RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://x.com/Hillsdale/status/1837909084084793523?utm_campaign=hc_current&utm_medium=email&_hsenc=p2ANqtz–

“You prove your innocence, but at the end you’re a charred, smoking lump, and so is your career and so is your savings account.” In this excerpt, Mark Steyn reveals the risks of facing an American justice system where the process is the punishment. Steyn’s entire talk and other events from Hillsdale’s 2024 Constitution Day Celebration are now available to watch. 

I always wondered how the Nazis and the communists could just take over a country of millions and then destroy the bodies and souls of the people.

In America, it is happening before our very eyes. In fact, the American Gulag is sadly alive and well.  At the Gateway Pundit site article titled “J6 Political Prisoner Jake Lang Thrown in Permanent Solitary Confinement”of October 24, 2024, one learns that

“The Biden-Harris regime has passed a red line that hallmarks all totalitarian regimes: persecution and torture.

“January 6 Political Prisoner Jake Lang has been thrown in solitary confinement permanently for posting a video from a secret contraband cell phone of himself praying, Holy Bible in hand, on the floor of his prison cell.

“Lang is a January 6 patriot and founder of the community fundraiser for all of the J6ers, SponsorJ6.com, who has spent nearly 1,400 days behind bars without a trial [emphasis mine]. Jake’s treatment has become an example of the egregious overreach of a weaponized federal government. For almost four years, he’s been incarcerated as a political hostage of the Biden-Harris regime, enduring unimaginable hardship, including over 900 days in solitary confinement.

Patriots are being urged to call the following and demand that all January 6 detainees be moved back into their own cell block C3B in the Central Treatment facility so as to avoid being further mistreated.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21074/rx-for-america

In the autumn of 2024, there are many things to consider about the future of our nation, as citizens of the greatest nation on earth will soon be exercising their right to choose our next leader.

Among the challenges:

The fate of 21st century nations will rise or fall based on their access to energy. Those leaders who fail to see this simple but stark reality will preside over the decline and fall of their nation.

As a result, the United States faces a crucial decision this Election Day: Which president will recognize that truth and act upon it in a world where enemy states seek to control strategic energy reserves?

Fracking technology has made the United States not only capable of being energy independent, but an exporter of energy to allied nations equally concerned about their fate. Rather than allow the full might of America’s fossil fuel industry to power our society, however, the Biden-Harris administration has preferred to find reasons to curtail, inhibit, and harm this industry’s ability to do so. The Biden-Harris Administration apparently prefers to pursue a “green energy” agenda dictated by so-called “progressives,” with wind and solar alternatives that could not possibly meet the demands of an energy-hungry nation.

The energy policies of this White House are reflective of a still-larger failure at a time when our nation finds itself at a critical turning point in history. No country has ever spent or taxed itself into prosperity. Washington needs to use the next four years to lower taxes and dispense with the federal regulations that are now throttling growth.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/how-gender-ideology-captured-the-state-department

The U.S. Department of State is charged with advancing American interests abroad through complex and delicate diplomatic missions, as well as maintaining the safety of those missions and the Americans serving them.

The institution’s lodestar should be the national interest, but under President Joe Biden, the State Department has demoted that critical objective in favor of a new global agenda: to spread radical gender theory to foreign nations.

The shift began at the top. President Biden and, in turn, the apparatus beneath him led America’s leftward charge on the world stage. Upon taking office in 2021, the administration used the previous year’s racial unrest as a pretext to issue a slew of executive orders and memoranda entrenching left-wing ideologies in all levels of the federal government, under the guise of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” or DEI.

As part of this initiative, the White House required each federal agency to submit detailed DEI progress reports regularly, appoint a chief diversity officer, and create “Agency Equity Teams,” whose leaders were tasked with “delivering equitable outcomes.” These requirements contributed to what the president called “an ambitious whole-of-government equity agenda.”

The gender component of this agenda spread to the State Department through the president’s “Memorandum on Advancing the Human Rights of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Intersex Persons Around the World.” Published in February 2021, this memorandum directed State and other agencies to monitor closely and report on the “LGBTQI+” policies of our allies, to “broaden the number of countries willing to support and defend” the radical Left’s understanding of gender—for example, by funding pro-transgender “civil society advocates” in order to shift public opinion in those countries—and to tie in the principles of gender theory to America’s foreign-aid programs.

If necessary, the memo maintained, agencies should use “the full range of diplomatic and assistance tools” to ensure foreign governments’ compliance with this agenda, including “financial sanctions, visa restrictions, and other actions.”

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

Kama-lama-ding-dong’s got the blues.  This was supposed to be her time.  This was supposed to be her rise.  She was supposed to make her-story.  Instead, Kam-Kam’s on her way to an Election Night drubbing, a week-long bender, and a few months of solitude in celebrity rehab.  She should take Hillary Clinton along, too.  A period of detox and sobriety could do both some good.  And the American people would benefit from their prolonged absence from television news.

America will one day have a female president.  She will be smart, articulate, prudent, and brave.  She will treat her campaign for office as a chance to prove to the American people that she has their best interest at heart.  She will be thoughtfully prepared to answer any and all questions.  Nobody will say it’s “her turn” or pretend she is more talented than she really is.  Nobody will hold her to a lower or higher standard because of her sex.  She will rise to the top because she earns it.  Americans will listen to her speeches, watch how she conducts her personal life, and conclude that she is the right leader for the time.  And when she is elected, no one will mumble, “She won only because she’s a woman.”  She will win on her own merits.

The Democrats have done women no favors by pushing the candidacies of Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris.  Neither has the necessary disposition for holding the highest office in the land.  Both are rash and unwise.  They are selfish and unjust.  They are intemperate and vengeful.  They are self-conscious and uncertain.  They are unkind, impatient, and self-serving.  They exude no faith in God, inspire no hope in others, and display no courage.  They are weak in mind and soul and encourage such weakness in others.  They are unfit to lead.  They are not remarkable women.

That Democrat party elites have forced Hillary and Kamala on the American people shows how little they actually think of women.  Hillary is an inveterate liar and shameless shrew whose chief accomplishment in life has been to obtain enough dirt on Washington insiders to stay out of prison.  She won a seat in the U.S. Senate because New Yorkers pitied her when it became clear that her president husband is a lecherous creep incapable of moderating his own depravities.  Giving Hillary a prestigious government job after Bill’s Oval Office debauchery with an intern barely old enough to drink legally was a Hallmark card kind of way for the American people to say, “Sorry your husband humiliated you while you were first lady.”  Had voters known that Hillary was already scheming for the top job and only pretending to be wounded by Slick Willy’s philandering, they would have been much less likely to overlook her own personal qualities.  And they certainly were not hoping that Hillary’s presidential ambitions would one day return both immoral Clintons back to the White House!  

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21040/who-is-running-the-country

Members of both American political parties and other concerned observers have been asking for a while now, “Who’s actually running the country?”

More often it seems as if is a cadre of unelected bureaucrats – a faceless politburo – who uphold the law or not, according to political expediency or whim.

American author and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy has called this group “a machine.”

Are “open borders” legal or not? Are immigration laws being violated or not? Are illegal aliens legal or not? Are prosecutions of presidential candidates within a month of a presidential election “election interference” or not? Were the deliberate lies of former US intelligence officials to the US public about the authenticity of Hunter Biden’s laptop actionable “election interference” or not?

What we should probably be asking, as we head to November, is: “Do we really want to go on living like that?”

Members of both American political parties and other concerned observers have been asking for a while now, “Who’s actually running the country?”

Answers include:

Former President Barack Obama, who, in November 2020, said on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert:

“People would ask me, knowing what you know now, do you wish you had a third term? And I used to say, “You know what? If I could make an arrangement where I had a stand-in, a front man or front woman, and they had an earpiece in, and I was just in my basement in my sweats looking through the stuff, and then I could sort of deliver the lines, but somebody else was doing all the talking and ceremony, I’d be fine with that.”

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/10/25/we-live-under-a-tyranny-of-the-self-righteous/

We no longer live in an age of moral relativism, but one of moral absolutism.

That’s one observation made by Canadian academic Eric Kaufmann in his latest book, Taboo, published this year. It’s an arresting inversion of a long-held view. Everyone today does indeed seem to know what is ‘right’ and what is ‘wrong’.

But it also makes it hard to square the argument that postmodernism is at the root of our ethical woes and moral vacuum. Rather than living in a state of doubt and ambivalence, as postmodernism’s most optimistic advocates argued in the 1990s, we now actually inhabit a world where people cleave to firmly held truths and fight over them with righteous fury.

This can be seen most evidently in the present day over Israel and the Middle East. For many, the Israelis – and very often, by extension, the Jews – are the personification of evil. Hence, the precipitous rise of virulent anti-Semitism and of correlating sympathy for the Palestinians. In the minds of many, this is a war of good against evil. The Palestinian flag has itself become a universal symbol of goodness. And when you feel you have good on your side, any sort of appalling or belligerent behaviour or words are permissible.

This Manichean viewpoint is replicated in matters over the environment. Here, those who supposedly have right on their side deem it acceptable to resort to any sort of anti-social behaviour because it’s for a ‘good cause’. Self-righteousness is an intoxicating sensation and a self-perpetuating one. The self-righteous become consumed by their own sense of power. Elsewhere in this regard, others abide by the creed that race determines everything. Others hold to the inviolable sanctity of trans rights.

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

Dwight Waldo, whose 1948 book The Administrative State gave the eponymous term widespread usage, believed that public administration is rational action designed to maximize public goals.

Unfortunately, the administrative state and its bureaucrats no longer have the public on their minds.

Without any constitutional authority, the administrative state frames, enforces, and adjudicates the regulations of a plethora of alphabet agencies. Unelected bureaucrats, politicized by monied NGOs and lobbyists, exercise powers of all three branches of government, disregarding the separation of powers and the checks-and-balances provisions of the Constitution.

Such is the viselike hold of the administrative state that Chief Justice John Roberts, dissenting in a 2013 judgment on a regulatory scheme of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), wrote: “The administrative state ‘wields vast power and touches almost every aspect of daily life….’ The Framers could hardly have envisioned today’s ‘vast and varied federal bureaucracy’ and the authority administrative agencies now hold over our economic, social, and political activities.”

An example of the arbitrary power the administrative state wields are some of the rules agencies have framed for the Swampbuster provisions, passed by Congress in 1985, under which the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) can deny benefits to farmers who do not voluntarily give up farming on wetlands. And who designates wetlands? It is the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), a federal agency of the USDA. Using Swampbuster, the USDA has come to regulate property it would otherwise not have been able to.

However, four recent Supreme Court decisions have reined in the administrative state. The court swept aside decades-old precedents to shift the balance of power from the agencies to the courts. The Swampbuster provisions and NRCS-framed rules, too – seen by many legal experts as violative of property rights and overly broad in implementation – have been challenged in two recent lawsuits. Though the courts have yet to decide on the Swampbuster lawsuits, the four Supreme Court decisions will likely have a strong bearing on the cases.

Here, in brief, are the salient points of the four rulings:

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

A paradigm shift occurs when there is a radical change in thinking from an accepted point of view to a new one.  Changes in social consciousness are not easy.  Institutions defend orthodoxy with all their assorted powers, while new ideas receive support only from iconoclasts who are often dismissed as kooks or disparaged as domestic enemies.  

Prevailing opinion is like a heavy boulder sitting in the valley between several steep hills.  For a novel idea to succeed, its proponents must push that boulder up the slope until it reaches the top of a neighboring peak.  Two observations follow from this analogy: (1) when moving the heavy boulder of conventional wisdom in a new direction, the gravity of traditional consensus works to roll it right back into the valley where it originally rested, and (2) once the boulder is finally pushed up a hill with the force of sufficient evidence and popular support, it will quickly roll down the other side and rest in a new valley of conventional wisdom.  Changing human minds, in other words, is a punishing exercise until you reach a tipping point, when social change occurs rapidly.

We are right now in the midst of one of these phenomenal paradigm shifts.  Americans are “awakening” to the idea that the federal government does not have their best interests at heart.  They are pushing back against mass illegal immigration.  They are resisting government surveillance and censorship.  They are questioning economic regulations that have weakened private property rights while giving a small number of corporations and financial elites almost total control over commerce, the food supply, and the monetary system.