RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2025/01/05/the-hydra-of-government-how-the-global-engagement-center-lives-on-through-rebranding/

If you visit the State Department’s website for the Global Engagement Center, you will read that “The Global Engagement Center closed on December 23, 2024.”

Not really.

As has been often observed, the nearest thing to immortality this side of the pearly gates is a government initiative. I have noted in this space and elsewhere that the innocuous-sounding “Global Engagement Center” was actually (in Vivek Ramaswamy’s accurate summary) a “key node of the censorship industrial complex.” According to its mission statement, the GEC was supposed to be focused on “foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining or influencing the policies, security, or stability of the United States, its allies, and partner nations.” I thoughtfully added the italics to the word “foreign.”

The point is that the GEC—like the State Department as a whole (like, indeed, the CIA and the rest of the alphabet soup that makes up our “intelligence” services tout court)—is supposed to be focused outward: on foreign threats. Thanks in part to reporting by people like Matt Taibbi, we know that much of our government has been weaponized against the American people, at least against those of whom the regime disapproves. On issues ranging from COVID to Hunter Biden’s laptop, Taibbi has shown that “every corner of government”—“the FBI, DHS, HHS, DOD,  . . . even the CIA”—has leaned on virtually all social and traditional media companies to toe the approved government line. The GEC has played a small but not insignificant role in this clandestine effort to monitor opinion and suppress entities and individuals emitting “Wrongthink” (what George Orwell called “Crimethink”).

Item: Because the GEC could not operate against Americans directly, it did so indirectly by funding entities like the British-based Global Disinformation Index, which compiled a list of publications and individuals that said things the regime did not like. That list was consulted by advertisers wary of winding up on the wrong side of the government. The Washington Examiner made the list. So did RealClearPolitics, Reason, The New York Post, Blaze Media, the Daily Wire, the Federalist, the American Conservative, Newsmax, and many conservative entities. Result? Millions of dollars of ad revenue dried up, imperiling the future of those outlets.

Funding for the GEC was in the original 1500-page obscenity that Speaker of the House Mike Johnson had the temerity to bring to his colleagues as a “continuing resolution” last month. That monstrosity instantly drew some portion of the contempt and ridicule it deserved, not least from Elon Musk, whose fingers got a workout on the platform formerly known as Twitter. A 120-page, slimmed-down version of the bill was hastily cobbled together minus the GEC funding and other objectionable features (a raise for the legislators, for example). That passed, and so a putative “government shutdown” was avoided.

There was modified joy over this seeming victory. The fact that funding for the GEC was cut was one of the principal goads to celebration. Here at last was proof that a bad government activity could actually be zeroed out. No money, no activity.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/01/06/conspiracies-too-awful-to-imagine/

Over the decade of Donald Trump’s political career, the left—as exemplified by Democratic politicos, the media, academics, the Washington military hierarchy, and the permeant bureaucratic state—illustrated a level of furor, venom, and near madness unprecedented in modern American history.

Yet stranger still about such visceral, indeed lunatic hatred, despite Trump’s eccentricities and lack of a traditional political resume, his administration between 2017-21 was successful by traditional economic, military, security, and diplomatic standards. It was certainly not characterized by weaponizing the DOJ, Pentagon, CIA, or FBI, get-even vendettas, the use of lawfare, corruption, optional wars, open borders, hyperinflation, or a war on the environment—as predicted and alleged. Nevertheless, the idea of Trump as president justified to the left the greatest assault on our civil liberties, justice system, and free expression in modern history.

Indeed, at times the frenzy has ranged the gamut of an unprecedented two impeachments, a first Senate impeachment trial of a private citizen ex-president, and a coordinated effort to deplatform the major Republican presidential candidate from state ballots.

But at other times, the efforts were more sinister—and conspiratorial—to the point that the attempt to destroy the purported threat of candidate, president, and two-time candidate Trump apparently justified any means necessary.

In retrospect, what is the legacy of these unmatched efforts? They have established precedents, if ever again followed, will destroy the republic as we have known it.

1. “Russian collusion.” There was never any evidence that a 2016 Trump candidacy sought to “steal” the election through the intervention of the Putin Russian government. But a paranoid Clinton campaign, through the deliberate paywalls and agency of the DNC, Perkins Coie law firm, and Fusion GPS consulting firm, hired a retread ex-British spy, Christopher Steele—who was also FBI Director James Comey’s paid informant—to fabricate a “dossier” of invented scandals and salacious sex detail to smear Trump and ensure his defeat.

That effort required sowing the dossier throughout the government, partnering with traditional and social media, warping the FISA courts, forging an FBI-submitted document, and ambushing and destroying the National Security Advisor designate Gen. Michael Flynn.

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/01/06/will-we-make-it-until-jan-20/

Joe Biden’s first 46 months in the White House were an exercise in political vandalism, the effects of which the world will be dealing with for years. But it wasn’t enough for him. He’s accelerated his offensive on his way out. Inauguration Day can’t arrive soon enough.

The candidate who ran in 2020 on restoring dignity to the office of the president is a small and petty man. This is not a revelation but a fact known since he “served” in the U.S. Senate and was especially evident when ran for president the first time, nearly four decades ago, dropping out after he could no longer cover his serial lies, blatant plagiarism and the vicious side of his personality.

So it’s not in the least surprising that he would try to burn down the world around him as he moves toward the door. Following is a brief glimpse of Biden’s efforts to handicap the next president and add needless hassles and costs to the lives of everyday Americans.

Energy

An executive order designed to permanently ban new offshore oil and gas development along some yet undetermined coastlines is expected to be issued soon. The decree will be difficult for Donald Trump to reverse, as it “is rooted in a 72-year-old law that gives the White House wide discretion to permanently protect US waters from oil and gas leasing without explicitly empowering presidents to revoke the designations,” Bloomberg reports. 

It’s a red-hot poker in the eye of Trump, whose agenda includes U.S. energy dominance, and average Americans, whose wallets will be adversely affected by higher energy prices.

Biden is also “attempting to implement last-minute restrictions on oil and gas drilling,” says Fox News, pursuing a “20-year ban on oil and gas leases in 264,000 acres of Nevada’s Ruby Mountains.”

https://www.city-journal.org/article/biden-commutes-prison-death-sentences-garland

With their recent commutation of death sentences for federal prisoners, President Joe Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland are leaving office not in a blaze of glory but under a cloud of shame.

The clemencies seem like a culmination to a long record of dereliction and misjudgment. Biden and Garland spent the last few years lamenting the death toll of Americans killed by fentanyl, with overdoses and the accompanying violence of drug dealing resulting in more than 100,000 deaths per year, according to the administration’s own threat assessment. Meantime, Biden left the nation’s southern border wide open, allowing drug traffickers easy passage to bring more fentanyl into the United States. For his part, the attorney general issued his infamous Garland Memo, telling federal prosecutors not to impose mandatory minimum sentences on fentanyl traffickers (and other drug dealers) unless the dealers met a byzantine list of requirements for prior violence, leadership roles, and criminal history, conditions virtually impossible to prove for shadowy drug couriers operating outside the United States.

The president had repeatedly stated that he would not pardon his son Hunter Biden, even as the younger Biden was convicted at trial of firearms offenses and then pled guilty to tax offenses. President Biden claimed the moral high ground, allegedly respecting the rule of law. Then Donald Trump won the election. With tallying of the election returns barely completed, Biden did an abrupt about-face, pardoning his son as sentencing proceedings loomed. The president did not merely pardon Hunter for the two federal cases in which he already had been convicted but for any conduct going back to 2014—a postdated, decade-long get-out-of-jail-free card designed to shield Hunter from some unsavory financial transactions that might have implicated the “big guy,” a term that government whistleblowers claim refers to the president himself.

And this was just a prelude. Supported by Garland’s Department of Justice, Biden then commuted the prison sentences of nearly 1,500 convicted federal criminals, the largest such grant ever given by an American president. Biden touted the historical nature of his action, claiming that the criminals affected had demonstrated “a strong commitment to making their communities safer.” But Biden and Garland must not have been paying close attention to whom they were granting their favors, as they managed to include a commutation for corrupt former judge Michael Conahan. Conahan was one of the infamous “kids-for-cash” judges in Pennsylvania who sentenced juveniles to prison in exchange for millions of dollars in kickbacks, a scheme that affected more than 2,500 children and involved the suicide of at least one young man.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/now-the-hard-work-begins/

The Christmas and New Year festivities have been joyous for us Americans who have suffered through the four years of incompetence and malignity inflicted upon us by the previous administration, the most dysfunctional since at least World War II. Both at home and abroad, a Democrat party hijacked by the left-over left defied nature and nature’s God with policies and programs astonishing for their gross violations of reality and morality, not to mention common sense and the laws of science.

But as we rejoice over our deliverance, and look hopefully to January 20, we should gird our loins and steel ourselves for the fight to come, starting with whatever feckless policies that lame-duck Biden’s puppeteers manage to get passed. The damage to our culture and Constitutional order has deep roots, and has poisoned our institutions and culture both openly and so insidiously that even those who know better still tolerate or endorse the same policies that have weakened our Republic.

Most of us can catalogue the examples of Democrat malfeasance. Take the “renewable energy” and “net-zero carbon” grift that has disrupted our economy and fed inflation in a nation blessed with huge reserves of oil and natural gas, enough to make us energy self-sufficient. But no, the Lefty Dems have been addled by the scientifically dicey “global warming” hypothesis tarted up with lurid apocalyptic panic and promiscuous scientism, all greased by corporate subsidies and tax incentives that have befouled the free market, and created a huge moral hazard for the future. At the same time, an already existing, actually “clean and renewable energy”––nuclear power–– has been put on the shelf and starved of funding, while billions are squandered on intermittent solar and wind energy that enriches China.

Another Dem failure to “follow the science” is the transgender fad preying on neurotic children and teens. Science tells us that mammals are either males and females that together procreate, yet doctors presumably trained scientifically are openly poisoning children with puberty blockers and cross-hormone treatments, then move on to irreversible surgeries that leave their victims mutilated for life. Whether through greed or misplaced “compassion,” doctors are blatantly violating their Hippocratic Oath that in the original Greek requires physicians not just to do no harm, but to benefit their patients.

Nor should we forget the Uniparty’s feckless economic policies that print, borrow, tax, spend, and redistribute trillions of dollars to political clients. Or what Rudyard Kipling called “Robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul,” and Churchill dubbed “Government of the dole-drawers, by the dole-drawers, and for the dole-drawers.” The unscientific mitigation policies and spending sprees during the Covid pandemic damaged millions of people, and flooded the economy with more money chasing fewer goods, the eternal formula for inflation.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/01/02/obamas-censorship-office-goes-bankrupt/

This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.

he Global Engagement Center, an office housed within the State Department and aiming to thwart disinformation and misinformation, has been forced by Congress to close up shop. It’s no mystery why; the taxpayer-backed GEC violated its mandate to work only overseas and devolved into a partisan enabler of speech suppression in the United States.

Here’s how.

Founded in 2016 and technically the product of an Obama-era executive order on counterterrorism, the GEC lapsed in December and lost congressional funding. Over the last two years, my investigative reporting in the Washington Examiner as well as that of Racket News journalist Matt Taibbi pulled back the curtain of the GEC’s ties to foreign and domestic NGOs trying to defund news outlets they say peddle disinformation – including RealClearPolitics. My reporting showed that the GEC and the State Department-funded National Endowment for Democracy combined granted almost $1 million to the British Global Disinformation Index, which created a blacklist of U.S.-based websites that published content it determined to push “adversarial narratives” and then pressured advertisers to shut them down (think the Hunter Biden laptop story and COVID-19 lab leak hypothesis).

The GEC, moreover, was involved with the Election Integrity Partnership, a consortium of left-wing nonprofit groups, universities, and federal agencies that pressured Twitter and Facebook to remove GOP-aligned content in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election. The GEC also bankrolled New York-based company NewsGuard, a “misinformation” tracker that, along with the Global Disinformation Index, has found itself at the center of a lawsuit brought by the Federalist, the Daily Wire, and the State of Texas against the GEC for allegedly funding an unconstitutional “censorship scheme” that suppressed voices on the right.

Taibbi, the former Rolling Stone writer, demonstrated that the GEC pressured social media platforms in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic to moderate extensive content, testifying to Congress in March 2023, “We learned Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other companies developed a formal system for taking in moderation ‘requests’ from every corner of government: the FBI, DHS, HHS, DOD, the Global Engagement Center at State, even the CIA.”