RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2023/05/28/it-was-always-only-about-power-with-the-left/

Why do so many liberal climate-activist grandees fly on private jets? Or why do those who profited from Black Lives Matter have a propensity for estate living? Or why do the community-activist Obamas prefer to live in not one, but three mansions? 

The answer is that calls for radical equity, “power for the people,” and mandated equality are usually mostly sloganeering for those who enjoy power and the lucre it brings, and their wish is to augment both for themselves. The result is that the issue du jour of mandated equality often becomes secondary if not irrelevant. There is neither fear of inconstancy nor hypocrisy, given the central theme that governs a leftist party line is political utility—or the ends of power always more than justify the hypocritical means used to obtain it. 

Spout racialist nonsense for 40 years? Harass women and young girls by blowing in their hair and squeezing them too tightly? Create a family grifting syndicate to leverage foreign cash in quid pro quo fashion? Praise racial segregationists?  

Joe Biden did all those things and more. But he also did them in service to a supposed noble cause, sort of like the current board president of the NAACP promoting a black travel ban on Florida, while he lives—in Florida!

Keep political utility in mind and the baffling hypocrisy of the Left makes all too perfect sense. 

January 6 vs. the “Summer of Love” 

From all the tens of thousands of January 6 Capitol protesters a small percentage entered the Capitol itself. Of that group, an even smaller number committed violent acts. Most of those seriously injured that day were among the protesters themselves. Despite official propaganda, there were not five police officers killed on January 6 as alleged by the Left. 

Instead, the only likely death at the hand of another was the diminutive, 5’2’’, 14-year-military veteran and unarmed Ashli Babbitt. She was lethally shot by a Capitol officer Michael Byrd for the likely misdemeanor of trespassing and—illegally entering a broken window to the Capitol.  

Yet over a thousand protesters were arrested, tried, and mostly convicted of various charges from parading without a permit to insurrection. Many of them were sentenced to long prison sentences. Some may spend most of their remaining lives in prison.  

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19677/end-of-free-speech

[M]edia polling from Harvard-Harris showing that Americans hold almost diametrically opposing viewpoints from those that news corporations predominantly broadcast as the official “truth.”

Americans have correctly concluded that [with the “Russia Hoax” and suppressing reported influence peddling in Hunter Biden’s laptop ] journalists and spies advanced a “fraud” on voters as part of an effort to censor a damaging story and “help Biden win.” Nevertheless, The New York Times and The Washington Post have yet to return the Pulitzer Prizes they received for reporting totally discredited “fake news.”

“Under the current approach to journalism, it is the New York Times that receives a Pulitzer for a now debunked Russian collusion story rather than the New York Post for a now proven Hunter Biden laptop story.” — Professor Jonathan Turley, George Washington University Law School, Twitter, May 15, 2023.

The government apparently took the public’s censorship concerns so seriously that it quietly moved on from the collapse of its plans for a “disinformation governance board” within the DHS and proceeded within the space of a month to create a new “disinformation” office known as the Foreign Malign Influence Center, which now operates from within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Although ostensibly geared toward countering information warfare arising from “foreign” threats, one of its principal objectives is to monitor and control “public opinion and behaviors.”

As independent journalist Matt Taibbi concludes of the government’s resurrected Ministry of Truth: “It’s the basic rhetorical trick of the censorship age: raise a fuss about a foreign threat, using it as a battering ram to get everyone from Congress to the tech companies to submit to increased regulation and surveillance. Then, slowly, adjust your aim to domestic targets.”

Democrat Senator Michael Bennet has already proposed a bill that would create a Federal Digital Platform Commission with “the authority to promulgate rules, impose civil penalties, hold hearings, conduct investigations, and support research.”

Effectively, a small number of unelected commissioners would have de facto power to monitor and police online communication. Should any particular website or platform run afoul of the government’s First Amendment Star Chamber, it would immediately place itself within the commission’s crosshairs for greater oversight, regulation, and punishment.

Will this new creation become an American KGB, Stasi or CCP — empowered to target half the population for disagreeing with current government policies, promoting “wrongthink,” or merely going to church? Will a small secretive body decide which Americans are actually “domestic terrorists” in the making? US Attorney General Merrick Garland has gone after traditional Catholics who attend Latin mass, but why would government suspicions end with the Latin language? When small commissions exist to decide which Americans are the “enemy,” there is no telling who will be designated as a “threat” and punished next.

It is not difficult to see the dangers that lie ahead. Now that the government has fully inserted itself into the news and information industry, the criminalization of free speech is a very real threat. This has always been a chief complaint against international institutions such as the World Economic Forum that spend a great deal of time, power, and money promoting the thoughts and opinions of an insular cabal of global leaders, while showing negligible respect for the personal rights and liberties of the billions of ordinary citizens they claim to represent.

If Schwab’s online army were not execrable enough, advocates for free speech must also gird themselves for the repercussions of Elon Musk’s appointment of Linda Yaccarino, reportedly a “neo-liberal wokeist” with strong WEF affiliations, as the new CEO of Twitter.

In an America now plagued with the stench of official “snitch lines,” censorship of certain presidential candidates, widespread online surveillance, a resurrected “disinformation governance board,” and increasingly frequent criminal prosecutions targeting Americans who exercise their free speech, the question is not whether what we inaudibly think or say in our sleep will someday be used against us, but rather how soon that day will come unless we stop it.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/05/25/regime-apparatchiks-and-sadists-inflict-their-punishments/

Matthew Graves wasted no time doing the political dirty work of the man who appointed him to serve as the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia: Joe Biden.

The Biden regime, Attorney General Merrick Garland in particular, faced heat in late 2021 for failing to bring harsher charges against Americans who protested Biden’s election on January 6. Garland was on the defensive for seeking mostly misdemeanor charges, giving the Right ammunition to mock the media’s description of the four-hour disturbance as an “insurrection.”

Enter Graves, the man responsible for prosecuting every January 6 case. 

Shortly after taking the reins of the powerful office, Graves charged 11 members or affiliates of the Oath Keepers, including founder Stewart Rhodes, with seditious conspiracy, the most serious charge brought by the Justice Department in the unprecedented criminal investigation. Created during the Civil War as an alternative to treason to punish supporters of the Confederacy, seditious conspiracy is tantamount to waging war against the United States government. 

Graves’ indictment not only broke new legal ground to criminalize political speech but lent credence to Biden’s claims made during his speech on the afternoon of January 6 that what was happening at the Capitol “border[ed] on sedition.” Garland’s office announced the indictment in a lengthy press release on January 13, 2022 to great fanfare. Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin awarded Garland with her “distinguished pol of the week” prize for “dramatically ratchet[ing] up the investigation.”

Considering a federal judge tossed the exceedingly rare charge out of court in 2010, the last time the government attempted to prosecute Americans for seditious conspiracy, one might assume the Justice Department would have an uphill battle to make the indictments stick. In fact, prosecutors recently admitted that only a “handful” of individuals, all tied to Islamic terror cells including al-Qaeda and the Taliban, have been convicted of seditious conspiracy in the past several decades. For example, Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and nine others were charged and convicted of seditious conspiracy for the 1993 World Trade Center bombings that left six dead and more than 1,000 injured.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/05/26/americas-dangerous-shortage-of-free-thinkers/

“A society without free thinkers, dissenters and contrarians is not only one that lacks color and vibrance, it is accelerating toward a wreck. Some might recognize that happening right in front of them.”

Our country has become a conformist society where free expression is rewarded with the swing of a truncheon. We’re on a road that leads to repression, and we are not far from the destination.

This nation owes its existence and its never-seen-before prosperity to free thinkers. The founders were men of the enlightenment. They stand in stark contrast to our ruling class of today, a corrupt and depraved cabal of politicians, state media, institutional leaders, militant activists and corporate executives that is hurtling us into an era of darkness. In the 2020s, the only “truth” is what the narrative, invariably fabricated by the worst people who have ever held power and influence in this country’s history, says it is.

We see those yard signs, the ones that proclaim their occupants’ unwavering grand tolerance and thirst for diversity. But we know that those who put up those signs are the most intolerant, limited thinkers among us. They don’t believe in diversity of thought. Their objective is to force conformity to their way of thinking while immodestly displaying their superior virtue.

“​​There is a new use for tolerance today, and, quite frankly, it is self-serving and hypocritical,” says Paul Chappell, a pastor and president of the West Coast Baptist College in Lancaster, California. “It doesn’t mean tolerance in the traditional sense of the word at all. It means, ‘You must condone and support my choices – even at the expense of your beliefs.’”

https://swtotd.blogspot.com/

Time is both precise and ambiguous. Computer scientists measure it in zeptoseconds, the time it takes a particle of light to cross a hydrogen molecule, which has an ionic radius (don’t ask) of 0.208 nanometers, one billionth of a meter. The longest measurement of time is a supereon, three billion years. For us, time is finite. In my 83rd year, I have lived just under 730,000 hours, barely a nanosecond for a paleontologist.

Stopwatches are used to measure the time it takes a runner, skier, race car, or horse to cross the finish line. But the word can be vague: ‘She won’t give me the time of day,’ ‘Will the doctor have time to see me?’ ‘My love for Caroline, my children and grandchildren is timeless.’ “And indeed there will be time,” wrote T.S. Eliot in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, “to wonder, ‘Do I dare?’ and Do I dare?’” A Tale of Two Cities begins: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” While ambiguous, we know what Dickens meant. And then there is this quote from Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring, which reflects his time in the trenches during the Great War: “‘I wish it need not have happened in my time,’ said Frodo. ‘So do I,’ said Gandalf, ‘and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.’”

While every hour has sixty minutes and each minute sixty seconds, hours and minutes spent in childhood seemed longer than those spent in adulthood, probably because each hour of childhood was a larger percent of our lives. And time continues to accelerate as we age. Nevertheless, we have more time than did our great grandparents. In 1860, life expectancy in the U.S. was 39.4 years. By 2020 it had doubled to 78.9 years. Will it double again for our great grandchildren? And time varies by species. An hour represents about 4% in the life of a Mayfly, while for Jonathan, a 190-year-old Seychelle giant tortoise, an hour represents only 1/1,664,400th% of his life. It is possible that future scientists might learn from the immortal Turritopsis dohrnii jellyfish, which, once it reproduces, reverts to a polyp stage and starts life all over again.

https://nypost.com/2023/05/24/how-google-manipulates-search-to-favor-liberals-and-tip-elections/?utm_campaign=iphone_nyp&utm_source=mail_app

While the focus has been on Twitter and Facebook’s censorship and liberal bias, the worst Big Tech culprit of all has been getting a free pass — and now it’s coming for our children.

That’s the warning from research psychologist Dr. Robert Epstein, a Californian Democrat with a Harvard Ph.D, who has spent the last decade monitoring Google’s manipulation of newsfeeds, search results and YouTube suggestions.

He shared his latest research with The Post when he was in New York this week to raise donations for the next stage of his project.

Epstein’s research shows that Google has the power to change minds and move elections to suit its liberal corporate worldview.

And despite regular protestations of innocence to Congress, the $1 trillion multinational tech giant is using its virtual monopoly as a search engine to elevate liberal views, stifle conservatives and manipulate the impressionable minds of our children.

Shifting 6 million votes

You thought Twitter and Facebook censoring The Post’s Hunter Biden laptop stories was bad?

How about 6 million votes shifted to Joe Biden by Google in the 2020 election by manipulating what we read and see online?

https://www.thefp.com/p/judges-ruin-high-school-debate-tournaments

At national tournaments, judges are making their stances clear: students who argue ‘capitalism can reduce poverty’ or ‘Israel has a right to defend itself’ will lose—no questions asked.
Members of the Walter Johnson High School debate team in Bethesda, Maryland, take part in an American tradition in 2005. (Nikki Kahn via Getty Images)

My four years on a high school debate team in Broward County, Florida, taught me to challenge ideas, question assumptions, and think outside the box. It also helped me overcome a terrible childhood stutter. And I wasn’t half-bad: I placed ninth my first time at the National Speech & Debate Association (NSDA) nationals, sixth at the Harvard national, and was runner-up at the Emory national. 

After college, between 2017 and 2019, I coached a debate team at an underprivileged high school in Miami. There, I witnessed the pillars of high school debate start to crumble. Since then, the decline has continued, from a competition that rewards evidence and reasoning to one that punishes students for what they say and how they say it.

First, some background. Imagine a high school sophomore on the debate team. She’s been given her topic about a month in advance, but she won’t know who her judge is until hours before her debate round. During that time squeeze—perhaps she’ll pace the halls as I did at the 2012 national tournament in Indianapolis—she’ll scroll on her phone to look up her judge’s name on Tabroom, a public database maintained by the NSDA. That’s where judges post “paradigms,” which explain what they look for during a debate. If a judge prefers competitors not “spread”—speak a mile a minute—debaters will moderate their pace. If a judge emphasizes “impacts”—the reasons why an argument matters—debaters adjust accordingly. 

But let’s say when the high school sophomore clicks Tabroom she sees that her judge is Lila Lavender, the 2019 national debate champion, whose paradigm reads, “Before anything else, including being a debate judge, I am a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist. . . . I cannot check the revolutionary proletarian science at the door when I’m judging. . . . I will no longer evaluate and thus never vote for rightest capitalist-imperialist positions/arguments. . . . Examples of arguments of this nature are as follows: fascism good, capitalism good, imperialist war good, neoliberalism good, defenses of US or otherwise bourgeois nationalism, Zionism or normalizing Israel, colonialism good, US white fascist policing good, etc.” 

https://amgreatness.com/2023/05/24/the-irs-opened-its-investigation-into-reporter-matt-taibbis-taxes-on-christmas-eve-the-same-day-he-dropped-twitter-files-9/

In a letter to IRS Director Daniel Werfel Wednesday, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) revealed that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) opened a case targeting independent journalist Matt Taibbi on Christmas Eve 2022, coinciding with Taibbi’s Twitter Files reporting on the intelligence community’s collusion with multiple tech platforms. The IRS, according to recently obtained documents, then produced a dossier on Taibbi that included information such as his voter registration records, whether he possessed a hunting or fishing license, and whether he had a concealed weapons permit.

The “case” has since been resolved, and the documents confirm that not only did Taibbi not owe the IRS any back taxes, the IRS owed him a “substantial refund.”

The House Judiciary Committee has been investigating the circumstances surrounding the IRS’s visit to Taibbi’s house on March 9, 2023, the same day he testified before the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.

The IRS on May 6 produced some documents responsive to the Committee’s March 27 request for information regarding an IRS agent’s suspiciously timed visit to Taibbi’s home.  These documents “raise more questions than they answer,” Jordan wrote in his letter to Werfel.

The IRS asserted to the Committee that it sent a letter to Mr. Taibbi on October 24, 2019—nine days after Mr. Taibbi filed his 2018 tax return—asking Mr. Taibbi to verify his return because it met identity theft criteria and could not be processed until he confirmed. The IRS alleged that it sent a second letter to Mr. Taibbi on March 23, 2020. However, according to Mr. Taibbi, neither he nor his accountant received either of these letters or any other notification that there was an issue with his 2018 tax return—that is, until the IRS conducted a field visit at Mr. Taibbi’s home three years later. The IRS also failed to produce these purported letters to the Committee.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/05/24/the-left-has-pushed-the-envelope/

The Left is waging a full-fledged cultural revolution against traditional America. And the Maoist results are often as absurd as they are terrifying.

Special-counsel John Durham just issued his final report on wrongdoing within the FBI, CIA, and the Department of Justice. 

The summary confirms that our premier investigatory and intelligence agencies interfered in the 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns. 

Directors and high-ranking FBI officials lied under oath. They misled Congress. They altered court documents and deceived federal judges. 

The FBI hired a foreign national to gather dirt on Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign—while he was being paid by the rival Hillary Clinton campaign.

The FBI contracted Twitter to suppress news stories. It kept the Hunter Biden laptop under wraps, even as former intelligence officials flat out lied it was likely “Russian disinformation.” That was a blatant effort to aid the 2020 Biden campaign.

The IRS just conceded whistleblowers were correct and the agency fired its entire multiyear audit team responsible for investigating Hunter Biden’s purported tax irregularities. 

The agency claimed it was ordered to do so by the Department of Justice, headed by Biden’s appointee Merrick Garland.

California is facing a crushing $32 billion deficit. Yet it flirts with an $800 billion-dollar “reparations” payout to the state’s black residents. 

No one has any idea where the money for that would come from. No one can define who would qualify. No one can explain why a state that never allowed slavery eight generations ago now owes selected Californians billions of dollars it does not have. 

One of the reparations board leaders asserts blacks might be willing to accept an “installment” plan of payments.

The NAACP just issued a “travel alert” advising blacks not to visit Florida. The announcement was timed to draw negative attention to conservative Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ announcement of a presidential bid. 

Chicago, Baltimore, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, and Indianapolis—all outside Florida—have the highest black murder rates in the nation. 

Florida in contrast, with a black population of 3.3 million, has the second largest number of black businesses in the nation. The chairman of the NAACP’s board of directors is himself a Florida resident! 

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/05/what_to_do_and_why_it_matters.html

Among the sharp-witted reader comments that come my way, some clonk me on the head with reasonable gripes that take a couple of forms: (1) sure, Shurk, the country is a mess, but what precisely are we going to do about it?  Or more despondently: (2) Given how awful everything is, how could anything we do possibly matter?

I would like to address the second question first by stating emphatically: what you do matters tremendously.  Your efforts influence others in ways you may never know.

As but a single illustration of this truth, consider this message from a young woman that was reposted to a comment thread at The Conservative Treehouse:

My heart goes out to the men and women who have been awake for years if not decades.  I cannot imagine the frustration and hopelessness you must have felt when you were literally watching the world burn with no one to talk to.  We’re here now and we are awake.  Sorry we’re late.

If those fifty words don’t give you a bit of a jolt, check yourself for a pulse.  The moment we stop believing that our actions can make a difference in this world is the moment we thank our enemies for having dug the six-foot hole up ahead.  When we refuse to surrender and force our enemies to keep digging, then the only question that matters is this: who will get tired first?  

Even when you feel alone, there are people watching and wondering whether you will hold the line.  Some of those people are even carrying shovels.  But over time, your resilience changes minds.  Diggers throw down their tools to join sides with the people who refuse to go away.  It is an enduring certainty that all movements for great change begin with a smattering of strong-willed truth-tellers who seed the ground with inspiration before a harvest of raw courage sweeps the land.  Nobody can keep you from being that seed.  Perseverance is its own reward.