RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/truckers-biden-trudeau-not-enemy-liz-peek

What if … Justin Trudeau had met with the truckers the day they first arrived in Ottawa?

Instead of bolting and hiding out in an “undisclosed location,” what if Canada’s prime minister had emerged from the Privy Council building and talked to the Freedom Convoy drivers about their demands?

Might Trudeau have defused the entire protest? Would the truckers have been satisfied that their cause was heard and gone home?

After all, these are truck drivers, not thugs. Even under the microscope of a censorious press, during those first heady few days, when massive crowds appeared from nowhere to cheer on the drivers, they committed no crimes, no injuries, no looting. There was not a single arrest, much to the disappointment of the liberal media.

More recently, as police moved in to dismantle the blockade at the Ambassador Bridge at Windsor, almost all the demonstrators peacefully decamped. CNN sounded downright disappointed to report that none went to jail.

The truckers are speaking for millions of working people in Canada and around the world who are sick of COVID restrictions and increasingly skeptical of the “science” behind them. Canada’s drivers were set off by a new rule, imposed even as the pandemic crested, that required all truckers entering the country from the U.S. be vaccinated or self-quarantine. The rule seemed unnecessary considering that 85% of the truckers had taken the shot, and that most spend the majority of their time alone.

The new mandate also seemed whimsical in that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other medical authorities have now proclaimed immunities from surviving COVID just as effective against infection as the vaccines. Truckers were praised as selfless essential workers as they continued to work through the pandemic, putting themselves in harm’s way. Presumably, many got sick and now have antibodies; they may not need the vaccine.

What was Trudeau scared of? That the crowd of burly drivers might scoff at his perfectly coiffed hair? Not be properly reverent of his literature degree from McGill University? That the truckers might not respect a lifelong politician whose career rested on the fame of his father?

Instead of engaging with the truckers, Trudeau ran like a rabbit, only to emerge from hiding to demean the protesters as a “fringe minority.” The irony is, of course, that Trudeau himself represents a minority, with his Liberal Party setting a record last fall for the lowest vote share of any party to ever form a government, winning a mere 33% of the popular vote. As in 2019, the Conservatives won the popular vote.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/02/13/joe-biden-alchemist/

Medieval alchemists sought to turn base metals into precious metals like gold. The more the alchemists bumped into the reality that gold was an element, the more desperately they sought to find fantastic ways to fabricate the rare element out of nothing. 

Joe Biden operates on the same alchemist principles. He tries to turn his record of dross into golden success. And the more he fails, the more zealously he embraces his next new fantasy. Meanwhile,  the midterm reckoning approaches. 

Printing money, talking up low interest rates, disincentivizing work, subsidizing inactivity, and being unprepared that a pent-up, locked down, constipated economy of the past two years would eventually break out—all that resulted in January’s 7.5 percent annualized inflation rate. Unlike Joe Biden, even a child knows that too much demand and liquidity and too few available goods and services cause prices to rise. The rate of inflation is increasing at an annualized rate not seen in 40 years. And the jump already follows a prior 2021 annual rate of 6.8 percent. The prices of gas, food, and houses—the stuff of life—are collectively rising far higher than just 7.5 percent. 

At first, the Biden Administration attempted to turn this inflationary dross into gold. Price hikes, we were assured, were all just the worries of an elite. 

https://www.city-journal.org/metropolitan-museum-of-art-has-redefined-itself-as-an-antiracist-agent-of-change

Like the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has redefined itself as an antiracist “agent of change.” In July 2020, its director Max Hollein and CEO Daniel Weiss announced that the museum will henceforth aim to overcome the racism still perpetrated by our “government, policies, systems, and institutions.”

What such a political mandate means for an art museum may seem puzzling, but two exhibits currently running at the Met provide an answer. They suggest that the museum will now value racial consciousness-raising over scholarship and historical accuracy. Double standards will govern how the museum analyzes Western and Third World art: only the former will be subject to the demystification treatment, while the latter will be accorded infinite curatorial respect. The Met will lay bare European art’s alleged complicity in the West’s legacy of oppression, while Third World violence and inequality will be chastely kept off stage.

The first show, “In Praise of Painting: Dutch Masterpieces at The Met,” arranges the Met’s own seventeenth-century Dutch canvases in thematic categories, such as still life and landscape. (The content of those categories is sometimes hard to discern underneath such mannered academic rhetoric as “Contested Bodies.”) Highlights of the show include Franz Hals’s portrait of Paulus Verschuur, a bravura performance of spontaneous brushwork and psychological acuity that captures the Rotterdam merchant’s modern irony, and Johannes Vermeer’s A Maid Asleep, which anticipates Paul Cézanne in its treatment of decorative pattern and geometry.

The Dutch Baroque formed the cornerstone of the Met’s first holdings; subsequent bequests created one of the world’s great assemblages of Rembrandt, Hals, Vermeer, and their peers. The antiracist museum, however, understands that it is not just Western art that needs deconstructing; the collecting and donating of art does, too. Thus, the commentary accompanying “In Praise of Painting” wearily notes that “of course” there are “blind spots in the story these particular acquisitions tell. Colonialism, slavery, and war—major themes in seventeenth-century Dutch history—are scarcely visible here.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/02/muslim-federation-event-speaker-glorifies-hitler-joe-kaufman/

On March 18th, the South Florida Muslim Federation (SoFloMuslims), an umbrella group for the vast majority of South Florida’s radical Muslim institutions, will begin its two-day First Annual Conference, titled ‘Our Collective Strength.’ The group has been advertising the event’s featured speakers, since early November. One of these speakers is Khalid Griggs, an anti-Semite who has used his social media to glorify Hitler and someone who believes the United States is “owned and controlled” by Jews. Having Griggs on its roster shines a light on the motives of the Muslim Federation and all who agree to participate in this month’s conference.

Khalid Fattah Griggs is the imam of the Community Mosque of Winston-Salem (CMWS) in North Carolina. He is also the Vice President of the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA) and the Chairman of ICNA’s Council for Social Justice (CSJ). Unlike ICNA that has its roots in South Asian Islamism, Griggs, a black Muslim convert, took his main influences from the black power movement. In December 2019, Griggs wrote of the “honor” he had in meeting Kwame Ture, a rabid anti-Semite who claimed European-born Jews were not Jews but “Cossacoids” and said, “The only good Zionist is a dead Zionist.” Griggs called Ture a “courageous political visionary.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/02/caligulas-horse-senate-bidens-dog-doe-robert-spencer/

In the most consequential appointment since the Roman emperor Caligula made his horse Incitatus a senator, Old Joe Biden’s handlers have appointed one Sam Brinton (“they/them”) to be the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition in the Office of Nuclear Energy in the Department of Energy. But in our American version of late imperial decadence, Brinton is not a horse, but a dog: Brinton is also involved in “puppy play,” which apparently involves grown men putting on dog masks and behaving like animals for sexual kicks. Some people think Caligula was playing an elaborate practical joke on the Roman elites by exalting Incitatus, but the appointment of Sam Brinton is no laughing matter, and no one is more po-faced about it than the broadminded Leftists of the Biden administration.

Brinton is, to put it bluntly, a pervert, and proud of it. In his drag queen persona, “Sister Ray Dee O’Active,” he announces: “I am the slutty one. And the nerdy one. #sexynerd.” In a 2016 article in Metro Weekly, he speaks at length about puppy play (he is identified only by his first name, but an accompanying photo makes it clear that Sam in the article is Brinton), explaining his role as a “handler” of men who pretending to be puppies: “It’s the concept of the teacher and nurturer…. My job is to make sure that while he’s in headspace, I’m keeping him safe.” He says of one of his companions in this bizarre role play: “Pup and I have what I feel is one of the most ideally perfect connections between our personal and kink life. Both of us have other partners, so we come into this space, and then we come out of it, knowing the boundaries of where your kink and non-kink relationships begin and end.” Right, that’s always good to keep in mind.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/02/spies-hillary-daniel-greenfield/

If you were to watch CNN, the former cable news network’s biggest story about Hillary Clinton is that she’s selling a $32 baseball cap with “But Her Emails Hat” stitched on it pink as a “dad hat”.

Unlike Jeffrey Epstein and Vince Foster, Hillary and CNN’s credibility really did kill themselves.

Compared to Uranium One, the Lincoln Bedroom, and the State Department, this lame meme may be the least offensive thing that Vince Foster’s former boss ever sold at a markup.. 

Outside the mainstream media echo chamber, the big story is that the latest revelation by Special Counsel John Durham exposes more of the scope of the Clinton spy operation. We already know that elements of Russiagate encompassed recruiting Christopher Steele, a former MI6 operative, and Igor Danchenko, an alleged former Russian FSB agent employed by a Qatari-allied think tank, already arrested and indicted as part of the Durham investigation.

The big Hillary revelation doesn’t involve the $32 baseball cap that CNN is promoting, but a digital Clinton spy network that allegedly targeted Trump Tower and even the White House.

In the fall of 2016, as the election was approaching and the investigation into her own server was heating up. Hillary Clinton threw out the bizarre claim that “computer scientists” had “uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank.”

The secret Russian server was too much even for most of the media which had a boundless appetite for Russiagate garbage, but the discredited story did have a real scandal behind it.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/02/durham_makes_allegations_that_make_watergate_look_like_small_potatoes.html

On Friday, Special Counsel John Durham filed with the D.C. Federal District Court a what should have been a boring conflict of interest motion, but it hid a surprise: The Clinton campaign, through Perkins Coie, spied on Trump both before and after he was president. The following is a plain English-language summary of relevant parts of the motion:

Michael Sussman was a partner at Law Firm-1 (i.e., Perkins Coie). He met with the FBI General Counsel (i.e., James Baker), and offered data and “white papers” purporting to show that Trump was communicating covertly with a Russia-based bank (i.e., Alfa-Bank). Mueller, incidentally, had to admit this was untrue.

Durham indicted Sussman because he allegedly told Baker that he was not divulging this information for a client. In fact, he was acting for at least two clients: the Clinton campaign and “Tech Executive-1” (i.e., Rodney Joffe), who worked at a “U.S.-based internet company” (i.e., Neustar Inc., a federal contractor).

As part of his work on the Clinton campaign, Sussman repeatedly met and communicated both with Joffe and with “another law partner” who was “Campaign Lawyer-1.” (I guess we can await that indictment soon….)

Beginning in July 2016, Joffe began to work with (1) Sussman, (2) an investigation firm that Perkins Coie hired for the Clinton campaign, (3) cyber researchers, and (4) “employees at multiple Internet companies” to assemble the data handed to James Baker. To do so, Joffe exploited access to private and/or proprietary internet data. He even coopted researchers at a U.S. university who were receiving lots of internet data as part of a cybersecurity research contract that was pending with the feds. (The Conservative Treehouse says the university is Georgia Tech and it was a DARPA contract.)

https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/02/12/the-deadly-consequences-of-defund-the-police/

Remember ‘Defund the Police’? It was the slogan du jour of the Black Lives Matter movement. It was being hollered on every street during the protests over the killing of George Floyd by Minnesota cop Derek Chauvin. In those riotous days in the summer of 2020, everyone seemed to be waving a placard or wearing a t-shirt demanding defunding. The entire in-crowd posted those three words on their social-media accounts. Even here in the UK, where cops aren’t armed and where the police-funding model is very different to America’s, the right-on lined up behind the vague, strange call for police forces to be starved of funds. A headline in the impeccably middle-class Guardian declared: ‘The answer to police violence is not “reform”. It’s defunding.’

Yet now, ‘Defund the Police’ seems to be a fast fading idea. You don’t hear it very much anymore. It might linger among the white antifa oafs who stomp around in cities like Portland and among well-to-do radical students on quiet, handsome campuses in the UK where there’s very rarely any need to call the cops. But on the streets, in politics, in the press, ‘Defund’ seems to have fizzled out. The old woke roar is barely a whimper now. And it isn’t hard to see why. This slogan has proven lethal. It has been an unmitigated disaster in numerous US cities. The cutting of cops’ budgets did not give rise to the new dawn of flowery peace and racial justice that the virtue-signalling defunders fantasised it would. On the contrary, it helped to stoke violent crime, further destabilise city life, and make life even harder for poor black and brown communities in particular. The lesson here is clear: wokeness kills.

The idea of ‘Defund the Police’ has been around for a couple of decades. But it exploded into public view following the killing of Floyd in May 2020. It’s a simple-sounding proposition: you take public money away from police departments that are too often heavy-handed and racially prejudiced and plough it instead into fairer non-policing forms of ‘public safety’, like mental healthcare, youth services, improvements to housing, and so on. And hey presto, there’ll be fewer trigger-happy cops on the streets and more happy citizens no longer tussling with mental problems and crappy living conditions. The reality, of course, as could have been predicted by anyone who doesn’t live in a gated community and get all their news from the New York Times, has been rather different.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/black-history-month-usable-past-ancestry/

This is Black History Month when we are invited to think through a certain spectrum of the people who came before us. As it happens, I am very much interested in black history. I wrote a book about it, 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project, and several books about diversity, and I have been working for several years on a nearly completed documentary about the early days of black theater and film. But, lacking any black ancestors, I must make do with my own sketchy line of progenitors.

When I was growing up in the Fifties and Sixties, my father attempted to find his great-grandfather — GGF in anthropological parlance. GGF had an air of mystery since all anyone knew about him was his last name and GGM’s inveterate reply when asked about him: “He was lost at sea.” His name had been razored out of the family Bible. My father doubted the bit about his being “lost at sea.” The family haled from the far side of the Adirondacks, where few fathers were lost full fathom five. Dad wanted to know more. This led to detours on family vacations to rural cemeteries and county court houses in Upstate New York.

In this week’s “Waste Of The Week,” we spotlighted the Biden Administration’s plans to continue spending your hard-earned tax-dollars in Afghanistan.
 
Over the past 20 years, the United States spent nearly $2 trillion in Afghanistan – while we experienced 22,000 military casualties and lost 2,400 American soldiers.
 
If we move forward with the Administration’s plans to fund Afghanistan through the U.S. Department of Treasury – we run the risk of funding the world’s most dangerous foreign terrorist organization, The Taliban.

U.S. Senator Joni Ernst and other senate colleagues responded to these plans and sent a letter to Secretary of State, Antony Blinken and Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen, sharing their concerns and inquiring as to whether U.S. taxpayer dollars have gone to Afghanistan since the withdrawal in August 2021.
 
Will the Administration respond to Ernst?
 https://komonews.com/news/nation-world/taxpayer-dollars-used-for-afghan-humanitarian-aid-says-watchdog-group-biden-afghanistan-military-taliban-treasury-joni-ernst-antony-blinken-iowa-haqqani