RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-misuses-of-a-colorado-atrocity/

When the news broke that an armed man had entered Club Q, an “LGBTQ” nightclub in Colorado Springs, at about midnight on Saturday, on the eve of something called the “Transgender Day of Remembrance,” and had proceeded to kill five people and wound at least twenty-five, one thing seemed all but certain. It was too early to know what had motivated the perpetrator, Anderson Lee Aldrich (who apparently was arrested last year, after a “brief standoff with law enforcement,” for making a bomb threat against his mother). But it seemed a safe enough prediction that the usual “LGBTQ” activists and their allies in the media would soon be spinning this atrocity to their advantage.

Sure enough, within a few hours, Colorado’s largest daily, the Denver Post, had posted an article in which one Elizabeth Hernandez linked the murders to “hateful rhetoric directed toward transgender people and the broader LGBTQ community.” The recently re-elected Congresswoman Lauren Boebert, stated Hernandez, “has been vocal against LGBTQ and transgender issues, including in a June tweet saying ‘Take your children to CHURCH, not drag bars’ and a 2021 speech on the House floor during which she warned of ‘young girls across America who will have to look behind their backs as they change in their school locker rooms just to make sure there isn’t a confused man trying to catch a peek.’” Hernandez also noted the controversy surrounding “all-ages drag shows at public libraries and other locations” and a Colorado librarian who was “fired from her job for planning LGBTQ youth programming.”

What do all of these specifics cited by Hernandez have in common? Simple: not a single one of them is about hatred for transgender people or anybody else. They’re all about legitimate questions of public policy.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/11/22/as-shortages-persist-under-biden-its-time-to-ask-is-this-on-purpose/

Did the United States suddenly become a socialist basket case? It’s hard not to come to that conclusion after reading about the endless shortages plaguing the nation. Each of which President Joe Biden either seems clueless to resolve or determined to make worse.

Let’s start with the biggest one: the shortage of diesel fuel. While Biden was busy draining the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to tamp down gas prices before the midterm elections, the real worry was that supplies of diesel fuel have been running short.

Two years after the short-lived COVID lockdowns ended, diesel inventories continued to trend downward to their lowest levels since 2008. The cost for a gallon of diesel fuel is 46% higher than it was a year ago, according to AAA, and now costs more than $5 a gallon.

That affects every corner of the economy because, while passenger cars mostly use regular gasoline, diesel powers just about everything else that makes the economy move, and many homes, especially in the northeast, rely on heating oil – a related product – to keep their families from freezing to death.

The American Farm Bureau Federation tried to alert Biden to the scale of this problem weeks ago. “Our nation’s food supply is driven by diesel. High diesel prices are severely impacting our farmers and ranchers, causing increased costs to consumers, and adding to food insecurity.”

One big factor for all this: declining refinery capacity. After trending upward for years, it has fallen off each year since. A big reason: Biden’s war on fossil fuels.

“If you are a refiner forecasting billions in losses — and you require massive investments in order to keep your refinery operating safely and in compliance with the laws — you may very well simply make the decision to close down,” writes Robert Rapier in Forbes.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/11/21/donald-trump-and-the-blue-tick-pricks/

So Elon Musk has done it. He’s brought back Trump. After conducting a Twitter poll on whether Trump should be unbanned – by far the most transparent thing the Twitter company has ever done – Musk and his minions pressed a few buttons and The Donald was back online.

Whether or not he’ll actually tweet again is another matter (he says he won’t). Regardless, Musk’s reinstatement of Trump’s account is a great blow against the tyrannical meddling of the worthy, woke, censorious fainthearts of Silicon Valley who have bizarrely come to exercise such extraordinary power over what may be thought and said in the 21st century.

The usual suspects are agog, naturally. There’s been a great relapse into Trump Derangement Syndrome. Trump’s return will ‘plunge Twitter deeper into chaos’, says CNN. Jack White has melodramatically fled the Twitter hellscape. ‘Absolutely disgusting, Elon’, wept this rocker who’s strangely scared of other people’s words.

Sadiq Khan, London’s pint-sized Torquemada, issued a statement saying Trump ‘must not be allowed to use social media’. Mate, who do you think you are? Mayor of the world? ‘Freedom of speech is vital’, said Khan, ‘but’ – there’s always a massive, unsightly but – ‘it must be balanced against keeping other people safe to protect our democracy and society’. Do we really need to remind folk, in 2022, of Benjamin Franklin’s words, about how those who would ditch liberty for safety deserve neither? Khan would have banned Franklin, too. A free-speech extremist? Deplatform.

Against all these unhinged demands to keep Trump banned – forever, one presumes – we should remind people of just how undemocratic and outright imperious Silicon Valley’s banning of Trump was in the first place. It was the most sinister act of social-media censorship to date. And that’s saying something.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/11/ill_barrs_latest_antitrump_diatribe_explodes_the_myth_that_hes_a_wise_man.html

The Bible holds that “Even a fool, when he holdeth his peace, is counted wise…” (Proverbs 17:28.) In the modern era, with attribution to Mark Twain, Abraham Lincoln, or others, that’s been reworked as “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt.” Former Attorney General Bill Barr’s latest embittered statements about the documents the FBI stole from Mar-a-Lago place him squarely within that quotation.

In the government, where it’s almost impossible to get fired, those who stick around long enough become respected, even revered. That’s especially true for attorneys who work in the Department of Justice. Having the entire weight and resources of the government tends to give them a track record they wouldn’t earn in the free market. Barr’s pronouncements about Trump’s potential criminal liability when it comes to the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago raid leads me to believe he earned his august reputation, not because he’s knowledgeable or bright, but just because he stuck around.

Barr appeared on PBS to opine about Merrick Garland’s politicized, despotic decision to investigate Trump the moment that Trump announced he was running again for president. Barr gave it as his opinion that the DOJ has a case:

Regarding the FBI’s raid on Mar-a-Lago earlier this year as part of their criminal investigation into Trump’s handling of U.S. government records, Barr said, “If the Department of Justice can show that these were indeed very sensitive documents, which I think they probably were, and also show that the president consciously was involved in misleading the Department, deceiving the government, and playing games after he had received the subpoena for the documents, those are serious charges.”

When asked if Trump’s actions were a “serious enough crime” to prosecute, Barr said, “That’s serious.”

“Well, I’ve said that I personally think that they probably have the basis for legitimately indicting the president. I don’t know, I’m speculating,” he said. “But given what’s gone on, I think they probably have the evidence that would check the box. They have the case.”

Barr is totally and completely wrong because his premise is wrong. “If the Department can show that these were indeed very sensitive documents which I think they probably were….” Nope, that’s not how it works.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/11/19/the-insurrection-house-of-cards-is-collapsing/

Amid bombshell revelations that the FBI embedded numerous informants in two militia groups accused of plotting to overthrow the government on January 6, FBI Director Christopher Wray finally is facing some heat. 

During a House Homeland Security Committee hearing on Tuesday, Representative Clay Higgins (R-La.) angrily demanded to know more details about the use of FBI informants related to the Capitol protest. Higgins twice asked Wray whether FBI informants disguised as Trump supporters were planted inside the building even before protesters gained entry.

When Wray offered his usual obfuscating tap dance about protecting sources and methods—“the suggestion that the FBI’s confidential human sources or FBI employees in some way instigated or orchestrated January 6th, that’s categorically false,” he indignantly insisted—Higgins called his bluff. “It should be a no!” he yelled when Wray wouldn’t give a straight answer.

Ironically, Wray was saved from directly responding by none other than Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-La.), the chairman of the January 6 select committee. One would assume the lawmaker in charge of the 18-month congressional investigation into the events of January 6 would force Wray to respond. Thompson should have been shocked at the suggestion the FBI stationed assets dressed as Trump supporters inside the Capitol prior to the breach.

Further, given reporting by friendly regime news organizations such as the New York Times confirming the existence of FBI informants months before January 6, Thompson and his fellow Democrats should have blasted Wray for either inept sources or a complete failure to collect accurate intelligence from those informants. Where’s the outrage that Wray concealed this information from the public and various  congressional inquiries?

https://amgreatness.com/2022/11/20/the-strange-morality-of-the-bay-area-billionaire-left/

“Ya. Hehe. I had to be. It’s what reputations are made of, to some extent. I feel bad for those guys who get f—ed by it, by this dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths and so everyone likes us.” —Sam Bankman-Fried

The FTX Bitcoin empire of 30-year-old CEO Sam Bankman-Fried is in shambles. Or more specifically, his “dumb game” cryptocurrency exchange has destroyed thousands of lives. Electronically, he may have robbed perhaps a million investors, and along with them hundreds of large institutional investors. 

Mysteriously, only after the conclusion of the midterm elections, did we suddenly learn that this left-wing “philanthropist” and benefactor of Democratic politics, this megadonor to the quid pro quo puff-piece media, this con artist protected from federal securities regulators, had drained off, lost, hidden, or spent billions of dollars of other people’s money. 

As a result, the Bahamas-basking, tax-avoiding, polyamorous sybarite, and heartthrob of progressive moralists, now claims he has no wherewithal to honor his financial commitments to his own investors. Preliminary postmortem auditors sigh that they have never encountered a greater financial mess than what Bankman-Fried has left in his wake. 

How does the most sophisticated financial system in the history of civilization allow a virtue-signaling nerd to nearly wreck it? Where were the Federal Trade Commission, the Department of Justice, the IRS, and all the other alphabet soup agencies that supposedly exist so that someone like Bankman-Fried does not? Where is Merrick Garland and his special prosecutors, the FBI with its televised SWAT swoops and leg irons?

For all the performance-art boasts of simply doing good for others by doing far better for himself, Bankman-Fried may soon be revealed to be one of the great, dissolute con artists in American history. Like the infamous Charles Ponzi, “Bankman” may become our eponymous word in the 21st century for electronically driven, pyramid-scheme theft. 

His Stanford-Silicon Valley moral veneer was shiny but otherwise razor thin. Yet Bankman-Fried told at least one truth when he explained to obsequious media what his ilk easily does to fool purported suckers who send him cash, while he avoided federal and media oversight: “This dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths and so everyone likes us.” 

Well, not everyone. Instead, he might qualify his “everyone” as the like-minded, cynical, left-wing politicos, the kindred media hacks at the Washington Post and New York Times, and brethren investor toadies who helped him render Bernie Madoff a small-potato sinner in comparison.

Bankman-Fried had showered Joe Biden in 2020 with millions of dollars in campaign donations and did so again with larger sums to congressional candidates in 2022. His public relations arm of FTX exuded the usual virtue speak—including promised impending multibillion-dollar gifting—for utopian, Democratic, and progressive causes. And the media on spec gushed about their pet grunger as he sought to buy protection from Democratic fixers. 

“Effective Altruism,” Ponzi-Style

https://amgreatness.com/2022/11/19/third-times-a-charm-for-merrick-garland/

What do you suppose the chances are that Merrick Garland, Joe Biden’s attorney general and chief enforcer, is a student of Søren Kierkegaard? Pretty slim, I’d wager. But his announcement yesterday that he was getting the old band back together and appointing yet another “special counsel” to investigate Donald Trump made me think that he should take a gander at Repetition, a book that Kierkegaard published in 1843 under the pseudonym Constantin Constantius.

The book is an arch, hothouse affair, full of Kierkegaard’s mocking and self-indulgent philosophical curlicues. But the MacGuffin of the book—whether one can really repeat the events of one’s life and, if so, what significance that repetition has—is something Garland might want to ponder for himself. I don’t think I will be spoiling things by revealing that Kierkegaard—or at least his pseudonymous narrator—concludes that, no, “there simply is no repetition” in life.  

I don’t expect that would faze Garland. A man who can direct his Stasi agents to treat parents as domestic terrorists because they complain about the actions of their local school board is clearly made of strong stuff. Why not conduct an unprecedented raid on a former president’s home? Why not organize another political vendetta against him? 

Sure, this will be the third special counsel assigned to harass Donald Trump, the most investigated American president in history. It would be nice if Garland could lure Robert Mueller out from his Golden Pond activities to take on the attack against the once and possibly future president once more. I suspect, though, that Mueller is too deep in Bidenesque (or Fettermanesque) mental twilight to mount that steed again. Maybe Garland can harness up the despicable Andrew Weissmann, Mueller’s brain and primary dogsbody in the now thoroughly discredited “Russian collusion” delusion. 

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.