RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://dianebederman.com/what-is-the-meaning-of-freedom/

Freedom is defined by Merriam Webster as the quality or state of being free, such as: the absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice or action: liberation from slavery or from the power of another: boldness of conception or execution.

In the beginning, Adam and Eve lived a lovely life. Everything was given to them. There was one demand – do not eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. Eve was seduced by the serpent, she ate of the fruit and convinced Adam to taste the apple and he lied to God.

And so ended Paradise.

I suggest that there is within us a desire to go back to the Garden, where we are cared for, protected. I think it is much like a child, no matter the age, wanting his mommy in times of trouble – a desire to go back to the womb – where it is safe. Fear leads us to submit and when government promotes fear, too many bend the knee and give up their freedom in order to be cared for.

Aung San Suu Kyi: “The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.”

But we live in a world where we must make decisions. In the West, we have free will-because the West is rooted in the teachings of the Hebrew Bible and in that Bible we are taught that all life is sacred, we all have equal intrinsic value and we have free will. “If humans are free then they need a free society within which to exercise that freedom(p120). Free will is not found in countries not based on the teachings of that Bible.

https://pjmedia.com/rick-moran/2024/10/05/three-years-ago-harris-was-put-in-charge-of-the-425-billion-internet-for-all-plan-where-is-it-n4933097

We should be used to the idea by now that the Biden administration does not exist in the same time frame of the universe as the rest of us. You might recall the $7.5 billion set aside in the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act to build 500,000 EV charging stations across the country. As of June, exactly eight charging stations had been built.

Amazingly, in that same Act, Congress authorized the Commerce Department to create an “Internet For All” scheme, which was supposed to bring broadband internet to everyone in America at an affordable price by 2030.

“It is going to help our kids and our business to succeed in the 21st century,” Biden said in his address on April 29, 2021. “I’m asking the vice president to lead this effort because I know it will get done.”

How’s that “broadband for all” rollout working out for ya, Kamala?

Would it surprise you to discover that not a single customer has been hooked up to broadband internet under the program in three and a half years?

“The program has collapsed under the weight of red tape imposed by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration,” said Americans for Tax Reform in August. “NTIA required states to submit multiple rounds of dense paperwork to even qualify for the funds they were given by Congress and has only recently started approving state plans for how to spend the money.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/10/the_usaf_goes_woke.html

Who is General Charles “CQ” Brown? He’s the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. So what? What does that have to do with anything? He’s also arguably more woke and dangerous to America’s national security than thankfully retired General “White Rage” Milley.  

Brown disgraced himself and his uniform during, and in support of, the Black Lives Matter race riots by releasing a video in which he ‘seemed to barely contain his rage’ while ranting ‘that the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution ‘that I’ve sworn my adult life to support and defend’ have not always delivered ‘liberty and equality’ to all.’

Serving military members, particularly general officers, aren’t supposed to support rioters or engage in politics. A white servicemember doing that—Brown is black—would have been dishonorably discharged. Brown was promoted. Under Democrats/socialist/communists (D/s/cs), useful functionaries fail upwards.

Brown is one of the foremost proponents of DEI, which he has imposed on the USAF with a vengeance. His policies are paying dividends beyond diversity, equity and inclusion, like running the Air Force short of thousands of pilots. That’s only a part of the serious recruiting problems our military is experiencing.

Our civilian and military “leaders” blame the recruiting crisis on any and everything but their DEI lunacy. That’s necessary for officers seeking promotion.

Traditionally, our military academies and ROTC programs seek the finest scholar-athletes they can find. Particularly for pilots, candidates highly proficient in STEM disciplines are highly sought after. DEI ensures the USAF won’t get those kinds of candidates.

The Center To Advance Security in America filed a FOIA request with the Air Force in 2023, seeking documents to prove Brown’s DEI focus, but as one might imagine, was stonewalled until recently. 

https://www.thefp.com/p/douglas-murray-a-time-of-war?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

When we planned this episode of Honestly, I thought we would be looking back at the past year from a slightly quieter vantage point. We were going to release it on October 7. But quiet is the last thing happening in the Middle East right now. The war that Iran outsourced to its proxies since October 7, 2023 has now become a war explicitly between Iran and Israel.

Hours before I sat down with Douglas Murray in New York City, Iran launched over 100 ballistic missiles toward Israel. As Israel’s 9 million citizens huddled in bomb shelters, a handful of them made a direct impact. For a lot of Americans, it still feels like a faraway war. But it is not.

There are not many bright lines that divide good and evil. This is one of them. This is a war between Israel and Iran. But it’s also a war between civilization and barbarism. That was true some 360 days ago. And it’s even more true today. And yet this testing moment has been met with alarming moral confusion.

Consider a few examples from the last week. At the United Nations, 12 countries, including the U.S., presented a plan for a ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon without mentioning the word Hezbollah. Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib tweeted, “Our country is funding this bloodbath,” minutes after Israel assassinated the leader of the most fearsome terrorist army on the planet, Hassan Nasrallah, who, The New York Times described as “beloved,” “a towering figure” and “a powerful orator.” Here in New York, students chanted for an intifada moments after the Jewish community memorialized six civilian hostages murdered by Hamas. At Yale this week, students chanted, “From Gaza to Beirut, all martyrs we salute.” That’s just a few examples from the past week.

No one I know understands the moral urgency of this moment better than Douglas Murray. Douglas isn’t Jewish. He has no Israeli family members, although I know a lot of Israeli families who consider him an adoptive family member. And it is Douglas, more than almost anyone in the world, who has articulated the stakes of this war with the moral clarity it requires.

Douglas’s work as a reporter has taken him to Iraq, North Korea, northern Nigeria, Ukraine, and most recently, of course, to Israel, where he has become a celebrity. When you walk down the streets of Tel Aviv with Douglas Murray, it’s like being with The Beatles. He’s also the best-selling author of seven books, a regular contributor at the New York Post, National Review, and most importantly, at The Free Press, where he writes the beloved Sunday column, Things Worth Remembering. There is just no one I would rather be sitting with as we watch the Middle East and, really, the world transformed before our eyes.

https://reason.com/2024/10/03/tim-walz-jd-vance-free-speech-censorship-debate-veep/

Toward the end of Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) argued with Sen. J.D. Vance (R–Ohio) about former President Donald Trump’s efforts to remain in power following his 2020 election loss. Trump’s conduct was indefensible, and thus Vance did not do a very good job defending it. Rather, he attempted to turn the tables on Walz, accusing the Democratic ticket of disrespecting the most important democratic norm of all: free speech.

“You guys attack us for not believing in democracy,” said Vance. “The most sacred right under United States democracy is the First Amendment.”

Vance went on to accuse Walz of wanting to criminalize misinformation, referencing previous, inaccurate comments the governor made about exceptions to the First Amendment. At that point, Walz actually interrupted Vance, and claimed that the First Amendment does not protect misinformation or “threatening or hate speech.”

In other words, misinformation, threats, and hate speech are all unprotected categories of speech, according to Walz.

But the governor is mostly, very wrong. He’s correct to note that true threats of violence lack First Amendment protection if they are specific enough. Misinformation and hate speech are absolutely protected by the First Amendment, however. And while the former is a relatively new category of expression facing explicit calls for censorship, the latter category—hate speech—has been exhaustively litigated before the Supreme Court.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/10/04/that-70s-show-2/

A widening war in the Middle East that includes a literally more explosive Iran. Russians and Ukranians killing each other for no reason in a conflict in which the former has threatened a nuclear strike. A belligerent China menacing Taiwan. A dockworker strike (possibly resolved?) that could thrash an economy already ravaged by inflation. A migrant stream that is more invasion than immigration. Rising antisemitism.

Are we back in the 1970s, when the world felt unstable and the future appeared grim?

The words typed above would have not been applicable in late 2019, as Donald Trump was about to complete his third year in office. Then came the novel coronavirus, leading to both economic and political disruption that was not necessary.

America and the world left the ugly 1970s behind when Margaret Thatcher was elected British prime minister in 1979 and Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980.

The details are different. In the 1970s Americans were ground down by an energy crisis, then-record postwar unemployment, stagflation, political upheaval, societal turbulence and a war that seemed intractable until it was over and then felt like a discouraging loss. There were legitimate concerns that America was losing its status. The Cold War raged and we feared the Soviets would launch nuclear missiles and start a conflict that might finish off all of us.

Our world today is causing similar frustration, uneasiness, and division. All were dropped on us, like a bomb, by the Biden-Harris administration, which has followed the instruction manual of the Obama regime.

Apparently some – maybe close to half of the country – favor, and likely savor, our decline. Polls keep telling us the presidential election is going to be close.

The other half, or so, believes that perpetuating these conditions, in fact, choosing to make them worse, is insane.

Voters have a choice in one month. They can choose concession, to approve the candidates who want the U.S. to be just another country, nothing special, to be a nation of a few elites and a lower class that’s there to serve them. They can send out another Democratic president on another apology tour, invite Washington to increase its influence over our lives, and give censorship and lawfare enormous boosts.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20987/us-losing-freedom-of-speech

What [Biden-Harris administration climate envoy John Kerry] does not mention, of course, is who decides what is “disinformation,” or if it is just whatever the current government wants the public to think.

Recently, a video of vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz has also been circulating in which he alleged that there is “no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy.” Some have implied that Walz does not understand the First Amendment, but his statement, arguably, should not be viewed so much as being about what the First Amendment is, which he as Governor of Minnesota obviously knows, but what some political leaders would like it to be.

[Meta founder and CEO Mark] Zuckerberg also noted that he had agreed to kill the Hunter Biden laptop story on his social media platforms after the FBI, treacherously, falsely “warned us about a potential Russian disinformation operation about the Biden family and Burisma in the lead up to the 2020 election.” As it turned out, it was 51 former US intelligence officials who deliberately lied in a 2020 letter that the laptop story was Russian disinformation — lies that signatories such as former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, ex-intelligence heads of the CIA and other analysts and officers still refuse to apologize for, with some of them instead referring to their treacherous behavior as “patriotism.”

Evidently, according to some of those in power, government disinformation is good — freedom of speech for the citizenry is bad.

In 2022, the Biden-Harris administration’s Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy demanded that social media stop certain people from publishing their expertise and views.

“We partnered with Google… For example, if you Google ‘climate change,’ you will, at the top of your search, you will get all kinds of U.N. resources.” According to Fleming, the partnership came about after U.N. officials were “shocked to see that when we Googled ‘climate change,’ we were getting incredibly distorted information right at the top…. We’re becoming much more proactive. We own the science, and we think that the world should know it, and the platforms themselves also do.” — Melissa Fleming, UN Under-Secretary-General for Global Communications, yahoo.com, October 4, 2022.

In 2022, the Biden-Harris administration had attempted to do something similar in the US, when it actually created an Orwellian Ministry of Truth called the “Disinformation Governance Board,” under the Department of Homeland Security. The initiative met with so much backlash that it had to be scrapped just three weeks later.

No one can tell you that some politicians do not have totalitarian ambitions. They have not even tried to hide it.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/10/redefining_masculinity_kamala_s_hubby_doug_emhoff_

Democrats have been gushing about Kamala Harris’s husband of four years, Doug Emhoff, as a model for American men.

He’s a “wife guy.” He ‘redefines masculinity,’ as MSNBC host Jen Psaki put it. He’s a “dreamboat,” “a hunk,” a “fantasy man” and a “sex symbol,” as Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell put it, unable to control herself.

That was after news broke that Emhoff had gotten his previous family’s nanny pregnant and apparently paid her off to keep quiet about it, the very thing that leftist prosecutors put President Trump in the dock for. For Emhoff, that episode flushed his marriage to his first wife and their two teenage kids down the toilet, freeing him up to go get ‘girlfriends.’

For Democrats, that news made him a male role model, and a lot of them couldn’t stop publicly swooning about it, which is precisely when the gushings started.

Now just in time for ‘Domestic Violence Awareness Month,’ as Breitbart columnist John Nolte noted, Emhoff is back in the news, credibly accused by an anonymous woman lawyer in New York who had been his girlfriend in 2012 of slapping her so hard she “spun around.”

According to the Daily Mail:

Vice President Kamala Harris’s husband assaulted his ex-girlfriend, three friends have told Dailymail.com.

The Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff, 59, allegedly struck the woman in the face so hard she spun around, while waiting in a valet line late at night after a May 2012 Cannes Film Festival event in France.

One of her friends told DailyMail.com that the woman called him immediately after the incident, sobbing in her cab, and described the alleged assault.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/10/why_they_hate_trump.html

If you’re old enough to vote in the United States, then you’re old enough to remember a time when Americans of all political stripes liked Donald Trump.  A public figure for most of his adult life, a businessman with a taste for luxury, and a showman who embodied the “American dream,” Trump appeared in television shows and movies because people enjoyed seeing him.  For decades, he was an American icon with universal name recognition, a global brand, and even a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. 

Then he moved into the political arena, and everything changed.  Actors, musicians, and politicians who had once jumped at the chance to be photographed with him pretended they had never met.  Writers and entertainers who had always praised him for his generosity began calling him filthy names.  Television networks that had made boatloads of money from his goodwill with the public started slandering him as a “wannabe dictator,” a “Nazi,” and a “threat to democracy.”

What happened?  Donald Trump dared to challenge the political status quo.  By publicly questioning the economic and foreign policy decisions of the Establishment Class in Washington, D.C., he became an existential threat to a system that has long worked against the interests of the American people.  As David Plouffe, one of Barack Obama’s closest advisers, inveighed before the 2016 presidential election: “It is not enough to beat Trump.  He must be destroyed thoroughly.  His kind must not be allowed to rise again.”  Plouffe had harsher words for the guy with a wholesome cameo in Home Alone 2 than he ever had for the leaders of China, Hamas, or Iran.

Why is this one American’s voice so threatening to the old guard?  It’s simple: President Trump is (1) a political outsider who (2) rejects the supremacy of the administrative state and (3) prioritizes Americans over foreign nationals.  

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/10/03/is-anyone-here-competent-responses-to-hurricane-port-strike-add-to-white-house-failures/

Hurricane Helene has wrought deadly and destructive havoc across the South and Appalachia, killing dozens and doing billions in property damage. Fast on Helene’s heels, we now have another disaster hitting the U.S.: The longshoreman strike that now threatens to shut down much of the U.S. economy.

And very conspicuously, Joe Biden did nothing about it. No jawboning. No ideas. No attempt to cool tempers and bridge differences to get a deal. Apparently Biden’s leaving it to others as he whiles away the remainder of his only term as president at his beloved Rehoboth Beach vacation home.

Kind of like his administration’s reaction to the devastation from Hurricane Helene, the second-deadliest hurricane of this century. A complete failure.

As for the port shutdown, Biden as president has the authority and political clout to help mediate a dangerous strike that has both economic and national security implications. But he did nothing to stop the potentially devastating walkout. He apparently has left it in the hands of anonymous aides and incompetent Cabinet members to deal with the mess.

They are failing spectacularly. Yes, Biden did nothing. Nor did Vice President Kamala Harris, a likely preview of what’s in store if she becomes president. How about Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg? Is he on a second paternity leave? If not, why has he done zip about this?

How about Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo? Don’t the nation’s ports have something to do with “commerce”?

Here was her response when asked about it in a television interview. “I have not been focused on that,” she said in a CNBC interview, in which she was appearing as a campaign “surrogate” for Harris.

“Not been focused”? Is that a sick joke? That’s her job. No, instead of doing her job, she’s chosen instead to join Harris’ election campaign, while still being paid by public tax dollars. By the way, the strike could cripple our economy, costing by some estimates as much as $4.5 billion a day.