RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/03/one-year-later-more-lingering-questions-about-january-6/

A bombshell report just published in Newsweek details an in-depth, secret operation conducted by the Justice Department before and during January 6. Contrary to the lamentations of FBI Director Christopher Wray that he wished his agency had had better resources to prevent the Capitol breach, hundreds of elite forces under Wray’s authority were on stand-by days just before the protest, and even on the ground as it happened.

The “shadowy commandos” stationed at Quantico, home of the FBI Academy, on January 2, 2021 included the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team and SWAT teams. 

“On the morning of January 6, most of these forces staged closer to downtown Washington, particularly after intelligence was received indicating a possible threat to FBI headquarters building or the FBI’s Washington Field Office,” Newsweek investigative reporter William M. Arkin wrote. “FBI tactical teams arrived on Capitol Hill early in the day to assist in the collection of evidence at sites—including the Republican and Democrat party national headquarters—where explosive devices were found. FBI SWAT teams and snipers were deployed to secure nearby congressional office buildings. Other FBI agents provided selective security around the U.S. Capitol and protection to congressional members and staff.”

An FBI tactical team, according to the report, entered the building immediately after protesters did, which was shortly after 2 p.m.

To the casual reader, news that the nation’s top law enforcement agency prepared ahead of time to combat possible violence on January 6 is reassuring. But to anyone who has closely followed the hyperpartisan activity of the FBI over the past several years, the article reads more like a confession, confirming deep suspicions that the FBI played an instrumental role in prompting the events of that day rather than act as a legitimate police force helping to keep lawmakers and American citizens safe.

Those suspicions are not without merit. In September, the New York Times confirmed that at least two FBI informants had infiltrated the Proud Boys, an alleged “militia group” that breached the Capitol that day. Defense attorneys disclose in court documents that FBI agents were in the crowd.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/03/china-to-conquer-moon-in-2026-while-america-makes-gender-neutral-space-suits/

Space is the ultimate strategic high ground. This domain is divided into various zones. First there are the orbits around the Earth: low-Earth orbit, medium-Earth orbit, and geosynchronous orbit. Ancillary to those orbits are the Lagrange points, which are the orbits separating the Earth from its moon. Next up is the Earth-Moon system. If you control the orbits around the Earth and the Lagrange points—as well as the moon itself—you effectively have total dominance over the Earth below. Today, China is poised to dominate not just the orbits around the Earth, but the entire Earth-Moon system. The Americans, despite having won the original space race with the Soviet Union, have yet to realize that another space race is at hand.

In 2018, Ye Peijian, the man charged with getting Chinese taikonauts to the moon, told audiences that China’s leaders viewed the “universe as an ocean.” Beijing believes the moon is analogous to “the South China Sea,” and Mars is akin to the Philippines. Chinese leaders, therefore, are applying classical geopolitical principles to space at a time when their space program is enjoying extraordinary success, all while the Americans remain firmly grounded (and as Washington is doing its best to complicate and stymie SpaceX through onerous regulations).

Recently, China announced it was building the rocket system that would deliver its personnel to the moon by 2026. It’s hardly a far-fetched goal; the Chinese have either hit or come very close to fulfilling their lofty space policy goals since the turn of this century. 

China’s rockets are essentially as advanced as SpaceX’s rockets are. As I wrote in Winning Space: How America Remains a Superpower, China’s space program is likely to overtake the U.S. program unless Washington embraces drastic changes. Yet, NASA has already announced that its lunar return mission—originally approved by former President Donald Trump in 2018—has been pushed back to the 2030s. China announced its 2026 target shortly after NASA’s disappointing news. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/01/fly-elon-fly-frontpagemagcom/

Scoring political populist points is the only thing that can explain Elizabeth Warren’s self-serving, myopic and relentless scorn of Elon Musk. To one of the greatest innovators and taxpayers in all human history, Senator Warren mockingly called on the billionaire to pay more in taxes, tweeting, “Lets change a rigged tax code so The Person of the Year will actually pay taxes and stop freeloading off everyone else.” 

Elon Musk came to America with no money, risked everything he had, and in the process minted thousands of productive and now wealthy members of society, all while steering us, the entire world, toward a brighter future. This is the very essence of the American Dream. What world does Elizabeth Warren inhabit when her only inclination regarding Elon is to mock and ridicule him?

Her target is a guy who will personally pay upwards of $10 billion in taxes in just 2021. That is roughly equivalent to what the entire population of Boston will pay in income taxes in 2021. Or what 20,000 average American taxpayers will pay in their entire lifetimes.

This is a guy who is bending history before our very eyes to all of humankind’s benefit by accelerating the global shift to electrify transportation. That is a very big deal.

This is a guy who put it all on the line fifteen years ago in self-funding what is now the globe’s most innovative automobile company that is now, depending on the day, worth more than the next eight or nine largest global automobile companies combined. What he is doing to turn the automobile industry on its head is beyond comprehension, yet Elizabeth Warren feels compelled to berate and scold him. I can only ask: Why?

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2022/01/03/falling-back-into-history-n1546610

We are falling back into history, by which I don’t mean the history of the West or of any particular nation but the history of the political world and human settlements from time immemorial, that is, for as long as we have records, monuments, artifacts, cave art, primitive tools and other memorabilia. (I use the term “history” to incorporate what we call “prehistory,” which is pre-literary but discoverable.) Whether we consider Thomas Hobbes’ description of the state of nature as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short” or the erection of a harshly authoritarian governing Leviathan to ensure self-preservation, the picture is one of endemic inequality, poverty, famine, perpetual conflict, and despotic control of a laboring and subject population. 

This is the default position of human life across the millennia, the rope bridge across the historical abyss that civilizations perilously negotiate. The complexities of civilization, however, do not assure general human flourishing. Only the slow and painful emergence of the democratic state has succeeded in lifting vast populations out of misery, destitution, stagnation, and unaccountable, coercive authority.

David Stasavage’s magisterial study The Decline and Rise of Democracy furnishes a comprehensive account of the concept, practice, and history of democracy from its early origins in 6th century Athens to the present day, relying on a minimalist definition of democracy as “based on the presence of competitive elections with a broad suffrage in which incumbent parties stand a chance of losing.” Modern democracy began in the Anglo-American sphere and spread to Europe and certain post-colonial nations in several installments. In an earlier volume, The Third Wave, political philosopher Samuel Huntington provided an assessment of the development of democracy in the modern age, which according to his calculation evolved in three waves dating from the 19th century, post WW II, and the Iberian Peninsula during the 1970s (the Portuguese Carnation Revolution), leading to the establishment of consensual governments. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/01/gift-mendacious-nikole-hannah-jones-conservative-mary-grabar/

If political leaders across the country are looking for more evidence that they are justified in banning The 1619 Project curriculum in schools they can refer to comments made by the Project’s own creator, Nikole Hannah-Jones, on December 26, during the Sunday show line-up, on NBC’s Meet the Press.

In her comments to Chuck Todd, she revealed herself to be a dissembler regarding her role in promoting 1619 Project classroom lessons. Then in tweets that insisted that all critics henceforth engage only with her new book The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, a 600-page expansion, she admitted that the original project, upon which the lessons are based, is flawed.

Shortly after the program aired, at 10:21 a.m., Hannah-Jones tweeted, “It is revealing when critics of the 1619 Project, 2 yrs later, refuse to critique the book & instead keep rehashing arguments abt the magazine. That’s because we responded to good-faith critique, we revised in response, we included 1,000 endnotes, historians wrote half the essays.” Phil Magness, Senior Research Fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research, who has been among the earliest and most frequent critics of the economic claims promoted by The 1619 Project, and who had reached out to Hannah-Jones, commented, “I witnessed this process directly as one of those critics over the last 2 years. And there’s not a word of truth to what she is claiming.” Hannah-Jones, who refuses to engage in debate, in typical fashion, attacked the economic historian’s credentials.

Sixteen minutes later, at 10:37 a.m. she went after Victoria Bynum, one of the historians who early on requested corrections to the Project. In December 2019, Bynum had signed Princeton historian Sean Wilentz’s letter to the editor, which was also signed by historians James McPherson, Gordon Wood, and James Oakes. At 6:28 a.m. Bynum had commented on Oakes’s recent article in Catalyst magazine responding to New York Times Magazine editor Jake Silverstein’s November 12 defense of the Project—a promotional lead-up to the November 16 publication of the hardcover book, which is copyrighted by the Times. Bynum summarized it as a critique of the political agenda, specifically Black Nationalism, motivating the project. Hannah-Jones tweeted, with no reference to these points, “Is it common ‘very serious’ practice, 2.5 years later, to critique the unrevised work and to not engage the updated version? Asking for a friend.” Bynum politely replied that neither she nor Oakes was commenting on the new book. As revealed by her defensive response, Hannah-Jones was admitting that the original 1619 Project, the August 18, 2019, issue of the New York Times Magazine, was error-riddled. As Magness noted, “Nikole Hannah-Jones’s latest argument is to claim that the original 1619 Project—as published in the New York Times as part of a multimillion dollar advertising blitz—was just a rough draft, and the new book is the revised version by which it should be judged. Seriously.”

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/02/durhams-investigation-fearless-predictions-for-2022/

While the seemingly slow pace of Special Counsel John Durham’s “Russiagate” investigation is frustrating to many, it appears that conditions are ripe for a slew of indictments in 2022, holding to account both FBI personnel and a number of other actors connected to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, possibly including the Clinton campaign itself.

Although grand jury proceedings are kept confidential, COVID restrictions likely caused both its sessions to be postponed and its witnesses to be temporarily excused from appearing. These delays were inevitable and certainly not Durham’s fault.

One strikingly ironic result of the partisan Mueller investigation was that its one-sided focus ignored any attempt to ferret out anti-Trump crimes dealing with “Russian Collusion.” Had it done so, a subsequent investigation, such as Durham’s, might have been foreclosed. In any case, Mueller’s investigation delayed the start of Durham’s.

Durham is scrupulously ethical and does not leak to a thirsty public. That is a good thing, because the partisan Attorney General Merrick Garland would like nothing better than a “good cause” excuse to fire Durham for violating Department of Justice policies. Durham’s silence, though, has frustrated curious citizens.

But recent indictments do tell us something about the focus of Durham’s probe, when viewed alongside other publicly available information such as the Report of FBI Inspector General Michael Horowitz on FBI FISA abuse.

For instance, Durham in the Igor Danchenko indictment does not mention, as does Horowitz in his report, that in his January 24-26, 2017, interview with the FBI, Danchenko said his Steele dossier claims were mainly gossip, rumor, and bar talk. After this interview, for the next year and a half, the FBI told the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) that it found Danchenko truthful and cooperative, a claim repeated to the Senate. But what the FBI did not tell FISC or the Senate was that Danchenko was truthful and cooperative about the Steele dossier’s being untruthful speculation and jest “over beers.” In short, the central thrust of the FISA application was without factual basis.

Accordingly, any FBI agent who knew of Danchenko’s interview and participated in either of the two subsequent FISA renewal applications or the Senate testimony has potential criminal culpability. The Danchenko interview thus places agents Stephen Somma, Joe Pientka, Peter Strzok, Bill Priestap, Lisa Page, Andrew McCabe, and others in potential jeopardy.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/01/trouble-in-paradise-the-crumbling-california-model/

California is broken, but it is not doomed.

S ome horrified conservatives dismiss California as the progressive dystopia, bound for bankruptcy and, let’s hope, growing irrelevance. Progressives, for their part, hail the Golden State as the avatar of a better future, the role model for a new, more environmentally friendly and socially just economic order. They often dismiss critiques as conservative misinformation.

Yet California is not doomed, at least in the near term, nor is it anything like a model of social democracy. As long as its tech oligarchs produce enormous profits and generate wealth, California remains fiscally flush for the near term, and the evolving economy, long on digitization and constant entertainment, works to the state’s historic strengths. Key industries such as space and biomedical research also offer promise.

The big problem with the California model is that it does not work for most Californians, who suffer from the highest poverty rate (cost of living adjusted) in the country. Despite being home to three of the nation’s four most expensive housing markets, California has among the lowest cost-adjusted median income of any state, as demographer Wendell Cox notes. Although not particularly hard hit by pandemic fatalities, California continues to recover more slowly than the rest of the states and now suffers the highest unemployment rate in the country — including nine of the 16 metros with the greatest joblessness. Even as the tech oligarchy has reaped record profits and expanded its wealth to unprecedented levels, California ranks as the second-worst place to find a job of all the states. Thank God for Hawaii!

A New Economic Model?

Flush from his recall triumph, Governor Gavin Newsom, along with the legislature, seems determined to double down on his attempt to shape California as the model for the progressive future. He claims that our state is “the envy of the world” and the model of social justice. “Unlike the Washington plutocracy,” he boasts, “California isn’t satisfied serving a powerful few on one side of the velvet rope.”

We can see, in aggregate numbers, some justification for crowing. A writer at Bloomberg claims that the state has “the best economy” in the world, pointing to the bloated stock prices of the major tech firms, soaring home values, and the enormous wealth creation accruing to a relative handful. Other writers insist that California will continue to dominate most of its key industries, owing to its innovation and capital resources.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/debunking-the-latest-round-of-covid-hysteria/

Welcome back to “Forgotten Fact-Checks,” a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we talk Omicron, preview the upcoming January 6 coverage, and tally 2022’s already growing list of media misses.

Age of Omicron

The pandemic has been a wellspring for poor reporting and analysis for portions of three calendar years now, with reactions to the spread of the Omicron variant serving as a catalyst in the opening days of 2022.

Some habitual hysterics, including Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding, a public-health scientist who previously taught at Harvard, have sought to use the emergence and spread of Omicron to argue for more restrictions and mandates, mocking the idea that it’s milder than previous iterations of the virus. Feigl-Ding even went so far as to suggest  that “whoever arrogantly pushed the ‘#Omicron is mild’ [narrative]” be fired. In support of his theory, Feigl-Ding points his more than 600,000 Twitter followers to rising pediatric-hospitalization rates.

However, these data neither vindicate Feigl-Ding’s perspective, nor convict those he’s criticizing. A report from the New York Times indicates that overlapping cases attributable to both the Delta and Omicron variants – as well as lower vaccination rates in children – are what’s driving the rise in hospitalizations. The fact that the vaccines were approved later for children than they were adults, as well as the lack of consequences of infection for them relative to their parents and grandparents, has resulted in fewer of them being inoculated.

Moreover, the rising number of hospitalized children who have tested positive for the virus include many who arrived at the facilities with other medical issues. In fact, the Times report stated that “around the country have reported positivity rates as high as 20 percent among children. But the vast majority were asymptomatic and arrived at the hospital with other health problems.” What’s more, one study of southwest Pennsylvania – where Omicron has emerged as the leading variant –  showed that “the proportion of pediatric admissions requiring intensive care services had dropped by half since early fall, and has continued to fall in the last month.” Pediatric coronavirus hospitalizations still have yet to come close to matching the typical amount of seasonal pediatric flu cases seen in a year.