RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/3961719-europe-backs-off-climate-push-as-voters-rebel-will-biden-take-note/

Europe is beginning to back off its aggressive carbon-zero policies. Why? Because consumers are balking. European Union administrators have gone too far, too fast, and the citizens of France, Germany and the Netherlands, among others, have had enough.

There is a lesson here for Joe Biden. Unfortunately, he and his White House climate zealots are unlikely to learn from what is going on across the Atlantic.

Ironically, it is the French Green Party that most recently tried to block plans pushed by the European Parliament to put a carbon tax on fuel used in heating and transport. Its members fear that the measure will reignite the protests of the Gilets Jaunes, the yellow vest group that emerged overnight to oppose a proposed carbon tax on diesel fuel and whose protests all but shut down France. It is not that the Greens have gotten realistic about the need for oil and gas as a bridge fuel, or have suddenly recognized the economic risks of betting on unreliable renewable fuels; rather, they worry that, as one legislator put it, “in a few years’ time, people will hate climate policies. People will go to the far-right parties.”

The proposal to force businesses to buy emissions allowances on fuel and heating would increase household costs by an estimated 50 percent — too much to be politically acceptable. Nonetheless, the EU Parliament approved the measure, which will not go into effect until 2027 and could be postponed if energy prices increase.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/04/23/do-we-even-know-we-are-all-socialists-now/

Sometimes when you are in the midst of a revolution, you do not even know it. 

I doubt all the Germans who voted in National Socialism quite foresaw what quickly was to come. Those who overthrew the Bourbons or the Romanoffs had no real idea that they had sown the wind and were soon to reap the Jacobin and Bolshevik whirlwind. 

Socialism With a Whimper

So it is with our “woke”—a euphemism for the socialist revolution we are in and do not fully appreciate or even understand.

Socialism is variously defined. The Merriam-Webster dictionary emphasizes the role of the state in near-communist terms: “Any of various egalitarian economic and political theories or movements advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods.”

The Cambridge Dictionary more accurately notes that socialism is “the set of beliefs that states that all people are equal and should share equally in a country’s money, or the political systems based on these beliefs.”

The latter definition perhaps best sums up much of the operative ideology of the new Democratic Party, the Biden Administration, and its subordinates, both elected and administrative. 

But perhaps socialism in America 2023 is even better described as something like “the doctrine of enforced ‘equity’ by government redistribution of money and power from one ‘oppressive’ group to another ‘oppressed,’ with the caveat that the elite redistributors have the right to supersede the law based on their own self-professed superior morality, and the assurance that they will never be subject to the baleful consequences of their own unnatural ideology.”

We have been drifting into such a socialist system for decades, but it was accelerated by the eight years of the Obama Administration and has arrived at near fruition with the Biden Administration. Note first that the more socialist we become, the greater the resistance grows, and the more desperate and cruel the socialists become to force down the throats of the public something they otherwise would vomit up.

Under the woke socialist model there are no longer any absolutes, laws, or customs. We are left instead with mere constructs deemed illegitimate and arbitrary, in need of systematic dismantling in the interest of the proverbial people. 

Such redistributionist, compensatory and reparative efforts to make us equal on the backside have in common a war against all meritocracy and indeed any accomplishment deemed singular and beyond the abilities of the masses. 

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/nyc-mayor-eric-adams-says-migrant-crisis-under-biden-administration-has-destroyed-city?intcmp=tw_fnc

Democrat New York City Mayor Eric Adams said Friday the migrant crisis the country is facing under the Biden administration has “destroyed” his city.

Adams made the comments during a panel discussion with the African American Mayors Association in Washington, D.C.

“[The] city is being destroyed by the migrant crisis,” Adams said during the discussion. 

Adams even appeared to take a hit at politicians from his own city, suggesting they aren’t doing much to fix the issue at hand.

“None of my folks came to Washington, D.C., to fight for the resources, that’s going to undermine every agency in our city,” Adams said.

Adams made similar comments Wednesday, when he said that the “national government has turned its back on New York City,” adding that “every service in this city is going to be impacted by the asylum seeker crisis.”

In a memo from the New York City Office of Management, reported by the New York Post, the city will spend an estimated $4.2 billion on costs related to migrants and asylum seekers that would be spent through June 30, 2023, and the end of fiscal year 2024.

According to the internal city memo, Democratic New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s plan would reimburse the city for up to $1 billion in migrant aid, which only covers 29% of expected shelter costs.

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/3963743-antony-blinken-and-the-made-men-of-the-biden-administration/

Secretary of State Antony Blinken would really, really prefer to talk about grain in Ukraine this week. But many people are less interested in what Blinken is doing as secretary of state than in what he did to become secretary of state. 

This week, Blinken was implicated in a political coverup that could well have made the difference in the 2020 election. According to the sworn testimony of former acting CIA Director Michael Morrell, Blinken – then a high-ranking Biden campaign official – was “the impetus” of the false claim that the Hunter Biden laptop story was really Russian disinformation. Morrell then organized dozens of ex-national security officials to sign the letter claiming that the Hunter laptop story had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

Morrell further admitted that the Biden campaign “helped to strategize about the public release of the statement.”

Finally, he admitted that one of his goals was not just to warn about Russian influence but “to help then-Vice President Biden in the debate and to assist him in winning the election.”

Help it did. Biden claimed in a presidential debate that the laptop story was “garbage” and part of a “Russian plan.” Biden used the letter to say “nobody believes” that the laptop is real.

In reality, the letter was part of a political plan with the direct involvement of his campaign, but Biden never revealed their involvement. Indeed, over years of controversy surrounding this debunked letter, no one in the Biden campaign or White House (including Blinken) revealed their involvement.

Of course, the letter was all the media needed. Discussion of the laptop was blocked on social media, and virtually every major media outlet dismissed the story before the election. 

That was also all Biden needed to win a close election. The allegations that the Biden family had cashed in millions through influence peddling could have made the difference. It never happened, in part because of Blinken’s work. 

Once in power, Blinken was given one of the top Cabinet positions. He was now one of the “made” men of the administration.

He was not alone. The 2016 election was marred by false allegations of Russian collusion with the Trump campaign. Unlike the influence peddling allegations made against Biden, the media ran with those stories for years. It later turned out that the funding and distribution of the infamous Steele dossier originated with the Clinton campaign. The campaign, however, reportedly lied in denying any such funding until after the election. It was later sanctioned for hiding the funding as legal expenses.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/joe-biden-and-the-51-spies-of-2020-hunter-laptop-new-york-post-russia-disinformation-73072839?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Why is public trust in American institutions, including the press, in free fall? One reason is the revelation last week that the Biden for President campaign helped to organize the open letter that spread disinformation about Hunter Biden’s famous laptop computer on Oct. 19, 2020.

The House Judiciary and Intelligence committees released portions of a deposition transcript exposing the origins of the statement from 51 former U.S. spies declaring that Hunter’s laptop had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” The admission came from Mike Morell, former deputy CIA director under Barack Obama. The letter served its political purpose of giving the media and Joe Biden the opening to dismiss the New York Post’s laptop scoop as Russian disinformation. (The letter and the names of the 51 signers can be read nearby.)

It turns out the Biden campaign was behind the letter. Mr. Morell told Congress under oath that he received a phone call from Antony Blinken on Oct. 17, 2020—three days after the Post published emails from Hunter’s laptop. Mr. Blinken was then a senior adviser to the campaign and is now secretary of State.

According to a letter the House committees sent to Mr. Blinken last week, Mr. Morell said the call was “couched as simply gathering Morell’s reaction to the Post story,” yet it “set in motion the events that led to the issuance of the public statement.”

Committee question to Mr. Morell: “Prior to [Mr. Blinken’s] call, you—you did not have any intent to write this statement?”

Mr. Morell: “I did not.”

The letter says Mr. Morell also “explained that the Biden campaign helped to strategize about the public release of the statement.” Mr. Morell says he then contacted an aide to former CIA director John Brennan to say “the Biden campaign wanted the statement to go to a particular reporter at the Washington Post first and that he should send the statement to the campaign when he sent the letter to the reporter.”

https://amgreatness.com/2023/04/22/the-garland-blinken-and-morell-morass/

Doubtless your mother used to tell you to count your blessings. It was good advice. Your situation may be bad. In the case of the United States, things indisputably are bad, and worsening. You know that. But look on the bright side. Merrick Garland, the first American Gothic attorney general of the United States, is a partisan horror show, withholding real protection from Supreme Court justices who are threatened by violent criminals even as he stigmatizes as “domestic terrorists” parents who criticize their local school boards and orders the FBI to conduct dawn raids on critics of the regime. He is a horrible man and a dangerous partisan hack, the very instantiation of the two-tier application of the law that has made such a mockery of justice during Biden’s tenure. 

But look on the bright side. Garland will soon be gone. And remember, he almost made it to the Supreme Court. Obama nominated him in the waning days of his administration. But Donald Trump had other ideas and—let’s give credit where credit is due—Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) made sure that Garland’s nomination got lost when Republicans held the majority. I am no fan of McConnell’s, but I try to remember to say a little prayer for him whenever I list my intentions. By scotching Garland’s ascension to the Court, McConnell did the country a huge favor. 

I say Garland will “soon” be gone. Most of my readers will assume I mean on or about January 20, 2025, when the next Republican president assumes office. 

It might take that long. But recent developments have me wondering whether he might make his congé even earlier.

A few days ago, it was reported that an unnamed, senior IRS special agent was seeking whistle-blower status in connection with the ongoing investigation of First Son Hunter Biden, who has serious tax problems. 

According to a letter from the agent’s lawyer to several House and Senate committees, the agent laid out multiple examples of “preferential treatment and politics improperly infecting decisions and protocols that would normally be followed by career law enforcement professionals in similar circumstances if the subject [i.e., Hunter Biden] were not politically connected.” The agent’s allegations also “contradict sworn testimony to Congress by a senior political appointee” and “involve failure to mitigate clear conflicts of interest in the ultimate disposition of the case” against Hunter Biden.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/04/getting_off_the_roller_coaster_to_bondage.html

Life right now feels like that moment when your roller coaster car begins slowing down near a terrifying peak, and your line of sight finally captures the precipitous plunge lying ahead.  Americans know that what happens next won’t be enjoyable except in that perverse way when abject terror floods the body with adrenaline.  Majorities or near-majorities expect imminent economic disaster, global war against nuclear-armed foes, and civil war here at home.  If that’s “progress,” then it’s long past time to turn the country around.  Yet that’s the thing with roller coaster rides: even if we hit the brakes now before cresting the summit, our downward acceleration is guaranteed — in one direction or another.

It’s not as if the ruling class’s “cult of expertise” provides any comfort.  We have a president who long ago lost his marbles, a vice president who succeeded in the political profession by excelling in the oldest one, a secretary of defense committed to promoting men in dresses, a health bureaucracy pumping citizens full of experimental drugs, a Treasury Department endlessly printing money, a Commerce Department prioritizing inflation-inducing “green” windmills over real economic growth, a homeland security chief dedicated to keeping the nation insecure, and a national police force that treats half the country as “domestic enemies.”  It’s almost as if whoever installed these yahoos into the highest positions of authority wanted obvious “fall guys” for when everything, well, falls down.

The Gateway Pundit recently ran an article reminding readers of an ominous analysis from a private intelligence outfit predicting a seventy-percent decline in America’s population by 2025.  That Deagel Corporation forecast released less than a decade ago shocked a lot of people at the time, but in an age when Farmer Gates and Doom Fauci continue to promise incoming pandemics worse than COVID, the World Economic Forum’s human sacrifice cult insists on widespread energy poverty and famine, and U.S.-NATO plays Russian roulette for fun and profit, apocalyptic population drops no longer seem so unimaginable from the top of this globalist roller coaster.  (Morbid side question: If Deagel’s devastating prophecy proves right, will climate cultists still insist that only global government and micromanaged markets can save the world from destruction?  Arg, of course they will; even after killing off 95% of the planet, A.I. clones of Klaus Schwab, George Soros, and Barack Obama will still be blaming the remaining 5% for “hate” crimes, global warming, and “white supremacy.”  Hustlers can’t ever give up the con.)

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/04/communism_is_libertys_mortal_enemy.html

In a December 26, 1955 article in Time magazine, George Meany of the AFL-CIO warned Americans that

[t]oo many in the free world fail to see the real nature of Communism as the mortal foe of everything that we hold dear, of every moral and spiritual value. Too many are still prisoners of the illusion that Communism is, historically speaking, a progressive system  [or] … extreme liberalism temporarily making bad mistakes. Actually, Communism … is an anti-social system in which there are embedded some of the worst features of savagery, slavery, feudalism and life-sapping exploitation manifested in the industrial revolution of early-day capitalism.

Meany forcefully asserted that

[t]oo many in the free world seem to have lost their capacity for moral indignation against the most brutal inhumanities when they are perpetrated by Communists. It is painful, but we must face the cruel facts of life. It is disturbing to me that many people in our country who call themselves liberals … never find the time to utter a word of condemnation against the Communist imperialist destruction of the national independence and democratic rights of hundreds of millions of people in Europe and Asia.

It was unfathomable to Meany that liberals could not perceive that “communism is the deadliest enemy of liberalism.”

With great prescience, Meany recognized that “[t]he conflict between Communism and freedom is the problem of our time.  It overshadows all other problems.  This conflict mirrors our age, its toils, its tensions, its troubles and its tasks.  On the outcome of this conflict depends the future of all mankind. I pray that … we of the free world can muster the moral courage and total strength to preserve peace and promote the freedom of the men and women of every continent, color and creed.”

In January of 1956, Meany took aim at the American business community when he explained that “[s]omehow or other, many in our American business community are not sufficiently alert to the danger of world Communism[.]”  Meany urged American business “not to let the prospect of monetary profits blur your vision.  Know your enemy.  Don’t help him.”

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/american-crisis-walter-russell-mead-via-meadia

EXCERPT:

We are also an American society. That is, we share characteristics with other countries in the Americas like Mexico and Brazil that set the countries of our hemisphere apart from countries in Europe, Asia, and Africa. Like many other American countries, the United States has more ethnic, cultural, social, and religious diversity than most European countries. The turbulent history of the hemisphere has left its mark on many American societies, where levels of crime, inequality, and violence are extraordinarily high by world standards. At the same time, our cultural roots are more Anglo and Protestant than most of our fellow American states, giving us much in common with countries like Australia, New Zealand, the U.K., and of course Canada. As is the case throughout the Western Hemisphere, our intellectual classes and social elites have historically looked to Europe for aesthetic and intellectual values, while much of our population has had little knowledge of or interest in European history and culture. Serial waves of immigration, the latest and largest of which is taking place now, have reshaped American politics and culture, while leaving many of the essential elements of the national character largely unchanged.

Most of the time, however, our national conversation fails to do justice to the rich complexity of our national life. There are some outstanding exceptions both on the left and the right of American political discourse, but the quality of too much of our national conversation, mediated as it often is by cable news and social media, is too superficial, too one-sided, and too polarized to address the real issues in American life. That would be dangerous enough in ordinary times, but we live in demanding times. The disruptive economic and social consequences of the information revolution combine with the decadence and decay of the midcentury American model of regulated industrial democracy to plunge American society into a maelstrom of interconnected economic, social, racial, political, cultural, and ideological crises.

Between the domestic upheavals in American society, the international turmoil at a time of renewed great power competition, and global threats ranging from nuclear war to climate change, many Americans feel angry, frustrated, and afraid. To make matters worse, America’s leadership class has lost its way, and too many of the politicians, intellectuals, artists, educators, and religious leaders who ought to be pointing the way forward are locked into stale ideologies and failed institutional models, lacking the vision required to move up to the next stage of American life.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/vivek-ramaswamy-files-lawsuit-against-world-economic-forum_5209770.html?utm_source=partner&utm_campaign=TheLibertyDaily

Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy is suing the World Economic Forum (WEF) for affiliating him as one of its “Young Global Leaders,” despite rejecting the request and repeatedly asking to be removed from its list of members.

“I fundamentally disagree with the WEF agenda,” Ramaswamy said in a post on Twitter Tuesday. “I’ve been one of the biggest crusaders in our country against it. They named me a ‘young global leader’ when I explicitly said no. Now it’s time to hold them accountable for it.”

Ramaswamy argued that the organization of global elites also listed other young and successful business leaders on the forum without their consent.

In a poll initiated by the 37-year-old businessman-turned-politician, he asked his 456,000 followers to vote on whether they think he should sue the WEF, with over 29,000 Twitter users responding to it. The result showed a whopping 90 percent in favor of filing a lawsuit against the organization, which is headquartered in Geneva.

In a statement on Wednesday, Ramaswamy formally announced that he’s filing a lawsuit against the WEF, saying it’s time to hold the organization accountable “for creating the false illusion of affiliation” in order to undermine its adversaries.

“Our Founding Fathers fought the American Revolution to declare independence from the Old World monarchy,” Ramaswamy said. “That old monster now rears its head again in the form of WEF’s agendas including ‘stakeholder capitalism’ and the ‘Great Reset.’ That’s why I’ve been one of the most vocal crusaders in America against WEF.”

According to the New York Post, citing the lawsuit, Ramaswamy filed it in a court in Cincinnati, Ohio, on Wednesday and is seeking only nominal damages of $2,500.

The lawsuit, per the Post, reads: “The WEF seemingly exploited this false and manufactured affiliation with Mr. Ramaswamy to undermine his credibility as a critic of the World Economic Forum and its objectives.”

“This is an organization that does a lot of wrongs and I’ve opposed it publicly and believe it should be held accountable,” Ramaswamy told the paper. “The WEF has a radical worldview that rejects the principles America was founded on. I’m not interested in being a ‘global citizen.’ I’m an American.”

Ramaswamy, an entrepreneur who founded and leads biopharmaceutical company Roivant Sciences, appeared on the WEF’s 2021 list of Young Global Leaders (YGL) before his name was pulled from the website, an archived version shows.