RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20723/california-legalized-drugs-cartels

Six years after California legalized marijuana, the bodies keep piling up. Earlier this year, six men were murdered in the Mojave Desert. Four of the men had been burned after being shot with rifles. In 2020, seven people were killed at an illegal pot operation in Riverside County.

Violence like this was supposed to disappear after legalization. Legalization advocates argued that making the drug trade legal would end the grip of the cartels. Instead, the legal market has failed, and the cartels are taking over sizable parts of California and the rest of the country.

California’s legal drug revenues have fallen consistently, as have those in other legal drug states including Colorado, whose model helped sell the idea that drug money would fix everything.

Despite falling revenues, Colorado legislators brag about $282 million in drug revenue. That number may sound high, but it’s a drop in the bucket considering the money that the state and cities like Denver are spending on homelessness, drug overdoses and law enforcement.

While the legal drug business is also collapsing in California, the state is spending a fortune fighting marijuana even as it tries to tax it. Gov. Gavin Newsom paradoxically promised to close the budget deficit with $100 million in drug revenue, meant to be used to fund law enforcement and fight substance abuse. The state seized over $300 million in illegal pot this year and uses satellite imagery and heavily-armed raids to fight untaxed marijuana.

But despite all those efforts, illegal marijuana has won and legal marijuana has lost.

https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/education/bragg-drops-trespassing-charges-against-nearly-all-columbia-protesters

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg dropped charges on Thursday against most of the Columbia University protesters who were arrested for trespassing in Hamilton Hall in April.

Nearly 50 people were charged with criminal trespassing after they staged a multi-day protest on the Manhattan campus of the Ivy League school. But 31 of those cases were dismissed on Thursday due to a lack of evidence, according to NBC News. Prosecutors said another 14 of the 46 cases will be dismissed if the defendants do not have any other arrests in the next six months.

The court said the person who will remain charged is James Carlson, who has two other separate cases opened against him. One of those charges is flag burning, and he is not associated with Columbia University.

Hundreds of protesters initially engaged in the protests, which was centered on the U.S. response to the war in Israel. But the 46 who were charged had illegally occupied Hamilton Hall towards the end of the protest, despite warnings that they were trespassing. Of the 46 charged, at least 14 were undergraduate students at Columbia, nine were graduate students, and two were employees. 

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/06/21/bidens-fiscal-crisis-is-far-worse-than-we-thought/

Nothing should shock us anymore, but the latest Congressional Budget Office report did. Released this week, the report shows that the nation is in vastly worse financial shape than anyone thought just a few months ago. And the report makes clear who is to blame.

The CBO’s latest “Budget and Economic Outlook” projects that the federal deficit this year will top $1.9 trillion. That’s $408 billion higher – a 27% increase – than what the CBO thought it would be just four months ago.

This will make the 2024 deficit the biggest ever recorded in American history – not counting the two years of panic-induced COVID-19 spending sprees – and will mark the third consecutive increase in deficits under Biden. (See the chart below.)

It’s also highly unusual for the CBO to make such a huge correction to its forecast.

The nonpartisan office routinely produces a budget and economic forecast at the start of the year, and then an update mid-year. Normally, these don’t vary much. In Trump’s first three years, for example, the average variance between the first forecast and the final deficit was just $73 billion.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/06/20/how-californias-paradise-become-our-purgatory/

California has become a test case of the suicide of the West. Never before has such a state, so rich in natural resources and endowed with such a bountiful human inheritance, self-destructed so rapidly.

How and why did California so utterly consume its unmatched natural and ancestral inheritance and end up as a warning to Western civilization of what might be in store for anyone who followed its nihilism?

The symptoms of the state’s suicide are indisputable.

Governor Gavin Newsom enjoyed a recent $98 billion budget surplus—gifted from multibillion-dollar federal COVID-19 subsidies, the highest income and gas taxes in the nation, and among the country’s steepest sales and property taxes.

Yet in a year, he turned it into a growing $45 billion budget deficit.

At a time of an over-regulated, overtaxed, and sputtering economy, Newsom spent lavishly on new entitlements, illegal immigrants, and untried and inefficient green projects.

Newsom was endowed with two of the wettest years in recent California history. Yet he and radical environmentalists squandered the water bounty—as snowmelts and runoff long designated for agricultural irrigation were drained from aqueducts and reservoirs to flow out to sea.

Newsom transferred millions of dollars designated by a voter referendum to build dams and aqueducts for water storage and instead blew up four historic dams on the Klamath River. For decades, these now-destroyed scenic lakes provided clean, green hydroelectric power, irrigation storage, flood control, and recreation.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/what-does-the-student-intifada-want

With few exceptions, college and university presidents were slow and ineffective in responding to the protests and encampments on their campuses this spring. Their passivity calls to mind the character Gottlieb Biedermann in Max Frisch’s play The Fire Raisers, who, hearing about a series of local arsons, refuses to believe that the men who manipulated their way into occupying his attic could be the perpetrators. Deceived by feelings of guilt, Biedermann is unwilling to throw the men out or believe that they are dangerous—even when they tell him exactly what they are doing. Remaining in denial to the end, he hands them the very matches they use to incinerate his home.

Too often, when faced with the fervent demands and outlandish behavior of student demonstrators, university officials allowed them to violate institutional policies, disrupt academic life, and harass Jews. When presidents finally acted, many negotiated with the protesters and capitulated to their demands. Even those who rightly called the police often failed to impose serious consequences on the disrupters. In the end, few protesters face meaningful sanctions for their extended violations of campus policies and, in many cases, the law.

Yet, the protesters and their allies complained about “authoritarian” crackdowns, betrayals of democratic values, and free-speech violations as their camps got cleared away. Their complaints can be attributed partly to ignorance; a student speaker at Harvard University’s commencement, for example, proclaimed to a cheering crowd that the university had violated students’ “right to civil disobedience,” a right she genuinely seemed to believe that they had. One poll showed that more than half of those who said they supported chanting “From the river to the sea” were unable to name the river and the sea to which the chant referred. When a young woman at New York University was asked what she wanted the university to do, she turned the question to her friend: “Why are we protesting?”

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/06/19/conformity-is-the-enemy-of-free-speech/

The Gaza solidarity encampments that spread across US universities earlier this year showed that free speech is under threat from all sides. Intolerant ‘pro-Palestine’ students wanted to exclude Zionists, Jewish students and anyone not fully committed to their cause from campus. They were happy to disrupt university life and to prevent classes and lectures from taking place. At the same time, some on the pro-Israel side called for these protests to be forcibly shut down, for demonstrators to be arrested and for Israelophobic speech to be censored or punished. Those who are consistent in their support for free speech are becoming rarer by the day.

Greg Lukianoff – president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) – returned to The Brendan O’Neill Show last week to discuss the need for a radical revival of free speech. What follows is an edited extract from the conversation. Listen to the full thing here.

Brendan O’Neill: Where does the left-right divide currently fall on the question of free speech?

Greg Lukianoff: One of the reasons I’m worried about the future of freedom of speech, in the United States and beyond, is that there used to be a contingent of the left that unapologetically defended free expression. These people were always in tension with those totalitarians who believed that, if society was governed by enlightened people like them, censorship would be justified. For the most part, I grew up at a time when freedom of speech was actually considered a left-wing value. But with totalitarian thinking winning on the left and the rise of the populist right, there’s no natural constituency for free speech today other than the centre.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/our-intel-agencies-celebrate-pride-by-prioritizing-nail-painting-over-national-security/

Under the Biden administration, America has taken many wrong turns, but what may prove to be one of the most consequential is quite simply the fact that we are becoming a fundamentally unserious nation, one that is throwing away its self-respect, its dignity, its gravitas, if you will, in the name of embracing the emasculating gender ideology that has become the tip of the spear of the cultural Marxist subversion of America.

To demonstrate this tragic state of affairs, let me share with you something at the Daily Wire which caught my eye, an exclusive there regarding how President Biden’s intelligence community is celebrating the so-called “Pride Month” of June with, among other activities, free trans flag manicures for agents who would otherwise be occupied with our national security.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) is an agency which oversees the rest of the intel community, including the CIA, FBI, NSA, and intelligence departments in each branch of the military. It is celebrating Pride Month – an entire month devoted to the mandatory celebration of transgressive sexual proclivities – by inviting intelligence agents to have the transgender flag painted on their nails, participate in a “Pride Ally Challenge,” and learn all about non-binary identity from a “Filipinx” activist. (The “x,” for those are blessedly ignorant of such things, is a non-binary suffix that gender activists are desperately trying – and failing – to normalize.)

The Daily Wire came into possession of a document which outlines nine different Pride Month activities which occurred on June 4th during work hours. So at a time when intel officers should have been focused on thwarting terror plots or investigating violent political movements like Antifa, they had the opportunity to have their nails painted with trans flags, or even to learn how to crochet their very own pride flags!

The document reads,

For nail painting, we’ll have our pro team of FVEY artistes ready to decorate you ready for Pride Month, with the option of celebrating pride or trans flag colors. If you don’t normally paint your nails, or have never done so, all the better! We’ll do everything for you, and you might just love it. What better way to show your allyship to the community?

Cringeworthy, to say the least. FVEY, by the way, is an awkward acronym which refers to the Five Eyes Intelligence Alliance of the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. This reference suggests that intelligence agents from those countries may have been invited to the nail painting event as well.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/06/the_censorship_industrial_complex_and_how_it_has_the_internet_in_its_grip.html

Since the 1960s, the military-industrial complex has influenced and driven American policy to profit cynically from conflict and war.  But in this decade, a new complex has arrived, one that is far more dangerous to American values.  It is the censorship-industrial complex (CIC), which has gained tremendous control over the internet.

When the internet-backed World Wide Web was created in 1989, it democratized information and connectedness.  Through rapid commercialization, it unleashed unlimited possibilities and economic growth.  Equally, it became a haven of free expression, debate, and creativity.  These ideals crystallized into the five principles of the 2012 Declaration of Internet Freedom: non-censorship; universal access; freedom to connect and create; the right to privacy and control of personal information; and protection for technology and innovation.

But governments and the elites that control them were quick to move in, sensing the threat to their authoritarian instinct.  At work since 2016, the pernicious CIC gained strength during the Covid-19 pandemic, amplifying government-approved narratives that favored the agenda of the elites.  Furthering the advance to the Great Reset, it now works to color content and discourse in the leftist hues that disguise the intent and operations of the global elites.

Mike Benz, a former State Department official who now heads the Foundation for Freedom Online and is a staunch campaigner against the CIC, reveals that the complex is controlled by the State Department, the Defense Department, the CIA, MI6, and Brussels.  The turning points, according to him, were the Brexit referendum, the election of Donald Trump, and elections in the Philippines, in all of which the internet played an important role.  Therefore, it was decided to end free speech on the internet and control the flow of information.  Since the American government was hamstrung by the First Amendment, NGOs and fronts were enlisted for “doing the dirty work.”