RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2025/01/13/how-trump-plans-to-take-on-censors-and-they-plan-to-take-on-trump/

This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations and made available via RealClearWire.
The incoming Trump administration scored an early but possibly illusory victory last month in its effort to reform government overreach when it successfully pressured Congress to eliminate what it termed “sweetheart provisions for government censors” from a measure to stave off a government shutdown.

Funding for the State Department’s Global Engagement Center – which Republicans had attacked as a tool of domestic censorship – was stripped from the final bill, and the center announced that it was closed for good on Dec. 23. Days later, however, reporting emerged that the State Department had devised plans to shift the center’s 51 employees and millions of dollars of funding to a separate hub purportedly to counter foreign “information manipulation and interference.”

President-elect Donald Trump has not said how he will respond to this maneuver. But in extensive public comments, he has said that targeting what critics have called the Censorship Industrial Complex will be a high priority in his new administration. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s pledge to restore free expression on his platforms and join the Trump administration in its efforts to push back on global censorship, two weeks before inauguration day, indicates speech-policing forces like his may be disarming accordingly.

As the State Department’s move suggests, however, this push will likely face stiff resistance. “There will be a visceral reaction from the bureaucratic state in permanent Washington,” Sen. Eric Schmitt told RealClearInvestigations. As attorney general of Missouri, Schmitt launched the Missouri v. Biden lawsuit against federal government collusion with social media companies and nonprofits to target disfavored speech.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/01/13/woke-dei-green-nihilism-dresden-in-california/

Firebombing on the Pacific

Over 25,000 acres are ablaze in Los Angeles in the Pacific Palisades fire, a veritable living hell.

Some 12,000-plus structures were incinerated. More than 250,000 souls have been evacuated and are in need of shelter.

No one has really taken charge yet. And now even the woke culprits for the catastrophe are blame-gaming each other to determine who was the more incompetent, which in this case translates to the most woke.

No one knows how many have died; all know the number will escalate in the next few days.

The eventual price tag of the ruin will exceed $200-300 billion and outstrip the billions of dollars given to Ukraine.

And there are still some fires that are completely uncontained.

The Los Angeles apocalypse was a multisystem, green-woke collapse—and a disastrous reminder that when Soviet-style, anti-meritocratic ideology permeates all aspects of modern life in California, disaster is inevitable.

First, note that the culprit of the catastrophe is not climate change; it is not Donald Trump. Those are excuses for arrogant incompetency and disdain for the public. And it is not racism or homophobia to fault those who paraded and virtue signaled their tribal identities so extraneous to their actual responsibilities for public safety.

Note that all California statewide officeholders are left-wing. The California left holds supermajorities in both houses of the state legislature. Only 17 percent of California’s huge congressional delegation of 52 seats is Republican. California’s judiciary is the most left-wing in the country. There is not a single Republican on the 15-member Los Angeles City Council.

Add it all up, and the woke socialist state has been eagerly deindustrializing, decivilizing, and retribalizing its way into what is now a veritable peacetime Dresden on the Pacific.

Again, there is no one else to blame, because California is one of those rare states in which Republicans have de facto zero political power. All the state media, the legacy newspapers, the Silicon Valley daily online news sites, the Bay Area-based Apple, Google, and Facebook monopolies, and the local news outlets are parrots of the woke-green mindset.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/when-the-democrats-went-mad/

Nowadays it is taken for granted that if you’re a “progressive,” you’re in favor of extensive federal control over the economy, under the guise of concern for common people. The idea that moving toward statism and ever more government control constitutes “progress” is a Marxist notion that is rooted in the idea that history is moving inevitably and inevitably toward the Communist state. In America, one of the public figures who was primarily responsible for the popularization of this idea was a charismatic and yet thrice-failed Democrat presidential candidate, William Jennings Bryan.

In 1896, the Democrats were going through a revolution. The Republican platform committed the party to the gold standard, which prevented the production of so much currency as to lead to inflation. A minority of Republicans and a significant majority of Democrats, however, supported the free coinage of silver, which would lead to inflation and thereby make it easier for farmers to pay off their debts. That rapidly rising prices were rendering the life savings of Americans essentially worthless did not trouble the silver advocates, who cloaked their case in the language of support for the plight of the common man.

President Grover Cleveland supported the gold standard, but toward the end of his second term, he was deeply unpopular, and the silver forces among the Democrats were restive. At the Democratic National Convention, Bryan, a handsome and vigorous thirty-six-year-old congressman from Nebraska, electrified the delegates with a speech in favor of the free coinage of silver that is one of the most celebrated pieces of oratory in American history. “You come to us,” Bryan declared, “and tell us that the great cities are in favor of the gold standard; we reply that the great cities rest upon our broad and fertile prairies. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.”

Bryan sounded notes of class warfare that would become ever more common in American politics: “We do not come as aggressors. Our war is not a war of conquest; we are fighting in the defense of our homes, our families, and posterity. We have petitioned, and our petitions have been scorned; we have entreated, and our entreaties have been disregarded; we have begged, and they have mocked when our calamity came. We beg no longer; we entreat no more; we petition no more. We defy them!” In conclusion, he thundered: “You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/biden-is-going-to-destroy-as-much-as-possible-on-his-way-out-the-door/

Ever see a drunk asked to leave a nice restaurant? It doesn’t have to have been in person, you’ve likely seen it in a movie or a TV show; something where the person is asked nicely, but forcefully, to leave and they cause a huge scene as they walk to the door – knocking over drinks, bumping into people, being very loud, etc. That guy is Joe Biden. The current President of the United States and his administration are going to go out like a destructive drunk and it should lead not only to the destruction of his legacy, but a dramatic change of the transition period in the future.

Remember when the Obama administration was ending and there were a whole bunch of political appointees – people whose jobs should have ended on January 20, 2017 – who moved to non-political jobs so they could stay in various departments and undermine the incoming Trump administration?

The Biden administration appears to be trying to do that with ideas, bad ideas. “The State Department has crafted plans to distribute staffers from a shuttered office accused of censoring conservatives to a new internal ‘hub’ that will coordinate its activities,” reports the Washington Examiner. “The Global Engagement Center, the office that Republicans accused of working with groups aiming to demonetize right-leaning media outlets in the United States, shut down in late 2024 upon lawmakers agreeing to no longer fund it. However, in a non-public letter to members of Congress on Dec. 6, the State Department outlined its plans to “realign” more than 50 GEC officials and tens of millions of dollars in funding to a hub purporting to counter foreign interference, documents show.”

There was an agreement to shut this censorship machine down and the people the deal was struck with simply started moving it around and calling it something else.

Maybe Biden doesn’t understand or know that this is happening, but he is still responsible for it.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/donald-trump-cabinet-picks-government

Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen recently expressed what many felt at the reelection of Donald Trump: not triumph so much as relief. “I hope this last ten years increasingly is just going to feel like a bad dream,” he told podcast host Joe Rogan. “I can’t believe we tolerated the level of repression . . . and anger and . . . emotional incontinence and . . . cancellation campaigns.” Much of it was orchestrated or encouraged by our government.

One could say many things about Trump’s cabinet picks. At times, they seem to embody Government by Middle Finger. But they also, undeniably, represent Government by the Canceled: an assemblage that doesn’t need to be reminded of the administrative state’s ability to coerce the American public by calling in favors from Big Tech or pulling the levers of regulation, audit, or investigation. Many have experienced such treatment firsthand.

Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s pick to lead the intelligence community, was briefly placed on a government watch list, she says, for criticizing Kamala Harris. The Biden White House and surgeon general pressured social-media companies to censor Stanford epidemiologist Jay Bhattacharya’s attempts to warn the public that the Covid lockdowns were the biggest policy error in American history; Trump named Bhattacharya to head the National Institutes of Health. And Elon Musk, appointed to lead the newly created Department of Government Efficiency, knowingly overpaid for Twitter to give Americans a sphere for free speech. At takeover, Musk immediately released the Twitter Files, revealing a coordinated effort by the Biden administration to censor the speech of Americans whose views it disfavored. The Biden administration repaid Musk by targeting his businesses with unprecedented levels of regulatory harassment.

One wonderful thing about Americans: we despise being bullied by our government. Not even our Anglosphere allies share this aspect of our national character. Yet, over the last decade, for anyone with views departing from progressive orthodoxy, American life has become increasingly suffocating. Our posts have been censored on social media—or labeled “misinformation” by “fact-checkers”—as mine were, for criticizing Biden administration policy on boys participating in girls’ sports. We got booted from Twitter for opposing gender ideology or expressing skepticism about Covid vaccine safety.

https://dianebederman.com/child-abuse-fits-right-in-with-our-woke-ideology-diversity-inclusion-and-equity-in-rape/

What is it about men that they desire children for sex – boys and girls? From the beginning of time children have been used, abused and sacrificed. Muslim men. Caucasian men. Black men. I guess one can say that child abuse fits right in with our Woke Ideology: Diversity, Inclusion and Equity; in rape.

Today, thanks to Elon Musk, the horror of young white girls in Britain, raped by Muslim men, is finally being shared in Main Stream Media.

As Melanie Phillips recently wrote: “For at least 25 years, gangs of mostly Pakistani-heritage Muslim men have been grooming young white girls by luring them with gifts, alcohol and drugs in order to pimp, rape, imprison, torture, and in some cases, even murder them. In town after town, tens of thousands of girls—many of them young teenagers—have been subjected to debauched and depraved sexual violence, with many serially raped by multiple men in one night.”

Sadly, this behaviour is nothing new.

The Greeks and Romans had their boy toys, the pagans had Moloch, and the Muslim Afghanis have their “Bachi Bazi.” And don’t forget America has Epstein’s Island and P. Diddy.

Some of the Ancient Greeks and Romans regarded sex with children as a common practice and sometimes something to be celebrated. Pedophilia was common in Greek and Roman mythology and daily life. Ancient Romans and Greeks openly practiced forms of pedophilia. Forms of pedophilia were common among nobility and were often seen as rites of passage for the youth involved in them.

We have all read about Sodom and Gomorrah.

And Judaism tells us about the pagan sacrifice of children to Molech.

Today, in the Muslim world: In Afghanistan Bacha Bazi or dancing boys (from Persian: bacheh – “boy”, and bazi – “play, game”) is an expression used in certain parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan. It refers to a practice in Afghanistan engaging generally male children and male adults. This practice has turned into a centuries-long tradition and involves sexual abuse and slavery of young boys by older powerful men, often Pashtuns (New Line Institute, 2021). These preadolescent boys, called Bacha Bareesh or beardless boys come from impoverished families and serve as “entertainers” to influential Afghans. Dressed as girls and wearing makeup they dance for their masters who later take them in order to get involved in a sexual relationship Sexual “relationship?” This is no relationship!

Here, too, the officials are AWOL.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2025/01/09/california-inferno-was-preventable-blame-malfeasance-of-newsom-bass-for-catastrophe/
Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and author of the book “The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won.” He is a lifelong resident of Southern California.

I’m here in California. I’ve been a lifelong resident of the state, fifth generation to live in the same house. I had a house in the Sierra, and it would almost burn down three years ago during the Aspen Fire, and I’m speaking on the evening when you’ve all heard about the disastrous fire in Los Angeles.

As I’m speaking on a Wednesday night, there have been 15,000 acres, 1,000 structures destroyed. Nobody knows how many people are killed or missing. And how do we characterize this? Everybody’s talking about the Santa Ana winds, climate change—I mean everybody, the people in power.”

But it was preventable. And once it started, this fire, it could have been assuaged. You could have had it lessened, that the severity didn’t have to be as catastrophic. So, I would characterize it as a DEI–Green New Deal hydrogen bomb. It’s something out of “Dante’s Inferno.”

And what I mean by that is, it’s a systems breakdown, a civilizational collapse. When you look at the people in charge, [California Gov.] Gavin Newsom flew in, to sort of do these performance-art stunts, but he has systematically ensured that water out of the Sacramento River and the watershed of Northern California would go out to the sea, rather than into the aqueduct, so Los Angeles didn’t have sufficient amounts of water.
 
He bragged not very long ago that he blew up four dams on the Klamath River. They provided 80,000 homes with clean hydroelectric power. They offered recreation, flood control, irrigation. He blew them up.

California’s fire management, whether we look at the Paradise Fire or the Aspen Fire near where I’m speaking, it destroyed 60 million trees. We have no timber industry in California. [Newsom’s] dismantled it.

We don’t clean the forest. We don’t let loggers come in and have a viable livelihood by harvesting trees. It’s sort of considered natural to let these things burn or to at least create the conditions in which they will inevitably be burned.

It’s almost as if we don’t like humans. We worry about grubs and worms and birds and the ecosystem.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/01/12/merchans-verdict-a-conviction-without-consequence/

I was at a dinner event on Thursday night when the news came that Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett decided to throw a sop to the left.  At issue was whether the Democrat activist New York judge and Joe Biden contributor Juan Merchan should be allowed to sentence Donald Trump in the magic bookkeeping-error-non-disclosure-agreement case in which a possible misdemeanor underwent a legal transubstantiation and suddenly became a polished thirty-four-count felony. Amazing.

Along the way, Merchan issued gag orders against Trump,  interfered with his campaigning, and generally made it plain that he was singling Trump out for unfair treatment.  Still, Roberts and Barrett joined the Court’s left flank to render a 5-4 decision against Trump. Merchan could proceed with the sentencing of the past and now future president of the United States.

Merchan found Trump guilty, guilty, guilty last May. Thirty-four times did he pronounce “guilty.”  The world was amazed. The entire case was unprecedented. Not only was Merchan himself a Democrat activist, his daughter Loren has made millions from consulting for progressive candidates from Kamala Harris on down. What a long time ago it seems. Joe Biden was still running for president in May. Donald Trump had yet to be shot by a would-be assassin.  And Kamala Harris was still cackling in the wings.

We’ve had a lot of legal decisions since then, most of which have gone decidedly against the anti-Trump, lawfare establishment.  We also had an election, which Trump won handily, and a vast and sudden change in the emotional weather of the country.

When Ronald Reagan won the presidency in 1980, there was a surge of optimism and people said that it was “morning in America” again. The bad Carter years gave way to a period of enthusiasm and confidence. Gone was Carter’s gas rationing, his skyrocketing inflation, unemployment,  and interest rates (what Reagan called “the misery index”).  Gone too was the hostage crisis in Iran. Reagan jump-started a period of economic growth through which the developed world saw the greatest accumulation of wealth in history. Reagan’s philosophy of “we win, they lose” put the Soviet Union on the fast track to disintegration, which happened in 1991, just a couple of years after Reagan left office.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21307/us-free-speech-eu-censorship

What is important is the solidarity being forged between the major US social media platforms and the incoming US administration in support of real freedom of expression.

The new US administration will not tolerate levying fines of tens of billions of dollars on major US technology companies by an EU that is drifting towards authoritarianism and is at the same time more dependent than ever on American power.

It would be in Europe’s lasting interest to prepare for the return of free and unfettered expression.

Anyone wishing to gauge the extent of the European Union’s regulatory drift will need to read Articles 34 and 35 of the Digital Services Act (DSA). Given their length it is impossible to quote them in full here, so here is an extract:

DSA Article 34, “Risk assessment”:

“1. Providers of very large online platforms and of very large online search engines shall diligently identify, analyse and assess any systemic risks in the Union stemming from the design or functioning of their service and its related systems, including algorithmic systems (…) and shall include the following systemic risks (…) (a) the dissemination of illegal content through their services (which includes ‘hate speech’); (b) any actual or foreseeable negative effects for the exercise of fundamental rights, in particular the fundamental rights (…) to non-discrimination; (c) any actual or foreseeable negative effects on civic discourse and electoral processes, and public security; (d) any actual or foreseeable negative effects in relation to (…) public health (…) and serious negative consequences to the person’s physical and mental well-being (…).”

Article 35, “Mitigation of risks,” obliges these platforms to take a whole arsenal of preventive and repressive measures, basically to prevent the sharing of information that displeases the European Commission. In short, the idea is to force these platforms to pay hordes of patrol officers to relentlessly hunt down opinions that do not please the European Lord. The preventive nature of these measures means that they can be described as censorship in the strict sense. What’s more, general censorship, because the terms used by the European legislator – hate, non-discrimination, civic discourse, electoral process, public security, public health, well-being – are so vague that censors with (digital) scissors do cut wherever they please, at the whim of the European Prince.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/sen-john-fetterman-to-become-first-sitting-democratic-senator-to-visit-trump-at-mar-a-lago/ar-BB1rbwVn?ocid=winp2fptaskbar&cvid=7148764e0eff4e62f664f37163b33dd4&ei=27

Democratic Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman said Thursday that he has accepted an invitation from President-elect Donald Trump to meet with him at Mar-a-Lago, which will make him the first sitting Democratic Senator known to have visited him at his Florida home since the election.

“President Trump invited me to meet, and I accepted. I’m the Senator for all Pennsylvanians — not just Democrats in Pennsylvania,” Fetterman said in a statement. CBS News first reported that Fetterman accepted Trump’s invitation to meet.

“That is the plan. Yes, we are going to have a conversation,” Fetterman told CBS News. “I think that one, he’s the president, or he will be officially.”

“And I think it’s pretty reasonable that if the president would like to have a conversation — or invite someone to have a conversation — to have it. And no one is my gatekeeper,” he added.

Fetterman has continued to break with his party over his support of many of Trump’s cabinet picks. He has also been very vocal on allegations of antisemitism in the Democratic party and has been a vocal supporter of Israel. Now, he will be the first sitting Democrat in the Senate to visit Trump at Mar-a-Lago.