bumper stickers and yard signs and refuse to acknowledge their party affiliation publicly … The climate across rural Pennsylvania is symptomatic of a larger political problem threatening the Democratic Party ahead of the 2022 mid-term elections. Beyond losing votes in virtually every election since 2008, Democrats have been effectively ostracized from many parts of rural America, leaving party leaders with few options to reverse a cultural trend that is redefining the nation’s political landscape.

They could try, you know, not telling Americans frustrated by enormous fuel price increases that they should just go out and buy electric cars.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/29/ron-desantis-leads-republican-charge-against-biden-regimes-ministry-of-truth/

Republicans hit at the Biden administration’s new Disinformation Governance Board Friday, arguing that it is an “unconstitutional and unamerican” means of crushing dissent.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis led the charge during a press conference Friday, calling the Department of Homeland Security Counter-Disinformation Governance Board a “Ministry of Truth,” and vowing to fight it.

“You cannot have a Ministry of Truth in this country. We’re not going to let Biden get away with this one. So we will be fighting back,” he said. The Republican was  in Willston, Fla. to talk about his administration’s investment of $22 million for infrastructure in Florida.

The recently created disinformation board is being led by Nina Jankowicz, 33, a self-proclaimed “disinformation expert” and Karaoke enthusiast who helped spread the Russia collusion hoax in 2017, and supported the COVID lockdowns in March of 2020. In October of 2020, she called Hunter Biden’s laptop a “product of the Trump campaign.”

“She’s a career left-wing partisan, from her days working at the National Democratic Institute to her Fulbright-Clinton fellowship to her gig at the left-leaning Wilson Center where she routinely did media hits with NPR, CNN, PBS and so on while placing New York Times and Washington Post opeds,” the New York Post opined.

https://americanmind.org/salvo/perverting-civics/

The Biden Administration and Democrats in Congress are infusing critical race theory (CRT), so-called anti-racist (in reality, profoundly racist) teachings, and other progressive ideologies into K-12 curricula. With forceful support from progressive states, there is a coordinated assault at all levels of our educational system to indoctrinate children and professionals in far-left anti-America rhetoric. If this effort succeeds—it is making spectacular progress—our country’s values and future are in jeopardy.

The advocates of CRT and related progressive principles have spent years planning and readying their takeover of our institutions. By dominating departments of education, accreditation agencies, university administrations, professional licensing organizations, and teacher unions, they have been able to mandate ideological training at each level of education, and then coerce compliance as a condition of employment, promotion, and appointment to governing boards.

Anyone who objects is shunned as a white supremacist, and suspended or terminated for insubordination or failure to comply with conditions of employment. The institution defends its suppression of academic freedom and free speech by pointing to its accreditation and licensing obligations, and the admission requirements of universities to which its students typically apply. While the Left may suffer an occasional setback in local elections or court, over time, this strategy will ensure the implementation of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), which is the immediate goal of CRT.

The success and prospects for this intricate strategy deserve respect, and fear. If conservatives and moderates do not use every lawful lever of power remaining to break the progressive chokehold, there soon will be no place to turn. Even in red states, the national accrediting and licensing requirements will do devastating damage and perpetuate a cultural civil war.

https://thefederalist.com/2022/04/29/emails-surface-more-evidence-hillary-clinton-paid-for-anti-trump-disinformation-operation/

Evidence continues to mount that the Hillary Clinton campaign paid former MI6 agent Christopher Steele to launder fraudulent opposition research through U.S. intelligence agencies.

Newly published internal emails reveal that before Fusion GPS hired Steele on behalf of the Clinton campaign to dig up dirt on Donald Trump, the opposition-research firm began peddling several of the same Russia collusion lies that the former MI6 agent would later detail in the Steele dossier. This fact highlights a significant aspect of the Spygate scandal that deserves further focus and condemnation: Democrats’ outrageous exploitation of intelligence credentials and connections to launder scurrilous accusations against a political enemy.

Since early 2018, when the then-Chair of the House Intelligence Committee Devin Nunes exposed in a four-page memorandum evidence that the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had abused the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act during the 2016 presidential election cycle, Americans open to reality have been slowly learning of the breadth of the Spygate scandal.

Attention during this time rightly focused first on FISA abuse and the FBI’s use of unverified “intel” to obtain a court order to surveil former Trump campaign advisor Carter Page. As the scandal continued to unravel, the categories of impropriety multiplied, from deep-staters illegally leaking to the media to build the collusion narrative and later to force the appointment of a special counsel, to the selection of the “right people” in the form of rabid partisans to staff the Crossfire Hurricane team.

Another underlying aspect of the scandal only became clear recently with the prosecution of former Clinton campaign attorney Michael Sussmann. Proceedings in Special Counsel John Durham’s false statement criminal case against Sussmann reveal Democrats paid credentialed individuals connected to U.S. intelligence agencies to pass, to both the press and the government, invented evidence of Trump colluding with Russia.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/04/should_we_be_alarmed_by_bidens_new_disinformation_governance_board.html

” Biden’s Disinformation Governance Board — the strongest argument against its existence is that no government has the authority to sit in judgment on the First Amendment rights of its own citizens. The Democrats are getting more brazen with every passing day.It is now up to the GOP to aggressively challenge the Democrats and prove to the voters that they are worthy of their trust and votes in November.”

Ever since Elon Musk announced his intentions to buy Twitter, the reaction from liberals has been nothing short of a meltdown.

When Musk actually clinched a deal to buy Twitter for $44 billion, the meltdown morphed into a full-scale implosion.

The primary cause of the outrage was Musk’s pledge to defend free speech:

Most of the anger emanated from the Washington Democrat establishment and spread like wildfire elsewhere.

Musk recently added a caveat to his assertion about free speech, saying it has to be within the realm of the law.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/04/bidens-ministry-of-truth/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=top-stories&utm_term=third

A federal speech czar? Just as the Founders imagined it, no doubt.

Earlier this week, Department of Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told Congress that his agency is creating a “Disinformation Governance Board” to combat “misinformation” coming from Russia as we near this year’s midterm elections. The Biden administration’s new Committee on Public Information will be led by Nina Jankowicz, “a disinformation fellow” who, perfectly enough, comes to the administration from a think tank named after Woodrow Wilson. Like Wilson, Mayorkas, himself a font of untruths, does not explain under what constitutional power he proposes to oversee speech.

It gets tedious to point this out, but you can vividly imagine the thermonuclear meltdown the country would be (rightly) subjected to if a Republican president assembled a government panel tasked with weeding out “disinformation.” To our technocrats’ dismay, this isn’t Europe, where the state can dictate allowable speech and sometimes arrests those who don’t abide. Here, citizens are the ones who call out the state for peddling misinformation, not the other way around.

The pro-censorship Left, which is to say the vast majority of contemporary Democrats, now have Barack Obama on board as well. The one-time neoliberal champion of free speech — a freedom he employed aggressively to mislead the American people when it served his partisan interests — alleged during a recent Stanford University speech that “people are dying” from misinformation. And, you know, if censorship can save one life . . .

Indeed, these arbiters of truth not only happen to be some of the same people who ran around repeating ludicrous conspiracies about foreign interference for five years; they’re also the same people who used the menace of “Russian disinformation” to lie and suppress news that undermined their electoral prospects, as they did with the Hunter Biden laptop story. (That crew, you’ll be surprised to learn, includes Czarina Jankowicz.)

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/fbi-conducted-3-4-million-data-record-searches-in-2021-according-to-report/

The FBI conducted as many as 3.4 million searches of data in the U.S. without a warrant over the year 2021, according to a new government report.

The Annual Statistical Transparency Report, was published by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Thursday and focuses on the intelligence community’s use of national security authorities for surveillance under U.S. law.

The information was previously gathered by the National Security Agency, the U.S. military’s signals intelligence agency, but was transferred to the civilian-led FBI per the U.S.A. FREEDOM Act, passed in 2015.

The figure represented a 260 percent increase from the previous coverage year, 2020, where the FBI had conducted around 1.3 million searches.

According to analysis by the Wall Street Journal, more than half the data searches – 1.9 million – pertained to the FBI’s investigations of attempts by Russian hackers to infiltrate and sabotage critical U.S. infrastructure. This included the investigation of the cyberattack on the Colonial Pipeline, a 5,500-mile pipeline from Texas to New York, which was shut down by Russian hacking group “DarkSide” in exchange for ransom in May of 2021.

The shutdown briefly prompted emergency fuel rationing measures by the Department of Energy across the northeastern United States.

Though a version of the same report has been published every year since 2014, this marks the first time that an accounting of the number of data acquisitions by the FBI has been undertaken. At a press briefing in Washington on Friday, an FBI official admitted that “3.4 million is certainly a large number. I’m not going to pretend that it isn’t.”