RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/09/our-ship-state-becoming-ship-fools-bruce-thornton/

The Ship of Fools allegory first appears in Plato’s Republic, where Plato uses it to show how  a weak and badly trained captain creates chaos among the crew, who bicker over which of them should steer the ship, even though they have little of the knowledge and skills necessary for doing so. They end up mutinying against the captain and spending their time plundering the ship’s stores and eating and drinking, even as they sail towards disaster.

Plato, of course, was targeting the Athenian democracy, and its presumption that ordinary citizens have the capacity to govern, even though they lack the philosophical knowledge that shows what is good for people and the city they inhabit––not power, conquest, wealthy, or the pleasures of the body, but the virtue that comes from philosophical study. In other words, a technocratic oligarchy that Plato called “guardians” in his imagined perfect government.

For over a century the West has been evolving into such a government, whether it be socialism, communism, or the progressivism that has increasingly dominated our technocratic “managerial elite” and the numerous executive agencies staffed by credentialed “experts” who know better than the people what’s best for them.

This tyranny of the minority “managerial elite” has been more dangerous than the tyranny of the majority, assaulting our Constitutional structure that managed to avoid those extremes through divided and balanced government, along with the unalienable rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/democrats-party-overclass-student-loans-working-vaccines-grocery-hourly-college-debt-university-progressives-elite-morals-virtue-11661961896?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

President Biden’s student-loan forgiveness plan will mostly benefit the elites. The majority of those loans are held by college graduates, who on average make $1 million more in their lives than people who don’t have a degree. How did progressives—who claim to care about the poor and working class, about fairness and equity—end up pushing a bailout for the wealthy at working people’s expense?

Well, consider who progressives are—the whitest and most highly educated members of the Democratic coalition. They’re advancing their own economic interests, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But they’re doing it under a false pretense, casting it as a moral battle for the indigent.

It isn’t the only example. Consider the push for open borders. Progressives cast it in moral terms, as a way of helping needy and oppressed foreigners. In truth, open borders benefit consumers at the expense of Americans who work in industries undercut by importing new laborers. To add insult to injury, they label you racist if you object.

The green agenda fits the pattern too. Progressives zip around in Teslas, a symbol of both affluence and virtue, while union members in the energy sector lose their jobs. Progressives push to release mentally ill drug addicts into working-class communities where they prey on vulnerable people of color—while they themselves live in nice neighborhoods with astronomical rents, polishing their halos.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/joe-biden-misidentifies-the-crime-culprit-democrats-pennsylvania-defund-the-police-11661983065?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

President Biden is stumping for Democrats in Pennsylvania this week, and law and order was his theme Tuesday in Wilkes-Barre. He was joined by Rep. Matt Cartwright, who is in a tight race to keep his House seat, and gubernatorial candidate Josh Shapiro. Democrats are worried about public anxiety over rising crime, and they should be.

Statewide, murders and non-negligent manslaughters increased 46% last year compared to 2019, according to Pennsylvania’s Uniform Crime Reporting System. Pittsburgh recorded 53 homicides last year, a 43% increase over 2019. Nonfatal shootings there were up 25% in 2021 compared to two years prior.

Earlier this year Pew reported that only 44% of Philadelphia residents said they felt safe in their neighborhood at night, while 65% said they’d heard gunshots near their homes in the past year. Some 362 people have been slain in the City of Brotherly Love so far this year, compared to 226 in the first eight months of 2019.

Mr. Biden was at pains Tuesday to neutralize the perception that Democrats want to defund the police. “When it comes to public safety in this nation, the answer is not defund the police. It’s fund the police. Fund the police.” That’s a welcome line, but remember that in 2020 such sentiments were heresy in the Democratic Party.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/08/reiner_klobuchar_and_the_big_lie_of_january_6.html

Dismayed by the failure of the courts to charge any of the protestors with “insurrection” the media have grasped at every proverbial straw within reach. When eleven members of the Oath Keepers were charged with “seditious conspiracy” a year after the riot, the zealots trumpeted their vindication across the fruited plain. Constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley, no Trump fan, quickly rained on their noisy parade.

“The charging of a relatively small number of extremists in this large protest belies rather than supports the broader allegations of an actual insurrection,” wrote Turley. “This remains a protest that became a riot.” More than six months after the incident, an informed FBI source was telling Reuters, “Ninety to ninety-five percent of these are one-off cases. Then you have five percent, maybe, of these militia groups that were more closely organized. But there was no grand scheme with Roger Stone and Alex Jones and all of these people to storm the Capitol and take hostages.”

To any fair minded observer, the incident at Capitol Hill was much closer to the on-air graphic—“fiery but largely peaceful protest”—that CNN used to euphemize scenes of a burning Kenosha. The difference between the Kenosha and Capitol Hill riots is that the rioters in Washington set no fires and destroyed about $50 million less property. Then, too, Kenosha was just one of scores of BLM-Antifa riots that summer that left as many as 30 people dead and caused some $2 billion in damage.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/08/30/obama-era-sisters-circle-trump/

Susan Rice describes the trio as family.

In her 2019 memoir, Rice, Barack Obama’s final national security advisor, wrote glowingly of the close bond she shared with two other women in Obama’s tight knit circle of confidants. “In my last two years as NSA, I was extremely fortunate to have the invaluable input, support, and counsel of my sisters, Avril Haines and Lisa Monaco,” Rice explained in her book, Tough Love: My Story of the Things Worth Fighting For. “Never before, I am sure, had such small packages wielded such national security punch. Confident in ourselves and each other, we wouldn’t let any outsider perceive, much less exploit, our differences. Woe unto anyone, especially any male counterpart, who tried to play one of us against another.”

Hard eye roll.

Rice’s self-aggrandizing flex notwithstanding, no one tried to “play” the little women off each other; to the contrary, Haines and Monaco—Obama’s deputy national security advisor and homeland security advisor, respectively—and Rice played the American people by helping engineer one of the biggest frauds in U.S. political history: the Trump-Russia election collusion hoax.

Their sisterhood presumably strengthened during secret huddles in the months leading up to the 2016 presidential election. Working off alleged intelligence collected by CIA Director John Brennan, Haines’ former boss, indicating the Kremlin planned to sabotage America’s election, Rice, Monaco, and Haines “convened meetings in the Situation Room to weigh the mounting evidence of Russian interference and generate options for how to respond,” the Washington Post reported in June 2017.

Monaco accompanied then-FBI Director James Comey to Capitol Hill in September 2016 to “warn” top congressional leaders in both parties that Russia was up to no good. After the election, in a brazen attempt to sow doubt about its legitimacy, Monaco announced the intelligence community would conduct an assessment into how Russian “hacking” impacted the results. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/trumps-attorney-general-explains-raid-trumps-lloyd-billingsley/

“Number one is that I think a lot of the attacks on the FBI are over the top because a decision like this is not made by the FBI,” former Attorney General William Barr told the Bari Weiss podcast on August 25.

“In fact, I don’t think the FBI would push a decision that it’s best to go in and search and obtain those documents after being jerked around for a year and a half. The decision would be made at the Department of Justice, by subordinates of the AG, and ultimately signed off on by the AG. The FBI would be told to go and execute it. I think the idea that the FBI is the problem here is misplaced.”

The former AG was more disturbed by “the constant pandering to outrage” on the right, without discussion of whether the outrage had any merit. The FBI seized Trump’s passports, leaving the impression that the former president had committed a crime and was now a flight risk. FBI agents also rummaged through the closets of Melania Trump, an act of pure intimidation. With Trump attorneys forced outside, the FBI could easily have planted or destroyed information. If that is not cause for outrage, it’s hard to imagine what might qualify.

Weiss brought up the “Russiagate” episode, as the host explained, “the idea that Donald Trump was a compromised agent of Moscow. That there were deep connections between Trump’s people and Russian intelligence. That the Trump campaign had colluded with the Russians, including by hacking Democratic National Committee emails.” Barr was all over it.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/08/31/its-time-for-voters-to-channel-their-inner-howard-beale/

“Voters had better get mad, stay mad until November, and kick the left out of every leadership position it holds. Because Biden and Co. are setting the nation on a road that will lead to disaster. If voters don’t get mad now and force a course correction, they will only have themselves to blame when the inevitable crash comes.”

The mainstream press sees a glimmer of hope in recent polls showing President Joe Biden’s approval rating inching up and Democrats’ prospects looking brighter for the midterm elections. Don’t let yourself, or your friends, family, and neighbors be conned.

Biden’s string of “victories” includes getting a massive growth-killing tax-and-spend bill through Congress and canceling about $1 trillion worth of student loan debt to benefit a small minority of college-educated Americans.

The only thing these recent events have in common is that they are designed specifically to improve Democrats’ chances in November.

These are awfully big price tags for vote buying. And you are paying for it.

So why isn’t the public mad as hell?

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2022/08/30/biden-to-warn-that-republicans-will-destroy-the-country-in-prime-time-nationwide-address-n1625223

Joe Biden is going to give a prime-time address to the nation Thursday evening in order to warn us that Republicans want to destroy America.

What does he mean by that? Last week, the president addressed a Democratic National Committee event in Maryland where he spelled out exactly the line of attack against Republicans he will deliver on Thursday night.

“They refuse to accept the will of the people. They embrace — political violence. They don’t believe in democracy,” he said. “This is why, in this moment, those of you who love this country — Democrats, independents, mainstream Republicans — we must be stronger, more determined, and more committed to saving America than the MAGA Republicans are to destroying America.”

Sheesh. Laying it on kind of thick, isn’t he?

“Vote for Democrats or you’re dead” is kind of a silly campaign slogan. But it’s what Democrats have been saying for months — ever since it became clear that Biden had so trashed the economy and tarnished our reputation overseas with his incompetent botched withdrawal from Afghanistan that Democrats were going to get a huge shellacking in the midterms.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/08/30/meghans-empire-of-cringe/

What do they see in her? That’s the question staring us in the face once again as Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex, is trending once again, this time due to a toe-curling interview in the Cut and the arrival of her new podcast, Archetypes. Most Brits have been distinctly unimpressed with Markle since she and Prince Harry abandoned their royal duties in 2020, alleging they were hounded out by a racist palace, a racist press and ultimately a racist public, with zero evidence of this supposedly foul treatment. According to YouGov, just a quarter of the public holds a favourable view of Markle and she ranks 14th – just above Prince Andrew – in the list of the most popular royals. Meanwhile, the liberal media continue to treat Meghan as a hero and saintly victim, splashing ever-more adoring column inches and lavish photoshoots on her.

This new 6,409-word Cut article has to be seen to be believed. It represents a spectacular failure of self-awareness, a bottomless brunch of Californian cringe. It begins with journalist Allison Davis being welcomed into the Sussexes’ vast Montecito mansion – described as ‘the kind of big that startles you into remembering that unimaginable wealth is actually someone’s daily reality’ – before Meghan proceeds to talk about her oppressive treatment in Britain and triumphant reinvention as a sort of faux-humanitarian influencer. The couple’s multimillion-dollar deals with Spotify and Netflix – the piece hints at a new fly-on-the-wall doc in the pipeline – are presented as somewhere between acts of public service and acts of self-realisation. ‘I feel different. I feel clearer. It’s like I’m finding – not finding my voice. I’ve had my voice for a long time, but being able to use it’, Meghan says of her new podcast, aimed at challenging the sexist stereotypes that supposedly hold women back.

https://www.city-journal.org/the-failure-of-progressive-criminal-justice-reforms

For the last decade, radical prosecutors and progressive politicians have been proposing and enacting illogical criminal-justice policies, often with little consideration for the real-world effects of these ideas. Enough time has passed for an evidence-based assessment of how these policies have played out in the real world.

Gun Buybacks: Politicians in big cities believe that gun-buyback programs will reduce the violent crime that is spiking in America’s urban centers. But comprehensive research shows no evidence that such programs work. Philadelphia just completed a three-year gun-buyback program that yielded over 1,000 firearms. Not a single recovered firearm was linked to violent crime and, during the course of the program, Philadelphia set new all-time records for homicides. “It’s not reaching the area of the community that’s possessing illegal guns and using them,” says criminologist Joseph Giacalone. “It’s political theater.”

“Violence Interrupters”: Progressive prosecutors tout violence interrupters—former gang members and convicts who mediate disputes on the streets—as a serious weapon against crime. Cities led by “reform” prosecutors, such as Baltimore, Indianapolis, and Philadelphia have staked a lot on this idea. The results have not been encouraging. Multiple violence interrupters have been murdered in Baltimore. In Indianapolis, the former convict in charge of training violence interrupters was arrested for threatening a woman and had to be fired. In Philadelphia, a violence interrupter shot three people in a bar while he was working his anti-violence job. And a recent research paper states that violence interrupters, despite their tough histories, are suffering from severe trauma, mainly because they are being exposed to the type of violence that police officers face every day (imagine that). The real question for violence-interruption programs is whether they might be adding fuel to the fire of violent crime.