RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/28/mcconnells-exhilarating-insurrection/

A dirty little secret about January 6—one of many—is that Democrats and establishment Republicans, not Trump supporters, wanted to shut down the official proceedings of that day.

Just as the first wave of protesters breached the building shortly after 2 p.m., congressional Republicans were poised to present evidence of rampant voting fraud in the 2020 presidential election. Ten incumbent and four newly-elected Republican senators planned to work with their House colleagues to demand the formation of an audit commission to investigate election “irregularities” in the 2020 election. Absent an audit, the group of senators, including Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) pledged to reject the Electoral College results from the disputed states.

The Hail Mary effort was doomed to fail; yet the American people would have heard hours of debate related to provable election fraud over the course of the day.

And no one opposed the effort more than ex-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). 

During a conference call on December 31, 2020, McConnell urged his Republican Senate colleagues to abandon plans to object to the certification, insisting his vote to certify the 2020 election results would be “the most consequential I have ever cast” in his 36-year Senate career.

From the Senate floor on the afternoon of January 6, McConnell gave a dramatic speech warning of the dire consequences to the country should Republicans succeed in delaying the vote. He downplayed examples of voting fraud and even mocked the fact that Trump-appointed judges rejected election lawsuits. 

“The voters, the courts, and the States have all spoken,” McConnell insisted. “If we overrule them, it would damage our Republic forever. If this election were overturned by mere allegations from the losing side, our democracy would enter a death spiral.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/04/the_comical_buffoonery_of_bidens_new_disinformation_czarina.html

I confess to alternating between fear and scornful laughter when it comes to the newly announced Disinformation Governance Board that DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced April 27 in a Senate hearing. The blatant violation of the First Amendment, the lack of Congressional authorization, the blatant choice of topics of focus (immigration and Russia in Spanish Language media) right before an election and the utter ridiculousness of the woman named to head, it all make it hard for me to take this Orwellian state organ seriously.

Yet, Joe Biden sits on the Oval Office and commands the federal bureaucracy, which is seeming eager to accommodate plans that would expand their powers over the citizenry.

Still, the selection of Nina Jankowicz to head the organization inclines me to laughter. Tucker Carlson began his May 28, 2022 show with a segment on Jankowicz that was alternately horrifying and hilarious. You must see her TikTok video in which she uses the tune from Mary Poppins, supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, to express her deep thoughts. 

Watch and weep… with tears of laughter:

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/05/16/woke-warriors/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=top-of-nav&utm_content=hero-module

— Mr. Gallagher  is the ranking member of the Military Personnel Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee and a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. As a U.S. Marine Corps officer, he served seven years on active duty, including two deployments to Iraq.

How DEI threatens the DOD

Wolf Warrior II, released in 2017, is the second-highest-grossing Chinese film of all time. Early in the movie, the hero, a former People’s Liberation Army special-ops soldier named Leng Feng, sums up the film’s main message: “The Americans are good for nothing.” Posters promoting the movie featured the tagline “Anyone who offends China, no matter how remote, must be exterminated.” In the climactic scene, an American mercenary named “Big Daddy” is about to kill Leng Feng. As Big Daddy attempts to jam a knife into Leng Feng’s throat, he gloats: “People like you will always be inferior to people like me. Get used to it. Get f***ing used to it.” Spoiler alert: Leng Feng improbably turns the tables, brutally stabbing Big Daddy to death with a bullet he wears as a necklace, the same bullet that Big Daddy used years before to kill Leng Feng’s fiancée.

The movie’s message may be familiar territory for those who have watched the diplomatic corps of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) operate over the past few years. Responding to the call of General Secretary Xi Jinping to display more “fighting spirit” — and inspired by Leng Feng’s on-screen heroics — CCP officials have adopted a posture known as “Wolf Warrior” diplomacy. CCP Wolf Warriors aggressively confront and criticize China’s competitors abroad and promote CCP propaganda on American social-media platforms (to which Chinese citizens don’t have access). Both the Wolf Warriors and the Wolf Warrior movies are part of a broader effort to discredit democratic and liberal values globally and to demonstrate the superiority of socialism with Chinese characteristics.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/04/29/welcome-to-stagflation/

When it comes to the economy, Democrats like to say it’s unfair to judge a president by his first year in office. Very well. President Biden is now in his second year and now we have the statistical verdict of his economic stewardship rendered by the first-quarter drop in GDP. Stagflation, anyone?

It may well be that the first quarter’s annual GDP growth of -1.4% marks not just the beginning of a period of low or no growth accompanied by inflation, but also the return to the stagflation that ruined the decade of the 1970s and helped destroy the presidency of Jimmy Carter.

And no, you can’t blame Donald Trump anymore for things that go wrong. The economic disasters piling up are now on the progressive Democrats’ tab. They broke it, they bought it.

Biden immediately spun the bad GDP news as due to “technical factors,” including a slowdown in government spending and a decline in net exports, which both contributed to the GDP drop.

“What you’re seeing is enormous growth in the country, that was affected by everything from COVID, and the COVID blockages that occurred along the way,” Biden said, after the Commerce Department delivered the bad news.

“No one is predicting a recession now, they are, some are predicting a recession in 2023. I’m concerned about it,” he said.

“But I know one thing, if our Republican friends are really interested in doing something about dealing with economic growth, they should help us continue to lower the deficit,” Biden added, saying he wants “a tax code that is actually one that works.”

https://openthebooks.substack.com/p/investigation-hospitals-ignoring?s=r

Before he left office, President Donald Trump made good on his vision that hospitals should be transparent about the prices they charge patients for services.

His administration proposed a rule that those prices must be posted online in real time for everyone to see.

If it was price disclosure at the grocery store or the gas station, it wouldn’t have been revolutionary. But, the hospitals went crazy!

In a recent study, 857 out of 1,000 hospitals audited weren’t complying — a full year after the Biden administration finalized the price transparency rule.
 
Hospitals are slow-walking price transparency. And we found that the Biden administration has yet to levy a single fine!

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/athena-thorne/2022/04/27/free-speech-alert-dhs-setting-up-new-disinformation-governance-board-n1593400

The ink isn’t even dry on Elon Musk’s deal to buy Twitter and make speech free again, and the authoritarians in the Biden administration are nakedly acting to lock down the flow of information. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is creating a new agency called the Disinformation Governance Board.

Politico is reporting:

DHS is standing up a new Disinformation Governance Board to coordinate countering misinformation related to homeland security, focused specifically on irregular migration and Russia. Nina Jankowicz will head the board as executive director. She previously was a disinformation fellow at the Wilson Center, advised the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry as part of the Fulbright Public Policy Fellowship and oversaw Russia and Belarus programs at the National Democratic Institute. (h/t Daniel Lippman)

Why would a DHS program focus solely on “irregular migration and Russia”? Are there no other threats to the homeland about which someone might mislead us? Or are these just the most politically dangerous narratives for the Left to lose control over?

DHS secretary Alejandro Mayorkas revealed the creation of the new Ministry on Wednesday when speaking with the House Appropriations DHS Subcommittee, in a clip posted by the Post Millenial. When asked what the DHS is doing about an assertion that African Americans and Spanish-speaking Americans are being “heavily targeted” for disinformation, Mayorkas mentioned:

Our Undersecretary for Policy, Rob Silvers, is co-chair with our Principle Deputy General Council, Jennifer Daskal, in leading a just recently constituÿyted misinformation, disinformation governance board.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/27/tearing-down-the-silicon-valley-wall/

Elon Musk has finally managed to buy Twitter. And the moment he did, the enraged Left flipped out. 

Abruptly leftists began trashing their favorite electronic communications platform as the domain of the nation’s elite, professional classes. Had they just discovered that they had been racists and privileged users all this time? 

And what happened to the Left’s former worship of Musk as the man who revolutionized the clean, green automobile industry with his Tesla electric car company?

Or Musk the space revolutionary and hip star trekker, who with his own money helped ensure the United States remains preeminent in space exploration?

Or Musk, the patriot who is providing free next-generation internet service to the underdog Ukrainians fighting Russians for their lives? 

No matter. The Left reviles Musk because he has announced that Twitter will be the one social-media platform whose business is not to censor or massage free speech in an otherwise monopolist, intolerant, and hard-Left Silicon Valley. 

Who knows, Musk might even allow former president Donald Trump to communicate on Twitter—in the fashion that the terrorist Taliban, Iranian theocrats, and violent Antifa protesters all take for granted in their daily access to Twitter. 

But how did the once free-speech, anti-trust, let-it-all-hang out Left become a Victorian busybody, a censorious Soviet, and an old-fashioned robber-baron monopoly? 

When it discovered that few Americans wanted left-wing, socialist politics it turned elsewhere. It found power instead through control of American institutions, from academia and Wall Street to traditional and social media. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/04/defending-constitution-jason-d-hill/

Recently, Elie Mystal, author and “Justice Correspondent” for The Nation, went on the daytime TV show The View and stated that the U.S. Constitution is “kind of trash.” In his new book, Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to The Constitution, Mystal continues to denigrate the Constitution in chapters such as “Canceling Trash People is Not a Constitutional Crisis” and “Bigotry is Illegal Even if You’ve been Ordered by Jesus.” Msytal is not alone in his dim view of the Constitution. Repeated surveys show that college students have increasingly come to believe that the U.S. Constitution is outdated and ought to be “brought up to the contemporary era,” radically modified, or abolished altogether. In this first of a series of three articles, I aim to show, in a measured and rational manner, both the indispensability of the Constitution in its universal form and content, and the revolutionary nature of its foundation.

When the Founding Fathers turned on the light of reason over 244 years ago and wrote the Constitution and Declaration of Independence, they achieved a remarkable feat. It was not just, as hundreds have remarked, the creation of an unprecedented political achievement that was the constitutional republic of the United States of America. This republic, replete with its Bill of Rights and subsequent constitutional amendments, was a major civilizational advancement over any other political phenomena that had ever existed.

But the major achievement of the Founding Fathers was not political; that was a derivative achievement. They, the first and last of America’s great intellectuals, had done what no other philosopher had done in the history of mankind: they achieved a revolution in epistemology by discovering the proper application of human nature to its appropriate political configuration. For the first time, the requirements of man’s survival as a human being – that is, man’s nature as a rational and conceptual being – were grafted onto a social and political environment that supported its rational upkeep.

The political milieu that they created was a direct corollary of that nature. In other words, they were the first to understand that the endpoint of all human striving—freedom and happiness—required a specific political milieu in which human preservation and the achievement of rational happiness were possible. They were the first to integrate man’s nature with the perfect political environment. America was and remains a political application of human nature. It is a metaphysical expression in the form of a political republic derived from an unprecedented epistemological feat: the perfect integration of a discovery of man’s nature and the artificial creation of a political system that corresponds to that nature.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/04/human-rights-watch-aclu-amnesty-international-robert-spencer/

There has been one salutary effect of the weeks-long efforts of Elon Musk to gain control of Twitter, and the debate over the freedom of speech that ensued: now the Left’s foremost individuals and institutions are out in the open about their hatred for the freedom of speech. The authoritarian heart of the Left has been exposed, as has their war against the foundational principle of any free society: the right to express oneself even if one’s opinions don’t coincide with those of the powerful and/or moneyed elites. Barack and Hillary hate the freedom of speech and want you to think it’s a dangerous toy, too dangerous for you to play with. And now three pillars of the unctuous and hypocritical Leftist “human rights” establishment, Human Rights Watch (HRW), Amnesty International, and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), have come out against it as well.

Reuters, adopting the solemn, even funereal tone it reserves for significant Leftist setbacks, noted Monday that Musk has described himself as a “free speech absolutist” and has called the freedom of expression the “bedrock of a functioning democracy.” That’s exactly what it is, and that’s why Leftists are enraged that someone who believes such things has gained control of one of the foremost means of mass communication in our age. They had become complacent in their control of such outlets, as confident of the rightness of their power as much as any medieval king was in his divine election; but now their hegemony has been severely challenged, and so it’s time to try to shape public opinion by calling out the self-appointed and reliably Leftist “defenders of human rights” to explain to us why this is so very, very wrong.

Deborah Brown, whom Reuters describes as a “digital rights researcher and advocate” at Human Rights Watch, asserted: “Regardless of who owns Twitter, the company has human rights responsibilities to respect the rights of people around the world who rely on the platform. Changes to its policies, features, and algorithms, big and small, can have disproportionate and sometimes devastating impacts, including offline violence. Freedom of expression is not an absolute right, which is why Twitter needs to invest in efforts to keep its most vulnerable users safe on the platform.”