RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2022/11/21/trump_in_exile_a_tale_of_two_men_148495.html

He was the best of candidates. He was the worst of candidates. He was regaled for his wisdom. He was reviled for his foolishness. He gave his followers hope, led his opponents to despair.

Donald Trump is not Paris, and no 21st century American political writer reminds anyone of Charles Dickens, but I invoke the opening of “A Tale of Two Cities” to illustrate the duality of hope and despair that the name Donald J. Trump elicits.

MAGA Republicans got their wish Tuesday when Trump announced his third campaign for president. So did progressive Democrats. It remains to be seen which of them will live to regret their luck.

Will ex-President Trump be able to harness the raw power of Candidate Trump circa 2016, the populist tornado who wrecked his opposition, or will he be a lackluster imitation who is motivated not by any desire to improve the nation, but by a puerile desire to salve his own ego?

It’s no secret that I’ve been a nearly unswerving supporter of the man ever since his famous ride down the escalator at Trump Tower in June of 2015. The one exception was a column I wrote in September 2017 when it appeared that Trump was about to surrender on the issue of illegal immigration. It is useful to recall that moment because it demonstrated what could be called Trump’s potential fatal flaw – an overweening desire to be liked. Trump is most successful when he follows his instincts and throws caution to the winds. When he curries favor with the political class, or follows polls rather than his heart, he can lose his way.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/11/17/new-democrat-group-led-by-david-brock-to-mount-multi-million-dollar-campaign-to-undermine-gop-investigations/

In the wake of the Republican midterm election trickle, a coalition of left-wing Democrats led by Media Matters founder David Brock is planning a multimillion-dollar counteroffensive against congressional Republicans.

With funding from some of the biggest donors in Democrat politics, Brock’s new nonprofit group, “Facts First USA,” plans undermine congressional Republicans as soon as they take control the House of Representatives.

The group intends to spend $5 million-a-year to push back against an expected onslaught of investigations into Joe Biden’s incompetent and corrupt administration, as well as his notoriously corrupt family’s foreign business dealings.

Brock has stepped away from his position as chairman of Media Matters and American Bridge, “to focus on Facts First USA, for which he will serve as president,”  the New York Times reported on Thursday.

After the 2016 election, Brock, through his American Bridge PAC, began concocting a project to “hobble the Trump Administration with lawsuits, media criticism and new media competition.”

Now, his new group “Facts First USA” and the White House appear to be working together to hobble any investigation into the Biden regime’s rampant malfeasance. Together, they are reportedly assembling opposition research intended to cast Republicans conducting oversight as hypocrites, “pointing to those who defied subpoenas in the congressional investigation into the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/11/17/midterm-voter-fraud-nothing-to-see-here-folks-move-along-move-along/

“Unfortunately, Americans are skillful at fighting off foreign enemies; they are helpless in dealing with internal enemies that proclaim the destruction of America as their goal.Compare their sheep-like acceptance of voter fraud with that of the people of Belarus and, right now, Brazil and Iran. Goodbye America. It was great while it lasted.”

Having been a research psychologist I am data-oriented to the point that whenever I write on social or political issues, I buttress my argument with an overabundance of facts, irritating editors no end who prefer flowery essays instead. I reply that leftists could write essays to counter my point, but they cannot dispute facts. For example, liberals have claimed with a straight face that the COVID vaccines are safe, that there is no indoctrination of schools, and that the media hivemind does not engage in fake news. I dispute their innocence by presenting data from hundreds of compiled instances.

However, there are times when intuition takes over and I nervously stick my neck out. Such is the case now with the recent election. But first, let me present two instances where my intuition turned out to be accurate in spite of having little data, and in spite of a torrent of propaganda.

First, the vaccines and face masks. I used neither. They didn’t make sense. I knew how infinitesimal a virus is and felt that a cloth face mask would be ineffective in preventing contagion. Recent research confirms this. As for vaccines, they can be extremely dangerous if they do not undergo rigorous trials. COVID vaccines have, in fact, proven deadly. As for COVID being another bubonic plague, I suspected otherwise.

Second, the 2020 election. In the past, when some of my candidates lost elections, I was disappointed and shrugged it off. In 2020, something didn’t make sense. According to a 2020 Gallup poll, Trump had been picked by the public as the most admired man that year (which made some New Yorkers practically have seizures). His accomplishments had been outstanding. The polls said he would win easily. Trump’s opponent was nowhere to be seen. Then, that election night Chuck Todd, who was reporting and who has the typical obsessive, blinding, hatred for Trump, was grinning ear to ear while describing Trump’s lead. And then the vote counting stopped. A wealth of data eventually came out detailing voter fraud.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/11/18/the-dems-ftx-scandal-is-only-just-beginning/

Not only was crypto-billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried’s company, FTX, allegedly a fraud, but it spent huge sums on recent elections to get Democrats into office. Was this a case of massive election fraud? If so, it isn’t just Bankman-Fried who should be punished.

In case you’re not caught up on all this, FTX, a futures exchange for crypto-currencies including its own, exploded into the public’s attention just after the election. That’s when it was revealed that FTX had questionably transferred or “loaned” some $10 billion to its sister company, Alameda Research, to “fund risky bets,” a highly questionable move seemingly to shore up Alameda’s finances.

And yes, FTX was a big deal. It’s name is on an NBA arena. Its commercials featured NFL GOAT Tom Brady, as well as “Seinfeld” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm” creator Larry David.

That brought media reports about some of the money, around $1 billion, simply “disappearing.” That was followed by a host of regulatory agencies and prosecutors launching investigations of the company.

FTX has filed for bankruptcy, and its 30-year-old founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, has resigned.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/11/the_left_cashes_in_on_the_real_red_wave.html

Indeed, there was a red wave but not the one conservatives had hoped for. It was, however, the continuation of the leftists’, Marxists’, and communists’ eternal obsession to destroy America and obliterate her values—and Ayn Rand predicted it in her 1965 seminal book titled The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution.

Frighteningly prescient, Rand understood the beginnings of the “intellectual disintegration” that is now front and center in most colleges. Fifty-seven years later, the Left is “cashing in” on its quest for ultimate power.

Ground Zero was the “so-called student ‘rebellion’” that started at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1964. Billed as a Free Speech Movement, it was anything but. William Peterson, a professor of sociology at the time, wrote:

The first fact one must know about the Free Speech Movement is that it has little or nothing to do with free speech . . . . If not free speech, what then is the issue? In fact, preposterous as this may seem, the real issue is the seizure of power.

Now living in a woke United States, it is no longer preposterous at all as we realize that “the Free Speech Movement is reminiscent of the Communist fronts of the 1930s” wherein “the key feature [was] that [of] a radical core that uses legitimate issues ambiguously [emphasis mine] in order to manipulate a large mass.”

Thus, we see students from Ivy League schools overwhelm vacillating university administrators who cave to their demands and dis-invite speakers or cancel professors. We watch students whose wanton destruction is met with no resistance whatsoever, thus setting the stage in which “each provocation and subsequent victory [leads] to the next.”

Consider that the riots in 2020 were not met with absolute pushback but instead destroyed entire communities.

As students dismantled university buildings, where were the administrators firmly stating that “there can be no such thing as the right to an unrestricted freedom of speech or of action on someone else’s property”? In fact, “[t]he owners of a state university are the voters and taxpayers of that state.”

https://www.city-journal.org/how-did-ron-desantis-outperform-the-gop

The consensus is that, amid generally disappointing results for conservatives, Florida governor Ron DeSantis won the midterms. He defeated his Democratic opponent, Charlie Crist, by a 19-point margin and turned the state, which was once considered a battleground, deep red. He won everywhere, notching impressive victories with Hispanic and urban voters in formerly Democratic strongholds like Miami-Dade County.

How did DeSantis outperform the rest of the GOP? The answer, I believe, is that he has created a new model for “culture war as public policy,” which combines popular media combat with competent, effective governance.

DeSantis has built his profile by engaging in controversial cultural fights on critical race theory, gender ideology, and other “woke” issues. In his election night victory speech, DeSantis framed himself as a culture-war champion. “We fight the woke in the legislature. We fight the woke in the schools. We fight the woke in the corporations,” he said. “We will never, ever surrender to the woke mob. Florida is where woke goes to die.”

But DeSantis is not merely blustering. He has advanced a substantive agenda to rein in left-wing ideologies in Florida’s institutions, passing significant higher education reforms, new curriculum guidance for K–12 schools, a ban on gender theory in grades K–3, and the Stop W.O.K.E. Act, which restricts critical race theory-style racial scapegoating in large institutions, including corporations. Most notably, DeSantis picked a fight with the Walt Disney Company, which had previously been untouchable in Florida politics—and won.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/11/16/cape-cod-decides-to-boost-its-crime-rate/

Like many places in America today, Massachusetts is not what it used to be. Known in political mythology as the home of the center-Left, tax-cutting Cold Warrior John F. Kennedy, the commonwealth has become increasingly fringe since the days of Camelot. The excesses of Ted Kennedy led to Mike Dukakis, which has led to the bonkers wokeism of Elizabeth Warren and Ayanna Pressley. Those Bay Staters who still cling to pragmatism must feel like orphans by now.

After the recent midterm election, the situation appears even more grim. In Cape Cod’s Barnstable County, voters replaced retiring Sheriff James Cummings with Donna Buckley, who previously worked as general counsel in the sheriff’s office. Despite her time in Cummings’ office, Buckley’s election represents a sea change in how the county protects its citizens, and that’s bad news for residents who value their safety and property.

Cummings spent nearly 50 years in law enforcement and completed four terms as county sheriff. He stood out in Massachusetts as one of only a few sheriffs in the state who participated in the 287(g) program, in which local law enforcement cooperates with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to transfer custody of criminal illegal aliens to the federal agency for arrest and deportation proceedings.

The program seemed to work well in Barnstable County, as crime rates have been below the national average. Despite Massachusetts’ status as a sanctuary state, the county’s assembly of delegates even rejected a resolution in 2018 to oppose Cummings’ participation in the program.

Perhaps because of its effectiveness, 287(g) has been in the crosshairs of the anti-borders Left for several years. The result has been a string of sheriff candidates across the country who have campaigned on a promise to rescind cooperation with ICE. Buckley was one of them.

What can residents of Barnstable County expect now that they have voted for such a dramatic shift in law enforcement posture? The Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI) earlier this year investigated a similar change in Georgia’s Gwinnett County. Newly elected Sheriff Keybo Taylor ended the county’s participation in the 287(g) program his first day in office in 2020.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/11/16/let-the-blame-games-begin/

Who or what was responsible for the Republican nationwide collapse in the midterms? After all, pundits, politicos, and pollsters all predicted a “red tsunami.” 

Moreover, the average loss of any president in his first midterm is 25 House seats. And when his approval sinks to or below 43 percent—in the fashion of Joe Biden—the loss, on average, expands to over 40 seats. 

Barack Obama in 2010 lost 63 seats. Is Biden, therefore, more charismatic or more energetic than Obama? Was his agenda more successful and popular? 

Given such high Republican expectations, the blame game for the loss is as strident and confusing as was the election itself. 

Here are some of the most common targets of criticism. 

Donald Trump is being blamed on various counts. Before the midterms, he strangely attacked Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. And he loudly hinted that he would run again. 

Those histrionics supposedly took attention away from Republican candidates. Trump turned off some DeSantis fans from Trump-endorsed candidates, and energized Trump-hating left-wingers to go out and vote to stop the momentum for a second Trump presidency. 

Yet the idea that Trump was erratic or reckless was not really new and surprised no one on either side of the political divide. 

Two, Trump promoted many losing candidates, often on the narrow basis of whether they had accepted his charges of a rigged 2020 election. His critics countered that while his MAGA candidates won primaries in states like Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and Pennsylvania, they had little chance of going on to win general elections. 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/mark-milley-and-the-coming-civil-military-crisis-joint-chiefs-ukraine-negotiation-russia-politics-president-11668634194?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

Gen. Mark Milley apparently thinks Ukraine should negotiate with its Russian aggressors and the U.S. should shift its policy toward Kyiv. That’s the upshot of a New York Times piece, published last week, about remarks the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff made at the Economic Club of New York. Such views aren’t merely strategically irrational. They also demonstrate the risks of elevating general officers to positions of political prominence. As partisanship continues to plague American politics, we need a new chairman to repair the military’s fractious relationship with civilian authorities.

The airing of Gen. Milley’s comments isn’t surprising. Since the war began, there have been leaks about intra-White House disputes, particularly over whether to provide Ukraine with long-range weapons. Though Gen. Milley may not have shared all those sentiments, it also shouldn’t be surprising that he is fearful of—and vocal about—escalated conflict with Russia.

Gen. Milley, who became chairman of the Joint Chiefs in October 2019, has a track record of political activity. In September 2021, he admitted that he sought to assure his Chinese counterparts in late 2020 that there was no possibility of a Sino-American war. He took the same approach to Iran in 2020, apparently resisting then-President Trump’s desire to strike the regime in the final months of his term. Never mind that such wartime decisions are the sole constitutional authority of the commander in chief, not senior military officials.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/democracy-dies-in-illinois-democrats-unions-j-b-pritzker-11668462531?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

President Biden says last Tuesday was “a good day” for democracy, but he must not be paying attention to what happened in Illinois. Behold a case study in how Democrats change the rules to limit political competition and entrench one-party, public-union rule.

Democrats held supermajorities in both legislative chambers and a 4-3 majority on the state Supreme Court before the election. But their ex-boss Michael Madigan’s corruption scandal gave Republicans a chance to make gains in the statehouse, compete for Governor, and take control of the state Supreme Court for the first time in more than 50 years.

After deposing Mr. Madigan, Democrats last year did him proud by jamming through new state legislative maps that forced 12 Republican incumbents into six House districts. Democrats held 73 of 118 House seats under Mr. Madigan’s gerrymander. Their new, more extreme gerrymander helped them pick up four to five more seats.

Democrats also redrew state Supreme Court districts for the first time in 60 years. Three Justices are elected exclusively from Cook County, which includes Chicago. This guarantees Democrats three seats. But their majority looked in danger after a Democratic Justice representing central Illinois lost a retention election in November 2020 for the first time in state history.

Unions and Democrats have counted on the Democratic Supreme Court to block pension reforms and a ballot initiative backed by former GOP Gov. Bruce Rauner that would have established an independent redistricting commission. Democratic Justices have prevented citizens from using the ballot process to bypass the Legislature and enact government reforms.