RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://nypost.com/2023/01/26/the-mike-pompeo-speech-on-chinas-influence-on-us-universities-that-mit-killed/

“Pompeo says that American schools that are “hooked on the CCP’s sugar must go into rehab.”Frankly I think a lot of institutions — including some of our financial institutions — should join them there. In the end it´s about whose side you are on. It would be good to know that American universities were on America’s side — for once.”

It’s always the way with political memoirs that everyone sifts them for the high-grade gossip. So it is with Mike Pompeo’s memoir, “Never Give an Inch” released this week. Media reports have understandably focused on the former CIA director and Secretary of State’s opinions on Donald Trump, John Bolton, Kim Jong-Un and a bunch of other folks.

But as is often the case, one of the biggest stories in the book has so far been overlooked.

When Pompeo was Secretary of State he took probably the most hawkish view any American official has yet taken towards the Communist Party of China. In a speech in October 2019, he told an audience of business-people (many of whom made money in China) that the Communist Party of China is “a Marxist-Leninist party focused on struggle and international domination.” He couldn’t be more correct. But something that happened afterwards proved his point.

As Pompeo relates it, he wanted to give a major speech on China and especially the way in which the CCP is distorting universities and other research institutes inside the United States. Not just by funding these institutions, and directing their research, but by trying to turn Chinese students into agents of the communist regime. It’s a crucial subject and was high time that an American official made such an intervention.

The speech was scheduled to take place at MIT, which had previously held an MIT-China Summit in Beijing sponsored by Chinese tech companies including ones that are now under sanctions for providing technology to crush human rights in China.

But shortly before the speech MIT said they couldn’t host the US Secretary of State after all. A strange move, no? Well according to Pompeo he picked up the phone and spoke with the president of MIT, Rafael Reif. And Reif claimed that there was no way that the speech could go ahead because of the risk of offending Chinese students. By MIT’s own data in 2021-22 a full 25% of international students at the university were from China.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/saraharnold/2023/01/26/more-than-half-of-democrats-question-bidens-mental-fitness-n2618805

President Joe Biden is facing a series of rough patches as he enters his third year in the Oval Office, sparking concern over his ability to govern the country from both sides of the political aisle. 

According to a Harvard/ Harris 2024 survey, six in ten respondents have doubts regarding Biden’s mental capabilities, with 65 percent believing that the 80-year-old is “too old” to run the country. 

Nearly a quarter of those who say Biden is too old, are Democrats, while 87 percent were Republicans and 67 percent were Independents.

The poll also found that 61 percent of Americans believe the country is heading in the wrong direction, while the majority, 56 percent, have an unfavorable view of Biden. 

Less than half of respondents believe that the president has failed on major issues such as immigration and the economy with 37 percent approving of how he has handled the crisis at the southern border, while 62 percent highly disapprove of his take on “fixing” the economy.

Meanwhile, in the wake of the bombshell revelations that multiple classified documents were found in Biden’s possession, American’s approval of the president slipped under the rocks even more.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/01/26/january-6-was-the-worst-incident-of-police-brutality-since-civil-rights-era/

One might be inclined to apply Hanlon’s razor—never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity—to the actions of law enforcement on January 6, 2021. One might even be inclined to replace “stupidity” with “incompetence” to explain why police behaved the way they did that afternoon.

But a growing body of evidence suggests neither stupidity nor incompetence can justify what now appears to be the worst incident of police brutality against political protesters since the civil rights era. After two years of watching cherry-picked video clips produced by the Department of Justice and the news media to depict Trump supporters as the violent aggressors on January 6, the public now has an opportunity to see what really happened thanks to police body camera footage released at trial.

It’s ugly—and clearly malicious.

As American Greatness has reported for nearly two years, members of the Capitol Police and D.C. Metropolitan Police Department were involved in egregious acts of excessive force during the Capitol protest. Some use of force, obviously, was necessary. But police officers initiated most of the confrontations with otherwise peaceful protesters lawfully exercising their First Amendment rights in the nation’s capital. 

Protesters by and large were not attempting to commit any crime and did not know the entire lawn surrounding the Capitol building had been declared off-limits. After all, police officials have since admitted that by the time people who attended Donald Trump’s speech arrived at the Capitol, signage and fencing indicating the campus was closed had been torn down.

The conclusion of Trump’s speech at around 1:10 p.m. coincided nearly to the minute with law enforcement’s first use of munitions on protesters assembled on the west side of the Capitol. Roughly 20 minutes earlier, a police barricade of metal racks on the far exterior of the grounds had been breached. But footage captured by the body camera of a D.C. Metro police officer showed that law enforcement had successfully pushed a growing crowd away from the building by 1:15 p.m.

Officer Daniel Thau, however, was on a mission. Sounding alternatively like a mad man or a bully, Thau desperately pleaded with other officers to give him munitions to use against the crowd despite a relatively controlled atmosphere outside. 

https://theleoterrell.com/florida-unemployment-rate-drops-to-2-5-as-red-states-economies-continue-to-outperform-blue-states/?utm_source=jeeng&utm_medium=email

On Friday, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis announced that his state’s unemployment rate dropped to 2.5 percent in December, far below the national average. The news follows the pattern of Republican-led states outperforming Democrat-led states in economically recovering from the pandemic. 

“Florida continues to outpace the nation and withstand negative headwinds due to federal policy,” DeSantis said. “I look forward to building off our success with record tax relief in the upcoming legislative session.”

As explained in a press release from DeSantis’ office, Florida’s unemployment rate in December was “2.5 percent, 0.1 percentage point lower than the previous month’s rate and 1.0 percentage point lower than the national rate of 3.5 percent.”

“Florida’s statewide unemployment rate has been lower than the national rate for 25 consecutive months since December 2020,” the press release continued. “Between December 2021 and December 2022, Florida’s labor force grew by 361,000, or 3.5 percent. This was faster than the national labor force growth rate of 1.6 percent over the year.”

“Between December 2021 and December 2022, total private sector employment grew by 425,800 jobs (+5.3 percent), faster than the national private sector job growth rate of 3.3 percent over the year,” the press release added. “As of December 2022, Florida employers have added jobs for 32 consecutive months since May 2020. Florida’s private sector over-the-year job growth rate has exceeded the nation’s for 21 consecutive months since April 2021.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/vladimir-lenin-and-the-american-left/

At the Chinese Communist Party’s 20th Congress in October 2022, Xi Jinping’s report included the following statement: “Over the past decade, we have stayed committed to Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought, Deng Xiaoping Theory…” Karl Marx was a scumbag (study his life), Deng Xiaoping was the thug who killed over 3,000 protesters at Tiananmen Square in June 1989, and Mao Zedong was the greatest mass murderer in human history (read more about him here). These men are the forerunners and mentors of Leftists in America today. This is the Left, folks. Study history to find out more about what these men were and believed. And thus, what their American offspring have in store for our country.

In this article, I want to home in on Vladimir Lenin, who Xi also mentioned, and who was the major instigator and theoretician of the communist revolution in Russia in 1917. I only have space to share with you a few quotes from this man whom, again, the Left idolizes. You’ll get an idea of what Lenin was and what the Left is.

1. “We must hate—hatred is the basis of communism. Children must be taught to hate their parents if they are not communists.” Hate is indeed a major characteristic of the Left; it is probably the main motivation for most of them. They have no clue what love is. Contrast Lenin’s words with the following: “But I say to you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you” (Jesus, Matthew 5:44). Which system would you rather live under?

2. “A lie told often enough becomes the truth.” Most decent people think lying is wrong, but not Leftists. Anything to advance the cause is morally acceptable. And American Leftists certainly follow this adage of Lenin, hoping the American people will eventually accept their lies as truth. Sadly, too many do.

3. “Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.” This is frightening but is one of the reasons the Left is trying to “groom” children now. Indoctrinate them, as early as possible, with Leftist propaganda. It’s right out of Lenin’s playbook.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/01/chinas-useful-idiots/

A nation that is obsessed with apologizing for itself is ill-prepared to confront external threats.

The anti–“zero Covid” protesters in China may be finished with the CCP, but the CCP isn’t finished with them. After making a public show of easing some Covid restrictions, Xi Jinping and his army of Stasi-like thugs set about making an example of those involved in the regime’s monthslong embarrassment. The show of force against the protest movement was typical of dictatorships that rely, at least in part, on fear as a mechanism for maintaining power. But the efforts to delegitimize the anti-regime demonstrations had an ideological component as well. A New York Times piece on the crackdown today reported:

The party is also working to discredit the protesters by casting them as tools of malevolent foreign powers. Beijing has long dismissed dissent at home — from calls for women’s rights to pro-democracy activism to ethnic unrest — as the result of Western-backed subversion. The protests against “zero Covid” were no exception: One Chinese diplomat suggested that some of the demonstrators had been “bought by external forces.”

Describing the detention of four Chinese women who were alleged to have been involved in anti-regime activities, the Times reported: “The police have asked the women about their use of overseas messaging platforms or involvement in feminist activities, such as reading groups. . . . Chinese propaganda has decried feminism as another tool of foreign influence.” As a descriptive matter, feminist movements in China probably do draw inspiration from Western ideology. Yet the irony in Beijing’s narrative is that Chairman Xi still has plenty of enablers in the West — particularly among the left-wing cultural movements tied to the kind of activism his regime decries.

This is not to say that the progressive forces that have emerged from academia in recent years — fourth-wave feminism, critical race and gender theory, and so on — are pro-CCP. When pressed, most of their advocates would likely mouth bromides about the Chinese regime’s human-rights violations and its oppression of women. The Left, for the most part, is not motivated by an admiration for China, as segments of it were toward the Soviet Union. What today’s progressives are motivated by is a distaste for the idea of America having a set of “national interests,” let alone any serious efforts to defend them.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/victoria-taft/2023/01/27/another-wave-of-joe-biden-j-o-b-s-losses-n1665451

Let me tell you about a little something important, Fat. It happens to be the “number one job facing the middle class and it happens to be a three-letter word: Jobs!  J–O–B–S!  Jobs!” So declared then-Vice President Joe Biden on behalf of his boss, Barack Obama, back in 2008, the last time the economy was shredded.

Here we are all these years later and Joe Biden, millions of dollars richer, is presiding over another disastrous economy made worse by his government overspending. He must think we all have sons funneling us cash from money laundering operations with Ukraine and China or something.

But no Negative Nellies are allowed here. The president says the economy’s just great, and how dare you say anything any different, Jack, unless you want to do a pushup contest right here and now to settle it.

This week, the Big Guy was broken out of the White House and rushed off to a curated collection of union members to tout what a great economy he has built back better. He put his foot down and whispered; he growled about how he had “no intention of letting the Republicans wreck the economy” that he and the Democrats have done such a top-notch job of destroying.

But sadly for his Happy Days Are Here Again narrative, these past few days brought another round of Big Tech and media sector layoffs. This is beginning to be a weekly occurrence as Silicon Valley’s ones and zeros are marched past the La Cimbali latte machine and the chef’s menu board, down the slide, and into the unemployment lines.

Will anyone tell Joe?

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/01/26/the-caesars-of-the-information-age/

I thought I would feel some relief when the social-media giants came to their senses and let Donald Trump back on their platforms. Yet now that it’s happened, now that Meta has decreed that Trump has served his time in the virtual wilderness and may once again post on Facebook and Instagram, I just feel unnerved. Unnerved by the extraordinary power these people wield over who may and who may not engage with the billions of souls who gather online. Unnerved by their supranational authority to grant or rescind a licence to speak in the global town square. Unnerved by the historically unprecedented dominion this small clique of the woke rich enjoys over the liberty to utter.

The unbanning of Trump feels less like a victory for freedom of speech than a triumph of Silicon Valley Caesarism. It sends the message that it is for these Emperors of the Information Age to decide who may enter the modern arena of discussion, who may have to be expelled, how long they should be expelled for, and under what conditions they may be permitted to return once their punishment is complete.

Indeed, even though Meta’s statement on readmitting Trump to Facebook and Instagram is justified in the language of freedom of speech – ‘The public should be able to hear what their politicians are saying’, it says, with staggering gall, given it spent the past two years preventing the public from hearing what Trump was saying – it also says it will keep a tight leash on Trump. If he violates any of Meta’s protocols, he’ll be suspended again, they warn, for anywhere between one month and two years. So the politician may speak to the people, so long as he says nothing to offend the arrogant hip capitalists who control 21st-century public discussion. Their message is crystal clear: ‘We’re still in control, and we always will be.’

Trump was banished from social media in January 2021. Following the Capitol Hill riot of 6 January, virtually all of Silicon Valley decreed that he should be unpersoned, blacklisted, silenced. He was kicked off Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Spotify and Twitch. YouTube, Reddit and TikTok brought in stiff restrictions on the expression of pro-Trump sentiment. Google and Apple removed the Parler app from their stores, so that the virtual masses wouldn’t be able to access the one platform that was still allowing Trump to speak.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/01/americas_future_is_bleak_when_only_27_of_the_younger_generations_are_proud_to_be_american.html

I first encountered unabashed pride in being American when I came to the United States in 1951.  I sailed across the Atlantic alone.  Perhaps someone along the way told me tht I was going to the United States; however, as a seven or eight-year-old I knew nothing about the nation that had granted me refuge.  Upon disembarking in New York what stood out was not the awe-inspiring and intimidating skyscrapers seemingly reaching to the heavens, or for the first time in my life seeing a city not lying in ruins from the ravages of war, but that there was a palpable atmosphere of confidence, optimism, self-reliance and above all pride among the people in this new and mystifying country.

I soon learned that this mindset permeated the entirety of this vast nation and had since its founding, thus, enabling it to evolve into the most successful nation-state in the annals of mankind.  While no nation can ever create an ideal society, due to certain immutable characteristics of the human race, no country has come closer to doing so.  It is the only nation in history committed to right societal wrongs, to live by the underlying tenets of Judeo-Christianity and govern itself by means of a written Constitution that reflects those values.

As recently as 2004, 91% of Americans were extremely or very proud to be American and the United States ranked first in the world in national pride.  However, in less than twenty years there has been a stunning reversal that portends a dire future for the United States as a precipitous erosion in national pride has undermined societal confidence, self-reliance, optimism, and cohesion. 

A recent poll revealed that a record low of just 68% of the citizenry are extremely or very proud to be American.  However, underlying that overall dismal outcome is the reality that among the two youngest generations only 38% of Millennials and 16% of Gen Z are proud to be American despite being the beneficiaries of living in a unfathomably prosperous nation that has not known any profound national adversity since the Great Depression. 

What we are seeing play out is the reality of demographic change in America as the younger mal-educated generations account for over half of the populace and are increasingly becoming culturally and politically influential.  Within these generations an overwhelming majority have been indoctrinated by socialist/Marxist ideologues to believe that a capitalist United States as founded is irredeemable and must be transformed.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/01/25/the-real-differences-between-the-biden-and-trump-troves/

Donald Trump for now certainly seems to have had more documents labeled classified at Mar-a-Lago in Florida than did Joe Biden at his various homes in Delaware. 

Yet otherwise, the comparisons between the two cases, contrary to popular punditry, hardly favor Biden. 

First, a stranger would face a far greater challenge entering a post-presidential Mar-a-Lago than a pre-presidential Joe Biden’s home, office, or garage—or who knows where?  

Secret service agents and private security were stationed at Mar-a-Lago. Prior to the 2020 presidential election they were not at citizen Biden’s various troves for most of 2017-2020 much less prior to 2009. 

Second, we seem to forget that for much of the developing controversy, Joe Biden’s own team was investigating Joe Biden. 

On the other hand, the Biden Administration’s Justice Department and the FBI were not just investigating Trump as an outside party, but as a former president—and possible 2024 presidential candidate and opponent of Biden himself. 

Remember, the narrative of the first Democratic impeachment of Donald Trump was the allegation that Trump had used his powers of the presidency to investigate Joe Biden and his family, a likely 2020 challenger to Trump’s reelection bid. 

Third, no one in a position of government authority had passed judgment on Joe Biden’s alleged security violations. 

That was not the case of the still alleged violations of Donald Trump.