RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2023/01/29/justice-for-john-eastman/

The January 6 Committee may have shut up shop, Liz Cheney may have scuttled back to her constituency in Georgetown and at CNN, but the great Democratic vendetta machine is still fired up and pounding along, looking for people to smash and livelihoods to destroy.  

Those who dared to walk around the Capitol that fateful day are still being apprehended and jailed. Many face multi-year prison sentences for such misdemeanor torts as “parading” or “obstructing an official proceeding.” Anyone associated with Donald Trump is fair game, as the names Peter Navarro, Rudy Giuliani, Steve Bannon, and Jeffrey Clark remind us. 

At the top of that hit list is John Eastman, the distinguished constitutional scholar who made the unforgivable error of offering legal advice to President Trump in the turbulent aftermath of the 2020 election. 

I have written about Eastman before, both in this space and elsewhere. He has had his life turned upside down. He was shuffled out of his position as dean of the Chapman Law School and has been treated as a pariah by colleagues in his profession. Anti-Trump protestors regularly congregate at the foot of his driveway—fortunately, a long one—to vilify him and his association with the Bad Orange Man. 

Now the State Bar of California has announced that it has filed an official complaint of 11 charges against Eastman, alleging that he endeavored to “plan, promote, and assist then-President Trump in executing a strategy, unsupported by facts or law, to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election by obstructing the count of electoral votes of certain states.”

https://amgreatness.com/2023/01/29/anarchy-american-style/

The 1960s revolution was both anarchic and nihilist. But it was waged against—not from—the establishment. Hippies and the Left either attacked institutions or, in Timothy Leary fashion, chose to “turn on, tune in, drop out” from them.

The current revolution is much different—and far more dangerous—for at least three reasons.

The Establishment Is the Revolution

The current Left has no intention of “dropping out.” Why would it? 

It now controls the very institutions of America that it once mocked and attacked—corporate boardrooms, Wall Street, state and local prosecuting attorneys, most big-city governments, the media, the Pentagon, network and most of cable news, professional sports, Hollywood, music, television, K-12 education, and academia. 

In other words, the greatest levers of influence and power—money, education, entertainment, government, the news, and popular culture—are in the hands of the Left. They have transformed legitimate debate over gay marriage into a hate crime. Transgenderism went from a modern manifestation of ancient transvestism or gender dysphoria to a veritable litmus test of whether one was good or evil.

Students have no need to jam administrators’ offices because the latter, themselves, are as radical as the protestors and often lead them on in a top-down fashion. Had they not long ago demonstrated they were perfectly willing to subvert meritocracy, free expression, and equality under the law, they would not be occupying their present positions.

Apple, Google, Facebook, and other tech companies are not 1980s and 1990s “alternative” media geeks and hipsters creating neat gadgets for the people. They are not Steve Jobs and his pugnacious Apple battling the evil Microsoft or IBM, or the Macintosh commercial of 1984 depicting a maverick throwing a hammer into Big Brother’s screen. They are the Orwellian screen.

The current generation of techies is effectively Stalinist. Big Tech now colludes with the FBI, the Democratic Party, and the bureaucratic state to suppress free expression, warp balloting, and serve as contractors of government surveillance. Currently, the most totalitarian people in America are likely to wear flip flops, have a nose ring or pink hair, and disguise their fascism with ’60s-retread costumes.

There are no “armies of the night” marching on the Pentagon. Would-be demonstrators see no need, since radical identity politics, and gay, woke, and transgendered agendas are fast-tracked by the Department of Defense. 

There are no protests against the Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureau or the “La Migra” anymore by advocates of illegal immigration, because the Left owns the border. And it has utterly destroyed it. There is no border, no border enforcement, and no meaningful immigration law. As many as 6 million illegal entries during the first two years of the Biden Administration are proof enough of that. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/biden-lets-chinas-spies-slide/

“Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn have dropped their case against a New York Police Department officer who had been accused of acting as a foreign agent on behalf of the Chinese regime,” The Epoch Times reports.

Baimadajie Angwang, 33, an ethnic Tibetan and naturalized U.S. citizen, was arrested in 2020 for acting as an agent of Beijing, for wire fraud, making false statements, and obstructing an official proceeding. Prosecutors charge that Angwang reported on Chinese citizens, cultivated intelligence sources, and connected Chinese officials with senior contacts in the NYPD.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Eastern District of New York recently filed a motion asking federal judge Eric R. Komitee, a Trump nominee, to dismiss the indictment due to “additional information” on the case. The Eastern District did not reveal the information or explain its relevance to the case. So the move to dismiss may reflect official Biden policy of turning a blind eye toward Chinese espionage in the United States.

“The Justice Department is ending a controversial program, launched under the Trump administration, to hunt down Chinese spies,” CBS News reported in February of 2022.

President Trump’s “China Initiative,” targeted China’s theft of trade secrets and intellectual property.

As federal prosecutors charged in 2017, MIT professor Gang Chen failed to disclose ties to China and failed to disclose a foreign bank account on a tax document. Prosecutors dropped the case against Chen, but it wasn’t clear what motivated them to act. This was hardly the only proceeding against Chinese agents the DOJ chose to abandon.

In 2020, federal officials changed that Chinese national Tang Juan lied about ties to the Chinese military in order to gain access to the University of California at Davis. The FBI  found an April 14, 2019 article on a Xi’an, China, health care forum that showed Tang in a military uniform bearing the insignia of the Civilian Cadres of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA). The FBI also found two other articles listing Tang’s employer as the People’s Liberation Army’s Air Force Medical University (AFMU), also known as the Fourth Military Medical University (FMMU).

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2023/01/29/are-the-walls-closing-in-on-joe-biden-new-details-raise-questions-n1666036

According to a story published on Saturday, the scope of Joe Biden’s classified documents scandal may be bigger than previously thought. Sources close to the investigation say in addition to classified documents, the FBI also seized notebooks from Biden’s Wilmington, Del., home, which were reportedly written by Biden while he was vice president.

“The notebooks were seized because Biden’s notes on some of the pages relate to his official business as vice president, including details of his diplomatic engagements during the Obama administration, and may refer to classified information, this same person said, adding that the notebooks do not have classified markings on them, but some of the handwritten notes inside them could be considered as such given their sensitive content,” NBC News reported. “Other pages in the notebooks, while they may not contain potentially classified information, could still be considered government property under the Presidential Records Act because they pertain to official business Biden conducted as vice president, according to the person familiar with the investigation.”

According to Jason R. Baron, a former director of litigation at the National Archives, if Biden shared the notes with staff while he was vice president, they would be considered official records belonging to the government.

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

Senator Lindsey Graham desperately wants more money and weapons for Ukraine.  Recently standing in Kyiv alongside two (other?) Democrat senators — one who repeatedly lied about his service in Vietnam and another who repeatedly lied about President Trump being a Russian spy — Graham demanded American tanks on the ground immediately.  “World order is at stake!” he declared.  Something serious must be at stake over there; having thrown over a hundred billion dollars to a nation that was known universally as one of the most corrupt in the world before Russia crossed its borders last year, the U.S. government has become “pot committed” to a European war, whether financially struggling Americans care or not.

Just what is this “world order” that keeps Ol’ Lindsey up at night?  Surely he means some combination of American hegemony, military dominance, dollar-denominated financial supremacy, and command over the vaunted “rules-based international system” so-called Western leaders love to defend.  You never hear anything about the importance of defending Western rights and liberties, though, do you?  Senator Graham-nesty isn’t worried about protecting America’s borders.  He says absolutely nothing about securing Westerners’ freedoms from threats of tyranny.  Why?

Because America has relinquished its status as “leader of the free world.”  That is not because dementia-addled Joe Biden is merely a figurehead under the unelected Deep State’s control.  It is because there is no “free world” right now — at least not within the jurisdiction of political governments.  The political persecution of J6 protesters for “thought crimes,” the authoritarian COVID-1984 lockdowns and mandates, and the confirmation through the “Twitter Files” that the U.S. government is heavily invested in censorship and public manipulation all make this damning statement soberingly clear.

Friedrich Hayek warned in The Road to Serfdom, “We shall never prevent the abuse of power if we are not prepared to limit power in a way which occasionally may prevent its use for desirable purposes.”  American independence and the U.S. Constitution embraced this principle.  The “American experiment” was not devoted to creating a vast administrative State in which the expertise and benevolence of “public servants” would usher in a future Utopia.  “Once the principle is admitted that it is the duty of the government to protect the individual against his own foolishness,” Ludwig von Mises observed, “no serious objections can be advanced against further encroachments.”  Arguing otherwise has been the fool’s gold of both idealists and tyrants for millennia.  “Freedom is indivisible,” Mises argued.  “As soon as one starts to restrict it, one enters upon a decline on which it is difficult to stop.”  The American system broke with tyrannies of the past, and for doing so, an unelected, mercurial, deceptive, and vicious Deep State has spent decades breaking the American system.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/01/is_america_at_its_worst_economic_point_since_the_great_depression.html

Biden and the Democrats have been boasting about the economic wonders he and his administration have performed with their modernizing, equitable, diverse, green energy economic policies. However, E.J. Antoni, a research fellow at The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis, says that the devil is in the details—and the details behind the latest GDP report show that ordinary Americans are in the worst economic condition they’ve been since the Great Depression.

RNC Research (a very good Twitter feed, despite the RNC’s dismal performance in other areas) assembled a few clips showing Biden’s economic boasts:

In Bidenland, economically speaking, everything is hunky-dory. And maybe that’s true because Biden’s family has become fabulously wealthy, as have all the people surrounding him. It’s a very rosy view from up there, in the Oval Office.

It’s less rosy where real people live. Writing at Fox Business, Antoni says that the Fed’s most recent GDP (“gross domestic product”) report contains within it terrible news about America’s flailing economy.

What Democrats like is that the report shows that the economy is still growing, albeit slowly: “The latest numbers from the Bureau of Economic Analysis show that the U.S. economy grew by 2.9 percent in the fourth quarter of last year, and 2.1 percent for 2022.” However, despite some growth, says Antoni, “economic growth is slowing down.”

https://justthenews.com/government/security/new-member-house-intelligence-committee-calls-security-damage-assessment-biden

Rep. Austin Scott (R-Ga.), one of the newest members of the GOP-led House Intelligence Committee, is calling for a national security damage assessment on the Biden family, following the discovery of classified documents at multiple locations connected to President Biden.

“I think so,” Scott responded when asked Thursday on the John Solomon Reports podcast whether such an assessment should be made. “I would also tell you that the difference I see is that the Biden documents were in an area where other people clearly had access to them. And I have serious questions about the amount of wealth that the Biden family has.”

The Democratic president has been under increased scrutiny since the recent disclosures about such documents being found at his Delaware home and in an office he used after serving as vice president.

Biden, at least since his successful 2020 presidential bid, had been under scrutiny regarding whether he profited or stood to profit from son Hunter Biden’s questionable overseas business negotiations including those with China. 

“I just don’t I don’t see how you accumulate that much making $175,000 a year,” Scott said about the president’s personal wealth. “I guess he made a little more as vice president, maybe $300,000 a year. But I don’t see how you accumulate that the type of wealth that he has.”

The FBI last August ceased classified document from former President Trump’s Florida home. And Vice President Mike Pence announced this week that a sweep of Indiana home had turned up such materials. 

Scott said that all people with classified documents need to be held accountable. 

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.