RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/columns/victor-davis-hanson/2022/12/08/does-trump-really-want-to-be-president-again-n1651792

Team Trump has sometimes compared former President Donald Trump’s current quest for a non-sequential second term to two-term President Grover Cleveland’s similar three election bids.

Cleveland remains our only elected president (1884) to have lost a reelection bid (1888) — in a disputed vote — only to be reelected four years later in 1892.

Yet Trump seems determined instead to follow a different, and bullheaded, Teddy Roosevelt model.

Roosevelt left the presidency in 1908, sat out four years, and then lost a reelection bid in 1912, split and alienated the Republican Party, and ensured the election of the progressive Woodrow Wilson.

President Joe Biden’s first “corrective” two years have been an utter disaster.

Biden birthed hyperinflation. He destroyed a secure border and Trump’s energy self-sufficiency. Crime is now out of control. The United States was humiliated abroad in Afghanistan. Rising interest rates will soon spark a recession.

After promising to unite the country, Biden smeared half the voting population as “un-American” and “semi-fascist.”

In addition, almost all of Trump’s prior complaints, predictions, and assertions that the media dismissed as conspiratorial, or crackpot have proven eerily prescient.

Hunter Biden’s laptop was all too authentic.

The FBI was compromised and acted as an agent of the Democratic Party. Anthony Fauci proved a partisan.

Russian collusion was an utter hoax. It was engineered by Hillary Clinton, the Democratic National Committee, and the FBI.

The Wuhan lab did likely birth the engineered COVID virus. That possibility was covered up by the media and public health establishments.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/12/a_call_to_the_good_people_of_maga_to_denounce_the_lefts_antitrump_slanders.html

For the past ten days or so, Donald J. Trump, has been falsely vilified as a White supremacist who is comfortable in the company of anti-Semites, and attacked for his “calls” to abolish or “terminate” the Constitution (despite having never said such a thing).

History, I believe, will note that the more preposterous the false accusation against Donald J. Trump, the quicker the stirred-up crowd will toss reason aside and follow the persons spewing anti-Trump slander.

So what else is new? These slurs and more have been hurled at Mr. Trump since he announced his first candidacy for president, some seven-and-a-half years ago.

Sadly, as Machiavelli pointed out in Chapter 6 of Il Principe, the logical supporters of a political reformer will be slow to defend the leader against attack from the establishment. This observation on human nature remains trenchant, after nearly 500 years since Machiavelli put his words to paper, as indicated by the reluctance of the logical allies of Donald J. Trump to stand with him against demagogic assault from the Deep State intent on crushing the MAGA (common good) movement — this apathetic attitude resulted in the Mueller investigation, and two phony impeachments, one straddling his term in office and his leave-taking.

And the reluctance to defend our best president since Reagan continues. Imagine how good the years from 2021 to 2025 would have been had MAGA populists stood shoulder to shoulder with our MAGA president who revived the populist spirit expressed by Madison in the first half of Federalist Paper No. 57.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/ignoring-lessons-learned-at-pearl-harbor/

Dec. 7, 2022 — Eighty-one years ago today, Commander Mitsuo Fuchida was preparing to lead an airborne strike force of 49 “Kate” bombers, 40 torpedo bombers, 51 “Val” dive-bombers and 43 “Zeke” fighters on the first wave of an assault on Pearl Harbor. At 0854 that terrible Sunday morning, a second wave of 167 aircraft added to the devastation. When the surprise attack was over, 3,581 Americans were dead or wounded; the largest naval anchorage in the Pacific was littered with sunken and burning U.S. warships; the best dry-dock and ship repair facilities west of California were in shambles, and less than 25% of U.S. military aircraft based in Hawaii were still operational.

The Japanese surprise attack was but the first blow in a cascade of disasters. The following day, as Imperial troops invaded the Philippines, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt proclaimed Dec. 7, 1941, to be “a date which will live in infamy,” and Congress declared war on Japan. Three days later, on Dec. 11, fascist Italy and Nazi Germany declared war on the U.S. in support of their Axis partner in Tokyo. By then, nearly half a million young Americans had already visited military recruiting stations volunteering to fight, and the phrase “Remember Pearl Harbor” was a watchword. When the conflagration finally ended in Tokyo Bay on Sept. 2, 1945, more than 16 million men and women had served in the U.S. armed forces.

Each year we praise the courage and resolve of the Americans who were in Hawaii that terrible day. Yet, few now acknowledge massive intelligence failures and lack of “situational awareness” in Washington that allowed such a horrific surprise attack to occur. Nor do they mention that America’s poor preparations for war resulted in the loss of every engagement with the Japanese from Dec. 7, 1941, until the battle of Midway on June 4, 1942.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/12/06/the-tyranny-of-the-minority/

In the Federalist, James Madison famously warned against the “tyranny of the majority,” but it is unlikely he could have envisioned what we face today. Twenty-first-century America is dissolving before our eyes, as a tyrannical coalition of minorities steals our heritage and sovereignty. Not ethnic minorities—their American bequest is being stolen right alongside that of America’s shrinking white majority. Nobody is exempt, and everyone should unite to resist.

“Minorities” in this context refers to the elite vanguard of what Californian political writer Joel Kotkin has called the “Upstairs-Downstairs Coalition,” a voting bloc, he says, “that brings together the most destitute with the most privileged parts of our society.”

At the top of the top are a few thousand of the super-rich. At the bottom are a few thousand hardened fanatics, many of them professionals. These two super-minorities, working in tandem, currently control the destiny of America. Expertly manipulating the voters in the upstairs-downstairs coalition, they’re actively destroying everything we love and everything we need.

The minority occupying the top position in the upstairs-downstairs coalition are the plutocrats who run America. A 2017 analysis identified the top 0.01 percent (1 in 10,000 Americans) to have an average annual income of over $30 million. A 2019 Stanford study found the top 0.1 percent (1 in 1,000 Americans) control a total net worth equal to the entire cumulative net worth of the bottom 90 percent of Americans. At the pinnacle, however, are America’s billionaires, a scant 735 of them at last count.

This is a vanishingly small minority of people, roughly one in every half-million Americans. But their influence is decisive. Every year, these billionaires and the corporations they control disburse billions—often getting tax deductions for doing so—to maintain standing armies of activist groups that conduct lawfare, fund civil disobedience, run massive propaganda campaigns, engage in targeted “get-out-the-vote” activities, prop up financially dependent media properties, and produce “expert” studies with paid-for ideas.

The minorities at both ends of this up-down coalition are groups identifiable not by their ethnicity or ideology, but by their behavior. In every case, they constitute a minute fraction of the population, but in the name of compassion, equity, diversity, and environmentalism they are undermining and, unless stopped, will destroy America.

The Weaponization of Mental Illness

https://quillette.com/2022/12/06/brute-physical-facts-and-social-construction/

According to the former Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, the most dangerous person in the world is Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers, and it’s not even a close call. “If you ask, ‘who’s the most likely to take this Republic down?’ It would be the teachers’ unions, and the filth that they are teaching our kids,” he told Semafor in a recent interview. This statement is startling given that Pompeo is a graduate of Harvard Law and West Point, until you realize that he is probably positioning himself for a 2024 Republican presidential run, where the primary electability criterion is one’s stand on certain cultural issues.

Pompeo and other Republican hopefuls are addressing the Republican base, like my friends and neighbors in Florida. While some of us may struggle to understand their hyperbolic invective, my MAGA neighbors understand it, and it resonates with their own concerns. They have impassioned and unalterable beliefs about many social/cultural issues such as gender, race, territoriality, abortion, and equality. They are certain that “men are men and women are women”; that race is a real phenomenon; that equality is not inevitable; that life begins at conception, and that America’s borders must be defended from foreigners.

These beliefs are intuitively plausible, often embedded in instinctual biases, and culturally reinforced. They not only form the bedrock of their adherents’ own social order, they are also attributed to the Founding Fathers and implicated in the success of Pax Americana. To question these beliefs and cultural norms is to threaten America and their way of life. In this context—and in the absence of a credible external threat—it is not surprising that the greatest threat to the Republic is perceived to be the university-educated “liberal progressives” who question and disavow these traditional norms and try to replace them with their own.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/12/07/civil-disobedience-starts-here/

As COVID-19 cases increase, the Los Angeles County public health director is threatening – yes, that’s the right word – another indoor mask mandate. It’s a hob-nailed boot on the neck. Angelenos need to resist, for themselves and the rest of the country.

“As COVID cases and other viruses continue to rise, the Southland is inching closer to a mask mandate,” the Los Angeles CBS affiliate reported Sunday. Barbara Ferrer, the county director of public health, who is not a physician, not a nurse, not even a paper shuffler at a doctor’s office, but a social welfarist, said last week that “masking” is one of several “commonsense mitigation strategies” that “remains a very sensible approach.”

Don’t mistake mask mandates as harmless cases of officials acting in an abundance of caution or just covering their backsides, as government always does. Mask mandates are open displays of outright meanness, a manifestation of authoritarian urges to control others. There is no data, no reputable research that tells us mask mandates works.

In fact, the data tells the opposite. Yet officials such as Ferrer and the Sacramento schools chamberlains are insisting that masks must go back on. It’s no coincidence that the madness is starting in a state where personal freedoms are routinely tread upon as if they’re gifts that can be handed down by the government rather than God-given.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-clarification-from-the-capitol-riot-committee-11670362454?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

Rep. Bennie Thompson, (D., Miss.), who defied the U.S. Constitution in 2005 by seeking to block certification of the re-election of President George W. Bush, is back in the news. No, Mr. Thompson is not denying legitimate election results again. But his Tuesday comments appear to represent yet another affront to constitutional governance.

Luke Broadwater reports for the New York Times:

The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol will issue criminal referrals to the Justice Department based on its inquiry, the panel’s chairman said on Tuesday, but has made no decision on who it will recommend charging or what offenses it will cite.
Representative Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, the Democratic chairman of the committee, told reporters on Capitol Hill that the panel had agreed to take the step and would meet later Tuesday to discuss the specifics. But within moments, he and his staff rushed to clarify his statement, reflecting a debate that is still underway within the panel about whether to call for charges against former President Donald J. Trump and some of his top allies.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/12/05/obama-biden-government-in-exile-ran-hunter-laptop-suppression-operation/

They got the band back together—to the extent the original members ever broke up in the first place.

Recent disclosures by independent journalist Matt Taibbi confirmed what other reporters have been covering for the better part of two years: According to files obtained by Elon Musk, the new owner and CEO of Twitter, the social media platform protected Joe Biden and his family from a major and potentially election-altering scandal as millions of Americans were voting early for president in October 2020. Years of denials and dismissals related to Hunter Biden’s lucrative shakedown of hostile nations, including Russia and China, were set to explode just a few weeks before Election Day.

Big Tech—and the government—was ready. Immediately after the New York Post published damning material retrieved from Hunter Biden’s laptop contradicting Joe Biden’s longtime protestations that he had nothing to do with his son’s profiteering gigs, Twitter claimed the reporting was based on “hacked material” and in violation of the company’s terms of service. 

“Twitter took extraordinary steps to suppress the story, removing links and posting warnings that it may be ‘unsafe,’” Taibbi wrote in a lengthy tweet thread on Friday.

The Post’s Twitter account was frozen for two weeks; Twitter users were forbidden from sharing articles on the site. Kayleigh McEnany, Donald Trump’s press secretary at the time, was locked out of her account for sharing the Post’s story. Amid internal confusion as to the company’s shaky explanation for censoring the coverage of Biden’s laptop, Twitter’s general counsel defended the move. James Baker told employees that “caution was warranted” and claimed “some facts . . . indicate that the materials may have been hacked.”

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/paula-bolyard/2022/12/05/breaking-we-now-have-the-full-transcript-of-faucis-deposition-in-mos-social-media-collusion-case-n1651090

Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt and Louisiana AG Jeff Landry deposed Anthony Fauci last month in the states’ case accusing the Biden administration of “colluding with social media companies to censor speech” related to the Covid-19 pandemic. Today, they released the full transcript of that interview (you can read the entire document below).

“Today, Louisiana and Missouri are releasing the full transcript for the deposition of Dr. Anthony Fauci, which was taken on November 23rd, 2022. The deposition was taken as part of Louisiana and Missouri’s landmark lawsuit against the federal government and the Biden Administration for colluding with social media companies to censor speech,” said Landry in a press release. “Fauci’s recent deposition only confirmed what we already knew: federal bureaucrats in collusion with social media companies want to control not only what you think, but especially what you say. During no time in human history was this more obvious than during the COVID-19 crisis where social engineering tactics were used against the American public, not to limit your exposure to a virus, but to limit your exposure to information that did not fit within a government sanctioned narrative.”

“Missouri and Louisiana are leading the way in exposing how the federal government and the Biden Administration worked with social media to censor speech. In our deposition with Dr. Fauci, it became clear that when Dr. Fauci speaks, social media censors,” added Schmitt in his own press release. “I invite everyone to read the deposition transcript and see exactly how Dr. Fauci operates, and exactly how the COVID tyranny that ruined lives and destroyed businesses was born.”

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/elon-musks-twitter-files-demand-answers-from-the-government/

The “Twitter files” Elon Musk released to two journalists have produced a cloud of confusion. So far, we have not seen the files themselves, only what one journalist, Matt Taibbi, has reported about them.

The main findings reinforce what we have known all along: Twitter’s former management strongly favored Democrats and used its powerful platform to aid them. It was far more likely to suppress the speech of conservatives and Republicans than of progressives and Democrats. Twitter’s systematic bias went far beyond its most famous instance, when it killed the New York Post story on Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop. Freddy Gray makes these important points in his recent piece here at The Spectator.

Bias like this can harm free, open, and robust political discourse in a democracy, especially if the bias is pervasive and hidden. But before criticizing Twitter, it is important to understand how our First Amendment protects free speech and what its limits are. Its protections do not require every media source to be fair and balanced. Each one can be as partisan as it wishes. Moreover, private entities, whether they are individuals, corporations, or nonprofits, are free to say whatever they wish, so long as they don’t directly threaten others. (If they libel or defame someone, then of course they can be sued.) These aspects of free speech reinforce each other. They encourage many voices to be heard, perhaps on different platforms, so citizens can judge for themselves.

That means Twitter, under Musk today or under the previous management, is perfectly free to say whatever it likes as a corporation, and free to encourage or discourage different political viewpoints from its users. Newspapers, TV stations, and podcasts can do the same thing. So can Donald Trump’s social media platform, Truth Social. Trump doesn’t have to broadcast the views of Rachel Maddow, and MSNBC doesn’t have to broadcast his. These platforms are also free to take whatever advice and guidance they wish from other private entities. If the Democratic National Committee wants Twitter to plug certain stories and deemphasize others, they are free to collaborate — or refuse to do so.