RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/06/an_explanation_of_tactics_to_fundamentally_transform_america.html

In 1984, former KGB officer Yuri Bezmenov, who defected to the West in the 1970s, alerted Americans to the methods the Soviet secret service was using to subvert our political system.  The aim of the agency, he said, was gradual “ideological subversion” or “psychological warfare.”

Using ample video footage of the late Bezmenov, Brainwashed America — the latest documentary from filmmaker, radio host, and author Brannon Howse — exposes how dangerously far this process of undermining American culture has advanced.  Howse’s conclusions are based on thirty years of study of the history, utilization, and advancement of brainwashing in America.  He defines brainwashing as “a method that manipulates and modifies a person’s emotions, attitudes, and beliefs” and indoctrination as a subtle, pedagogic process “to induce someone to give up basic political, social, and religious beliefs and attitudes, and to accept contrasting regimented ideas.”

In the mid-1980s, the former spy had delineated the phases of the Soviet operation in America: demoralization, destabilization, chaos, and normalization (when communism takes hold).  This came to be called Bezmenov’s “Soviet subversion model.”  As early as 1984, he had claimed that the process of demoralization — turning youths against traditional American values — was complete and that destabilization was well under way to subvert the economy, foreign relations, and defense.  He had warned that Americans may believe it’s peacetime, but they are really “in a state of undeclared war against the basic principles and the foundations of this system.”

Howse’s documentary contemporizes Bezmenov’s warning.  It sets out the twelve-step process of brainwashing aimed at effecting a Marxist revolution in America and illustrates it using events from the coronavirus pandemic.  The twelve steps are: 1) removing principled leadership; 2) encouraging the questioning of values, convictions, and the American worldview; 3) presenting a revisionist history that portrays the free market system as oppressive; 4) propagating moral relativity to cloud the distinction between right and wrong; 5) extolling consensus and collectivism while declaring individualism dangerous; 6) focusing on emotions over facts, reason, and context; 7) fostering anxiety, confusion, social turbulence; 8) concealing the ultimate agenda; 9) using trusted individuals and institutions to enhance credibility; 10) using informants to zero in on those who don’t comply; 11) rewarding compliance and punishing dissent; and 12) winning public trust by manufacturing chaos to lay the groundwork for a benevolent-seeming rescue.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/why-flag-day-disturbs-obama-and-dems-jack-cashill/

Named after journalist Michael Kinsley who introduced the concept, a “Kinsley gaffe” occurs when a speaker “accidentally reveals something truthful about what is going on in his or her head.” Last week, the New York Times Editorial Board Member Mara Gay made the season’s most notable Kinsley gaffe in her account on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” of a harrowing trip to New York City’s eastern suburbs on Long Island.

“I was on Long Island this weekend visiting a really dear friend, and I was really disturbed,” said Gay live on MSNBC, where she is a contributor. “I saw, you know, dozens and dozens of pickup trucks with explicatives [sic] against Joe Biden on the back of them, Trump flags, and in some cases just dozens of American flags, which is also just disturbing because essentially the message was clear: This is my country. This is not your country. I own this.”

After Gay had finished recounting how she found “just disturbing” the sight of “dozens of American flags,” co-host Mika Brzezinski chimed in, “Totally agree.”

The Babylon Bee responded with a story headlined, “New York Times Relocates Offices To Beijing So Reporters Won’t Have To See So Many ‘Disturbing’ American Flags,” but for people who fret about flags as Gay and Brzezinski do, the very anticipation of Flag Day, June 14, is no laughing matter.

Perhaps the most prominent of such thinkers—and the most anxious—is Barack Obama. As candidate and later as president, Obama had to pretend to care about the flag. It wasn’t easy. In his most recent memoir, A Promised Land, he spends an unseemly amount of time on an incident that most Americans had forgotten about but that apparently left the former president emotionally scarred—his failure to wear an American flag pin.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/betraying-america-john-perazzo-mark-tapson-and-david-horowitz-0/

No institution in America – from government offices to schoolrooms to corporate boardrooms and beyond – is safe today from the poisonous racism of Critical Race Theory and the “1619 Project” which posit that United States history is rooted in slavery and white supremacy, and that “whiteness” is an incurable disease. The institution whose subversion poses the greatest threat to our national security is the military, now overseen by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, a determined advocate of these repulsive anti-American views.

Austin has required both Critical Race Theory and the 1619 Project as core elements of the Pentagon’s military training programs – concealing their sinister agendas under the innocuous-sounding “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” label. He has ordered a purging of the military ranks of what he calls “extremists,” defined as opponents of these noxious views and supporters of Donald Trump and the Capitol protest of January 6th. This transformational focus of our military forces is the Biden administration’s answer to the growing threat of a heavily-militarized China – a purging of “whiteness” and patriotic pride from the ranks of our frontline defenders.

Lloyd Austin III, nominated in late 2012 for CENTCOM commander by President Barack Obama, who openly sought the “fundamental transformation” of America, spent his eight-year tenure politicizing the military command. When Austin retired from active duty with the U.S. military in 2016, he was a four-star general. He spent the next few years in the private sector as a founder and/or board member of various corporations until last December, when President Biden nominated him for the position of U.S. Secretary of Defense. The Senate subsequently confirmed Austin on January 22 by a vote of 93-2, making him the first black Defense Secretary in American history, and also the most radical – even though most black Americans are patriots and not radical.

Austin was a natural choice for an administration that seems to value the skin color, gender and politics of its appointees over all other characteristics, and – like the President, the Vice President, and the Democratic Party generally – views America as a nation so scarred by its racist history that nothing short of a radical transformation would make it worthy of celebrating and defending. Like Obama, Austin is intent on transforming the American military with dangerous consequences for the 330 million Americans whose mission it is to defend.

During Austin’s Senate confirmation hearing on January 19, he vowed to rid the U.S. military of the many “racists and extremists” that allegedly have infiltrated it. “The job of the Department of Defense is to keep America safe from our enemies,” he said. “But we can’t do that if some of those enemies lie within our own ranks.”

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2021/06/13/journo-who-broke-2016-clinton-lynch-tarmac-meeting-found-dead-n1454268

Christopher Sign, a news anchor for ABC 33/40 in Birmingham, Alabama, who broke the story about former President Bill Clinton’s secret 2016 tarmac meeting with then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch was found dead Saturday morning.

“Our deepest sympathy is shared with Christopher’s loving family and close friends. We have lost a revered colleague whose indelible imprint will serve forever as a hallmark of decency, honesty and journalist integrity. We can only hope to carry on his legacy. May his memory be for blessing,” said ABC 33/40 Vice President and General Manager Eric Land in a statement.

Hillary Clinton was under investigation for her private email server by the FBI when Sign revealed a secret meeting between her husband, Bill Clinton, and Lynch on June 27, 2016, on the tarmac at Phoenix’s Sky Harbor Airport, mere days before former FBI Director James Comey announced the FBI would not recommend charges against her.

The optics of the meeting proved problematic for Clinton, despite both Bill Clinton and Loretta Lynch insisting that the ongoing investigation wasn’t brought up during their conversation.

“Bill Clinton was on that plane for 20 minutes, and it wasn’t just about golf, grandkids, and Brexit,” Sign said on Fox & Friends in February 2020. “There’s so much that doesn’t add up.”

Sign also told Fox News then that his family had received numerous death threats after he broke the story. “My family received significant death threats shortly after breaking this story. Credit cards hacked. You know, my children, we have code words. We have secret code words that they know what to do.”

His death is being investigated as a suicide. He was 45 years old and leaves behind a wife and three children. He was described by ABC 33/40 as a dedicated family man, who “turned down an opportunity to work for one of the national networks to come to ABC 33/40, and he made that decision because of his family.”

“That decision put him in a place where he could see his boys off to school in the mornings, watch them play baseball in the evenings, and take them fishing on the weekends.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/pelosi-denies-rebuking-omar-over-u-s-taliban-comparison-she-clarified-we-thanked-her/

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) denied that House leadership rebuked Representative Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) following a tweet in which Omar compared the U.S. and Israel to Hamas and the Taliban, in comments on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday.

“Let me just say this: we did not rebuke” Omar, Pelosi told host Dana Bash. “We acknowledged that she made a clarification.”

When pressed by Bash, Pelosi emphasized that Omar is “a valuable member of our caucus.”

“What I’m saying is end of subject, she clarified, we thanked her, end of subject,” Pelosi added. “What happened is a reflection of the respect we have for our [caucus] member.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/06/why-obama-failed/

In a revealing interview, Obama tried to burnish his image for progressive posterity — but he still doesn’t understand his fundamental errors.

B arack Obama rose to political stardom in the wake of his 2004 convention speech, during which he made an implicit promise that he could transcend party divisions in Washington, bridge the gap between Republicans and Democrats, and make the federal government functional again. I’ll confess that I really thought he wanted to do this when he ascended to the presidency. It took the first volume of his memoirs and a recent interview he gave to Ezra Klein of the New York Times to fully and finally disabuse me of that notion.

During his 2008 campaign, Obama seemed to display a certain capaciousness of intellect and imagination that would allow him to get inside his opponents’ heads, understand their position in good faith, and address it in a perspicacious way, creating an illusion of rapport. He also knew how to do this with journalists. The conservative columnist David Brooks, for instance, was caught off guard during an interview with Obama when it became apparent that the then-senator had a favorite theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, of whom he could speak learnedly and with enthusiasm — a pleasant surprise for a conservative admirer of Niebuhr like Brooks. This circumspection is clearly a part of the Obama mythos that the man himself values, because he restates it at the beginning of his interview with Klein:

I forget whether it was Clarence Darrow, or Abraham Lincoln, or some apocryphal figure in the past who said, look, the best way to win an argument is to first be able to make the other person’s argument better than they can. And for me, what that meant was that I had to understand their worldview. And I couldn’t expect them to understand mine if I wasn’t extending myself to understand theirs.

After reading this quotation, many conservatives will likely wonder if they have gone through the looking glass. Close observers of American politics over the last decade will be aware that President Obama made very little effort to understand the worldview of his Republican colleagues in Washington. In fact, an interesting companion piece to Klein’s interview is this reported essay by Alex Thompson, written last summer for Politico, on the Obama-Biden relationship. Thompson’s sources indicate that Obama was exceedingly bad at persuading his Republican colleagues to back his proposals:

“Negotiating with President Obama was all about the fact that he felt that he knew the world better than you,” said Eric Cantor, the Republican House majority leader from 2011 to 2014. “And he felt that he thought about it so much, that he figured it all out, and no matter what conclusion you had come to with the same set of facts, his way was right.” Biden, he said, understood that “you’re gonna have to agree to disagree about some things.” A former Republican leadership aide described Obama’s style as “mansplaining, basically.”

https://swtotd.blogspot.com/

In a criminal act, some person (or persons) at the IRS leaked confidential information on some of the nation’s wealthiest people. It was given to ProPublica, an independent, non-profit newsroom based in New York City, which reported that they had “obtained” a “vast cache of IRS information” on “thousands of the nation’s wealthiest people,” which they then published.

In the report dated June 8th, Jesse Eisinger, Jeff Ernsthausen and Paul Kiel wrote: “ProPublica is not disclosing how it obtained the data, which was given to us in raw form, with no conditions or conclusions.” They claimed to have “verified” the information by “comparing elements of it” with dozens of already public tax details. They claim all people mentioned in the article were asked to comment. Those who responded, unsurprisingly, said they had paid whatever taxes were legitimately owed.

The incident raises questions: It is illegal to pass on confidential IRS data. Will the guilty party be exposed and punished? If unrealized capital gains should be taxed, as the report infers, would it be a recurring tax? And if unrealized gains can be taxed, what about unrealized losses? Could they be deducted against ordinary income? After all, there are years when stocks decline. Would future investment be inhibited by taxing unrealized gains? After all, expanding economies rely on capital investments, be it from a pension plan, the savings of an individual, or a business. But there is a broader question. What is the purpose of the IRS? Is it to levy and collect taxes so to fund the federal bureaucracy, or is its mission to redistribute income? ProPublica claims to investigate “abuses of power,” but the abuse they highlight is not the IRS, which a few years ago during the Obama Administration targeted conservative non-profits. Nor will they identify the unnamed leaker who abused his position by disclosing confidential information. No, they highlighted the assets of four wealthy individuals who had taken advantage of legitimate loopholes, all laid out in the 6,550-page Internal Revenue Code, which was passed by Congress.