RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/12/die_on_the_road_to_global_tyranny.html

Francis Fukuyama claimed, dubiously, that we are witnessing the end of history, with the universalization of liberal democracy as the final form of human government.  Yet we live in a world of worrisome pendulum shifts.  Republican congressional leaders disprove Fukuyama’s claim as they celebrate their stunning betrayal of the American people by supporting the passage of the $1.7-trillion McConnell-Schumer omnibus bill.  Rather than protect America’s southern border and comply with Congress’s constitutional duty, this bill moves the country farther to the left by explicitly funding a “woke” identity group supporting LGBT indoctrination in elementary schools, abolishing ICE, and defunding the police.  At the same time, this bill hands more power to a federal government dedicated to the preposterous claim that America is systemically racist.

This explosive proposition is aided and abetted by several additional contentions.  Dangerous contentions include claims that enforcing the United States Constitution fairly and equally, administering laws without focusing on visual identity, and advancing merit rather than identity-based preferences are forms of unconscious racism.  Such claims flourish because our overlords ignore the observation that truth is no defense against fools determined to believe lies.

Elites’ hysterical claims verify René Girard’s observation that concern for victims overwhelms modern culture and signals a genuine exhaustion of all other sources of authority.  Elites’ vulgar claims regarding race also ignore evidence showing that Asian-American women surpass white men in weekly earnings, as well as data showing that Syrian-Americans, Korean-Americans, and Filipino-Americans had significantly higher median household incomes than whites.  They also have higher test scores, lower incarceration rates, and longer life expectancies.  Indeed, African-born black women had higher earnings than U.S.-born white women.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/san-francisco-dying/

You may have heard the phrase, “Get woke, go broke.” It has become a common phrase in the past few years, mainly because it keeps proving itself true.

San Francisco is a prime example of the death spiral going broke puts cities, businesses, and people into.

The city has long been a bastion of liberalism. When it became fashionable after the death of George Floyd to defund the police, the city jumped at the chance. The people elected a prosecutor who was willing to allow criminals to go free.

This led to police resigning and crime in the city skyrocketing. Not only did violent crime rise, so did public drug use and homeless encampments because no one would enforce those laws.

The citizens and some government officials suddenly realized that police were needed. Politicians tried to refund the department as citizens called for police to enforce the laws.

The problem was the city has slipped into the death spiral. Even as politicians tried to pull it back, the crime problem led to citizens and companies leaving the cities in droves. San Francisco now has some of the lowest office occupancy rates in the country, “thanks to the tech companies that make the city’s lifeblood retreating to remote work, San Francisco has seen residents move to the suburbs – pushed also by rising crime,” the Daily Mail reported.

This has reduced the tax base, which means there is less money available to fund cities programs and services.

To compensate, programs and services will need to be cut or taxes raised. Both of which will drive more people from the city, leaving behind those most in needs of programs and less likely to be contributing much to the city’s coffers through taxes.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/12/27/twitter-americas-founders-and-free-expression/

Donald Trump’s declaration that he would run for president again in 2024 made me recall his previous tempestuous soap opera relationship with Twitter and “fake news.” And now we are living through the beginning of what could be an equally tempestuous soap opera triggered by Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. After all, the left has decided that with Twitter no longer under its control, it now prefers a “hands around the neck of Twitter” approach rather than a “hands off Twitter” approach. It makes it worth revisiting the relationship between Twitter, and the constitutional freedoms of expression America’s founders guaranteed citizens for insight.

If we applied the same standards America’s founders applied to speech and the press to current media that did not then exist, there would virtually never be a time to acceptably deny Americans’ those freedoms. And that remains true even for Twitter or when “fake news” or “disinformation” is invoked as justification. However, as a recent Orange County Register editorial put it, “Maintaining a commitment to free speech and resisting the temptation to suppress  contrary points of view is especially hard without an appreciation for why freedom of speech is important.” Let us consider that issue more closely.

The Constitution included freedoms of speech and the press because our founders knew freedom of expression was necessary to maintain liberty. They repudiated restrictions on the press because they remembered that colonial printers had been licensed, but licenses could be revoked and printers imprisoned (e.g., Benjamin Franklin’s brother, James). At the time, newspapers were the primary means of public communication, so they were insulated from political extortion from those who didn’t like what they printed. However, what was emphasized was freedom of expression, not the particular medium of expression used. If radio, TV and the internet existed in the 1770s, the principle behind freedom of the press would have been expressed more broadly.

To see this, you need only consider some of our founding generation’s own words, and those of their predecessors who greatly influenced their beliefs.

https://www.newsweek.com/fbi-gaslights-america-over-twitter-files-opinion-1769352

The FBI is gaslighting the American people over the stunning—if unsurprising—evidence that it engaged in a conspiracy with Big Tech to silence wrongthinkers in violation of the First Amendment, as the Twitter Files have revealed.

Meanwhile, in attacking those who refuse to be gaslit, the bureau is also telegraphing that it would respond to Congress investigating its hyper-politicization and weaponization with relentless information warfare.

The gaslighting comes in the preeminent law enforcement agency’s “move along, nothing to see here” response to the Twitter Files. It stated that “correspondence between the FBI and Twitter show nothing more than examples of our traditional, longstanding and ongoing federal government and private sector engagements.” The FBI, it says, “provides critical information to the private sector in an effort to allow them to protect themselves and their customers.”

Here is the kind of conduct the FBI wants you to believe is completely normal:

Grooming Twitter executives for months in advance of the release of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story to compel them to kill the story.
Referring myriad tweets concerning inherently political matters to Twitter’s censorship team for purging—so many tweets, in fact, that during one such bulk censorship request, a Twitter employee described the review of the “possible violative content” as a “monumental undertaking.”
Flagging specific Twitter accounts for the platform to take action against—up to and including suspension—apparently for engaging in thoughtcrime of promoting “civic misinformation” by making jokes related to the 2020 election.
Paying Twitter $3.4 million for its time and effort censoring Americans.

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

Lenin is reputed to have said, “Give me four years to teach the children, and the seeds I have planted will never be uprooted.” Every parent knows this is true: Children are sponges, learning things incredibly quickly. These things then stick, for they are buried in the very deepest recesses of our brains. Today’s leftists are attempting to reinstitute this specific type of Leninism in America. They want your children, and your efforts to protest will be unavailing. A Massachusetts federal judge confirmed this last week, saying that it didn’t “shock the conscience” that a school secretly indoctrinated two children into transgenderism.

From the Daily Wire:

A federal judge has thrown out a lawsuit from Massachusetts parents who accused public school officials of hiding their children’s gender transitions from them.

U.S. District Court Judge Mark Mastroianni, an Obama appointee, criticized Ludlow Public Schools officials for allegedly hiding the pair of siblings’ gender transitions from their parents, but he said the officials’ actions do not “shock the conscience.”

“While the court is apprehensive about the alleged policy and actions of the Ludlow Public Schools with regard to parental notification, it cannot conclude the decision to withhold information” about the children from their parents meets the conscience-shocking legal standard in Massachusetts, the judge wrote in his December 14 ruling.

The case revolves around the fact that the school deliberately made the decision to keep from the parents the demands that they be treated as members of the opposite sex in junior high school:

The 11-year-old girl allegedly emailed school staff in February 2021 and announced that she wanted to go by a cluster of new pronouns.

“I am genderqueer. … My new name will be R**** … If you deadname me or use any pronouns I am uncomfortable with I will politely tell you … A list of pronouns you can use are: she/her he/him they/them fae/faerae/aer ve/ver xe/xem ze/zir. … Please only use the ones I have listed and not the other ones. I do not like them,” the girl wrote, her parents said in court documents.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/12/25/what-will-the-fbi-not-do/

The FBI on Wednesday finally broke its silence and responded to the revelations on Twitter of close ties between the bureau and the social media giant—ties that included efforts to suppress information and censor political speech. 

“The correspondence between the FBI and Twitter show nothing more than examples of our traditional, longstanding and ongoing federal government and private sector engagements, which involve numerous companies over multiple sectors and industries,” the bureau said in a statement. “As evidenced in the correspondence, the FBI provides critical information to the private sector in an effort to allow them to protect themselves and their customers. The men and women of the FBI work every day to protect the American public. It is unfortunate that conspiracy theorists and others are feeding the American public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency.” 

Almost all of the FBI communique is untrue, except the phrase about the bureau’s “engagements which involve numerous companies over multiple sectors and industries.” 

Future disclosures will no doubt reveal similar FBI subcontracting with other social media concerns of Silicon Valley to stifle free expression and news deemed problematic to the FBI’s agenda. 

The FBI did not merely engage in “correspondence” with Twitter to protect the company and its “customers.” Instead, it effectively hired Twitter to suppress the free expression of some of its users, as well as news stories deemed unhelpful to the Biden campaign and administration—to the degree that the bureau’s requests sometimes even exceeded those of Twitter’s own left-wing censors.

The FBI did not wish to help Twitter “to protect themselves [sic],” given the bureau’s Twitter liaisons were often surprised at the FBI’s bold requests to suppress the expression of those who had not violated Twitter’s own admittedly biased “terms of service” and “community standards.”

The FBI and its helpers on the Left now reboot the same boilerplate about “conspiracy theorists” and “misinformation” smears used against anyone who rejected the FBI-fed Russian collusion hoax and the bureau’s peddling of the “Russian disinformation” lie to suppress accurate pre-election news about the authenticity of Hunter Biden’s laptop. 

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

Is Ron DeSantis a national treasure, or what?

Here’s what the press will undoubtedly claim is his latest “stunt,” as reported by Bob Hoge at RedState:

The Florida Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that Governor Ron DeSantis can impanel a grand jury to investigate COVID vaccine manufacturers Pfizer and Moderna for potential misconduct. At issue: do the mRNA jabs cause heart issues and were the manufacturers aware of the problem?

The court wrote:

A statewide grand jury shall be promptly impaneled for a term of twelve calendar months, to run from the date of impanelment, with jurisdiction throughout the State of Florida, to investigate crime, return indictments, make presentments, and otherwise perform all functions of a grand jury with regard to the offenses stated herein.

As we reported, DeSantis argued in his petition to the court earlier this month that the Florida Department of Health “found an increase in the relative incidence of cardiac-related deaths among males 18-39 years old within 28 days following mRNA vaccination.”​ The NY Post reports:

“​In Florida, it is illegal to mislead and misrepresent, especially when you are talking about the efficacy of a drug​,” DeSantis said during a roundtable with state Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo and a number of scientists and physicians last week.

“We’ll be able to get the data whether they want to give it or not​,” added DeSantis.

That’s an issue that’s on everyone’s minds right now, the foremost issue from the aftermath of the COVID pandemic. Were those hastily crafted anti-COVID vaccines, forced onto young people by state mandates, causing them to drop dead? And did these vaccine manufacturers, incentivized by the government directive shielding them from lawsuits, know all about it and not tell anyone? Because profits?

In a society that permits lawsuits over spilled coffee, that seems pretty much the kind of information the public is entitled to, not just because of the government mandates, but because so many young people are turning up dead and we’re all supposed to take “no idea why” for an answer.

The federal government is the one that should be investigating this, but we all know why they aren’t — they are a swamp of special interests, with Democrat donations and lucrative consulting contracts the priorities that ensure these things stay buried.

But instead of nothing being done, the one-among-fifty governor of Florida, with his limited scope of power, has stepped in to get to the bottom of this, skillfully maneuvering the entire activity through the court system, thwarting the leftist lawyers trying to stop him.

As a result, there will be answers now, answers the public is looking for, with DeSantis appropriately tough in his rhetoric, telling Big Pharma they’re going to deliver this information whether they like it or not.

https://nypost.com/2022/12/22/the-pain-isnt-goin-away-inflation-cost-households-an-extra-10k/

Inflation is over, the administration crows, even as Congress works to pass another massive spending bill — this time, $1.7 trillion.

But struggling families know not to pop the cork yet.

The consumer price index rose just 0.1% last month, bringing the 12-month rate to 7.1% — still higher than any year since the disco days of 1981. Politicians have downplayed inflation ever since President Biden ignored economist warnings in early 2021 that it would be economic malpractice to throw a $1.9 trillion stimulus bill at a supply-constrained economy. Then we were told that inflation was “transitory,” a relic of corporate price gouging and “Putin’s price hike.”

The Federal Reserve has also downplayed inflation. Two years ago, its Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) forecast that inflation (using a slightly different measure called the PCE, for Personal Consumption Expenditures) would be 1.8% in 2021. It instead came in at 5.8%. Not learning its lesson, the FOMC projected that inflation in 2022 would fall to 2.6%. It is now set to end the year at 5.6%. So here we are again, with the FOMC projecting inflation rates of 3.1%, 2.5%, and 2.1% over the next three years.

Losing credibility

Repeatedly downplaying the threat of inflation has reduced the credibility of the White House, the Federal Reserve and other forecasters.

Even as the Federal Reserve aggressively plays catch-up on interest rates, one or two positive months mean little to wary consumers — especially when paired with the same old promises that supply chains will open up, government spending will slow, and shifts in demand from goods to services will dampen price pressures.

Consumers have several reasons to worry that inflation may remain sticky.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2022-12-21-you-must-assume-that-all-information-put-out-by-our-government-is-corrupt

Throughout the agencies of our federal government, an important function is to issue data and information about the state of the country. These data cover a vast array of topics such as population, demographics, income and poverty, the state of the economy, the GDP, employment and unemployment, activities of foreign adversaries, weather and climate, energy production and use, and much, much more. The Congress and states use this information in making important public policy decisions, and the people use it to make decisions for their everyday lives. Not the least of those decisions is how to vote.

So is the information issued by the government basically honest and reliable for important decisions? Or, instead, is the output of official information cynically manipulated and corrupted by a government interested mainly in perpetuating and increasing its own power? And given that the federal bureaucracy is 90+% Democrat in political orientation, to what extent does that bureaucracy manipulate the information it issues to further the election of Democrats?

The evidence of data manipulation in favor of Democrats is so pervasive that we have to assume that essentially all information put out by the government is corrupt.

The instances of blatant manipulation of information by government personnel are way too clear and way too widespread to be ignored. What is now being called the “Twitter files” — shocking evidence of the FBI working with a big tech company to limit the circulation of information about corruption by one of the presidential candidates in the run-up to the 2020 election — is just one of the latest examples. Let’s have a review of some others:

Manipulation of temperature data to support the narrative of human-caused climate change.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/12/21/soros-backed-nonprofits-gave-tens-of-millions-to-anti-police-groups-in-2021/

Tax forms have revealed that, over the course of 2021, numerous nonprofit groups backed by far-left billionaire George Soros donated tens of millions of dollars to groups and initiatives that actively campaigned against the police.

Fox News reports that nonprofit groups that are members of Soros’ Open Society Foundations network collectively gave at least $55 million to such anti-police movements. This included groups utilized by progressives to actively dismantle law enforcement, as well as databases that track donations to police departments and police unions.

“The Open Society Foundations is proud to have been one of the earliest and most robust supporters of efforts to address the issues of crime and public safety while protecting freedoms that Americans hold dear,” said Laleh Ispahani, a spokeswoman for Open Society-U.S., in a statement. “We have supported reforms to our criminal justice system that enjoy broad support across the political spectrum. We believe that our freedoms are threatened when state actors are above the law, and that accountability is even more essential when they are given the right to use force on behalf of the government.”

“The level of police violence, particularly impacting communities of color, has spurred reform efforts across the country,” Ispahani falsely stated. “Open Society supports the exploration and development of policies that actually work to reduce crime and defers to communities regarding what alternatives make sense to them. Whether that includes shifting funding currently allocated to policing into services that actually work to address crime and improve public safety is up to them.”

Among the largest donations, the Open Society Policy Center gave $15 million to the Tides Advocacy for the Electoral Justice Project, a project that is being led by the Movement for Black Lives, a coalition of over 50 pro-Black Lives Matter groups. The Movement for Black Lives had previously pledged to hand out as much as $75,000 to “12 black-led organizations that are expanding democracy and building political power in defense of black lives.”