RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/07/defund-fbi-robert-spencer/

Was anyone really surprised when Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) announced that “highly credible” whistleblowers had given him information about FBI efforts to make the Hunter Biden scandal go away? Grassley wrote to FBI Director Christopher Wray and Attorney General Merrick Garland Monday that “the information provided to my office involves concerns about the FBI’s receipt and use of derogatory information relating to Hunter Biden, and the FBI’s false portrayal of acquired evidence as disinformation. The volume and consistency of these allegations substantiate their credibility and necessitate this letter.” Will anyone hail me as a prognosticator of extraordinary powers when I predict, correctly, that in response to this letter, Wray and Garland will do absolutely nothing, except possibly to cover their tracks more effectively? No, because anyone who has been paying attention can see that.

The FBI has become a cancer on the American body politic. The FBI must go.

Grassley summarized how the FBI spiked the Hunter Biden material, stating that “the allegations provided to my office appear to indicate that there was a scheme in place among certain FBI officials to undermine derogatory information connected to Hunter Biden by falsely suggesting it was disinformation.” He noted that a 2020 FBI intelligence assessment that was “used by an FBI headquarters team to improperly discredit negative Hunter Biden information as disinformation.” He added: “Based on allegations, verified and verifiable derogatory information on Hunter Biden was falsely labeled as disinformation.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/07/27/voters-give-biden-team-of-advisers-failing-grades-ii-tipp-poll/

Presidents matter, but so do the people they surround themselves with. A strong team of experienced advisers can have a major impact on a presidency. President Joe Biden’s advisers are a case in point, and perhaps go a long way toward explaining his current low favorability among American voters.

As part of our July I&I/TIPP Poll, we asked the following question about Biden’s various teams of advisers and Cabinet members: “In general, based on what you read, see, or hear, how would you rate the quality of advice President Biden receives from the following teams of senior policy advisers?”

Respondents to the online national poll of 1,643 adults, taken July 6-9, were asked to assign a grade of A (excellent), B (good), C (average), D (poor) or F (unacceptable). The poll has a margin of error of +/-2.5 percentage points.

If Biden’s advisers were students, they’d all be grounded by their parents for earning failing grades.

Biden’s economic team, for instance, received “A” or “B” grades from 31% of poll respondents, while getting “D” or “F” grades from 42%. 20% handed out “C” grades, barely passing.

But 25% gave Biden’s economic team an “F,” perhaps not surprising given the difficulties arising from the forced national COVID lockdown, including a looming recession, the implosion of the small-business sector, the national supply-chain nightmare, a meltdown of our air-transportation and trucking systems, and current inflation over 9%, the highest in 41 years.

https://thefederalist.com/2022/07/25/wokeism-is-collapsing-on-itself/

The evidence of cognitive dissonance is mounting. The left’s house of cards will inevitably collapse.

If there’s a light at the end of the dark tunnel our nation is in right now, it’s because of Horace’s ancient dictum, “You can chase out nature with a pitchfork, but she will keep running back.” Arguably, wokeism is defined by its gnostic rejection of nature on gender, sexuality, the laws of economics, energy, race, speech, and rationality itself. 

Yet, nature has the final say, and we’re seeing it in the slow retreat of leftists from wokeism. Nary a day goes by on which a new Substack writer confesses some variation of, “I’m not a right-winger; I’m a proud progressive, but these new leftists are crazy, and I’m done with the Democrats.” They’ve reached a terminus in their minds where they can no longer bear the cognitive dissonance created by the suspension of reality. They’re done drinking the Kool-Aid.

The Liar’s Paradox

Consider the left’s cognitive dissonance on race. They have a Liar’s Paradox problem. The Liar’s Paradox goes, “A Cretan says all Cretans are liars. Is he to be believed?” 

https://www.city-journal.org/marilyn-mosby-just-the-latest-progressive-prosecutor-to-go

Last week, Baltimore state’s attorney Marilyn Mosby lost in the Democratic primary contest to retain her position. Around the country, other de-prosecuting prosecutors are being removed one by one, as their failing policies and ethical problems culminate in disorder and public distrust. Is the progressive prosecutor movement on the decline?

Mosby’s original campaign platform was to ignore entire categories of crimes and to reduce sentences even for violent criminals. The criminals got the message: Baltimore was a free-fire zone. Homicides exceeded 300 per year in the Charm City every year that Mosby was in office, making Baltimore one of the nation’s most dangerous municipalities. People and businesses fled the city, with over 35,000 residents exiting, even as the rest of Maryland grew in population. Just a few weeks before the primary, a report from the Maryland Public Policy Institute detailed how many of the homicides in Baltimore were committed by criminals who would have been in jail under a normal prosecution regime. Mosby did not help her position by ending up under federal indictment for perjury charges alleging that she made false statements while applying for pandemic-related loans to buy a vacation home in Florida. Mosby’s victorious opponent, Ivan Bates, is something of an unknown quantity, but he campaigned explicitly on a public-safety platform, as his campaign materials make clear: “To build a safer Baltimore, we must have a functional and efficient prosecutor’s office led by a State’s Attorney who prioritizes public safety.”

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/what-john-durham-has-proved/

In May, when a federal jury acquitted former Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann of one count of lying to the FBI, the cadre of politicians, pundits and activists that comprise what they consider a “resistance” to Donald Trump’s presidency were brimming with indignation at the insult of its having gone to trial at all.

The Sussmann prosecution was the first case from special counsel John Durham to go to trial. Durham was appointed in 2019 to investigate the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia. And it took only a few hours for the jury to rule against him. As Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe told Politico: “The Durham roadshow has expended far too much of the taxpayers’ money with precious little to show for it and needs to be wound down in an orderly fashion. Enough already!”

Tribe’s view of Durham’s prosecution of Sussmann is ironic. Only a few years earlier, the very same resistance denounced anyone who attacked the integrity of Robert Mueller, the special counsel who examined the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. And yet when Mueller’s team found no evidence of conspiracy, the resistance did not complain that the hunt to prove Trump’s collusion was wasteful.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2022/07/same-fbi-moles-pushing-russiagate-are-protecting-daniel-greenfield/

We often think of institutions as inherently corrupt. And some are. But within the FBI it’s very much a case of political agendas being played out by certain figures. 

“Highly credible” whistleblowers have come forward to a senior Senate Republican alleging a widespread effort within the FBI to downplay or discredit negative information about President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, according to letters reviewed by CBS News.

“The information provided to my office involves concerns about the FBI’s receipt and use of derogatory information relating to Hunter Biden, and the FBI’s false portrayal of acquired evidence as disinformation,” GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley wrote FBI Director Christopher Wray and Attorney General Merrick Garland on July 25. “The volume and consistency of these allegations substantiate their credibility and necessitate this letter.” 

Grassley, the ranking member on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said the whistleblowers alleged that legitimate streams of information and intelligence about the president’s son were characterized as likely disinformation or prematurely shut down leading up to the 2020 presidential election. 

Some of that involves known players.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/07/25/media-and-select-committee-continue-to-lie-about-sicknick/

Sandra Garza is something of a fixture at January 6 Select Committee hearings.

Routinely described as the “life partner” of the late Brian Sicknick—even though she admitted the couple had taken a “break” from their 11-year relationship several months before the Capitol protest—Garza nonetheless acts the grieving widow of Sicknick, the Capitol Police officer who died on January 7, 2021 after suffering two strokes caused by a blood clot.

She has given numerous interviews since Sicknick’s tragic and untimely death at the age of 42, blaming Donald Trump and Republicans for her ex-boyfriend’s fatal strokes. Garza traveled to Capitol Hill in May 2021 to demand the creation of the special committee to investigate the events of January 6; her public suffering recently caught the attention of Prince William, who sent Garza a letter expressing his condolences. “I was very honored and humbled and in awe that Prince William from England decided to take time out of his busy schedule to write me a letter to honor Brian’s memory and to acknowledge my pain,” Garza told CNN’s Jake Tapper last month.

No doubt Garza remains heartbroken by the sudden and shocking loss of a beloved friend. But that does not mean her falsehoods or egregious politicization of Sicknick’s passing can go unchecked. 

In a way, one can hardly blame Garza when she’s egged on by everyone from Joe Biden and the national news media to members of the January 6 committee, all of whom continue to lie about Sicknick and other law enforcement fatalities allegedly tied to the Capitol protest.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/07/24/how-to-erode-the-worlds-greatest-military/

The U.S. Army has met only 40 percent of its 2022 recruiting goals.  

In fact, all branches of the military are facing historic resistance to their current recruiting efforts. If some solution is not found quickly, the armed forces will radically shrink or be forced to lower standards—or both.  

Such a crisis occurs importunely as an aggressive Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea believe the Biden Administration and the Pentagon have lost traditional U.S. deterrence.  

That pessimistic view abroad unfortunately is now shared by many Americans at home. In 2021, the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute conducted its periodic poll of attitudes toward the U.S. military. The result was astonishing. Currently, only 45 percent of Americans polled expressed a great deal of trust in their armed forces. Confidence had dived 25 points since an early 2018 poll. 

Military officials cite both the usual and a new array of challenges in finding suitable young soldiers—drug use, gang affiliation, physical and mental incapacities, and the dislocations arising from the COVID pandemic and vaccination mandates. But they are too quiet about why such supposedly longer-term obstacles suddenly coalesced in 2022—as if their own leadership and policies have had no effect in discouraging tens of thousands of young men and women to join them. 

The Greatest Skedaddle in Modern American History 

A year ago, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley were assuring the country not to worry over Joe Biden’s strange ideas of abruptly pulling out all U.S. troops from Afghanistan. The radical step was purportedly to coincide with Biden’s planned 20-year celebratory event marking his role in ensuring an iconic end of the war on terror that began on September 11, 2001.  

https://amgreatness.com/2022/07/20/the-left-should-be-happy-with-biden/

The Left should be ecstatic that Joe Biden has given them everything they wanted. 

The Left likes inflation. It reduces the value of old money by printing lots of new money. Those richer who have it, lose the value of their money; those poorer who don’t have any money, suddenly do. 

When combined with low interest rates, inflation roars even louder. Not since Jimmy Carter has a Democrat been so insistent on inflating the money supply. 

For decades, the Left has amplified former Energy Secretary Steven Chu’s 2008 dream that the government must spike fuel costs up to European levels. That was seen as the best way to force unsophisticated Americans to quit burning gas and transition to renewable energy. Biden took that sermon seriously. 

He canceled federal energy leases. He shut down ANWR. He canceled pipelines and warned the oil industry its days were numbered. Biden has done more than any other Democrat to ensure fossil fuels were unaffordable, forcing America’s supposedly unthinking consumers to drive less or consider ditching their gas-engine cars altogether. 

The hard American Left always wanted unlimited illegal immigration. Biden agreed and destroyed the southern border as we knew it. 

The result is that in less than two years, nearly 3 million illegal aliens have surged into the United States. Nearly all of them arrived unvaccinated, untested, and unaudited at a time of a COVID pandemic. 

Biden worries little that record numbers of Americans are dying from drugs that now pour across the border. Cartels became richer and more powerful than ever under his watch, while child traffickers were freed from worries. 

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/victoria-taft/2022/07/25/media-watcher-touts-j6-committee-tv-show-as-civics-lesson-hardly-n1615578

“This is an embarrassing kangaroo court on the same shame scale as the DOJ sending FBI agents to investigate parents going to school board meetings.But civics lesson?What a joke.”

CNN’s Brian Stelter touted the popularity of the January 6 Committee TV show, which ended its “summertime series,” as he called it, with boffo ratings. Considering the hearings were shown on most broadcast networks, that’s hardly a grand feat.

However, one of the more ridiculous observations about this series of one-sided hearings was made by a media “expert” who was a guest on Stelter’s “Reliable Sources” program.

David Zurawik, a former Baltimore Sun media critic turned professor, said the one-sided made-for-TV show “starring” lawmakers awkwardly reading pre-written speeches on teleprompters was a “civics lesson” for young Americans.