RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2023/08/10/who-will-say-no-more-to-the-current-madness/

Britain slept in the 1930s as an inevitable war with Hitler loomed.

A lonely Winston Churchill had only a few courageous partners to oppose the appeasement and incompetence of his conservative colleague Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain.

One of the most stalwart truth-tellers was a now little remembered politico and public servant Leo Amery, a polymath and conservative member of Parliament.

Yet in two iconic moments of outrage against the Chamberlain government’s temporizing, Amery galvanized Britain and helped end the government’s disastrous policies.

In the hours after Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, there was real doubt whether Chamberlain would honor its treaty and declare war on Germany.

A Labour Party member, surrogate Arthur Greenwood, got up in the House of Commons to announce that he would be speaking for Labour on behalf of his ill party leader Clement Attlee.

Immediately Amery interrupted, shouting out, “Speak for England, Arthur!”

He was met with overwhelming applause and soon public acclamation.

After all, Amery was a political voice in the wilderness warning that neither his own party nor opposition Labour was speaking or acting for the real interest of the British people.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/08/evil_never_takes_a_holiday.html

Many good people whom I respect tell me that the Marxist left have already won and that there is no longer any point in fighting.  I disagree for many reasons, but I will list three: 

(1) History is simply saturated with pivotal moments that radically altered what otherwise appeared to be the course of destiny.  In fact, I would say that history is really written only when good men and women find their backs against the wall and realize that the only way to preserve their free will is to fight like hell and buck everything that stands against them.  Suffering has a tendency to focus the mind and strengthen resolve.  Character truly reveals itself only when it is tested.  I’ll take a spirited and courageous insurgency that knows why it is fighting over an army of automatons enfeebled by groupthink.

(2) When fighting evil, there are no half-measures.  There is no point when you kick back, light a cigarette, and say to yourself, “Dang, evil sure did get the best of me this time.”  Huh-uh.  You fight evil even if you find yourself hanging with fingertips from a cliff’s edge while the devil is smirking above and crushing your hand.  It doesn’t matter how compromised you feel; all you have to do is tell the devil to stick it where the sun don’t shine.  Your refusal to submit is your greatest weapon.  Others will find inspiration in your indefatigability and push ahead, too.  

(3) Even if you think things are irreversibly bad, apathy guarantees that they will get only worse.  There will be a time in the future when you are being forcefully herded onto a train car headed for who knows where, and you will think to yourself, “If only I had resisted earlier…”  Now ask yourself, “What would I be willing to do today to avoid that train car tomorrow?”  If fighting back is never going to get any easier, then that makes today the best day to begin kicking and screaming against what’s already barreling down the track.  Your future self will thank you.

I also disagree that it is too late to win.  There is a reason the permanent Deep State now resorts to sham trials, censorship, and political persecution: it no longer has the time to pretend to respect free speech or the rule of law.  A century of slow but steady marching toward a Marxist technocratic super-state has given way to overt public harassment, coercion, and easily recognizable propaganda.  The left’s deceptive veil has been lifted, and tyranny now has a face in all those politicians who openly support punishing dissent and constructing a modern-day Ministry of (dis)Information.  

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/victoria-taft/2023/08/09/scared-jurors-intimidation-reporter-andy-ngos-case-against-antifa-shows-how-desperately-lost-portland-is-n1717494

Journalist Andy Ngo was chased, beaten, and chased again when he burst into a downtown Portland, Ore., hotel in May 2021 to get away from his black-bloc-clad Antifa attackers. “They’re trying to kill me,” he told the understandably frightened hotel workers. It wasn’t the first time he’d been attacked by the notorious Portland terrorist gang. If Portland’s criminal justice system wouldn’t stop these guys, Ngo figured, he’d sue them for $1 million.

On Tuesday, a Portland jury decided that two key alleged Antifa conspirators whose cases went to trial were not civilly liable for Ngo’s injuries, both physical and otherwise. The trial was marred by intimidation tactics — not just from the attackers but from their attorney who declared to the unidentified jury members, “I am Antifa” and “I will remember each one of your faces.” We’re talking Godfather stuff here.

Before you dismiss this as “Hey, you signed up for this, Portland, you voted in these knuckleheads who gave Antifa a wide berth,” let’s consider what this case means.

I sat in a Multnomah County courtroom in the trial of another journalist who was beaten by Antifa members and who pulled a pistol to fend off a second attack in 2016. Not a shot was fired, the second attack was thwarted, and instead of prosecuting his attackers, woke politicians went after Mike Strickland for showing his gun. He went to jail. His attackers were never pursued. In fact, they were never identified in court or by any of the undercover cops that had infiltrated the protest crowd that day.

The cops didn’t bother to help Strickland, either. While in the courtroom at his trial, I was threatened by Antifa allies. I also later received death threats that the Portland Police dismissed as no big deal.

https://openthebooks.substack.com/p/anthony-fauci-defended-nih-culture?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Big-Pharma, Chinese and Russian companies, and nefarious characters from around the world all benefited by licensing tech developed at the National Institutes of Health and paid for by U.S. taxpayers.

Newly released NIH documents show conclusively that statements made during congressional hearings to U.S. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) and Rep. John Moolenaar (R-MI) by then-NIH leaders Anthony Fauci and Lawrence Tabak were misleading, if not outright false, regarding third-party royalties paid before, during, and after the pandemic.

Tabak, then-acting director of the National Institutes of Health, and Fauci, then-director of the National Institutes of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, both claimed before Congress that they could not release the names of the companies paying NIH third party royalties.

Last week, however, our OpenTheBooks lawsuit based on our Freedom of Information Act request caused NIH to release new documents.

The newly released documents reveal – for the first time – the names of companies that paid NIH scientists $325 million in third party royalties from 56,000 transactions between September 2009 and October 2020.

Our OpenTheBooks oversight reporting — which led to three congressional hearings during 2022 regarding NIH’s secret third party royalty payments — is available here for review.

Here are some key findings from the new disclosures:

In U.S. Senate hearings during 2022, Dr. Anthony Fauci refused to disclose the companies who licensed his “inventions” and paid his third-party royalties. Finally, now, we know the companies paying him. They are listed below.

Chinese government-owned pharmaceutical companies, controlled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), paid the National Institutes of Health (NIH) third-party royalties to license technologies developed on the U.S. taxpayer dime. One such company neighbors the Wuhan Institute of Virology, collaborates with the lab, and even paid a royalty to Douglas Lowy, a multiple term acting director at the National Cancer Institute, a sub-institute of NIH.

Russian animal vaccine maker – which was allegedly a front for a Soviet bio-weapons lab – licensed inventions and paid royalties to NIH for tech developed with taxpayer dollars.

Purdue Pharma – the makers of the highly addictive and frequently abused OxyContin (oxycodone) – licensed tech developed with public funds and paid royalties to NIH – even after the company pleaded guilty to federal crimes relating to opioids.

Long-serving former NIH director, Francis Collins, received third party royalties on his inventions from four companies that themselves received nearly $50 million in federal contracts and grants since 2008.

During the pandemic, the American people started to worry that Big Government was too close to Big Pharma. Now, because of our oversight investigation at OpenTheBooks.com, we know just how close they are: NIH spends billions on the industry and now we know the industry sends millions back to NIH and its scientists.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/08/10/welcome-to-bidens-grand-illusion-of-prosperity/

‘You know, if you let me write $200 billion worth of hot checks every year, I could give you an illusion of prosperity, too.”

That was then-Democratic Sen. Lloyd Bentsen back in 1988 arguing that the Reagan boom was a myth because it was bought and paid for with deficit spending, then running about $200 billion a year. 

What would Bentsen say today about an economy that – instead of blasting ahead at more than 4% a year at it was in 1988 – is barely eking out gains and appears headed to a downturn … despite the fact that President Joe Biden is writing $200 billion in hot checks every two months. 

We know what Biden and his legions of sycophants in the “independent” media would say. The economy is doing great thanks to “Bidenomics.”

“The economy is growing and we’re lowering costs for families. That’s Bidenomics at work,” Biden said after the latest GDP numbers came out, which showed the economy growing 2.4% in the second quarter of this year. “This progress wasn’t inevitable or accidental — it is Bidenomics in action, growing the economy from the middle out and bottom up, not the top down.”

One week later, Fitch downgraded the U.S. credit rating from AAA to AA+.

The lower rating, Fitch said, “reflects the expected fiscal deterioration over the next three years, a high and growing general government debt burden, and the erosion of governance relative to ‘AA’ and ‘AAA’-rated peers.”

Fiscal deterioration over the next three years and a high and growing debt burden? Is this “Bidenomics in action”?

Look at the numbers and you see why Fitch is worried.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/stephen-kruiser/2023/08/08/dems-science-denier-accusation-is-old-wrong-and-pathetic-n1717244

The Democrats have long fancied themselves to be the party of science. They also fancy themselves the party of youth and diversity but are currently championing an 80-year-old white guy for a second term as president of the United States.

What Democrats are known for, to those of us who don’t lap up their propaganda, is a chronic lack of self-awareness, about both themselves as people and their ideology. Pretty much everything that they believe to be true about Republicans and Democrats bears no resemblance to reality. They repeat the lies about themselves until those lies not only become true for them, but also become part of the Democratic origin story.

One of the most enduring myths that Democrats believe — especially here in the 21st century — is that they’re all elite intellectuals, while all Republicans and conservatives are knuckle-dragging rubes. Even when Republicans like Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, or Ron DeSantis present the kind of higher education bona fides that usually send them into a mindless orgiastic frenzy around one another, they find reasons to be dismissive. Mustn’t allow for the possibility of intellectuals from outside the unquestioning hive mind, after all.

Of all the lies that the Democrats tell themselves, the “party of science” nonsense ranks second only to “the government always knows best.”

We’ll get to how wrong they were about all things COVID in a moment. Even before that, Democrats had essentially abandoned biology which, I just checked, is still a science. According to them, human embryos aren’t really human, there are 42,000,000 genders, and now men can get pregnant. That’s not merely denying science, that’s rejecting it altogether.

https://thefederalist.com/2023/08/08/bidenomics-has-been-a-disaster/

The president helped create inflation, high energy prices, and stifling interest rates. Jobs? Not so much.

After 40 years of “trickle-down economics,” Joe Biden says, “Bidenomics is just another way of saying restoring the American Dream.”

It’s not often that a politician openly pledges to bring the country back to a time of crippling inflation, high energy prices, and stifling interest rates. But this president is doing his best to keep that promise.

Unsurprisingly, “Bidenomics” is failing to gain traction among voters. This has caused consternation in the media. One thing to remember, though, is that “Bidenomics” isn’t really a thing.  Unlike, say, “Reaganomics,” which helped bring about the largest expansion of the middle class in world history, the president does not subscribe to any coherent or tangible set of economic theories or principles. The White House defines its economic policy as being “rooted in the recognition that the best way to grow the economy is from the middle out and the bottom up,” which is just platitudinous gibberish.

“Bidenomics” encompass anything and everything that’s convenient for Democrats. And in this moment, it’s convenient for them to take credit for merely letting people go back to work. Biden, who once claimed that the Democrats $3.5 trillion “Build Back Better” plan cost “zero dollars,” isn’t exactly a math whiz. But when he says stuff like “13.4 million jobs have been added to our economy” under his watch, more than “any other president in a full 4-year term,” anyone with even a passing familiarity with the events of the years preceding 2023 knows it’s a lie of omission.

The notion that presidents “create” jobs is itself a fantasy. In this case, though, Biden supported efforts to shutter private businesses during the pandemic, basically closing down the entire economy, not only while running for president but after winning office. When Florida, and other states, attempted to ease some restrictions, President Biden told them to “get out of the way” so that people could “do the right thing.” The pressure exerted on states to “do the right thing” was immense.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-never-trump-prosecutor-threatens-free-speech/

The indictment of Donald Trump for speaking out against the results of the 2020 election, and in the words of the indictment, fomenting “a conspiracy to defraud the United States,” has been challenged by legal commentators from both political parties. These jurists consider the prosecutor’s “novel legal theories” dubious or even preposterous, not to mention unconstitutional. If successful, this politicization of the legal system that attacks one candidate for the presidency and benefits the other, carries with it a huge moral hazard.

Democrat legal scholar Jonathan Turley has identified this risk: “The hatred for Trump is so all-encompassing that legal experts on the political left have ignored the chilling implications of this indictment. This complaint is based largely on statements that are protected under the First Amendment. It would eviscerate free speech and could allow the government to arrest those who are accused of spreading disinformation in elections.”

This corruption of First Amendment law––one already judged unconstitutional in several Supreme Court decisions–– will further empower significantly the already growing threats to free speech. “Woke” Dems for decades have been weakening this foundation of every free government and society. But if Trump’s political enemies can treat the ex-president this way with impunity, then we all will be further down the road to tyranny.

Part of sketchy federal prosecutor Jack Smith’s shambolic reasoning is the charge that Trump “lied” about the integrity of the 2020 election. That Trump is a serial liar is a NeverTrump cliché, reflecting his enemies’ inability or indifference to distinguish rhetorical hyperbole, a feature of political speech since ancient Athens, from a willful lie. As Salena Zito memorably said, when Trump uses such exaggerations, “the press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.”

Moreover, how does Smith determine that Trump knew he was lying?  As Kimberley Strassel writes, “But how do you prove legally that Trump truly didn’t believe his false claims? And even if you can prove that Trump lied, how do you legally distinguish his falsehoods from the lies other political leaders have told over the years?”

As Strassel explains Smith’s argument, though Trump has a First Amendment right to lie, “Yet if that politician is advised by others that his comments are untruthful and nonetheless uses them to justify acts that undermine government ‘function,’ he is guilty of a conspiracy to defraud the country. Dishonest politicians who act on dubious legal claims? There aren’t enough prisons to hold them all.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-florida-trial-and-a-d-c-grand-jury-for-trump/

The elites may have to hold one of their show trials in Florida, but the grand jury had to be in D.C.

Judge Aileen Cannon on Monday asked the Justice Department to explain its use of an out-of-state grand jury in the Mar-a-Lago case.

While the Mar-a-Lago case is being handled out of her Fort Pierce, Fla., courtroom, much of the grand jury work ahead of the indictment was conducted through a Washington, D.C., grand jury.

A D.C. grand jury is an obvious rubber stamp for political prosecutors. A D.C. grand jury would indict a ham sandwich, as long as it was a Republican. That’s why the real show is in Washington D.C.

Going down to Florida is a bit inconvenient because it’s one of those provinces of the empire.

For many months, Justice Department prosecutors had questioned witnesses in the Florida case before a federal grand jury in Washington.

A Florida case and a D.C. grand jury. Why not just try all political cases in D.C.?

The easiest way to understand all this is to think of what’s located in Washington D.C. as the occupying force. Much like the British during the American Revolution, it’s the epicenter of the imperial regime that is out of touch with most of the country, but rules over it anyway. Colonials from the hinterlands sometimes visit and are impressed by the big grand buildings. When they come to work there as members of Congress, they’re either taught their manners by their betters until they join the elites or they wash out.

D.C. is the imperial city and they don’t like to venture too far from their base of power.

For many months, Justice Department prosecutors had questioned witnesses in the Florida case before a federal grand jury in Washington. The secret proceedings yielded much of the evidence at the crux of the case. But in May, the grand jury activity appeared to continue at a federal courthouse in Miami. Ultimately, prosecutors filed charges in a West Palm Beach courthouse — a courthouse in the same district as Miami and the area where Mar-a-Lago is located.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/bring-on-the-counterrevolution

America is trapped in the loop of 1968. The politics of that fateful year have set the patterns and bounds of our national life for decades.

It’s as though we have lived an endless recurrence: the Black Panther Party reappears as the Black Lives Matter movement; the Weather Underground pamphlets launder themselves into academic papers; the Marxist-Leninist guerrillas trade in their bandoliers and become managers of an elite-led revolution in manners and mores. The ideology, narrative, and aesthetics of the left-wing social movements of that earlier time, though now often degraded through cynicism and repetition, have maintained the position of a jealous hegemon.

The cultural revolution that began a half-century ago, now reflected in a deadening sequence of acronyms—CRT, DEI, ESG, and more—has increasingly become our new official morality. Many conservatives have made an uneasy peace with this transformation of values, even as the culture around them has, in many places, collapsed.

This attitude no longer suffices. It is time to break the loop of 1968. We need a counterrevolution.

This is the word that haunts the revolutionary mind. The French Revolution fell to the forces of Thermidor; the Revolution of 1848 fell to the empire of the bourgeoisie; the Bolshevik Revolution fell to the democratic-capitalists, the imperialist-backed juntas, and the forces of global capitalism. Marx himself viewed counterrevolution as an overwhelming threat. “Every important part of the revolutionary annals from 1848 to 1849 bears the heading: Defeat of the revolution!” he lamented.

The urgent task for the political Right today is to comprehend the dynamics of revolution and counterrevolution and to create a strategy for dislodging the New Left ideology of 1968, which has solidified control over the most fundamental structures of American society. The challenge must be met not solely in the realm of policy debate but on the deepest political and philosophical grounds.

Today’s counterrevolution is not one of class against class but takes place along a new axis between the citizen and an ideologically driven state. Its ultimate ambition is not to replace the new “universal class”—the heirs of the 1960s cultural revolution, who have worked to professionalize it and install it in elite institutions—or to capture the bureaucratic apparatus that the universal class currently controls; instead, it seeks to restore the nation’s founding principle of citizen rule over the state.