RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/11/03/could-our-politics-be-even-more-childish/

Turn on the television, listen to the radio, or take a stroll through the internet. Democrats and their media confederates are busy dishing out the nonsense in helpings large enough to choke a giant. Either they are intentionally trying to deceive, or they are extraordinarily puerile. Or both.

There are no other possibilities.

To listen to the Democrats as they go begging for votes, to consume the tripe that their helpers in the press are putting out, one would think the Republicans are fascist white supremacists who will kill democracy while setting up themselves in a permanent position of unchallengeable power.

Says Keisha Lance Bottoms, a presidential senior adviser and former Atlanta mayor: “This MAGA Republican agenda is an effort to disrupt our democracy. So, whether it be through November and beyond November, I think it will always be important to call out any effort there is to destroy – essentially, destroy the United States of America.”

The president himself said over the summer that “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.”

Last week, Joe Biden’s former boss urged voters “to elect good people up and down the ballot,” because “across the country, some of the folks who tried to undermine our democracy are running for offices that will oversee the next election. And if they win, there’s no telling what might happen.”

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

Lucianne would have laughed uproariously at what is happening in San Francisco and at what Elon Musk is doing with Twitter. I can hear her say, “It’s over for the coverups.”

The media will still try and   bamboozle us with its version of the Mr. Pelosi incident just as it did for every Dem attack on Trump, but it won’t work now that the richest man in the world who is also a tech genius can and will uncover the truth.

Since Lucianne’s passing at age 87 on Oct, 26th, there have been numerous essays both laudatory and a downright snarky one by the Washington Post. One headline in particular caught my eye – The Indiscreet Charm of Lucianne Goldberg by Andrew Ferguson in Time magazine.

What struck me the most about that headline was the word, ‘indiscreet’ because the Lucianne I knew for the past 27 years was probably the most discreet person in public life. She knew just about everybody in politics and the media. She knew lots of the nitty gritty embarrassing details in the lives of the rich and famous but she never publicized them. She had a bawdy sense of humor and might have been outspoken in private discussions with friends whom she trusted to keep our own counsel, but she was not a malicious gossip. Only the Clintons brought out her knives.

She’d always say, “my loathing for the Clintons requires medication.”  The Clintons tried to destroy her, she told me. During the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Lucianne was a literary agent whose clientele, including Mark Fuhrman, was persuaded to leave her company because of pressure from the president on the media outlets that Fuhrman and the other authors needed to promote their books. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/should-convicts-have-to-earn-their-keep-in-prison/

“Let’s clean up the language of the 13th Amendment if such a feat is required. Agreed. And then let us remind criminals entering the penal system: There are no free lunches. You will pay as you go.”

The recent Red Scare by the Left in declaring that slavery is still legal in five of the United States needs some cautious reflection and analysis on at least one question it raises. Allegedly, the landmark 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which was ratified on December 16, 1865, saw the official abolishment of slavery. It is said, however, that it was allowed to continue as a punishment in prison against convicted felons.

Semantic interpretations of the 13th Amendment aside, and of how it has been and will continue to be applied, there is one moral question that frames the issue and gives it moral heft, so to speak: whether convicted felons ought to be paid for their labor while in prison. These felons include, but are not limited to, wider groups of individuals. They are rapists, murderers, armed robbers, pedophiles, carjackers, child-sex traffickers, and terrorists.

In being incarcerated, such individuals are not simply being punished for their crimes; they are also removed from society as they often pose incalculable harm to individuals and to public safety. They have violated the individual rights of others and have, in some respects, ejected themselves from the ambit of certain rights.

Society pays for their physical, psychological, and medical upkeep through taxation. Taxpayers pay a lot for private prisons. Various reports claim that in the 2018 fiscal year, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) spent over $800 million of taxpayer money on privately-owned or -operated detention facilities.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/11/02/its-not-just-congress-a-red-wave-is-hitting-social-media-too/

With the 2022 midterm elections less than a week away, it’s easy to be obsessed with the outcome of the vote. If recent polls are correct, this will be a “red wave” election in which Congress is returned to GOP control. But there’s another “red wave”: The one that’s washing over the Big Media and Social Media.

In recent days, the mainstream media have been in a tizzy following Tesla and Space-X founder Elon Musk’s dramatic $42 billion takeover of Twitter. Along with jokingly calling himself the “Chief Twit,” he promises major changes at the popular social-messaging site, with a total of 1.3 billion accounts and more than 200 million daily posts.

What’s left unsaid is what it will do for free speech and the return of centrist and conservative voices to social media. Musk, regardless of his politics, which range from left to right to everything in between depending on the issue, has been a robust defender of speech rights.

After taking over, Musk fired a whole suite of executives who had created and executed Twitter’s insidious plan to “de-platform” conservative voices from Twitter. The whole enabling apparatus seems set to go: Of Twitter’s 7,500 employees, some 50% to 75% are expected to get the axe as soon as this week.

With the likely restoration of hundreds if not thousands of suspended accounts, America’s thriving online opinion community is about to have part of its political and free speech ecosystem restored.

https://thefederalist.com/2022/11/01/how-the-surveillance-state-and-big-tech-colluded-to-make-twitter-disinformation-the-new-terrorism/

Federal law enforcement agencies originally created to protect us from terrorists are now being used to protect us from ourselves.

The late, great Angelo Codevilla maintained that America’s response to 9/11 was fundamentally flawed because it adopted a law enforcement approach to what is essentially a foreign policy problem. He argued that the law enforcement approach — the idea that we could detect and disrupt terrorist plots before they come to fruition, and arrest those responsible — required the construction of a vast state security and surveillance apparatus that would eventually, when the terrorist threat subsided, be turned on American citizens.

As in so much else, Codevilla was prophetic.

Earlier this week, a deeply reported piece by Ken Klippenstein and Lee Fang of The Intercept revealed an “expansive effort” by the Department of Homeland Security to curb speech it considers dangerous by pressuring tech platforms to engage in online censorship. Although DHS’s widely ridiculed “Disinformation Governance Board” was scaled back and then shut down earlier this year amid well-deserved criticism, “other initiatives are underway as DHS pivots to monitoring social media now that its original mandate — the war on terror — has been wound down.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/what-is-democracy_4831266.html?utm_source=ref_share&utm_campaign=copy&rs=0

Leaving aside the attack micro-drama involving Paul Pelosi, the Democrats seem to have two issues going into the midterm elections: abortion and democracy.

Neither seems to be getting much purchase with voters.

For reasons that seem puzzling to Democratic strategists, making the slaughter of the unborn (or, for some “make them comfortable” Dems, the recently born) a major plank on your platform just didn’t resonate with most women.

Or, rather, it resonated negatively, partly because it was transparently a cynical attempt at political manipulation, and partly because, for the vast majority of women, motherhood is an important part of their lives. The prospect of blighting that part of themselves doesn’t rally the troops.

Appeals to “democracy” is a little more complicated, but no less saturated with cynicism.

As attentive readers will have noticed, the word “democracy” is appealed to whenever it looks as though Democrats might lose.

One sign that this is about to happen is the promiscuous deployment of the phrase “our democracy.”

They really mean it. It’s not your democracy, peon.

If you voted for a Republican, you voted “against our democracy.”

As I have put it elsewhere, what “democracy” means to them is “rule by Democrats.”

https://amgreatness.com/2022/10/31/scandal-ridden-san-francisco-fbi-field-office-involved-in-pelosi-investigation/

No one should accept at face value the strange account of what happened to Paul Pelosi, husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), at their California home last week.

Plenty of factors—a wholly dishonest news media, unsubstantiated claims the attacker was a foiled assassin who planned to kill the speaker of the House, and Mr. Pelosi’s recent legal troubles, to name a few—feed justified skepticism surrounding the alleged break-in and hammer attack that occurred in the wee hours of October 28. Details continue to change while leading Democrats including Hillary Clinton blame the incident, without evidence, on Republicans and Donald Trump.

This situation is yet another example of how the public’s complete lack of faith in major institutions is fueling doubt and suspicion. Unfortunately, that level of distrust extends to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a once-revered agency that has blown its reputation in service to the Democratic Party. And news that the San Francisco FBI field office is taking a lead role in the Pelosi investigation offers little comfort that the American people will ever find out the truth of the matter.

The San Francisco field office, like the bureau’s Washington, D.C. headquarters and many other offices across the country, is mired in scandal. It’s particularly true as it relates to the FBI’s cozy ties to Big Tech—and the San Francisco FBI office is ground zero for that quid pro quo relationship. Rather than investigate the nearly 300 Big Tech companies within its Silicon Valley jurisdiction for various offenses such as election interference, the San Francisco FBI office appears instead to be in cahoots with these powerful corporate interests to do the Democratic Party’s dirty work.

Few people benefit more than Nancy Pelosi, who of course happens to live in San Francisco. Democratic candidates and lawmakers are flush with campaign donations from Big Tech; in 2020 alone, Facebook and Twitter—the latter located in Pelosi’s congressional district and the former located just outside its boundaries—donated at least $5.5 million to Democrats and only a paltry $435,000 to Republicans, a 12-1 ratio in favor of Pelosi’s party. Conversely, threats made by leading Democrats to break up Big Tech or hold congressional hearings into alleged malfeasance have been slow-walked since Pelosi reclaimed the speaker’s gavel.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/lincolnbrown/2022/10/31/a-transitioner-posts-her-uterus-on-tiktok-n1641525

“Surgeries like the one this person underwent should be approached with a degree of solemnity. These are life-changing procedures, and as I have said, they cannot be undone. And when the vagaries of society change and transgenderism is no longer interesting or popular, it won’t be a matter of making a trip to the Gap to catch up with the times. For some, there will be no going back, no matter how much they may want to.”

A TikTok user has had her uterus and cervix, complete with fallopian tubes, removed and placed in a jar. Think twice before you click on the video below, not just because it indeed shows a healthy human organ in a jar, but because it is an altogether uncomfortable thing to watch.

I hope that she is comfortable with this stage of her transition because there is no putting her uterus back. Aside from being an LED-lit conversation piece, what she has is a jar of medical waste, which is normally incinerated. And she seems perfectly happy with one of her internal organs being turned into a paperweight. And if she sees this transition through to the ultimate end, will she be as proud of the phalloplasty scar on her forearm?

If she should change her mind later in life, which has been known to happen, in some cases as soon as a patient has come out of the anesthesia, will that piece of preserved flesh still look so attractive on her bookshelf?

Having come of age in the 1980s, I remember the wide array of clothing and hairstyle choices. I remember in high school, I started out mimicking the look of the members of Duran Duran, and as time went on and that group drifted down the charts, I ended up looking a little more preppy by the time graduation rolled around.

In my late 30s, in a valiant but also lame attempt to remain on the cutting edge, I got two tattoos, one on each shoulder. In retrospect, I wish I had not got either of them. Not because I have anything against tattoos; I just made the decisions impulsively and probably for all the wrong reasons.

Styles come and go. And it was easy for me to change my look with a trip to the mall. Well, multiple trips since I worked during high school and had to save for a clothing budget. And if I decide that I want to get rid of my tattoos, it will cost some money and there may be a little scarring, but my life will be largely unchanged. Those things are reversible. Altering your body, outside of letting a piercing close up, is not so easy.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/10/31/paul-pelosi-and-the-violence-we-care-about/

It was the mention of zip ties that got me thinking. Apparently the man who allegedly broke into the San Francisco home of Nancy and Paul Pelosi on Friday was carrying zip ties. A possibly crazed individual approaching the home of a powerful politician with plastic fasteners that can be used to bind a person’s hands – it was both a nightmarish prospect and a familiar one, too. Wasn’t another public figure in the US recently targeted by someone who had zip ties? And a gun, a knife, pepper spray and a crowbar? Yes. It was Brett Kavanaugh. But many don’t remember that. Because thanks to the media, certain acts of political hate get less traction than others.

People are rightly horrified by what happened to Paul Pelosi on Friday. David DePape allegedly broke into the Pelosi home and yelled ‘Where is Nancy?’. She wasn’t there. DePape then allegedly attacked Mr Pelosi, who is 82, with a hammer. Pelosi suffered a skull fracture and is still in hospital, though he is expected to make a full recovery. This was a horrific assault on an elderly person, as well as seeming to have been motivated by a deep political animus. Sadly, it was not a one-off. There was a creepily similar incident at the home of Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh in Maryland in June.

A 26-year-old man from California travelled to Maryland allegedly with the intention of murdering Kavanaugh. That’s what he is charged with – attempted murder. He was armed with a tactical knife, a Glock 17 pistol, zip ties and other murderous paraphernalia. The difference between Kavanaugh’s alleged tormentor and the man who allegedly broke into the Pelosi home is that the former failed to gain entry. He spied two US marshals close to Kavanaugh’s home and called off his deadly mission. Kavanaugh was luckier than Paul Pelosi.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/10/30/permissible-and-impermissible-incendiary-speech/

United States Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) hit the airwaves to connect the recent assault on Paul Pelosi with “fascism” and “white nationalism.” She insists that both are now ubiquitous. And both prompt increasing politically motivated violence. (Ocasio-Cortez remains oblivious to the greatest sustained political violence in our recent history; the 120 days of Black Lives Matter and Antifa-fueled rioting, arson, looting, and mayhem of summer and fall 2020—often cheered on or defended by public officials and social media.)

The deplorable violent attack on Pelosi, husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), has been described as the logical reification of increasing bitter political discourse. Shrill accusations spread even as full details of the attack are still not known. But the general picture of the assailant is one of an unhinged conspiracy freak of all flavors. He seems to have been a lunatic, drug-crazed white supremacist and anti-Semite, a former hemp jeweler, and nudist, who was either homeless or was living in a cluttered hippie-like commune in Berkeley plastered with pride and BLM flags. 

Nonetheless, almost immediately the Left has seized on the attack to blame supposed right-wing political rhetoric as the cause. 

As we enter the final week before the midterms and likely near-historic Democratic losses in Congress, this effort to manipulate violence in the news for last-minute political advantage will increase—but certainly it is not new. 

In late October 2018, after the despicable mass lethal shooting of worshipers in the Pittsburgh Tree of Life synagogue, the Left immediately blamed Donald Trump and his supporters. That useful pre-midterm narrative insisted that Trump had provided the rhetorical fireworks that set off anti-Semite and conspiracy nut, Robert Gregory Bowers. 

The killer came from an atrocious family background. He was a known loner and outsider who came to embrace white nationalism. But in his incoherent rants and postings, he had made it clear that he was also no fan of Donald Trump. He considered the president pro-Jewish (Trump’s son-in law is Jewish and his daughter a Jewish convert) and a “globalist.” That fact, apparently, was of no importance. For the next week before the midterms, the media saturated coverage of supposed Trump culpability for Bowers’ crazy violence.