RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/

Watching the political Establishment freak out over twenty Republican members of Congress voting their own consciences in the election for House speaker has been hilarious.  Karl Rove, Dan Crenshaw, Sean Hannity, and just about anyone else whose sinecure and preeminence depend upon religious devotion to Washington’s status quo sounded like little Greta Thunberg whining, “How dare they!”  Oh, my goodness, some congressional representatives took it upon themselves to vote as they believe their district constituents would desire and not as the Uniparty nobles who insist on ruling the nation from their petty thrones demand.  Whatever shall we do if this lowly democratic spirit sweeps the land?

This is what’s wrong with the People’s House, where it is still occasionally possible to elect an iconoclast unbeholden to the Leviathan’s palace guard despite mail-in ballot fraud and outside money operations distorting local races: sometimes a freethinking heretic shows up in the nation’s capital with the beastly notion that a vote is more than ornamental pageantry garnishing a foregone conclusion.  Weren’t these Republican holdouts properly instructed that Kevin McCarthy is the Uniparty’s man?  An empty vessel of mediocre intellect and flaccid beliefs, Kevin is surely the only Republican who can lead the House!  We must bring McCarthyism back to Washington, or D.C. will become home to the right-wing nuts!

What a spectacle this whole affair has been.  Pretend President Biden and Senate Republicans agree: forcing the world to watch American legislators partake in repeated democratic votes without devolving into bloodshed (despite the anger management issues of Mike Rogers) is so embarrassing.  It is much more elegant when ballots can be printed, signatures forged, and elections certified according to the wishes of the ruling elites.  The appearance of democracy in the absence of it is ideal.  The practice of actual democracy would bring the whole government’s house of cards crashing down!

https://amgreatness.com/2023/01/08/a-rendezvous-with-rwanda/

“Despite being Black, he [Rep. Byron Donalds] supports a policy agenda intent on upholding and perpetuating white supremacy.”—Representative Cori Bush (D-Mo.)

“Larry Elder [former candidate for governor of California] is the Black face of white supremacy. You’ve been warned.”—Erika Smith, Los Angeles Times columnist

America is an increasingly multiracial society. Despite its early history of slavery and racial segregation, and ongoing bias and tensions, the United States remains one of the few contemporary multiracial constitutional systems that have actually worked. Yet recently few have appreciated that achievement.

Usually multiracial nations and empires—Yugoslavia, the former Soviet Union, the Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires—require some level of coercion incompatible with a democratic constitution to force calm. Brazil, India, Lebanon, Nigeria, and Kenya  may be currently multiracial democracies in theory, but in fact they are often sectarian and tribal cauldrons.

In most such places, pride, solidarity—and even safety—are only found through common religious, ethnic, and racial bonds that become all-encompassing. The individual’s primary allegiance to each particular warring group inevitably becomes incompatible with every other’s overriding loyalties.

The United States is insidiously nearing that abyss. It has all but renounced its old commitment to the melting-pot, and a “content-of-our-character” ideal of assimilation and integration within a common culture. But as we obsess on race and accordingly separate, do we really know the final consequences of what the diversity/equity/inclusion tribalism actually entails?

The first rule of tribalism is that the racial or ethnic collective superimposes solidarity over the individual, who then becomes a mere cog in racial-political wheel. Conservatives such as Larry Elder or Byron Donalds become especially despised as examples of successful individuals who reject tribal labels and loyalties. Are LeBron James, Senator Tim Scott (R-S.C.), and Representative Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) all to be black comrades first and quite different individuals second—if at all? In the same manner, do Adam Schiff, Devin Nunes, Donald Trump, and Mark Milley all share identical and overriding loyalty to “whiteness,” to the degree that we forget about their individual personalities?

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/how-the-fbi-hacked-twitter-lee-smith

After journalist Matt Taibbi published the first batch of internal Twitter documents known as the Twitter files, he tweeted that the company’s deputy general counsel, James Baker, was vetting them.

“The news that Baker was reviewing the ‘Twitter files’ surprised everyone involved,” Taibbi wrote. That apparently included even Twitter’s new boss, Elon Musk, who added that Baker may have deleted some of the files he was supposed to be reviewing.

Baker had been the top lawyer at the FBI when it interfered in the 2016 presidential election. News that he might have been burying evidence of the spy service’s use of a social media company to interfere with the 2020 election, is rightly setting off alarm bells.

In fact, the FBI’s penetration of Twitter constituted just one part of a much larger intelligence operation—one in which the bureau offshored the machinery it used to interfere in the 2016 election and embedded it within the private sector. The resulting behemoth, still being built today, is a public-private consortium made up of U.S. intelligence agencies, Big Tech companies, civil society institutions, and major media organizations that has become the world’s most powerful spy service—one that was powerful enough to disappear the former president of the United States from public life, and that is now powerful enough to do the same or worse to anyone else it chooses. 

Records from the Twitter files show that the FBI paid Twitter nearly $3.5 million, apparently for actions in connection with the 2020 election and nominally a payout for the platform’s work censoring “dangerous” content that had been flagged as mis- or disinformation. That “dangerous” content notably included material that threatened Joe Biden and implicated U.S. officials who have been curating the Biden family’s foreign corruption for decades.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/01/05/january-6-a-day-that-will-live-in-alchemy/

A few weeks before Christmas, federal authorities arrested a Washington state couple for their participation in the Capitol protest on January 6, 2021.

The FBI investigated Scott and Holly Christensen for more than 14 months; agents interrogated coworkers, scoured social media accounts, reviewed hours of security video from inside the Capitol building and body cam footage from law enforcement, and issued a search warrant to confirm the couple’s whereabouts that day. 

“According to records obtained through legal process served on AT&T, cellphones associated with [the Christensens] were identified as having utilized a cell site consistent with providing service to a geographic area that included the interior of the United States Capitol building, on January 6, 2021, from 2:43 EST to 3:51 EST. AT&T records confirm that both devices belong to Scott CHRISTENSEN of Puyallup, Washington,” an unidentified agent on the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force wrote in a November 2022 criminal complaint.

So, what exactly did these alleged “domestic terrorists” do? They entered the Capitol through open doors as police officers stood by. Carrying no weapons, the couple took photos inside the Rotunda and wandered through some hallways; surveillance video shows Holly Christensen talking to a Capitol police officer. At another point, Scott Christensen chatted with a D.C. Metro police officer, a conversation captured on a body-worn camera. Police led the pair toward an exit door about 45 minutes later without arresting them.

For that uneventful jaunt through a public building that posed a threat to no one, the Christensens will now be destroyed by the Department of Justice, the federal court system, and the news media. Although both were charged with nonviolent misdemeanors—the same four offenses that represent the overwhelming majority of charges—journalists dishonestly portrayed the couple as traitors to their country. “Washington state couple to face Jan. 6 insurrection charges,” an Associated Press headline blared on December 12.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-few-new-years-resolutions-for-the-fbi/

Last year was a complete disaster for the men and women of the FBI. They’ve been betrayed by apparatchiks at DOJ, led by the mole-like Attorney General Merrick Garland who has behaved like the Grand Inquisitor to Joe Biden’s very real persecution of everything constitutional. Aside from Jim Crow — another Democrat party initiative —our civil rights have never been more threatened, abused, or abrogated.

FBI Director Christopher Wray has presided over some of the most pernicious abuses of power in the history of the FBI. The Watergate scandal, an egregious invasion of executive privilege for which no one has been held accountable, and resulted in the impeachment of President Nixon, pales in comparison to the 2022 list of malfeasance.

The invasion of Mar-a-Lago by a gestapo-like phalanx of FBI agents, directed by DOJ and FBI HQ politicians was breathtaking in its unabashed hubris. And, the deeply collusive behavior of former and current FBI agents at Twitter is profoundly disturbing. It must be noted, however, that though conspiracy theories are tempting to entertain, because they’re simplistic, it is far more likely that these bad actors aren’t conspirators so much as they share a common liberal world view.

Furthermore, it’s not necessarily a bad thing to have former FBI agents working at a social media company. In fact, the FBI does some very necessary work by liaising with big tech to share threat information and collaborate on solutions.

As the new Congress is sworn in, there may be some cause for a cautious optimism. The new Republican chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Jim Jordan of Ohio, and Republican James Comer of Kentucky, who leads Oversight and Reform have both promised hearings. Well, we’ve heard that before. The Wall Street Journal’s Kim Strasser reports that Republicans are considering the creation of a new Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. Again, we’ve heard that before.

At this point, it’s a lot of talk. Some real action would be a welcome change from the mostly inert Republican Party.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/01/06/how-about-a-kill-switch-to-shut-down-washington/

Kris Kristofferson said that “freedom” is “just another word for nothin’ left to lose.” To the political left, freedom is an abomination that must be defined and controlled by the ruling class elites. And what better way to do that than to crack down on automobile travel?

Cars are a favorite target of all progressives and most Democrats. No human invention has increased freedom as much as the automobile. That’s why they have chosen to go to war on cars. It’s a long-term campaign that will take decades to finish. But there are victories along the way, and one of them was won in Washington with the help of Republicans.

According to Bob Barr, a former federal prosecutor and congressman from Georgia, the infrastructure bill the president signed a little more than a year ago includes “​​​​a little-noticed ‘safety’ measure that will take effect in five years.” It “amounts to a ‘vehicle kill switch,’” Barr wrote in the Daily Caller, and every car built after 2026 has to have one.

Of course, the mandate was characterized “as a benign tool to help prevent drunk driving.” But safety is always a pretense for further government intervention and the erosion of liberty. Prime example: The COVID-19 lockdowns we just went through. 

Writing in Motorius, automotive journalist Steven Symes notes that, ​to many, a mandatory kill switch “might sound like a wonderful idea.”

“After all, we’ve seen wanted criminals who have fled from police only to crash into a car with a family inside, killing innocents as they try to avoid capture. Being able to stop the pursuit early and almost instantaneously seems like a wonderful thing, a potential lifesaver any law-abiding citizen would enthusiastically embrace.”

https://www.city-journal.org/the-quiet-right-movement

The idea of a conservative counterculture might seem like an oxymoron. The term itself has been colored by the 1960s, when left-wing intellectuals, revolutionaries, and artists captured the spirit of revolt against a supposedly homogenous, oppressive, conformist America. That old counterculture has become the dominant culture, having been absorbed into the bureaucracies of universities, schools, government, and now major corporations. The left-wing culture no longer carries a critique; it is the status quo.

This reversal has created an opening for a new counterculture that challenges the orthodoxy of the “successor ideology” and reveals the hollowness of left-wing institutional management. Though many conservatives have seen the opportunity, they have been pessimistic about its prospects. Conservative critics have long lamented the lack of right-wing pop-culture production; some have rallied to such troubled figures as Kanye West, hoping that dissident celebrities could break through the stranglehold of left-wing ideological control.

But this pessimism is misplaced. The solution to left-wing cultural dominance is neither to embrace any celebrity who casts a glance rightward nor to mimic the artistic production of the cultural Left. It is to go deeper—to rebuild the structures that provide the basis for healthy, integrated human development: families, schools, churches, neighborhoods.

Though few have noticed, this is already happening. A “Quiet Right” is patiently, and nearly invisibly, building a viable counterculture.

The main locus of this movement is in education, where conservative families have created robust alternatives to the secular and predominantly left-wing public education system. Many have turned to homeschooling, which has seen double-digit growth in recent years. Others have enrolled their children in a fast-growing network of “classical schools,” which have returned to the traditional liberal arts curriculum of logic, rhetoric, grammar, mathematics, Latin, and music. And the small but influential network of traditional, faith-based colleges, such as Hillsdale, Benedictine, Thomas Aquinas, and University of Dallas, have seen record-breaking enrollment.

https://victorhanson.com/living-in-the-land-of-lies-part-one/

In reading and listening this holiday week I encountered nothing really other than outright lies.

I was sitting on a farm buffeted before Christmas by near record cold temperatures and after Christmas by near record precipitation. Yet almost weekly we receive stories about California’s “permanent drought” of hot/dry weather and an environmental Armageddon that only precivilizational scarcity can avert.

This fated doom means we in California have been outlawing gasoline-powered yard tools and new natural gas ovens and heating systems, and must always suffer fuel prices 30-40 percent above those in the rest of the nation—due to special green blends and restrictions on refinery operations and new gas and oil leasing.

So, no matter: all of these recent stories of near-record cold and precipitation, as well as fated new cutbacks are followed by warnings of imminent global warming catastrophes. Apparently, if Californians do not use fossil fuels at all, but, as the largest state importer of electricity in the nation, buy out-of-state electricity (much of it generated by coal or natural gas) then we at least can feel better about ourselves.

But more to the point, before the recent week of intense cold storms, giving ample rain and snowfall, California was already experiencing in most places a 100 percent-plus December precipitation rate. By New Year’s Day we may well have 100 percent-plus of the season’s entire average annual precipitation. Apparently, the harder the rain falls, the colder the days become, the more Governor Newsom and the Bay Area “scientific” community insist we need to return to a premodern lifestyle of mass transit transportation, unaffordable gas and diesel, and wind and solar generated, sky-high electricity rates.

We are told yet again by President Biden, by Vice President Harris, by their Pravda megaphone, Karine Jean-Pierre, and perhaps by soon-to-be-impeached Alejandro Mayorkas that the border is “secure.” And any who object that 5-million entries since January 2021 prove that it is not, is well a Great Replacement Theory racist.

Yet, living the lie proves otherwise. Here in Central California, I’ve noticed a substantial new surge and influx of illegal aliens. On my avenue a recent sheriff’s raid surrounded a nearby house, where neighbors long suspected gang chop shops, drug dealing, and other unmentionable trafficking.

The amount of trash on the farm is greater than usual, and the paper/trash is of exclusively Spanish language matter (but, alas, carefully sifted to exclude any address or names on envelopes).

The number of parked cars in the orchard of occupants variously shooting drugs, scouting out copper wire thievery, fornicating, or engaging in illegal shooting (e.g., red-tailed hawks, great horned owls, anything that moves), and those walking cross-country, through the vineyards and orchards, who do not speak English is on the rise as well.

https://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/2023/01/05/did-someone-or-something-seize-control-of-the-united-states-n1658786

What happened to the U.S. border? Where did it go? Who erased it? Why and how did 5 million people enter our country illegally? Did Congress secretly repeal our immigration laws? Did President Joe Biden issue an executive order allowing foreign nationals to walk across the border and reside in the United States as they pleased?

Since when did money not have to be paid back? Who insisted that the more dollars the federal government printed, the more prosperity would follow? When did America embrace zero interest? Why do we believe $30 trillion in debt is no big deal?

When did clean-burning, cheap, and abundant natural gas become the equivalent to dirty coal? How did prized natural gas that had granted America’s wishes of energy self-sufficiency, reduced pollution, and inexpensive electricity become almost overnight a pariah fuel whose extraction was a war against nature? Which lawmakers, which laws, which votes of the people declared natural gas development and pipelines near criminal?

Was it not against federal law to swarm the homes of Supreme Court justices, to picket and to intimidate their households in efforts to affect their rulings? How then with impunity did bullies surround the homes of Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, John Roberts, and Clarence Thomas – furious over a court decision on abortion? How could these mobs so easily throng our justices’ homes, with placards declaring “Off with their d–s”?

Since when did Americans create a government Ministry of Truth? And on whose orders did the FBI contract private news organizations to censor stories it did not like and writers whom it feared?

How did we wake up one morning to new customs of impeaching a president over a phone call? Of the speaker of the House tearing up the State of the Union address on national television? Of barring congressional members from serving on their assigned congressional committees?

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/01/05/twitter-files-prove-evans-law-of-inadequate-paranoia/

“No matter how bad you think things are, if you look closer, you’ll inevitably find it’s worse.” — M. Stanton Evans

For years Twitter denied that it targeted conservatives, despite piles of evidence to the contrary. But who could have imagined that Twitter had been working hand-in-glove with leftist officials in the federal government to silence speech they didn’t like. If Twitter was this bad, imagine what true tech giants like Facebook and Google have been up to.

As conservative paragon M. Stanton Evans rightly observed, whatever you think, it will likely turn out to be far worse.

The revelations that have been emerging over the past month from Twitter’s once-hidden corners – courtesy of Elon Musk – are being greeted with shrugs by reporters and editors who used to care about free speech. For everyone else, each layer uncovered by the Twitter files is worse than even its fiercest critics on the right had imagined.

Matt Taibbi, who is one of the few honest journalists left, has been on top of this from day one, and recently put together a compendium of what we’ve learned about a company that claimed its mission was to give people “the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.”

The first batch exposed the internal machinations over Twitter’s decision to blacklist the New York Post’s explosive Hunter Biden laptop story before the 2020 elections. Much of that was already known.

The second batch showed that Twitter was in fact shadowbanning people – despite repeated claims to the contrary. “Twitter had a huge toolbox for controlling the visibility of any user,” Taibbi notes, including a “Search Blacklist,” a “Trends Blacklist,” and a “Do Not Amplify” setting.