RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/08/the_new_epidemic_of_selfsilencing_plagues_america.html

A new study by the Populace organization revealed the obvious: that Americans are “self-silencing” — people saying what they think others want to hear rather than what they truly feel.

People often reshape their privately held views to conform to what they think their group believes, despite that assessment frequently being inaccurate. This causes the illusion of consensus.

The following are two of the most significant revelations from the study:

Four times as many Democrats say Corporate CEOs should take a public stand on social issues (44%) than actually care (11%).
On Education, one in three Democrats think parents should have more influence over public school curriculum, however, only one in four dares to say it publicly.

In the current climate, it is the left that is championing the idea of groupthink which they claim is the only ‘appropriate’ way of thinking.

Under the guise of being woke, the left is ‘canceling’ dissenters and rendering them outcasts, often by inventing claims of bigotry. Wokeism that claims to emanate from empathy is merely a euphemism for totalitarianism.

It is hence essential to revisit the principle of free expression which is the core tenet of Democracy.

This includes the right to opine without repercussions i.e. the right to offend, insult, satirize, and ridicule.  The result is obscene, hateful, abhorrent, and shocking ideas may be expressed.

But personal taste can never ever be the criteria for the expression of ideas.

The reason being what is hateful to one may be compelling to another. What is bigoted to one may be a fresh perspective to another. What is obscene to one may be artful to another. What is lewd to one may be hilarious to another. What is blunt and blatant to one may be hard-hitting to another. What is repulsive to one can be riveting to another.  

https://amgreatness.com/2022/08/21/the-worst-and-the-stupidest/

Elites have always been ambiguous about the muscular classes who replace their tires, paint their homes, and cook their food. And the masses who tend to them likewise have been ambivalent about those who hire them: appreciative of the work and pay, but also either a bit envious of those with seemingly unlimited resources or turned off by perceived superciliousness arising from their status and affluence. 

Yet the divide has grown far wider in the 21st century. Globalization fueled the separation in a number of ways. 

One, outsourcing and offshoring eroded the rust-belt interior, while enriching the two coasts. The former lost good-paying jobs, while the latter found new markets in investment, tech, insurance, law, media, academia, entertainment, sports, and the arts making them billions rather than mere millions. 

So, the problem was one of both geography and class. Half the country looked to Asia and Europe for profits and indeed cultural “diversity,” while the other half stuck with tradition, values, and custom—as they became poorer. 

The elite found in the truly poor—neglecting their old union-member, blue-collar Democratic base—an outlet for their guilt, noblesse oblige, condescension at a safe distance, call it what you will. The poor if kept distant were fetishized, while the middle class was demonized for lacking the taste of the professional classes, and romance of the far distant underclass.

Second, race became increasingly divorced from class—a phenomenon largely birthed by guilty, wealthy, white elites and privileged, diverse professionals. For the white bicoastal elite, it became a mark of their progressive fides to champion woke racialism that empowered the non-white of their own affluent class, while projecting their own discomfort with and fears of the nonwhite poor onto the middle class as supposed “racists,” despite the latter’s more frequently living among, marrying within, and associating with the “other.” 

The net result was more privilege for the elite and wealthy nonwhites, more neglect of the inner-city needy, and more disdain for the supposedly illiberal clingers, dregs, deplorables, chumps, and irredeemables. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/dems-weaponize-irs-silence-critics-frontpagemagcom/

The public should be frightened that Democrats are passing new legislation to weaponize the already abusive Internal Revenue Service.

For nearly a century, the IRS has been used by presidents and members of Congress to harass and incriminate political foes. In addition to collecting revenue to fund the government, the IRS is a hit squad that destroys reputations and criminalizes dissenters.

A lot of pain can be inflicted under the guise of tax “auditing.” The bill passed by Congress last week, erroneously labeled the Inflation Reduction Act, will mean more audits and investigations. The bill roughly doubles funding for the IRS enforcement division, adding an estimated 49,600 agents and auditors.

Meanwhile, President Joe Biden is starving the Defense Department, requesting too little funding to even keep up with inflation, despite Russian and Chinese aggression. Yet his bill will make the IRS three-quarters the size of the U.S. Marine Corps. Who’s Biden making war on?

It’s true the IRS needs funding to improve services to taxpayers, including getting phone calls answered and returns processed, and moving from antiquated paper files to modern technology. The bill allocates a minuscule amount to those priorities and puts the lion’s share — over $45 billion — into “enforcement,” including hiring and arming agents.

As much as 90% of the funds raised through beefed up audits will come from people making less than $200,000 a year, according to the bipartisan Joint Committee on Taxation. Audits can bring a tsunami of government document demands and repeated visits from IRS agents over months or even years. Most people don’t have accountants and lawyers to insulate them from the pain.

While the bill increases IRS muscle, it fails to impose serious criminal penalties for leaking confidential taxpayer information and political targeting. History shows how dangerous that will be.

In the 1930s, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt used the IRS to harass newspaper publishers who opposed his New Deal and adversaries like Huey Long and Charles Coughlin.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/08/22/bidens-in-big-trouble-with-his-own-base-for-2024-tipp-poll/

Sitting presidents usually get the benefit of the doubt from their own party. But looking ahead, President Joe Biden might have problems whipping up Democratic enthusiasm for a second term. The opposite is true for former President Donald Trump, the latest TIPP Poll shows.

For the August TIPP Poll, we asked members of both parties a similar question: “If the (Democratic/Republican) presidential primary were held today, who would you vote for?” The national poll of 1,182 registered voters was conducted online from Aug. 2-4, with a margin of error of +/-2.9 percentage points.

For Biden, the poll is clearly bad news. Of the 576 Democrats in our sample, just 30% answered that, as of today, they would vote for “Joe Biden, 46th President of the United States.” They were given 20 other possibilities for voting, plus “other” and “not sure.”

The good news for Biden is that no one looms very large as a potential challenger. Michelle Obama, former first lady, received 10% of the poll votes, while Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Vice President Kamala Harris tied for third with 8% apiece.

Trailing a bit further behind were California Gov. Gavin Newsom (6%), former Secretary of State and First Lady Hillary Clinton (5%), Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg (all three at 4%). They, in turn, were followed by New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez both received 3%.

Last January, NIH spent taxpayer money to push back against my column at Forbes and the findings of our nonpartisan, nonprofit organization at OpenTheBooks.com.

We were simply reporting the facts about Dr. Anthony Fauci’s finances. Here’s just a small sample of our findings:

Tony Fauci out-earns the president.
Mrs. Fauci, Christine Grady, the chief bio-ethicist at NIH out-earns the vice-president.
When Dr. Fauci retires, his first-year pension will exceed the president’s salary.

Then, the NIH executive-suite applied pressure to Forbes, which ultimately cancelled my weekly column. All for reporting facts.

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

When I was a child, I stumbled upon philosophy through a tummy ache.  I had eaten too much or run around too hard and found myself feeling miserable outside on a hot summer day.  While I was in my own private agony, I remember thinking, “I’ll never take all the hours I’ve spent without stomach pains for granted again.”  And I never did.  Sometimes when other childhood problems had me down, I’d think, “Well, at least you don’t have a stomachache,” and I’d nod in agreement to the voice in my head.  I learned to appreciate something simple — living without pain.  Yet I also remember wondering, “Did I really have to go through that momentary misery just to appreciate normal existence?”  I think the answer is “yes.”  

No matter how effectively my parents warned me about running hard right after eating a big meal, I do not think I would have learned the lesson without some painful experience driving the message home.  That epiphany, I realized, was bigger than a stomachache.  There was a fine line between painful consequences I could imagine and painful consequences that, for whatever reason, I had to experience firsthand.  Too often, in fact, I correctly imagined painful consequences in life and still insisted on experiencing them personally just to make sure they lived up to the hype in my head.  What can I say?  We humans are a strange lot.

Looking around today at this rumbling, raging contest between individual freedom and State-imposed control has me pondering that early childhood memory once again.  Can people imagine the costs of securing freedom without having to endure its attendant struggles?  Or is it necessary, from time to time, for some contingent of humanity to suffer through tyranny just so that it might subsequently fight for personal liberation?  “Freedom isn’t free.”  It’s a great bumper sticker, a message of sublime truth.  Do most people actually understand it, though, if they haven’t become personally acquainted with its painful meaning?  Or must they first lose what they were freely given before learning why liberty is so dear?  The past two years of COVID-1984 madness and Western governments’ increasing obsession with “climate change” fear porn necessitating today’s food and fuel rationing suggest an obvious, if dispiriting, answer.  

If Americans required a State-sanctioned stomachache to remind them of freedom’s natural bounties, they have certainly suffered the mother of all ipecac remedies.  As frustratingly difficult as it is to watch American politicians befoul the land with their Green New Deal communism and allegiance to the World Economic Forum’s New World Order, their attacks on Americans’ freedoms are simultaneously stirring in the collective American consciousness an equal and opposite effect that might not have previously been possible.  Until experiencing a pandemic police state that arbitrarily shut down lives and livelihoods at the whims of cynical and calculating bureaucrats, too many Americans put their faith in the government’s shameless cult of expertise.  Before the DOJ and FBI openly targeted fed up parents who objected to public schools’ abhorrently racist and sexualized curricula, most had no understanding of the Marxists’ pervasive indoctrination of their young children.  Before Congress’s J-6 Soviet show trials and the Deep State’s years of criminal persecution against Donald Trump and his voters, conservatives gave the federal government’s institutions entirely too much blind deference.  

https://amgreatness.com/2022/08/20/the-feds-go-too-far/

I am pretty sure that I have had occasion to quote Gertrude Stein’s wise advice for the aspiring avant-garde. It is important, she said, to know how far to go when going too far. 

This sage admonition applies just as much to practitioners in the realm of government and law enforcement as it does to those in the arts. An illustration of how pertinent Stein’s advice is to the former is the still-unfolding aftermath of the FBI’s raid on President Trump’s residence in Palm Beach on August 8. 

Everyone instantly knew that the swaggering agency had gone too far. But that had happened often in the past. Just ask Michael Flynn or Roger Stone or Peter Navarro. The FBI often goes too far. It’s what they do. But in raiding Mar-a-Lago, did they go too far when going too far? 

The FBI clearly underestimated the public’s reaction to their unprecedented violation of a former president’s privacy. According to a recent Rasmussen poll, more than 50 percent of likely voters agree with the statement “there is a group of politicized thugs at the top of the FBI that are using the FBI as Joe Biden’s personal Gestapo.” I agree with it myself. 

Question for Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray: Was it worth it? You carted off Donald Trump’s passports and other documents, and maybe, as you did with the journalist Sharyl Attkisson, you also bugged Trump’s computers or planted incriminating evidence in Melania’s underwear drawer. 

Garland and Wray don’t know the answer to that question yet. They are holding their breath. It’s been worth it in the past. The Russian collusion delusion? That was made up out of whole cloth to destroy Donald Trump. The utterly fictitious nature of the gambit was eventually revealed, but so slowly and in such piecemeal fashion that the damage to the agency, and to the regime generally, was minimal. Even the people guilty of crimes—Andrew McCabe, Kevin Clinesmith, Michael Sussmann, and others—all walked. 

Clinesmith actually altered an email in order to open a FISA investigation on Carter Page, thereby providing the Feds with a backdoor into the nerve center of the entire Trump campaign. The original email said that Page was a CIA asset. Clinesmith inserted the word “not,” thus providing the specious grounds for the whole Trump-is-a-Putin-Puppet meme. He got probation (!) and was last in the news, page B-78, when his license to practice law was quietly restored. 

My point is that despite loads of negative publicity, whenever they overstep the bounds of propriety (which is often: see “The FBI’s Bad Apples” for a summary) the noise quickly abates, and the fickle public moves on to something else. 

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2022/08/19/watch-huge-mob-flashes-california-7-eleven-and-picks-it-clean-n1622408

“Street takeovers” are becoming quite common in Los Angeles and big cities. A mob of people and cars, responding to a prompt on social media, show up at an intersection and raise holy hell. Police try to break it up but are usually far too late.

Such was the case on August 15 when a flash mob showed up at Figueroa Street and El Segundo Boulevard. After a few minutes of causing mayhem on the streets, they moved into a 7-Eleven store like a swarm of locusts. They picked it clean of anything of value in a matter of minutes.

CBSNews:

“Cars were just going everywhere,” said neighbor Lisa Trafton. “And then I looked into the store because I wanted to get a pop and the store’s totally trashed.”

Security video released by the LAPD shows dozens of people streaming into the store. At first, many people appeared to be simply shopping for snacks, but suddenly others started running in, ransacking shelves and jumping the counter to grab items behind the register. Candy, chips, and drinks were left strewn all over the store, and a cash register was destroyed, but it’s not clear if any money was taken.

“Angry mob mentality inside the store,” said Det. Ryan Moreno. “They started ransacking the place, taking food, cigarettes, lottery tickets — tried to get the cashier’s box.”

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/two-americas-california-florida-desantis-newsom/

What is America? The answer to that simple question can get you into a lot of trouble. Or it can propel you to the Oval Office.

You can try to run away from the question with adverbs. “Well, historically, America was the name a European mapmaker slapped on the unexplored continents across the Atlantic.” Maybe Amerigo Vespucci, that mapmaker, had Florida in mind, though Vespucci would have struggled to imagine a future figure such as the forty-sixth governor of the state, Ron DeSantis.

Or, “Linguistically, America is an abbreviated form of the United States of America, a political union that traces itself to a local rebellion of thirteen British colonies in the eighteenth century, which grew into territorially aggressive entity.” Eventually these practitioners of settler colonialism found their way to the western extremity of the continent, revolted against Mexican rule and founded the California Republic, which was soon subsumed into the United States where it became the personal vineyard of the entrepreneur and founder of PlumpJack wine store, Gavin Newsom.

Other adverbs come to mind. What is America politically, culturally, geographically, musically, economically, militarily? It is an open book exam. But don’t forget the Articles of Confederation, Gilligan’s Island, and Afghanistan.

Putting on my anthropologist hat, I’d point out that the measure of any society is what divides it — and a culture consists of the most meaningful disagreements among people who have to pay attention to one another. To take a famous literary example, when Jonathan Swift’s intrepid explorer Gulliver washes up on the island of Lilliput, he finds the inhabitants committed to the practice of breaking their eggs on the little end. Yards away lies the island of Blefuscu, similar in every respect to Lilliput except that Blefuscian tradition decrees that eggs should be broken on the big end. War between Big Enders and Little Enders has persisted for generations. To outsiders like Gulliver — and presumably Swift — these poignant differences seem trivial. But that’s bad anthropology. The perpetual war over which end an egg should be cracked first is vital to the lives of these islanders.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/this-is-your-irs-at-work-tigta-report-treasury-inspector-general-for-tax-administration-audit-inflation-reduction-act-11660943317?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

The new Inflation Reduction Act has many damaging provisions, but for sheer government gall the $80 billion reward to the Internal Revenue Service stands out. The money will go to hire 87,000 new employees, doubling its current payroll. This is also doubling down on incompetence, as anyone can see in the official reports of the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (Tigta).

We’ve read those reports for the last several years so you don’t have to, and the experience is a government version of finding yourself in a blighted neighborhood for the first time. You can’t believe it’s that bad. The trouble goes beyond the oft-cited failures like answering only 10% of taxpayer calls, or a backlog of 17 million unprocessed tax returns. The audits reveal an agency that can’t do its basic job well but will terrorize taxpayers whether deserving or not.

***

Consider the agency’s chronic mishandling of tax credits. By the IRS’s own admission, some $19 billion—or 28%—of earned-income tax credit payments in fiscal 2021 were “improper.” The amount hasn’t improved despite years of IRS promises to do better.

• A January Tigta audit found that an estimated 67,000 claims—totaling $15.6 billion—for the low-income housing tax credit from 2015 to 2019 “lacked or did not match supporting documentation due to potential reporting errors or noncompliance.”