RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/08/the_four_horsemen_of_the_biden_apocalypse.html

In the waning days of the Trump administration, the country was showing signs of economic improvement, people were feeling more confident about battling COVID, and the border was relatively secure as the wall was finally being constructed.

What a difference seven months can make.  It has been a horrific 207 days since President Joe Biden and his radical administration were unleashed on the country.

In effect, a political apocalypse is approaching.  In the New Testament Book of Revelation, the four horsemen of the apocalypse are revealed to be “Conquest, War, Famine, and Death.”  In the Old Testament Book of Ezekiel, the four horsemen are referred to as “sword, famine, wild beasts, and plague.”

In the era of Joe Biden, the four horsemen of our political apocalypse are the border invasion, the economic catastrophe, the assault on our families, and the use of the COVID plague to eliminate our constitutional rights.

1. Invasion.  Biden inherited a secure border and immediately decided to destroy the progress of President Donald Trump and create an unmitigated disaster for Americans.  The border wall was foolishly stopped, the policy of “catch and release” was reinstituted, the “Remain in Mexico” policy was ended, and illegal aliens were given an invitation to enter the United States.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/fear-and-self-loathing-at-american-express-11628884963?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

This has been the year of woke and weak corporate CEOs trying to signal virtue by endorsing leftist politics and attacking Republicans. But now we have a bizarre case of a business attacking itself. The Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo writes this week in the New York Post about a lecture hosted by American Express. He reports that at the Amex corporate event a guest speaker argued that the system of capitalism was founded on racism and that “racist logics and forms of domination” have shaped Western society from the Industrial Revolution to the present. Mr. Rufo quotes the insufferable lecturer telling Amex employees, “You are complicit in giving privileges in one community against the other, under the pretext that we live in a meritocratic system where the market judges everyone the same.”

Well, it’s true that the company’s advertisements have touted the privileges enjoyed by consumers who use its ubiquitous green cards. But the history of American Express is the story of a company that has thrived by offering its many services to a broader and broader clientele. The firm’s website says it has more than 100 million cards in use—accepted by millions of merchants. Sure, it has generally served a higher-income segment than Visa and Mastercard, but there are options for all kinds of consumers.

Mr. Rufo describes how American Express employees had to define themselves:

In a foundational session, the outside consulting firm Paradigm trained AmEx employees to deconstruct their own intersectional identities, mapping their “race, sexual orientation, body type, religion, disability status, age, gender identity [and] citizenship” onto an official company worksheet.

https://www.nysun.com/national/beyond-bretton-woods-it-was-as-close-to-economic/91617/

The formula to ensure prosperity is simple: Add a low-rate, broad-based flat tax to spending restraint, free trade, and sound money, and there you have it.

The Great Depression was born out of xenophobic protectionism, embodied in the 1930 passage of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, plus 1932’s massive increases in tax rates on our country’s most productive members. The economy collapsed as never before.

Gold being then, as it still is, the first refuge of the cautious, became a safe haven. There were runs on banks as depositors demanded gold in exchange for deposits or currency. The value of gold as measured in goods and services soared, meaning that there was a tremendous fall in the price level. Money back then was gold.

President Roosevelt was swept into office in March of 1933. Instead of reversing Hoover’s tariff and tax increases, Roosevelt made gold the scapegoat. In his first month in office, he legislated the so-called Bank Holiday Act, which prohibited banks from buying or selling foreign currencies or specie — especially gold; eliminated all gold clauses in contracts, public or private; and finally made holding gold by Americans illegal.

Gold ceased to be currency in the United States. This was the first step in ridding the monetary system of gold.

In late 1933, to make matters worse, Roosevelt followed his gold confiscation by devaluing the dollar against foreign currencies by some 60% and raising the official price of gold to $35 an ounce from $20.67. This was an enormous wealth tax on former gold holders. The depression settled in, lasting until 1945.

The anomaly was that while gold was removed from the U.S. economy, it still remained the official settlement medium internationally.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/12/questions-about-feds-involvement-in-january-6-demand-answers/

By now it’s clear that federal law enforcement had some degree of infiltration among the crowds gathered at the Capitol on January 6. Intelligence reports released publicly days before the incident indicated “militias” and loosely organized groups of individuals intended to act violently that day. It’s unlikely those reports were based solely on Parler posts. 

Based on the available camera footage, it appears that key individuals were leading the assaults on protected points of entry. One prominent militia leader, Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, appears to have actively planned and directed individuals both on the day of the incident and in the days leading up to it. Yet he remains a free man. This is in drastic contrast to the dozens of Americans currently being denied due process in a Justice Department prison in our nation’s capital. 

Our law enforcement and intelligence community officials need to answer some basic questions—questions that can be answered without “exposing sources or methods” or resorting to excuses about classification.

Normally, the FBI oversees domestic human intelligence operations that pertain to terrorism. This helps keep conflicts between law enforcement and intelligence agencies at a minimum. Human intelligence operations are very sensitive in nature, which in turn has given rise to extensive documentation and oversight. 

Congress should subpoena the director of the FBI’s Washington, D.C. field office, the chief of station for the CIA’s national resources office in D.C., the director of the D.C. Joint Terrorism Task Force, the chief of the U.S. Capitol Police and the D.C. Metropolitan Police and ask them the following questions under oath: 

1) How many confidential human sources (CHS), intelligence sources, agents, informants, or undercover law enforcement officers were present at the Capitol on January 6? 

2) What role did these sources/agents/undercovers (SAUs) play during the events of the day? 

3) How and what did the SAUs report to their controlling officers on January 6 and prior to that day?

4) How many SAUs were in direct contact with individuals currently detained or charged by the Justice Department?

5) How much involvement were SAUs allowed to have in illegal activity on January 6 or prior to that day?

6) Were the SAUs instructed to report threats of imminent danger? How many reported any plans to attack prior to January 6 or attacks in progress that day? 

7) Prior to January 6, how many SAUs had infiltrated or were reporting on groups or individuals planning violence against the Capitol? 

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/12/the-justice-departments-troubling-discovery-delays/

It’s been almost seven months since the FBI conducted a pre-dawn raid at the Virginia farm of Thomas and Sharon Caldwell. Dozens of armed agents broke down their front door, ransacked their home, and arrested Tom Caldwell on January 19. A week later, a grand jury indicted Caldwell and two other alleged Oath Keepers for various crimes related to their participation in the Capitol protest on January 6.

Despite the fact Caldwell never entered the building, carried no weapon, and assaulted no one, the Justice Department sought to keep the 66-year-old former Navy lieutenant with service-related disabilities in jail awaiting trial. Caldwell, a decorated military veteran, has no criminal record.

Nonetheless, on February 12, Judge Amit Mehta ordered Caldwell to remain behind bars: “What Mr. Caldwell is accused of is conspiring with others to plot an insurrection against the government of the United States, particularly the Congress of the United States, while it was attempting to certify the Electoral College vote,” Mehta said during Caldwell’s detention hearing. 

“So the concern with Mr. Caldwell is less what he specifically did on January 6th, like others,” Mehta continued. “It doesn’t look like he actually entered the Capitol building, didn’t assault any police officers. But what he did prior to January the 6th is clearly engage in planning and preparation for conduct that others were engaged in and that others participated in, in the incursion that took place at the Capitol and the violence that followed.” 

Caldwell interrupted the hearing to plead for mercy. “I beg your indulgence, sir. But my life hangs in the balance.”

Caldwell spent 50 days in jail before Mehta reversed himself on March 12 and released Caldwell to very limited home detention.

It now appears Mehta is having additional second thoughts about the Justice Department’s handling of the Capitol breach probe. In dozens of pre-trial detention motions filed by Joe Biden’s Justice Department, the evidence against January 6 defendants rests solely in the hands of the government. Detention hearings act instead almost as ex-parte criminal trials where federal judges in Washington, D.C. declare guilt or innocence based largely on what federal prosecutors present in court, occasionally sending defendants to jail for months before a trial can begin.

Caldwell was one of more than 100 Americans ensnared in what the top prosecutor managing the first stage of the January 6 investigation called a “shock and awe” campaign to intimidate Americans out of coming to the nation’s capital to protest Joe Biden’s inauguration. But that short-term political goal doesn’t seem to be working as a long-term legal strategy for the Justice Department.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/08/getting_rid_of_the_cdc_would_be_a_great_start.html

Believe it or not, we owe the evil Dr. Fauci a debt of gratitude.  He has demonstrated for all time the costs and folly of allowing ourselves to be ruled by government experts.  In addition, he has even given us the perfect name for rule by government experts: fauciism.

Fauciism is fascism with a difference.  Fascist rulers favored military uniforms and attacked opposition to their rule as treason against the nation; Fauci wears the garb of the government bureaucrat and declares that opposition to his rule is an attack on science.  

Fauci and his minions were wrong on AIDS — Fauci caused an earlier panic when he told the American people and Congress that we could catch AIDS from casual, merely social contact with the infected — and he and his minions have been wrong so many ways on the Wuhan flu that it has been difficult to keep an accurate count.

The Germans and the Italians paid a terrible price for letting the fascists take over.  We can hope that the terrible price they paid inoculated them from trying that form of rule again, at least for a while.  May the terrible price we have paid for allowing Fauci to have his way with America and with the American economy awaken us to what must be done before it is too late.

What’s to be done?  Let’s begin to find our way to the answer by asking how we got here. 

How we got here is no mystery.  Putting government experts in charge has been the goal of the Progressives all along.  From the beginning, they understood that transforming America into a country ruled by experts would be an enormous undertaking.  Consequently, their plan was to do it step by step, progressively.  For over a century, the Progressives have been replacing rule by the people through their elected representatives with rule by government experts.  They created an ever-expanding administrative state composed of agencies like the CDC, and put credentialed experts in charge.  These experts were Progressives who immediately set to work expanding the reach of the agencies they were put in charge of.  This is known as government overreach.

We owe Fauci.  He has shown us how far America has traveled on the Progressive path. 

https://www.city-journal.org/do-masks-work-a-review-of-the-evidence

“Seriously people—STOP BUYING MASKS!” So tweeted then–surgeon general Jerome Adams on February 29, 2020, adding, “They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus.” Two days later, Adams said, “Folks who don’t know how to wear them properly tend to touch their faces a lot and actually can increase the spread of coronavirus.” Less than a week earlier, on February 25, public-health authorities in the United Kingdom had published guidance that masks were unnecessary even for those providing community or residential care: “During normal day-to-day activities facemasks do not provide protection from respiratory viruses, such as COVID-19 and do not need to be worn by staff.” About a month later, on March 30, World Health Organization (WHO) Health Emergencies Program executive director Mike Ryan said that “there is no specific evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any particular benefit.” He added, “In fact there’s some evidence to suggest the opposite” because of the possibility of not “wearing a mask properly or fitting it properly” and of “taking it off and all the other risks that are otherwise associated with that.”

Surgical masks were designed to keep medical personnel from inadvertently infecting patients’ wounds, not to prevent the spread of viruses. Public-health officials’ advice in the early days of Covid-19 was consistent with that understanding. Then, on April 3, 2020, Adams announced that the CDC was changing its guidance and that the general public should hereafter wear masks whenever sufficient social distancing could not be maintained.

Fast-forward 15 months. Rand Paul has been suspended from YouTube for a week for saying, “Most of the masks you get over the counter don’t work.” Many cities across the country, following new CDC guidance handed down amid a spike in cases nationally caused by the Delta variant, are once again mandating indoor mask-wearing for everyone, regardless of inoculation status. The CDC further recommends that all schoolchildren and teachers, even those who have had Covid-19 or have been vaccinated, should wear masks.

The CDC asserts this even though its own statistics show that Covid-19 is not much of a threat to schoolchildren. Its numbers show that more people under the age of 18 died of influenza during the 2018–19 flu season—a season of “moderate severity” that lasted eight months—than have died of Covid-19 across more than 18 months. What’s more, the CDC says that out of every 1,738 Covid-19-related deaths in the U.S. in 2020 and 2021, just one has involved someone under 18 years of age; and out of every 150 deaths of someone under 18 years of age, just one has been Covid-related. Yet the CDC declares that schoolchildren, who learn in part from communication conveyed through facial expressions, should nevertheless hide their faces—and so should their teachers.

How did mask guidance change so profoundly? Did the medical research on the effectiveness of masks change—and in a remarkably short period of time—or just the guidance on wearing them?

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/11/the-hundred-year-road-to-crt/

While critical race theory has rightfully garnered much attention of late, it is simply the latest step in advancing what is known as cultural Marxism. Many people lay the origins of America’s left turn to the 1960s, but in fact, it actually dates back to the Progressive Era, a time of social and political reform that started over a hundred years ago. While eliminating some government corruption and granting suffrage for women were positive steps, the early 20th century movement ushered in an era of radical thought that has never left us. What follows are a few stand-out points of the far-left’s invasion into education.

“The purpose of a university should be to make a son as unlike his father as possible.” These radical words were uttered in 1909 by Woodrow Wilson as president of Princeton, four years before he became the 28th president of the U.S. (When Wilson won his election in 2012, socialist Eugene Debs received 6 percent of the vote.)

In 1916, education reformer John Dewey began professing what we now call “social justice.” At the same time, Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist came upon the scene. He believed that it was most effective to spread revolutionary ideology slowly and incrementally. By doing it gradually, he thought that enough people would eventually be won over to Marxist thought. His approach eventually became known as the “long march through the institutions.”

In 1923, a group of professors known as the Frankfurt School, came to the fore. These German Marxists—notably Theodore Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse—hated capitalism and traditional morals. (Marcuse’s dreary One-Dimensional Man was omnipresent when I went to college in the late 1960s.) The professors did not stay in their homeland long, however. Adolph Hitler’s rise to power forced them out of Germany, and unfortunately, they reemerged at Columbia University in New York City in 1935.

The 1940s saw the country involved with World War II, and we then focused on regaining domestic tranquility in the 1950s. But things became unhinged in the 1960s. Radicals ruled many college campuses and Saul Alinsky, the uber-leftist community organizer, was hired by the National Education Association as a trainer. John Lloyd, an NEA insider at the time, warned that to understand the union one must learn about Alinsky. Reading Rules for Radicals, will help one “understand NEA more profoundly than reading anything else,” he said, because the organization was modeled on Alinsky’s precepts, which the union used to train its staff.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/11/american-armageddon/

Americans are growing angrier by the day in a way different from prior sagebrush revolts such as the 1960s Silent Majority or Tea Party furor of over a decade ago. 

The rage at the current status quo this time is not just fueled by conservatives. For the first time in their lives, all Americans of all classes and races are starting to fear a self-created apocalypse that threatens their families’ safety and the American way of life. 

The border is not just porous as in the pre-Trump past. It is nonexistent. Some 2 million people may cross illegally in the current fiscal year—with complete impunity. 

There is zero effort to stop them. Officials daily hector Americans to get vaccinated and tested for COVID. But they are mute about illegal entrants, some of them infected with the virus.

Have we ever had a president who made no pretense about destroying federal immigration law and asking of Americans what he does not of illegal aliens? 

Joe Biden has also conceded that his hold on housing evictions deliberately defied a Supreme Court ruling. He added that he probably did not have the legal authority to ignore the court, but did not really care. 

As in the case of demolishing immigration law, the president seems either unaware or proud that he is insidiously dismantling the Constitution.

America has also never quite seen such overt and multifaceted efforts to undermine the foundations of free-market capitalism. 

At a time of resurging GDP, low unemployment, and record worker shortages, Biden has announced that renters can continue to avoid paying what they owe their landlords—even after a prior year of such free housing. 

In a rebounding economy amid record debt, the government is still sending workers unemployment benefits that are more remunerative than the paychecks they would earn if employed. 

Such insanity means not only that labor-short employers cannot provide goods and services to American consumers. The new ethos also institutionalizes the pernicious idea that it is smarter to stay home and idle than to get a job and be productive. 

Biden is also considering further extending exemptions for the repayment of $1.7 trillion in student loans. That amnesty will only further mainstream this growing notion that borrowing money entails no legal or moral obligation to pay it back.