RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/hunter-biden-piles-contempt-upon-contempt/

The president’s troubled son, Hunter Biden, has treated the congressional inquiry into his conduct and the Justice Department’s curious response to it with disdain from Day One.

Late last year, the House Oversight Committee issued a subpoena seeking testimony from the younger Biden, compelling him to answer the committee’s questions behind closed doors. His attorneys disregarded this courtesy, treating it as an opportunity to enter into public negotiations with the committee over the terms to which their client might graciously submit to Congress’s demand.

Hunter Biden wanted to testify in public and before the cameras — a request the Republican-led committee denied. Rather than observe Congress’s authority, Hunter Biden made a theatrical show of appearing in Washington on the day he was supposed to comply with the subpoena, but only to issue a fiery condemnation of House Republicans.

“I’m here to testify at a public hearing today to answer any of the committee’s legitimate questions,” the president’s son exclaimed. “What are they afraid of? I’m here. I’m ready.” But the subject of a congressional inquiry doesn’t get to make the rules — Congress does. So, in response to Hunter’s display of contempt, Congress elected to formalize that status. “Hunter Biden today defied lawful subpoenas, and we will now initiate contempt of Congress proceedings,” House Republicans declared in mid December.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/01/10/the-inherently-destructive-uniparty-agenda/

It’s easy enough to blame Democrats for everything, but as a rapidly increasing percentage of American voters have realized, Republicans share the blame. These politicians are controlled by their donors, and in America today, the big donors are in agreement regardless of which party or which candidate gets their money.

This, then, is what has become dubbed America’s uniparty. And while wealthy elites have always exercised disproportionate influence in American politics, and, for that matter, the politics of virtually every nation that has ever existed, what is happening in 21st century America is unique.

To begin with, for most of American history, elites have competed for political power and influence, with the differing agenda and interests preventing one faction from acquiring absolute power. But today, on the issues that will have the most profound impact on our future, America’s elites are perfectly aligned. Also today and without precedent in American history, the goals of America’s elites are in conflict with the interests of the American people.

There are two broad, interrelated areas where the uniparty consensus currently aims to break the American people, destroying our coherence as a nation along with our prosperity and individual freedom. They both relate to how we are handling immigration. America’s de facto immigration policy is to invite millions of people per year to enter the United States. Because this policy also effectively excludes immigrants who have the means and the integrity to attempt legal entry, the millions who cross our borders each year are the most desperate people from the most failed nations.

America’s immigration policy, in practice, admits people whose life experience is to barely survive in nations ruled by thugs and fanatics. They are accustomed to endemic corruption and extreme poverty. As for the small fraction of immigrants who enter the United States legally, the criteria for their admission is more of a lottery than a merit-based criteria that might arguably be in the national interest.

But immigration—even the uncontrolled, meritless, flagrantly illegal, massive wave that Americans are now experiencing—would probably not be enough to break our unity and our freedom. It would be a challenge, but absent two other nihilistic factors, both driven by America’s elites, we might eventually assimilate the new arrivals and continue to thrive as a nation.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20296/lawyers-defending-become-accused

Ensuring the integrity of elections is… a fundamental requirement to support the legitimacy of the American democratic republic.

We do not have to speculate about the motives of The 65 Project. The head of the group has admitted that their goal is “to deter right-wing talent from signing on to any future GOP efforts” to challenge elections, not only by bringing bar complaints but to “shame them and make them toxic in their communities and their firms.”

The 65 Project’s straight-faced motto, incidentally, is, “Defending Democracy and the Rule of Law.” If only!

We are witnessing a shift in the legal system from lawyers representing and defending clients to lawyers becoming the accused, and, as a form of pseudo-juridical destruction, being charged with unfounded claims.

One of the many great provisions in the American Constitution provides that everyone is entitled to a defense. The “right to counsel” is guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment and the “due process” clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments.

What, however, are the implications when the lawyers who provide that defense are threatened with disbarment proceedings, crushing legal costs to defend their licenses, exclusion from participation in the broader legal and academic communities, and having their reputations smeared, all because they represented clients who were deemed unpopular or took on cases fraught with controversy?

Lawyers throughout America are being subjected to these very ordeals due to their participation in cases related to the 2020 presidential election. One of the principal groups pursuing this strategy operates under the name “The 65 Project.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/destruction-and-obstruction-how-pro-palestinian-protesters-are-defending-hamass-massacre/

Masses of anti-Israel protesters have descended on cities to call for a cease-fire in Gaza in the months following Hamas’s October 7 terror attack. Here are some of the most extreme examples of protesters who have blocked major roadways, vandalized property, and broadcast antisemitic statements:

Washington, D.C.: More than 500 pro-Palestinian protesters staged a sit-in at the United States Capitol in October. The anti-Zionist movement Jewish Voice for Peace led the demonstration, in which protesters demanded a “cease-fire now.”

The protesters first gathered on the National Mall where Cori Bush (D., Mo.) and Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.) spoke to the crowd. Tlaib repeated the lie during her remarks that the Israeli military bombed a Gaza hospital (American and Israeli intelligence confirmed that a misfired Palestinian rocket caused the blast).

New York City: Pro-Palestinian protesters blocked the Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and Manhattan Bridges and the Holland Tunnel during rush hour on the morning of January 8. Protesters calling for a “cease-fire now” refused to let commuters into the city. The protest was part of a wider campaign to “Shut It Down for Palestine,” organized by the Palestinian Youth Movement, National Students for Justice in Palestine, Answer Coalition, the People’s Forum, International Peoples’ Assembly, Al-Awda in New York, and the Palestinian American Community Center in New Jersey.

Police arrested 325 protesters, the NYPD reported, and the roads were cleared by 11:15 a.m. that morning. Many of the 325 will face misdemeanor charges with a desk appearance ticket, according to NYPD chief of patrol John Chell.

“NYPD, KKK, IDF they’re all the same,” protesters chanted.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/01/the_fabricated_memory_of_january_6th.html

We in America have a collective memory of what slavery was like in the 19th century. And when I say we have a collective memory, I mean we share a fabricated collective memory. Slavery was real, but no one today has a real memory of it.

Our collective memory comes from television shows like Roots and movies like Speilberg’s Amistad and The Color Purple. It comes from every movie you’ve ever seen about slavery in the United States. And so, as a collective culture, we think that because we’ve seen these films, we have an authentic memory of what slavery was like when we are only remembering someone else’s portrayal — someone else’s idea of what they think happened. Whether it’s Alex Haley or Quentin Tarantino, we have someone else’s presentation.

The same thing is now happening with the Democrats when they’re recalling January 6th. The Democrat Party has created a fake and fabricated memory of January 6th. They did it with the help of ABC News, with the editors, camera crews, and the post-production people to create a memory that would be played over and over in the media to create a collective memory of an insurrection.

We know the then-House Speaker invited her niece (a professional photographer) to come down to the Capitol and photograph the historic event. We also know that ABC producers were employed to produce the televised hearings of the January 6 Commission for several weeks, and had a hand in editing actual J6 footage. This was designed to create an altered, fabricated memory of what happened the day thousands of people came to Washington because they were concerned the election of 2020 had unanswered questions. Not necessarily unanswered by a non-asking media, but unanswered, nevertheless.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/01/a-presidency-on-autopilot/

The Biden administration is plagued by lethargy and indifference. Does it expect voters not to notice?

The chances are that most voters do not know where Joe Biden’s secretary of defense is at any given moment. The public is likely to assume that the president, his subordinates, their staffs, and the watchdogs in media whose job it is to chronicle government officials’ activities are on top of it, if only because that was a reasonably safe assumption up until this week. What is likely to bite Biden — if Lloyd Austin’s reckless vanishing act bites the president at all — is the epiphany dawning on voters that no one in the administration was on top of it. And when those voters begin to think about it a little more, they might conclude that Biden hasn’t been on top of very much.

Biden’s presidency is buffeted by events, flitting directionless from one crisis to the next without having much of an impact on the trajectory of any one of them. Austin’s disappearance occurred amid an ongoing national humiliation abroad. No one, administration officials included, denies that Iran is behind the many dozens of attacks on U.S. service personnel in Iraq and Syria. Nor do they quibble about who is pulling the strings in Yemen, where a ragtag rebel group has partially closed crucial Red Sea shipping lanes to commercial traffic.

Presumably at someone’s direction, the Pentagon has retaliated against some of Iran’s proxy forces — with the notable exception of Yemen’s Houthi militia — but in a calibrated fashion that has failed to restore deterrence. Joe Biden and his officials appear content to allow Iran to dictate the tempo of events in the region. At the very least, the nation’s foremost defense official doesn’t see these ongoing assaults on America’s men and women in uniform and the U.S.-led geopolitical order they maintain as an obstacle to taking an unannounced sabbatical. Nor, apparently, does the president believe that Austin’s dereliction merits any sort of reproach.

https://thespectator.com/topic/lloyd-austin-mistake-career-ending/

When the secretary of defense goes AWOL, the clear chain of command is severed.

The disappearance of defense secretary Lloyd Austin for a few days without notifying the White House, or even the second in command at the Pentagon, is more than a one- or two-day story. 

It’s a much larger problem. It’s a problem politically for the White House, an opportunity for Republicans, a dilemma for congressional Democrats and a problem for the most powerful military in the world. And, of course, it’s a major problem for Secretary Austin’s future in the position.

Let’s start with the problem for the military. It is absolutely essential that the military have a clear chain of command that is clearly specified and operational at all times. Within the military, that chain of command goes up to the senior-most officer in each service branch. The chairman of the joint chiefs of staff is above them in the military hierarchy. 

Because the US military operates in a democracy, where political control is essential for major decisions, the top military officials are beneath a civilian secretary for each branch. All of them, plus the chairman of the joint chiefs, are beneath the civilian secretary of defense, who is appointed by the president, subject to Senate approval, and is supervised by the president himself. The civilian secretaries of each branch are also nominees that must be approved by the Senate. That, then, is a clear chain of command under civilian control.

When the secretary of defense goes AWOL, that chain of command is severed. The severance appeared to be even more severe because the second in command to Secretary Austin was herself on vacation and not informed of his being out of the chain because he was in the intensive care unit.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/prosecute-the-new-york-bridge-blockers

On the first commuting morning of the first full workweek of 2024, New York’s permanent “protesting” class demonstrated its tactical approach for the year: to make us miserable on our daily trips, even as the city struggles to attract pre-2020 commuting and tourism crowds. Under the rubric of “Shut it Down for Palestine,” a few hundred people on Monday managed, indeed, to shut down all three Lower Manhattan bridges to Brooklyn, as well as the Holland Tunnel to New Jersey, just after the morning rush. They created gridlock that inconvenienced tens of thousands of drivers, bus riders, bike riders, and walkers. Following months of smaller-scale actions, it was agitators’ most disruptive action yet—and organizers will continue to escalate their behavior unless Mayor Eric Adams and Governor Kathy Hochul make clear that blocking key transportation corridors is not “peaceful protest.”

Protests on all sides of any issue are a fact of urban life. But protesters are not free to obstruct movement; the First Amendment protects only speech and assembly, not unlawful obstruction of roads, transit, or sidewalks.  

Such illegal obstruction is the core tactic, though, of the post-2020 left-wing shut-it-all-down movement, and it started before George Floyd summer. On the last day of January 2020, a self-styled anarchist movement called “Decolonize this Place” swarmed Manhattan’s Grand Central Terminal. The few hundred masked agitators wanted to “disrupt” commuting until New York met their demands, including free transit and eliminating all policing in the subway system.  

They didn’t succeed in disrupting much of anything (though they did vandalize property), and the commuters who made their way through the mob might have seen the whole thing as a one-off aggravation. Even Occupy Wall Street, the precursor movement of nearly a decade before, hadn’t regularly interrupted New Yorkers on their daily journeys to work or to run errands. 

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20294/supreme-court-saving-democracy

Historians have an enormous advantage over the rest of us: they have the unique luxury of looking back through time and, with the power of hindsight, pinpointing the exact moment a new era began. Yet there are events that are so momentous, so crucial, and so obvious, that sometimes even those living in the moment can recognize their historic significance.

We are living through that moment.

Over the last several days, the turmoil surrounding the question of whether bureaucrats can unilaterally remove Donald Trump’s name from a presidential campaign ballot has only intensified. Colorado and Maine have already taken this action and other states are mulling the same.

As observed in a previous essay by this author, these actions attack the very fabric of our representative form of government. The idea that without so much as due process unelected persons in an individual state can remove a potential presidential candidate is the stuff of nightmares for a democracy.

Even leading Democrats have voiced opposition to this latest con by “ballot bandits.”

What this means, however, is that the future of our nation is now to the be in the hands of the U.S. Supreme Court.

To their credit, they have recognized this threat and their need to consider the arguments as a matter of urgency for, make no mistake, this is an existential threat to our nation.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-dark-side-of-free-speech/

The ongoing protests against Israel––from its defense policies and warfighting tactics, to its very existence as a nation and a people––have featured levels of irrational hatred and despicable endorsements of genocidal terrorists. The U.S., of course, is also a target not just for being Israel’s enabler, but for alleged historical crimes like “settler colonialism,” racism, and genocide. These charges are morally idiotic, ethically incoherent, and historically challenged. And they serve and advance political agendas dangerous for our national interests and security.

That such mendacious protests are legal in most Western nations reflects one of the foundational principles of Western civilization: the freedom of ordinary citizens to criticize and challenge their own country’s policies and actions. But these recent protests highlight the dangers of that freedom: the nurturing and spreading of a national self-loathing that undermines the patriotism and loyalty any country needs to survive.

Of all the world’s great civilizations, none has been as critically self-conscious as the West.  Starting with the ancient Greeks, the West has been willing to question its own beliefs and institutions, make them objects of thought and criticism, search for their meaning and significance, and use this process to make innovative improvements. The Greeks, as the 19th century historian Jacob Burckhardt said, “seem original, spontaneous and conscious, in circumstances in which all others were ruled by a more or less mindless necessity.”

Slavery, for example, has been a global evil since history began, and still persists in some regions of the world today. The Greeks’ critical examination of this practice––back then, no more questionable than the domestication of animals––on the one hand led to a justification for it, such as Aristotle’s infamous argument that those in bondage are “slaves by nature,” since they lack rational self-control and so can be justly controlled by another.

On the other hand, thinking critically about slavery also generated questions about the justice of it, as the early 4th century BC rhetorician Alcidamas did when he said, “The god gave freedom to all men, and nature created no one a slave.” It took two millennia, but this early argument that slavery is a consequence of force, and thus unnatural and unjust, bore fruit in the late 18th century when Christians started the West on the road to abolition.