RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/joe-biden-and-the-dems-supreme-court-reform/

Joe Biden may be a “political corpse,” but he has six months to get off a Parthian shot or two. He’s already taking aim at the Supreme Court––one of our most important branches of government for protecting citizens and their unalienable rights from the lust for power of the rest of the federal government and their encroaching tyrannical ambitions.

Biden launched this attack––endorsed by the Democrat Party and its probable presidential candidate Kamala Harris––in a column for the Washington Post, where he claimed, “What is happening now is not normal, and it undermines the public’s confidence in the court’s decisions, including those impacting personal freedoms. We now stand in a breach.” Having ginned up a “crisis” that can’t be let to go to waste, Biden is calling the assault a “reform” comprising 18-year term limits for justices; and government oversight, external to the Court itself, to investigate and punish dubious charges of “corruption.”

The Wall Street Journal stated the obvious: “This is an invitation for partisans to besiege the Court with complaints, however trivial.” For example, the judge on Trump’s trial for allegedly mishandling classified documents has received “more than 1,000 complaints in a week as part of what it called an ‘orchestrated campaign.’” Biden’s offensive against the court is not about some “crisis of ethics” and holding “corrupt” justices to account, but making it easier to discredit and recuse conservative justices and originalists who believe that the Constitution means what it says. These so-called “reforms” are political weaponss for illegal meddling in the Court’s decision-making in order to protect progressive policies and culture-war preferences.

This attempt of the executive branch to bend the highest court to its political will is not new, but rather reflects the progressives’ technocratic and tyrannical impulses blocked by the Constitution’s separated and balanced government powers and enumerated rights.

In 1937 Franklin Delano Roosevelt, his New Deal schemes blocked by a court with conservative leanings, tried to weaken the court with the Judicial Reform Act that allowed the president to appoint up to six new justices, one for every sitting justice over 70 years old. This attempt to neuter one-third of the government died in the Senate Judiciary Committee Report: “It is a measure which should be so emphatically rejected that its parallel will never again be presented to the free representatives of the free people of America,” the Committee concluded.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-one-drop-rule-transformed

Donald Trump’s recent comments about Kamala Harris’s shifting racial identity were an unforced error. It was a certainty that Trump would be unable to navigate the arcane and ever-evolving taboos around race without saying something that would provide fodder for several days of front-page “Trump is a racist” coverage in the New York Times and other media outlets.

This latest episode of racism-hunting is worth examining in some detail, however, since it reveals how topsy-turvy the current definition of “racism” has become.

Trump voluntarily walked into the lion’s den last Wednesday, facing off against a panel of interviewers at the National Association of Black Journalists convention in Chicago. That is to his credit; let us see if Kamala Harris would be willing to take questions at, say, a gun-owners’ convention. After a string of adversarial questions, ABC News reporter Rachel Scott asked Trump whether he thought it was acceptable for some of his supporters to label Harris a “DEI hire,” and whether he would tell them to stop doing so. Trump responded: “How do you define DEI? Go ahead.” Scott translated the acronym: “Diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

This was not, of course, what Trump was getting at. He pushed on, but as usual, failed to clarify his intent: “OK, yeah, go ahead, is that what your definition is?” Scott stood her ground: “That is literally the words.” Scott and Trump went back and forth in the same vein for a few more rounds before Scott finally articulated what DEI means in practice: “Do you believe that vice president Kamala Harris is only on the ticket because she is a black woman?”

Trump then reframed the issue: “Well, I can say, no. I think it’s maybe a little bit different. So, uh, I’ve known her a long time, indirectly, not directly very much. And she was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage. I didn’t know she was black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn black and now, she wants to be known as black. So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she black? I respect either one but she obviously doesn’t because she was Indian all the way, and then all of a sudden she made a turn and she became a Black person.”

These are the observations that have been labelled “overtly racist,” a manifestation of racial “animus,” disparagement of the vice president in “clearly racial terms,” a “lie,” and one of a “barrage of vicious attacks” on Harris. But were they any of these things?

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/07/14/why-slavery-is-not-americas-original-sin/

Modern histories tend to rely heavily on the new ideological pieties of left-wing activists. First among these is the belief that we live in a totally corrupt and oppressive society – in fact, in the world’s most oppressive and corrupt society. Feeding this belief is the widely accepted claim – at least, within the modern Western world – that slavery is the United States’ ‘original sin’, and alleged to be uniquely evil as practised within the US.

One major American textbook, Traditions and Encounters, appears to describe the Western-dominated slave trade as the largest and most brutal in history, calling even the full sweep of Arab / Islamic slavery ‘smaller than the Atlantic slave trade of modern times’. Elsewhere, the 1619 Project’s Nikole Hannah-Jones argues bluntly: ‘America’s brutal system of slavery [was] unlike anything that had existed in the world before. Enslaved people were… property that could be mortgaged, traded, bought, sold, used as collateral, given as a gift and disposed of violently.’

This take has become increasingly prominent within the modern American educational environment. The 1619 Project – which insists that 1619, the year that 20 Africans arrived in the English colonies, and not 1776, was ‘the true founding’ of America – has a formal curriculum. Underpinning this view that slavery in America and the West was uniquely brutal are several unexamined assumptions. Modern Americans tend to project our positive values back into the past while thinking that our sins are uniquely bad. What we don’t understand is that contemporary Western beliefs about human dignity, inalienable rights, a right to freedom, etc, are the exception, not the norm. If they seem like the norm today, that is largely because we have remade much of the world in our image. In reality, as conservative éminence grise Thomas Sowell writes in Black Rednecks and White Liberals (2005), it is probably fair to say that most Westerners think of historical slavery almost entirely in the context of Western white oppression of blacks during what is technically known as the Atlantic Slave Trade. Almost nothing could be further from empirical truth: American slavery was not unprecedented, it was not uniquely brutal and it did not invent any new oppressive systems. It was terrible, but talking about it as if it came out of nowhere means we understand less about history and about global norms. Slavery was ubiquitous throughout the ancient and historical world – often the step of human ‘development’ after simply killing and eating one’s defeated foemen.

Slavery in historical perspective

https://www.city-journal.org/article/prosecute-criminal-protesters

Civic engagement and an appetite for protest are crucial to America’s success. Our Founders were keenly aware of this dynamic—it’s how our country gained independence—and secured the people’s right to assemble peaceably by ratifying the First Amendment.

Recent events within walking distance of my home have shown that some in our country are unfamiliar with, or do not care about, protesting peaceably. Perhaps they feel that their cause is so righteous that they can ignore norms and even laws. Perhaps they act criminally because they know that they are unlikely to be prosecuted. The answer probably falls somewhere in between, highlighting two serious issues in America: the decline of peaceful protest and the unequal enforcement of the law.

On July 24, during Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress, protesters filled the streets of Washington and laid waste to historic monuments outside of Union Station. The pro-Hamas activists vandalized a monument to Christopher Columbus and desecrated a replica Liberty Bell with phrases like “welcome to the intifada” and “anarchy.” They also assaulted police and removed the American flag from its pole, burning it and replacing it with a Palestinian flag.

It’s little surprise that they acted in this manner. Earlier this summer, a similar group of pro-Palestine demonstrators defaced Lafayette Square, just outside of the White House. The vandals graffitied anti-Semitic and hateful messages such as “death to Israel”  onto statues and walked away without consequence. Those sympathetic to the anti-Israel movement were doubtless emboldened by the lack of legal accountability that day and felt it would be permissible to deface other federal statues and public property on future occasions.

Their perception was partially vindicated in the days after the Union Station protest. While some were properly arrested at the demonstration, nearly a dozen have seen their charges dropped, and others were released from jail pending further court action. That is more enforcement action than occurred at the Lafayette Square protest, but not nearly enough to deter the next round of violent demonstrations.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/08/everything_in_moderation_especially_government_power.html

Americans must force the government back into its constitutional cage.

One of the most important lessons in life is straightforward: everything in moderation.  If you eat too much, you’ll get fat.  If you drink too much, you’ll lose your wits.  If you play too much, no one will take you seriously.  Temperance is a remarkably sound philosophy for living well.

Living with an eye toward moderation is about more than restraining from vice.  Experience teaches that thoughtless excess undermines otherwise healthy activities.  Reading books without taking the time to consider the meaning of their words can make a person educated but unwise.  Almost everything in life is done best when done with earnest reflection and restraint.

You do not need to read through the correspondence of America’s Founding Fathers to appreciate their preference for moderate government.  Philosophically, of course, they were the radicals of their age.  They rejected the notion that an elite aristocracy should exercise power by divine right and fought a war for the revolutionary principle that “all men are created equal.”  They defended liberty, property rights, and speech as essential elements of what it means to live.  When it came time for them to design a government best equipped to protect these freedoms, however, moderation was the key!

The English Civil War of the previous century weighed heavily upon their minds.  The fall of the Roman Republic two millennia earlier guided their thoughts, too.  They understood the corrupting influences of power, but they also appreciated the carnage that corrupt governments wreak.  Mercurial monarchs and political repression guarantee war and forestall peace. 

The Founding Fathers’ spirit drove them to fight for freedom, but their temperance restrained their actions after achieving victory.  It has been said that General George Washington could easily have made himself king, but he was a man of humility who sought to follow in the footsteps of Cincinnatus — the virtuous Roman statesman who relinquished power and returned to his farm.  Similarly, had the Founding Fathers suffered from the same unchecked passions that seized Robespierre and the Jacobins during the French Revolution, America might have quickly ended in a Reign of Terror of its own.  Instead, the Founders’ commitment to moderate forms of government nurtured civic peace.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/08/the_stranglehold_of_censorship.html

With Artificial Intelligence we have finally arrived in a world of 24/7 censorship, a place where thought itself can be molded, where whole societies can be pushed and pulled like taffy in any direction or shape desired. If you doubt that this is occurring it is only because you are unaware of the influence, not because it doesn’t exist. Much of what you see and hear through electronic devices can be and is carefully crafted to a predetermined end.

AI machine learning can control narratives online in real time by dialing viral messages up or down. AI algorithms can scan and ban tens of millions of keywords in posts, shutting down or boosting narratives. AI tools can shape thought and action.

Mike Benz so aptly calls them weapons of mass deletion. Not some happenstance of tech evolution, these tools were developed by DARPA to take on ISIS and are utilized by the CIA, DHS, DoD, and State Department in what Benz calls the censorship industrial complex. An entire malinformation cottage industry has grown into a sprawling beast woven throughout government agencies and third-party NGO ‘researchers’ like EIP, the Orwellian-named Election Integrity Partnership. Fed by government grants and donor dollars, these weapons of censorship are now trained on us. Google controls everything you are shown.

State Department officials lobbied their counterparts in Europe to pass hate speech censorship laws that would boomerang back onto the U.S. A vague 2017 German law turned private social media companies into overzealous censors, with no judicial oversight or right to appeal. In 2022 the EU censorship law called the Digital Services Act created a frenzy of self-censorship by adding steep penalties for disinformation on platforms, all adjudicated by the government.

The UK has overtly criminalized “dangerous” thoughts and speech with fines and jail time penalties. The Public Order Act of 1986 makes it an offense for a person to use “threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour that causes, or is likely to cause, another person harassment, alarm or distress.” You can’t get much more vague and opinion-based than that. Who judges which ideas or speech are crimes? The police who investigate, and the Crown Prosecution Service. No chance that could be politicized or abused. The debate now is whether something said privately in one’s home should be criminalized. That anyone thinks that’s a good idea is frightening.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2024/07/30/democrats_vs_the_man_who_could_get_to_the_bottom_of_the_trump_shooting_1047928.html

After the evasive House testimony of now-former Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle and FBI Director Christopher Wray’s shortlived suggestion that Donald Trump may not have been hit by a bullet, one man alone may help allay Republican fears that the Biden administration will not conduct a forthright investigation into the attempted assassination of Trump last month: Joseph Cuffari.

The Trump-appointed inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security has already opened two investigations into the U.S. Secret Service, which is under the purview of the DHS, related to the agency’s handling of the July 13 shooting.

But some Republicans are concerned because, they say, Cuffari has been stonewalled by Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on other internal examinations – including one that might have revealed Secret Service lapses that might have prevented the attempt on Trump’s life. 

Specifically, congressional sources tell RCI that Cuffari’s report, “USSS Preparation for and Response to the Events of January 6, 2021,” has been on Mayorkas’ desk since at least April.

The report, according to Politico, will “cast light on a series of embarrassing security lapses for the agency.” And given some comparisons between Jan. 6 and July 13, the report might shed light on systemic issues that impacted both events.

For example, unanswered questions remain as to why the Secret Service allowed Trump to take the stage at The Ellipse outside the White House around noon on Jan. 6 amid reports of individuals with weapons in the vicinity – a question many Americans have about the July 13 assassination attempt. Law enforcement and spectators noted the presence of a suspicious individual, later identified as the gunman, Thomas Matthew Crooks, at least a half hour before Trump took the stage in Butler, Pennsylvania.

In addition, no one has explained how the Secret Service failed to notice an alleged pipe bomb found outside the Democrat National Committee DC office on Jan. 6 – while then Vice President-elect Harris was inside the building. Previous reporting by RCI shows multiple law enforcement officers, including one with a bomb-sniffing dog, walking past the bench where the device was found. 

https://www.thefp.com/p/bari-weiss-evan-gershkovichs-freedomand

On March 29, 2023, a 31-year-old American named Evan Gershkovich was meeting a source at a steakhouse in the city of Yekaterinburg, east of the Ural Mountains. The Wall Street Journal reporter had planned to return to his apartment in Moscow, but he never got there: he was picked up by the FSB and dragged out of the restaurant with his shirt pulled over his head. Then, a few months later, the American son of Soviet émigrés was sentenced to 16 years in a penal colony on sham charges of espionage.

Today—491 days since his arrest—he is on a plane back to freedom.

His release was part of what the Journal called the “largest East-West prisoner swap since the Cold War.” (You can read about the secret negotiations that led to the exchange in the WSJ.)

On one side of the swap: terrorists, killers, and spies, including, most infamously, Vadim Krasikov, a convicted Russian assassin who was serving a life sentence in Germany for murdering a Chechen fighter in a Berlin park in 2019. There are eight such villains worthy of a Homeland episode currently en route to Russia.

On the other side: journalists, dissidents, and democratic activists. There are sixteen of them.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/08/putin_s_prisoner_release_echoes_a_hostage_release_in_january_1981.html

Our adversaries fear strong presidents and will either try to keep them from office or yield to the inevitable. That may explain the events of the last two weeks.

On July 19, 2024, at the RNC convention, Donald J. Trump accepted the Republican nomination for President. During his speech, he said:

To the entire world, I tell you this: We want our hostages back, and they better be back before I assume office, or you will be paying a very big price.”

There are more than 60 Americans being held hostage or wrongly detained around the world.

Thirteen days later, on August 01, 2024, this news broke:

The Biden administration has agreed to a prisoner exchange with Russia and is expected to soon secure the release of three American citizens imprisoned in Russia including Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, Marine veteran Paul Whelan, and Russian-American radio journalist Alsu Kurmasheva, a senior administration official confirms. Others are believed to be part of the deal.

Boom! Before Trump assumes office, Russia decides to release its political prisoners.