RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/10/the_manifold_dangers_of_pretending_to_be_the_opposite_sex.html

In 2015, during the Obama administration, the Supreme Court ruled that the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment requires states to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.  This decision — which made the final pronouncement on the first major battle about gender confusion — rendered meaningless the distinction between men and women.  It was no longer necessary for a married couple to comprise a male and a female.  In a marriage, there could now be two husbands or two wives.

The weekend prior to this ruling, Bruce Jenner, a former decathlete who won gold in the 1976 Olympics, came out as transgender and won an award for “courage” for doing so.  Thus began the linking of sexual orientation and gender identity that cemented the transformation of LGB to LGBT.  In the following years, Hollywood and the media sought to mainstream transgenderism by highlighting it in TV shows, movies, and articles.  Meanwhile, the Obama administration began pushing legal mandates that characterized gender identification — whether in education, health care, housing, or the military — as a civil rights issue.  An individual’s “gender identification,” not biological sex, would be the criterion for determining admittance to public schools, sports teams, washrooms, locker rooms, showers, dorms, and the like.

The dogmatism and irrational haste surrounding so-called “anti-discriminatory” gender policies and the notion of “gender fluidity” have made it nearly impossible to voice alternative views.  This not only is unhealthy for society, but deprives the gender dysphoric — that is, people who are uncomfortable with their sex — of balanced counseling and a reasonable amount of time to arrive at how they want to be identified and whether they want so-called “sex change” surgery.  As a matter of course, counselors driven by the false narrative of “trapped in the wrong body” impose gender reassignment on confused youths, often causing untold trauma.

https://victorhanson.com/eeyores-cabinet-revolution-without-the-middle-class/

The beleaguered middle class, especially those of the suburbs, for the most part did not join rioting radicalized youths and inner-city minorities in the violence, looting, and destruction, even as their businesses were often targeted, and jobs lost.

Some small stores that had somehow endured the two months of shutdowns, did not survive the flames and break-ins that devoured entire city blocks from Santa Monica to Minneapolis. It was also no accident that many of the nation’s wealthiest, from enclaves in Malibu, Silicon Valley, and Manhattan, played the Jacobin role among the French aristocracy, and so cheered on the violent protests, assured that they were exempt from the violent ramifications of their own ideology.

Certainly, while there was expressed outrage about reports of the use of riot gas in dispersing violent protestors in the nation’s capital, few even noticed that the Beverly Hills police department stopped all would-be Black Lives Matter protestors aimed at Beverly Hills, through the generous use of tear gas.

In reductionist terms, the violence was medieval. The underclass attacked the sustenance of the middle class, while the progressive upper class virtue signaled the protests from their secure keeps. Disenchanted and mostly white youth found a new relevance for their education as megaphones for violence, in a loud and visible fashion that working at Starbucks or Target had never offered. Their foot soldiers who looted on television were all too often the urban and minority underclass.

So, in bitter irony, an entrenched feudalism was apparent even in the new resistance society—as the more educated middle class condescendingly directed the noncredentialled poorer to new looting grounds.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/terry-mcauliffe-faith-experts/

Parents shouldn’t control schools, he says, but what about when expertise is wrong?

Terry McAuliffe, Virginia’s former governor and Democratic power broker, is seeking to return to his old job in 2021. Polls show him narrowly ahead of his Republican opponent, Glenn Youngkin, by a one- to four-point margin.

That is by no means a safe distance for McAuliffe in a state that is widely understood to reflect national sentiment. Virginia’s 2021 gubernatorial race, one year ahead of the congressional midterms, will be the first major contest held in the blazing light of Biden’s constitutional bonfire.

Many Americans believe that the government is absconding with their rights and liberties, and high on the list of stolen articles is their right to have some say in the education of their children. School boards in almost every state have been visited by throngs of citizens outraged over the imposition of curricula infused with the 1619 Project, critical race theory, the diversity-equity-inclusion agenda and other approaches that characterize the country as systemically racist. Many of those parents are also unhappy over their schools’ embrace of transgenderism and aggressive mask mandates.

Virginia has been no exception. Fairfax and Loudoun county school districts are frontline battlegrounds in the fight over curricula. Videos of parent rebellions and the heavy-handed responses of school boards have racked up millions of hits. Fairfax and Loudoun are adjacent in the metropolitan DC area. They are part of must-win Northern Virginia if McAuliffe is to prevail over Youngkin.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17811/hunter-biden-corruption

It is the latest in a string of scams Hunter Biden has undertaken. First, it was his being named, with no expertise whatsoever in either Ukraine or the oil and gas business, to the board of directors of Burisma, a Ukrainian oil and gas company under investigation for fraud. Then it was the deluxe payday in 2012 for his Rosemont-Seneca real estate investment partnership, which was bankrolled to the tune of more than $1.5 billion by Chinese investors with close ties to the Chinese Communist Party.

It is genius-level corruption, an ethical nightmare for the White House, and a masterpiece of congressional and media dereliction of duty.

Bergès himself has said he is eager to expand his business into the Chinese market. Who will know if China’s art-loving billionaires, all connected deeply to the Communist Party and in some cases to the Chinese military, are Hunter’s benefactors?

Are we really supposed to believe that the anonymity of the buyers will remain a tight secret, and that Chinese government-connected buyers will not somehow let the Bidens know they are Hunter’s newest and biggest fans?

Money-laundering in the art market is nothing new. A Senate Homeland Security and Government Oversight committee report last year identified the art market as the “largest legal, unregulated market in the United States” and a significant weakness in the nation’s sanctions and anti-money laundering regimes. Simply put, art transactions are not covered under what’s known as the Bank Secrecy Act, which require financial institutions to maintain anti-money laundering and anti-terrorism financing controls.

Is there any reason to doubt that the proceeds from Hunter’s artistic payday will somehow once again find their way into the Biden family estate?

Why are they failing to scrutinize what is so obviously a back-door scheme to funnel money to the president’s son from foreign sources? Every American who cares about transparency in government should be outraged.

They say the beauty of art is in the eye of the beholder, but does that apply to corruption as well?

President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, has now plunged into the world of international art, with a New York gallery owner brokering art sales for the rare, emerging talent. Apparently, Hunter’s paintings might sell for as much as $500,000 to various anonymous aficionados, according to Hunter’s new art dealer, Georges Bergès.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/10/americas_descent_into_totalitarianism_advances_unabated.html

If you look around you can’t find a single thing America is doing right, unless “right,” means to deliberately destroy the nation. In light of the comprehensive assault against Americans, we who notice are told we’re crazy, we should ignore it, or we’re “canceled.” Yet the obvious trap that’s been strung leads inevitably to totalitarianism unless we break free from blind complacency or fear.

Energy policy threatens our gas supply and the government, simultaneously heightening COVID fear and promising to keep us “safe,” is abetting rapid inflation.

Commerce is a good indicator something’s wrong. There’s a flotilla of container ships languishing off Long Beach, California, our busiest port—and it turns out that this was already a problem in January:

It can take 8,000 trucks to haul the cargo away from a ship, Marine Exchange executive director Kip Louttit said in March. When all those trucks hit the road, there aren’t enough available when dockworkers are trying to unload the next ships in port.

Nine months later, nobody’s addressed this issue adequately, except that Costco’s again limited toilet paper purchases.

The shortage of hogs, leading to a lack of product and increased retail cost, is just one example of our broken supply chains. The industry can’t find workers, can’t transport products, and feed costs are sky-high. I talked to the butcher at Whole Foods, who said he “had no idea” when his supplies would be replenished—maybe in a few days, maybe not.

The labor market is a mess with simultaneously high unemployment and high worker demand. We’ve trained the entire service sector to be overly fearful of COVID, and many can’t rely on sending their kids to school. Government subsidies encouraged unemployment. Inflation makes hard (and allegedly deadly) work seem useless.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/09/30/whitmer-case-exposes-pattern-of-fbi-misconduct/

As the first shoe related to the FBI’s involvement in the breach of the U.S. Capitol dropped—the New York Times last week reported at least two informants tied to the Proud Boys were working with the FBI before, during, and after January 6—another high-profile case continues to expose the bureau’s corrupt role in what the government also considers an act of domestic terrorism: a concocted plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer from her vacation cottage in October 2020.

In fact, Joe Biden’s Justice Department has tied the two events together in an attempt to convince the public that right-wing militiamen, ostensibly loyal to Donald Trump, pose a looming threat to the country. In a recent sentencing memorandum for one man who pleaded guilty in the Whitmer case, government prosecutors wrote, “as the Capitol riots demonstrated, an inchoate conspiracy can turn into a grave substantive offense on short notice.”

Especially when at least a dozen FBI agents and informants take charge.

The Whitmer caper came to light when six men were arrested on federal charges of “conspiracy to commit kidnapping,” a felony punishable by life in prison. (A superseding indictment filed in April added a charge of domestic terrorism to the five remaining defendants. Several others face state charges.)

Headlines blared the shocking news just as early voting was underway in the crucial swing state. Team Biden and the Democrats made the most of this timely political gift: “There is a through line from President Trump’s dog whistles and tolerance of hate, vengeance, and lawlessness to plots such as this one. He is giving oxygen to the bigotry and hate we see on the march in our country,” Biden said in a statement on October 9.

During a press conference the same day, Whitmer suggested Trump was responsible. “When our leaders meet with, encourage, and or fraternize with domestic terrorists, they legitimize their actions. They are complicit.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/durham-issues-new-subpoenas-including-to-clinton-campaign-law-firm/

Special Counsel John Durham, the attorney tapped by the Trump administration to audit the Russia investigation, has reportedly handed down a new set of subpoenas, including to a law firm with ties to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign. 

The grand jury subpoenas for documents were issued earlier this month, according to CNN, after Durham charged Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann for allegedly knowingly making a false statement to the FBI.

Investigators from the special counsel’s office are seeking additional documents from Sussmann’s former law firm, Perkins Coie, an indication that Durham may be looking to add to Sussmann’s charges or to bring cases against other defendants.

Durham was reportedly investigating whether Sussmann lied to the FBI regarding who — if anyone — he was representing when he told the Bureau about communications between the Trump Organization and the Kremlin-connected Russian bank Alfa Bank.

The indictment against Sussmann states that the former federal prosecutor lied to top FBI lawyer James Baker in a meeting on September 19, 2016. At that time, Sussmann presented data and analysis from cybersecurity researchers who suspected the Trump Organization was using a secret server to communicate with Alfa Bank.

The secret server theory was ultimately dismissed and never appeared in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s final report.

Durham uncovered discrepancies between Sussmann’s congressional testimony and his September interview with Baker. Before Congress, Sussmann testified that he was working on the Alfa Bank project for an unnamed cybersecurity expert, a contradiction of his claims to Baker that he wasn’t working for any specific client.

Meanwhile, Perkins Coie’s internal billing records obtained by Durham show that Sussmann billed hours spent on the Alfa Bank project to Clinton’s 2016 campaign.