RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/06/15/ilhan_omar_and_contempt_f

“We have seen unthinkable atrocities committed by the U.S., Hamas, Israel, Afghanistan, and the Taliban,” Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota tweeted last week to her 1.2 million followers. They responded with warm support. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was cooler. Although the speaker lives in San Francisco’s progressive echo chamber, she heads a national party and understands that most voters do not think our country is similar to the Taliban or Hamas. They have noticed a few small differences. Nor do they see a moral equivalence between Israel, which tries to avoid civilian casualties, and terrorist organizations, which use human shields and bomb pizza parlors. They wonder if a representative who thinks America is so evil should sit on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, as Omar does.

Pelosi pressed Rep. Omar for a “clarification” and received a half-hearted one. That was good enough for the speaker, who stressed that she was not rebuking Omar, whom she called a “valued member of our caucus.”

Pelosi walked gingerly because she has only a tiny House majority and relies on several hard-left members and dozens of very progressive ones. She doesn’t want to lose them, but she doesn’t want to endanger her more centrist members, either. Omar’s tweet put her between the dog and the hydrant. Jewish members issued an outraged statement denouncing the tweet, while Omar’s left-wing colleagues, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, criticized Pelosi’s tepid request for clarification.

Another member of the Squad, Rashida Tlaib, chose to portray Pelosi’s request as an attack on all Muslims — on all women of color in Congress: “Freedom of speech doesn’t exist for Muslim women in Congress. The benefit of the doubt doesn’t exist for Muslim women in Congress. House Democratic leadership should be ashamed of its relentless, exclusive tone policing of Congresswomen of color.” Tlaib’s claim that she and Omar are being silenced was sent to 1.4 million Twitter followers.  Apparently, Tlaib has been fully inoculated against irony. Pelosi responded by saying that she had never meant anything as a rebuke. Not in the slightest.

The problem here goes well beyond Ilhan Omar, a Somali refugee who was welcomed to American and now sits in Congress, seething with contempt for her adopted country, its tolerant values, and those of its allies. The Democrats are stuck with a whole Squad of like-minded representatives and thousands, perhaps millions, of young supporters eager to promote these socialist attacks on America. That’s not just a problem for the Democrats. That’s a problem for the country.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2021/06/15/chilling-bidens-domestic-terror-agenda-confirms-conservatives-worst-fears-n1454729

The Biden administration is using the awesome might of the U.S. government to demonize conservative critics as abettors of extremist ideology, if not enemies of the state.

On Tuesday, President Joe Biden released a blueprint for his New War on Terror. In the “National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism,” the Biden White House pledges that the administration will combat domestic terrorism “while vigilantly safeguarding peaceful expression of a wide range of views and freedom of political association.” Yet the administration’s biases give conservatives good reason to doubt this pledge.

The White House claims that the “two most lethal elements” of domestic terrorism are “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists who advocate for the superiority of the white race” and “anti-government or anti-authority violent extremists, such as militia violent extremists.”

The document lays out four elements of a strategy to fight domestic terrorism: sharing domestic terrorism analyses at all levels of government and occasionally with the private sector; preventing domestic terrorism recruitment and mobilization to violence; disrupting and deterring domestic terrorism activity; and confronting “long-term contributors to domestic terrorism.”

Each element should raise alarms for conservatives and Republicans, given the Biden administration’s hyperbolic rhetoric on racism and the Capitol riot. Biden has condemned commonsense election reform as “Jim Crow on steroids” and said the Capitol riot was worse than the Lincoln assassination, the John F. Kennedy assassination, and multiple violent attacks on the U.S. Capitol.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/jun/14/exposing-bidens-exploitive-record-on-race/

For decades, President Joe Biden exploited race to advance his political career. 

Mr. Biden’s long history in public life provides ample evidence in both words and deeds of the now president playing both sides of the race card for political gain.

So in Mr. Biden’s own words, “Look at my record, man.”

Here we go.

Early in his political career, Mr. Biden befriended Democratic segregationists to capitalize on their power to advance in the Senate chamber and his political goals. For example, Mississippi Sen. James Eastland, who offered his assistance to help Mr. Biden with his re-election in 1978, said Blacks were “an inferior race.” 

Mr. Eastland also called the Brown vs. Board of Education decision a “monstrous crime,” and together, Mr. Eastland and Mr. Biden worked on an anti-busing bill to prevent desegregation in schools. 

Mr. Eastland mentored Mr. Biden during his early Senate career and Mr. Biden maintained a fondness for him. 

When commenting about his past relationships with segregationists, Mr. Biden often recalled favorable memories of his emotional connection to racist Democrats. 

While running for president for the third time, Mr. Biden said before his donors referring to Mr. Eastland, “He never called me ‘boy,’ he always called me ‘son.’”

Mr. Biden siding with segregationists in his early career is such an obvious political liability that then-Senator Kamala Harris drove an 18 wheeler truck through it during a Democratic debate. 

There is also Mr. Biden’s relationship with the late former Senate Majority Leader Robert Byrd of West Virginia. Mr. Byrd was a former recruiter for the Ku Klux Klan and even with this backdrop, Mr. Byrd was elevated to the highest role in the Senate.

Mr. Byrd, by the way, filibustered the 1964 Civil Rights Act for over 14 hours. Let that sink in for a moment.

But none of this mattered to Mr. Biden. During the eulogy at Mr. Byrd’s funeral in 2010, then-Vice President Biden said, “He was a friend, he was a mentor and he was a guide.”

https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/14/who-let-capitol-protesters-into-the-building-on-january-6/

Judge Amit Mehta thinks no one let protesters into the Capitol building on January 6.

During a pre-trial detention hearing on Friday—Joe Biden’s Justice Department continues to demand jail time for nonviolent offenders before their trials even begin—the D.C. District Court judge made that false claim. “No one was let in,” the Obama appointee told the lawyer representing Jason Dolan, an alleged Oath Keeper and former U.S. Marine with no criminal record. (Mehta denied the government’s motion for detention but admitted it was a “close call.”)

Mehta, of course, is flat wrong. Videos taken by people at the Capitol not only show some U.S. Capitol Police officers ushering protesters toward the building and allowing them to enter but, as American Greatness exclusively reported last month, USCP officers also cautioned several protesters how they should behave.

In fact, in an anonymous interview with the Gateway Pundit in May, Dolan himself described how someone inside the Capitol opened the doors. (Dolan was arrested three days after the interview was posted.) The Justice Department, in a motion to keep Dolan incarcerated awaiting trial, called his story a “conspiracy theory.”

Thousands of Hours of Video Unseen

In Mehta’s defense, he only has access to cherry-picked video evidence provided by the Justice Department, which is keeping more than 14,000 hours of surveillance footage captured by the USCP security system under seal by insisting the recordings are “highly sensitive” government material. Judges, defense attorneys, and Capitol defendants are at the mercy of whatever damning clips federal prosecutors produce for any given case.

A select group of lawmakers, however, is authorized to view the raw footage: Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) is one of them. As ranking member of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Johnson has directed his staff to closely examine the recordings to get a detailed account of what happened that day. 

“We’re going to look at relevant sections, trying to identify points of conflict and egress,” Johnson told me by phone on Friday. “I want a general, overall sense of the full spectrum of behavior in and around the Capitol.”

Johnson’s office already has flagged a slice of footage that may seriously undermine the accepted narrative—perpetuated by federal judges in court hearings and nearly everyone else—that “insurrectionists” broke into the building without permission.

In a letter to acting U.S. Capitol Police chief Yogananda Pittman last week, Johnson zeroed in on the suspicious activity of several individuals around 2:30 p.m.—right before more than 300 protesters entered the building through doors on the upper west terrace. Moments before, according to Johnson’s letter, an “unauthorized” person tried unsuccessfully to open a set of double doors.

Five people returned to the double doors shortly thereafter and walked past a USCP officer. “The security footage, which did not include audio, appeared to show the police officer gesturing toward the doors as these individuals walked past him. Once at the double doors, one of the five individuals pushed the left door’s crash bar and this time, it opened. All five individuals exited the building at approximately 2:33 p.m.”

But the last person to leave left the door ajar, “allowing people from the outside of the building to gain entry into the Capitol. At 2:34 p.m., as people began to enter through this door, the police officer who was in the vicinity of this door one minute earlier, walked into another hallway away from this door and out of the view of the security camera.” For nearly 15 minutes, Johnson estimates, 309 people entered the Capitol building while law enforcement did little to stop them.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/kamala-harris-just-keeps-getting-worse-david-limbaugh/

No matter how mentally diminished President Joe Biden is, you have to be horrified by who waits in the wings should he leave office before the expiration of his term.

Unfortunately, one of the many consequences of Biden’s mental decline is an impairment of judgment that manifests itself in such reckless decisions as putting Vice President Kamala Harris in charge of the border. It is like making a colicky infant the goalie of a professional hockey team. If Biden were more alert, I would suspect it was his way of seeking revenge against Harris and those who foisted her on to his presidential ticket.

Harris has neither a clue nor a rudder on this critically important issue, which by any fair measure, now must be considered a crisis. She is a dedicated progressive, and progressives are flagrantly open borders-oriented. But even more, she is a political opportunist and will say anything to salvage her hemorrhaging reputation.

Thus, after all the root-causes rhetoric and the castigation of anyone who properly advocates even a modest level of border enforcement, she told migrants during a press conference Monday, “Don’t come here.” “As one of our priorities, we will discourage illegal migration,” she said. “And I believe if you come to our border, you will be turned back. Do not come. Do not come,” she continued. “The United States will continue to enforce our laws and secure our border.”

Perhaps we should be grateful for the whiplash if it means we’ll begin to see a saner border policy, but how can we possibly rely on the White House to enforce the border when it’s signaled in every imaginable way that it is ideologically opposed to protecting our sovereignty?

https://thefederalist.com/2021/06/14/flashback-dc-mayor-honored-at-dnc-for-riot-response-new-reports-reveal-she-not-trump-teargassed-protesters/

The first speaker former actress Eva Longoria introduced at the Democratic National Convention in August 2020 was Muriel Bowser, the Democrat mayor of Washington, D.C. Longoria referenced the clearing of a street in front of the White House earlier that summer, an operation the media had repeatedly falsely characterized as the violent removal of peaceful protesters with tear gas for the sole purpose of a photo opportunity for President Donald Trump.

“When peaceful protesters were teargassed across from the White House, our next speaker stood up, stood strong and turned that place into the Black Lives Matter Plaza in their honor. Please welcome Mayor Muriel Bowser,” Longoria said.

Amazingly, new reports confirm it was Bowser — not Trump — who teargassed the protesters a few blocks away from the White House on the evening in question, that the protests had repeatedly devolved into violence and arson, and that the clearing was done for major security concerns and not a photo opportunity. For more than a year, Bowser allowed Trump to take the blame for what her police forces had done.

In her nationally broadcast speech, Bowser inaccurately called the violent riots — marked by widespread looting, arson of historic buildings, arson of White House buildings, and assaults on scores of police officers — safe and peaceful. Then she blamed Trump for her own police force’s teargassing of protesters.

“[W]hile we were peacefully protesting, Donald Trump was plotting. He stood in front of one of our most treasured houses of worship and held a Bible for a photo op. He sent troops in camouflage into our streets. He sent tear gas into the air and federal helicopters too. I knew if he did this to DC, he would do it to your city or your town, and that’s when I said enough,” she said.

But it was Bowser who “did this to DC,” not Trump.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/06/14/inflations-here-getting-worse-and-may-even-last-longer-than-covid-19-pandemic/

Both the out-of-touch Biden administration and our betters at the Federal Reserve Board continue to assert that inflation’s no big thing. They’re right. It’s not, unless you work for a living. Then it’s a very big thing indeed.

We were told by all the best “experts” that inflation is ephemeral, a mere blip. The Fed keeps telling us the recent jump in prices is “transient.” Democrats and many of their media friends continue to insist it’s not an issue. Just keep spending, they say. Stimulus!

But calling the recent burst in inflation “transient” or any other such euphemism to suggest it’s like a brief summer cold is not exactly accurate. In fact, it’s wrong.

The recent surge in inflation isn’t likely to go away anytime soon. Indeed, it’s even worse than the numbers now indicate.

In the most recent Consumer Price Index data, year-over-year inflation hit a tad above 5%. That’s the biggest spurt since 2008. In April, it hit 3.6%, nearly twice the recent average. Meanwhile, core prices (excluding volatile food and energy) are rising at their highest pace since 1992, when then-Fed chief Alan Greenspan was forced to nearly double interest rates to kill what many feared would be a bad bout of inflation.

This is no coincidence. In May, real average hourly earnings fell 2.8%, even as employees worked more hours. Let that sink in: Those earning an hourly wage actually took home less pay for working more.

As inflation rises, real wages — that is, earnings adjusted for inflation — inevitably go down. Just as in the 1970s, low-skilled, less-trained and less-schooled workers can’t keep up. Their wages fall behind. That’s the real danger here.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/news-flash-trump-was-right_3857177.html?utm_source=partner&utm_campaign=RCP

On Saturday, June 12, former President Donald Trump released a statement that, in tone, will have his opponents rolling their eyes.

“I told you so,” they will say, because Donald Trump told them so and managed to get in a bit of signature Trump braggadocio along the way.

Under the legend “Statement by Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States of America,” this is what he wrote:

“Have you noticed that they are now admitting I was right about everything they lied about before the election?”

“They” of course are the eye-rollers, not only those the former President delighted in calling dispensers of “fake news” but also their clients, toadies, and enablers.

Not for the first time, I wonder whether they all are readers of “Pride and Prejudice.”

I am thinking of that passage towards the end of the novel where Lizzy confesses her love for Mr. Darcy to her sister Jane.

Jane is horrified. “Oh, Lizzy! It cannot be. I know how much you dislike him.”

“That is all to be forgot,” Lizzy replies. “In such cases as these, a good memory is unpardonable. This is that last time I shall ever remember it myself.”

So it is with the reporters at CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, Politico, the entire Democratic side of Congress, not to mention woke members of our intelligence services, the DOJ, military men with a rank of colonel or higher, members of any teacher’s union and of course anyone who has been graduated from or teaches at any Ivy or near-Ivy institution of so-called higher education, not to mention the NeverTrump sorority and time-servers in HR departments across the country.

To save time, let’s call this wretched multitude The Committee.

The Committee said one thing then, when Donald Trump was president.

They say something contradictory now, claiming—or in the case of Joe Biden, really—to have forgotten what they said when their bête orange was in office.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/13/reflections-on-the-digital-revolution/

The problems and challenges posed by what is often referred to as “Big Tech” should primarily be understood as novel instantiations of age-old issues. Power, whether political, cultural, or economic, tends to concentrate over time unless that concentration is disrupted by an outside force that favors or forces dispersion.

This is readily apparent across nearly every segment of the American economy today. Every major industry and thus every labor market is dominated by what are effectively cartels: chemicals, airlines, steel, automobiles, health care, and so forth. This creates all kinds of undesirable byproducts, but nowhere is the effect more pronounced and the outcomes more anti-social than those created by Big Tech—especially the FAANG companies. These are Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google. I’d also include Twitter for our purposes because of the outsized role it plays as a platform for public discourse. It’s noteworthy that Microsoft is not included: it may be larger than Facebook, but is clearly less powerful.

That fact is critical to understanding the nature of the problem America faces. Part of the problem is bigness itself, but the more significant issue is the power that the large tech companies exert by controlling access to critical technology, infrastructure, customers, or people. The network effects that make these companies powerful also create a natural defense against competition. That’s a fantastic business proposition, but it can be bad for the country. And that’s where we find ourselves today. The power wielded by these companies undermines what Oren Cass describes as “the basic assumptions on which our market, our democracy, and our society have relied.”

The solutions to the problems created by the digital revolution are perhaps not simple, but they are less complex than they may seem once we understand the problems clearly. While the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, which already prohibits anti-competitive behavior, should be applied—and updated if necessary—to Big Tech companies, that is only a partial solution. The bigger issue is that these companies abuse the essential political rights of all Americans by regulating political speech. This is where both our thinking and the law need upgrades. The scale of these companies and the essential role they play as platforms for political speech mean that they must be regulated in order to protect and promote that speech. Arguments that Facebook and Google are analogous to small, local bakeries because they are both non-state-owned companies are facile, untrue, and disingenuous. They don’t have anything like the same amount of power and they don’t play the same role in the lives of their customers or the country.

/https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/13/anatomy-of-the-woke-madness/

Wokeism has become our most popular secular religion—at least for a moment dethroning climate change. It reduces all of the past and present into puerile binaries between “whites” and “non-whites.”

Its aim is for the present generation to rewrite our history—whether by The 1619 Project and cancel culture or iconoclastic statue-toppling and Trotskyization of names and places. Wokeism becomes a child’s morality tale of noble non-white victims versus villainous white victimizers. Erasing the past and its language supposedly fuels a recalibration of the future, all in the here and now, a holy Year Zero

In the process, wokeism has done a lot of damage to America, and will do even more if left unchecked. Here are its chief characteristics.

Elites vs. Elites

First, remember that wokeism is a top-down phenomenon. It started in academia with “critical race theory” and “critical legal theory.” These are bastard offshoots of harebrained “critical theory,” which arose from a demoralized and adrift Europe after the cataclysms of two devastating European-spawned world wars.

These ‘theories” are merely adolescent delusions that norms, customs, traditions, laws, and rules are just arbitrary “constructs.” Thus they should have no authority over those whom they “oppress.” These relativist props are the tools of the white male hierarchy to gain and consolidate their “power.” So they can only be resisted by rejecting all these insidious “norms,” whether  the canons of physics and math, jurisprudence, standardized test scores, or the idea that police keep the “peace.”

Outside of the campus, the media, the entertainment industry, the corporate boardroom, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley, thousands of rank-and-file social justice warrior demonstrators are not demanding, for example, to enroll women in Special Forces combat units. Grassroots America does not insist on subsidized transgendered surgeries.

Instead, leftist Washington politicos and bureaucrats pressure the Pentagon brass, in quid pro quo fashion. The subtext is that those who promote woke policies are assured of promotion and future exemption from audit of lucrative retirement consulting for defense-related corporations.

The people⁠—that is, 51 percent of America—is not organizing for more cancel-culture censorship on Facebook, or even greater percentages of college admissions determined largely by race. Inner-city residents are not clamoring for less police patrolling. Defunding law enforcement is an elite obsession of those who do not live in insecure places.

Whether in the corporate boardroom or in Hollywood casting meetings or in the campus president’s office, race-based obsessions mostly reflect intramural wars between elites for the lucrative spoils of the one-percent’s news anchorships, roles in TV shows and commercials, diversity deanships, and admissions quotas to the Ivy League.

As a result, class considerations have vanished. They are replaced by absurd racial reductionism. For example, CNN mediocrity Don Lemon, by virtue of his race-mongering, can pose as a multimillionaire victim. The anonymous white deplorables at Walmart, caricatured as smelly in the Lisa Page-Peter Strozk text trove, are his proverbial anonymous oppressors.