RUTHFULLY YOURS

Amid the drama that is today’s presidential race, serious subjects are getting short shrift. No one is happier about this than Barack Obama. And no agency within that president’s administration is more ecstatic than the Internal Revenue Service.

That tax authority’s targeting of conservative nonprofits ranks as one of the worst federal scandals in modern history. It is topped only by the outrage that no one has been held to account. Or perhaps by the news that the targeting continues to this day.

That detail became clear in an extraordinary recent court hearing, in front of a panel of judges for the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. The paired cases in the hearing were Linchpins of Liberty, et al. v. United States of America, et al. and True the Vote Inc. v. Internal Revenue Service, et al. They involve several conservative nonprofits—there are 41 in Linchpin—that were, as they said, rounded up and “branded” by the IRS. The groups are still suffering harm, and they want justice.

A lower-court judge had blithely accepted the IRS’s claim that the targeting had stopped, that applications for nonprofit status had been approved, and that the matter was therefore moot.

The federal judges hearing the appeal, among them David B. Sentelle and Douglas H. Ginsburg, weren’t so easily rolled. In a series of probing questions the judges ascertained that at least two of the groups that are party to the lawsuit have still not received their nonprofit approvals. The judges determined that those two groups are 501(c)(4) social-welfare groups, which are subject to far less scrutiny than 501(c)(3) charities, yet are still being harassed by the IRS five years later. The judges were told that not only are the groups still on ice, but that their actions are still being “monitored” by the federal government.

As one lawyer for the plaintiffs noted, despite the IRS’s claim that it got rid of its infamous targeting lists, there is “absolutely no showing” that the agency has in fact stopped using the underlying “criteria” that originally “identified and targeted for mistreatment based on political views.”

The hearing also showed the degree to which the IRS has doubled down on its outrageous revisionist history, and its excuses. IRS lawyers again claimed that the whole targeting affair came down to bad “training” and bad “guidance.” They blew off a Government Accountability Office report that last year found the IRS still had procedures that would allow it to unfairly select organizations for examinations based on religious or political viewpoint. The lawyers’ argument: We wouldn’t do such a thing. Again. Trust us.

More incredibly, the IRS team claimed that the fault for some of the scandal rests with the conservative groups, for not pushing back hard enough during the targeting. In response to complaints that the groups had been forced to hand over confidential information (information the IRS now refuses to destroy), one agency lawyer retorted: “They didn’t have to give the information to the IRS if they thought it was inappropriate, they could have said so.” Really. CONTINUE AT SITE

Artificial intelligence (AI) via predictive analytics is a game-changer. At last week’s Kentucky Derby, an AI platform that had previously predicted the winners of the Oscars and Super Bowl predicted the Kentucky Derby superfecta. The AI platform predicted the first-, second-, third- and fourth-place horses at 540-1 odds, netting the technology’s inventor Louis Rosenberg $10,842 on a $20 bet. How will this translate to the federal government?
On May 3, The White House issued a very interesting document: “Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence.” Recognizing that AI is a technology area full of both promises and potential perils, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy announced that it will co-host four public workshops topics in AI to spur public dialogue on AI and machine learning.

In addition, a new National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) Subcommittee on Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence was established to monitor state-of-the-art advances and technology milestones in AI and machine learning within the federal government.

Information technology research firm Gartner describes AI as a “technology that appears to emulate human performance typically by learning, coming to its own conclusions, appearing to understand complex content, engaging in natural dialogs with people, enhancing human cognitive performance or replacing people on execution of non-routine tasks.”

Emergent AI and its corresponding components of machine learning, augmented reality and cognitive computing technologies are no longer things of science fiction.

The Victimhood of Black Millionaires
Fresh from the success of Between the World and Me, professional literary victim Ta-Nehisi Coates snapped up a luxurious landmarked brownstone for $2.1 million. The brownstone featured original Tiger Oak, Maple, and Mahogany wood floors, a chef’s kitchen, wedding cake moldings, a tin ceiling, terrace, garden, carved woodwork, a fireplace and all the other expected trimmings of the downtrodden.

When the purchase was exposed and Coates was mocked on Twitter for his gentrifying ways, he posted a whiny self-pitying screed claiming that he could no longer live there because “you can’t really be a black writer in this country, take certain positions, and not think about your personal safety.”

Prospect-Lefferts Gardens is still a majority black area. Whatever risks to his personal safety Coates might have faced in his $2 million brownstone would have come from nearby gangbangers, not stealthy white ninja assassins out to hunt down black writers who “take certain positions.” The last recorded crime as of this writing involved an armed robbery with a “black male” fleeing the scene.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is the guru of black fragility. Between the World and Me is a gushing stream of hatred and self-pity in which the National Book Award winner and MacArthur genius grant recipient moaned that the firefighters and police officers who died on September 11 “were not human to me. Black, white, or whatever, they were menaces of nature; they were the fire, the comet, the storm, which could — with no justification — shatter my body.”

Neurotic black fragility justifies dehumanizing white people. White people are just evil forces of nature who might at any moment shatter Coates’ body, even while they’re dying trying to rescue people of all races from the World Trade Center, or impinge on his $2.1 million brownstone hideaway. Occasionally, in their inscrutable way, they might bestow a genius grant or a book award on him. But that’s just another example of how they exploit “black bodies” by financing their brownstone purchases.

This is a good season for the prophets and profits of victimhood. Black fragility is especially very profitable. The Civil Rights movement began with the assertion of moral strength and then eventually physical strength. The current crybullying claims only weakness. It’s a civil rights movement of fragile crybullying nerds who whine even while they’re winning.

The Mizzou protests were kicked off by Jonathan Butler, the son of a millionaire, who went on a hunger strike based on utter ridiculous nonsense. Butler insisted to the media that he was a “dead man walking”. Then the football team joined the protest to see “what can we do to make sure that Jonathan Butler eats.” That was last year. He’s still walking and whining. Also he’s available for “speaking engagements, personal appearances and corporate events”. Possibly also wedding and bar mitzvahs.

The Obama Administration is full of oddities — all ignored by the media. Obama’s bowing episodes, for example, with the international media video recording deep bows to the Saudi King and the Emperor of Japan. Then there is Obama’s personal contempt for certain foreign leaders, notably Benjamin Netanyahu and Vladimir Putin, but also 90-year-old Queen Elizabeth II (whose personal garden at Windsor Garden was ruined by three of Obama’s presidential helicopters in 2011).

Obama has constantly tried to meddle in the domestic affairs of our (former) allies, like Egypt and Israel, but also Britain. Obama publicly commanded Egypt’s President Mubarak to step down, a gross insult to a close ally. He tried to topple what was long considered to be the pillar of peace in the Middle East.

Then there is Obama’s much-resented advice to African countries like Kenya to allow freer homosexual behavior, when Africans are still dying from an HIV epidemic.

And now we have Obama’s Bathroom Gender Edict, telling local school districts to let boys and girls from six to sixteen decide whichever bathroom they “really” identify with, regardless of the rights of others. The President of the United States is coming to rescue you from gender-assignment tyranny, children!

Somehow the Founders forgot to include that as one of the enumerated powers of the President.

Troubling? Weird? Yes, you might think so.

President Obama’s bombshell transgender edict on bathroom and locker rooms last week to all American school districts did not come out of the blue.

Friday’s joint letter from the Departments of Education and Justice, plus Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s mind-bending comparison of separate sex bathroom policies to Jim Crow laws, was just the latest chapter in the assault on social norms begun in earnest by former Attorney General Eric H. Holder, Jr. as soon as he took office in 2009.

If the Trump campaign were wise, it would not blow kisses to the tiny, tiny percentage of the population that identifies as the other sex, and instead put Hillary Clinton in a vise — caught between her legions of LGBTQ supporters versus millions of average Americans shocked by the intrusion of the federal government into school restrooms. This issue is a visceral example of the dangers of overweening, centralized, establishment power without effective checks and balances. It’s made to order for the Trump insurgency.

But I digress. The main point is that this is not new. Here’s a case summarized in 2011 by American Civil Rights Union Policy Board member J. Christian Adams in his book Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department, which I offer with his permission:

Pink Wigs and Stiletto Heels

“Americans might be shocked to learn that the Obama DOJ thinks it is a federal civil right for boys to wear stiletto high heels and pink wigs to a public high school. In the Mohawk Central School District near Utica, New York, a 15-year-old male student wanted to come to class dressed as a flamboyant transvestite. Unsurprisingly, other students teased the boy, and the school attempted to enforce a reasonable dress code to maintain classroom order. But in the age of Eric Holder, this became a federal civil rights issue.

“The Civil Rights Division intervened in the affair to force the school to allow for child-transvestites. Where in the Constitution might this power be found? What could the legal theory possibly be? What federal right was at stake that could overcome the well-established power of schools to enforce order to facilitate learning? The answer, incredibly, is sex discrimination.

“’Gender non-conforming’ behavior has been elevated to a federal civil right under the Obama DOJ’s bizarre legal application of Title IX. This is not even within paddling distance of the mainstream. The law was intended to prevent discrimination against women, not against those who fantasize about having a different gender.

Christine Brim is a founder of Paratos LLC, a risk communications consultancy. Previously she served at the Center for Security Policy as a vice president and chief operating officer.
On May 13, the Washington Post published an online op-ed by former CIA director and CENTCOM commander David Petraeus, titled “Anti-Muslim bigotry aids Islamist terrorists.” The op-ed was noteworthy chiefly for Petraeus’ use of rhetorical clichés more commonly expected from the Council on American Islamic Relations and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation’s “Islamophobia Observatory,” including such standards as “inflammatory political discourse against Muslims and Islam,” “blanket discrimination on the basis of religion,” “those who flirt with hate speech against Muslims,” “those who demonize and denigrate Islam,” “who toy with anti-Muslim bigotry,” and the ever-reliable “demonizing a religious faith and its adherents.” Although the op-ed seemed to target Donald Trump, it also admonished all Americans to limit what we say about Islam.

Petraeus’s attack was so over-the-top, no expression critical of Islamic doctrine would escape his censorship. Have you criticized mainstream Islamic doctrine or the laws of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates? You’re demonizing a religious faith. Do you object to authoritative Islamic doctrines justifying jihad, proclaimed by both Islamic governments and non-state Islamic militants alike? Stop toying with anti-Muslim bigotry; you’re just aiding “Islamist terrorists.”
Robert Spencer of Jihadwatch expertly summarized Petraeus’s specious logic: “So the upshot of Petraeus’ argument is that we must not say things to which Muslims might object, because this will just make more of them become jihadis. His prescription for minimizing the jihad against the West is for the West to practice self-censorship in order to avoid offending Muslims.”

Sadly, Petraeus’s attacks primarily undercut the foremost critics of Islamic doctrine: Muslim reformers, the group of Muslims who most need our support. A prominent young Muslim reformer, Shireen Qudosi, responded to his op-ed with this poignant tweet: “Petraeus doesn’t see that for much of the maddening world of Muslims and liberals, hate speech is conflated w/ truth.”

The theme of Petraeus’s op-ed, “Anti-Muslim bigotry aids Islamist terrorists,” was in line with a campaign to blame ISIS on Western critics of Islamic doctrine. For example, The Mirror: “ISIS wouldn’t be here if there wasn’t Islamophobia”; The Nation: “ISIS Wants You to Hate Muslims”; The Guardian: “Islamophobia plays right into the hands of Isis”; Salon: “After Brussels, far-right Islamophobes are doing exactly what ISIS wants them to do”; and last but not least, Hillary Clinton in The Daily Mail: “‘He is becoming ISIS’ best recruiter’: Hillary Clinton blasts Donald Trump for demonizing Muslims and using ‘bluster and bigotry to inflame people.”

Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have been talking a lot about “fairness” and “equality” during their primary campaigns. Like most progressives, they pass themselves off as the champions of the ordinary people who are suffering beneath the boot of rapacious capitalists and the plutocratic “one percent.” Give us power, they say, and we will create “social justice” for all the victims of “white privilege” and capitalist greed, not to mention redistributing even more money from the selfish “rich” in order to finance such utopian goals.

Promiscuously displaying their hearts bleeding for the oppressed has long been the progressive camouflage that hides their real motive: the lust for power. Whether they want power to advance their failed ideology (Sanders), or to gratify their ambition for status and wealth (Hillary), in the end it doesn’t matter. History has repeatedly proven that the libido dominandi, the ancient lust for dominating others that lies behind the progressives’ political ambitions, in the end always leads to tyranny and misery.

When progressivism began in the late 19th century, progressives at least were honest about their aim to expand their power over the ignorant, selfish masses. A striking––and prophetic–– example can be found in Woodrow Wilson’s 1890 essay “Leaders of Men.” Wilson rejected the limited executive of the Constitution for a more activist president who has the “insight” to know “the motives which move other men in the mass”:

Besides, it is not a sympathy ­[with people] that serves, but a sympathy whose power is to command, to command by knowing its instrument . . . The competent leader of men cares little for the interior niceties of other people’s characters: he cares much-everything for the external uses to which they may be put. His will seeks the lines of least resistance; but the whole question with him is a question of the application of force. There are men to be moved: how shall he move them?

In the progressive view, fellow citizens are an abstract, collective “mass,” “instruments” that must be “moved,” manipulated, and used to reach the ideological goals of the technocratic elite, who knows far better than the people how they should live, what they should believe, and what aims they should strive for. Any resistance must be met by “the application of force.” Wilson means here primarily psychological or social force, but as we have seen after a century of expanding federal power, progressive policies enshrined in federal law are in the end backed by the coercive power of the police to punish non-compliance and enforce compliance.

From this perspective, Barack Obama is not an anomaly or some new political phenomenon birthed in the sixties. He is the predictable result of progressive assumptions over a century old. Thus he shares Wilson’s view of a “leader of men” as someone who knows what’s best for the people, and is willing to use unconstitutional “force” to achieve his aims. Think of the IRS hounding conservative political organizations, or the EPA violating private property rights, or the DOJ usurping the sovereignty of the states, or Obama’s various executive diktats that compromise individual rights, legislated laws, and the power of the states. All of these actions have applied “force” to “move” men in a particular ideological direction.

During the House Oversight Committee hearing examining the White House narratives on the Iranian nuclear deal, Congressman Jim Jordan (R-OH) compared the administration’s deceptive approach to selling the unpopular deal with the deceptive approach it took to selling Obamacare. He began by asking the panel — comprised of Michael Rubin (AEI), Michael Doran (Hudson Inst.) and John Hannah (Foundation for Defense of Democracies) — if they had ever heard of Jonathan Gruber.

Jordan reminded them that Gruber was the “Obamacare architect” who had gained “some notoriety in the press” a few years ago and was subsequently called to testify before Congress to explain himself.

“He was deceptive,” Jordan noted. “He talked about the stupidity of the American voter” and how a “lack of transparency is a political advantage.”

“That’s a nice way of saying, ‘if you deceive people, you might get your way. It might help your case,'” Jordan explained. “So here is Jonathan Gruber — architect of Obamacare — talking about deception. Things like: if you like your plan you can keep it, if you like your doctor you can keep him, premiums will go down, website’s gonna work, website’s safe….everything turned out to be false.”

He continued, “and now we hear about another person in the Obama administration — Mr. Rhodes — and he is given the title, according to the The New York Times, of the ‘single most influential voice shaping American foreign policy.'”

“Wow, things are starting to sound familiar,” Jordan exclaimed. “He creates a false narrative as well. He talks about this echo chamber and deceiving the press. His derision for the press is kind of like Mr. Gruber’s derision for the American voter.” After all, Rhodes had said, “they literally know nothing.”

The decline of America, perhaps surprisingly, can be traced directly to the Nixon administration. Surprising, because the Left hated Tricky Dick with a passion that can only be compared with the passion that animates the never-Trump crowd: sheer, animal loathing. Surprising, because Nixon was the most domestically liberal, if not actually leftist, president we’ve had until Obama. Surprising, because to this day old Nixon-haters still foam at the mouth at the very thought of the man who took down the “pink lady,” Helen Gahagan Douglas, and saved Israel in 1973; a year later, of course, they finally sacked him over Watergate.

But it was during the first Nixon administration that the hideous monstrosity of the Environmental Protection Agency came into being by executive order, along with its ugly twin, the Occupational Safety and Health Act. Seemingly innocuous and well-intentioned at the time, both agencies have metastasized, their original missions completed and now forever on the prowl for something else to meddle with. They’re both unconstitutional, of course, but what’s even worse is that they’ve turned into rogue agencies, issuing edicts, orders and regulations largely devoid of congressional scrutiny — pure instruments of executive power, with none to gainsay them.

To get an idea of just hoe obnoxious and intrusive these do-gooder agencies have become, get a load of this from Lou Ann Rieley, who owns a farm in Delaware:

This week a young rancher in Wyoming, Andy Johnson, won a battle for private property rights against one of the bureaucratic entities that strikes fear in the hearts of farmers and ranchers nationwide, the Environmental Protection Agency.

Johnson fought back against a mandate from the EPA to dismantle a pond that he had built on his own land with the required state permits. Fines totaling $16 million were imposed before they were finally overturned in the wake of his court victory.

As I read about his ordeal I thought back through the years that I have managed our small family farm and the many times we have been harassed by government busy-bodies who thought it was in their purview to question us, investigate us, intrude on us, and regulate us.

Let’s stop right there. (You can read all about the Johnson case, which ought to outrage every real American, here.) Sixteen million dollars in fines? For what?

A Wyoming man threatened with $16 million in fines over the building of a stock pond reached a settlement with the Environment Protection Agency, allowing him to keep the pond without a federal permit or hefty fine. Andy Johnson, of Fort Bridger, Wyoming obtained a state permit before building the stock pond in 2012 on his sprawling nine-acre farm for a small herd of livestock.

Not long after construction, the EPA threatened Johnson with civil and criminal penalties – including the threat of a $37,500-a-day fine — claiming he needed the agency’s permission before building the 40-by-300 foot pond, which is filled by a natural stream.

“The Agency’s permission.” The proper response to which from a freeborn American citizen is: shove it. CONTINUE AT SITE

Retired U.S. Army general and former CIA director David Petraeus wrote an article entitled “David Petraeus: Anti-Muslim bigotry aids Islamist terrorists.”

Thank you, sir, for the clarification. Up until now, I had believed Barack Obama; that Islamic terrorism was caused by climate change.

Petraeus’ premise is that “inflammatory political discourse…against Muslims and Islam…including proposals from various quarters for blanket discrimination against people on the basis of their religion… will compound the already grave terrorist danger to our citizens… directly undermine our ability to defeat Islamist extremists by alienating and undermining the allies whose help we most need to win this fight: namely, Muslims.”

Let us first dispel a universal myth and the fundamental flaw in Petraeus’ argument. There is no such thing as gratitude in foreign policy; only interests.

In every one of the “alliance” cases Petraeus cites: Sunni Muslims in al Anbar province, the Iraqi Shiite government, the Afghan Northern Alliance, the nation of Indonesia – all of them worked with the United States because of mutual interest, not happy talk.

NATO exists and operates on the basis of mutual interest and even after a decade of vitriol and their mutually exclusive ideologies, Hitler and Stalin still concluded the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact.

Petraeus is concerned that political rhetoric will inhibit our ability to root out entrenched terrorist, like in Libya, which would not have become entrenched with terrorists except for the foreign policy malpractice of the Obama Administration and CIA Director Petraeus, arguably compounding “the already grave terrorist danger to our citizens.”

The Islamic State, ISIS, has made no secret of its intention to infiltrate Europe and the United States through “refugee” migration or other means for the purpose of carrying out terrorist acts.

In his Congressional testimony, FBI Director James Comey admitted that there is no way to screen the tens of thousands of Muslim refugees the Obama administration plans to accept into the US.

Yet Petraeus considers any effort to halt uncontrolled Muslim immigration as “blanket discrimination against people on the basis of their religion,” “demonizing a religious faith” or “toying with anti-Muslim bigotry.”