RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/what-was-missing-from-the-debate/

Even at their best, presidential debates are glorified dog-and-pony shows. Voters always say they want a serious policy debate, but such discussions involve technical information, statistical data, and complex explanations, all of which a majority of people find tedious. They much prefer emotion, clashing personalities, drama, humor, flubs, gaffes, and, as Donald Trump has shown since 2016, street-fighting elan.

Those limitations are good for entertainment and marketing, rather than informing voters, the default purpose of these verbal jousts, which reduces their political utility.

Last week’s debate illustrated this flaw, especially the insult battles between Trump and Biden. The moderators’ questions covered the issues that concern voters and regularly show up in polls, such as illegal border-crossings and inflation. But the dueling narratives mostly comprise attacks on each other, rather than presenting specific policies.

Trump, however, had the advantage in that bout despite his trademark hyperbole, given his first-term successes on both fronts, compared to Biden’s surreal lies, incoherence, and obviously addled condition, not to mention his sorry record of exacerbating those very problems.

But especially on the economy, we didn’t hear the more detailed information needed in order to break through the partisan rancor and spin, and get closer to the facts. For example, a few days before the debate, the Wall Street Journal published an editorial about the Democrat’s “Tax Armageddon” scheme for undoing Trump’s 2017 tax reforms: “Democrats are saying out loud that they plan to use the scheduled expiration of the 2017 tax cuts at the end of 2025 to insist on the largest tax increase in history.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/07/02/did-the-supreme-court-just-throw-biden-a-lifeline-joe-thinks-so/

In his remarks following the Supreme Court’s decision on presidential immunity, President Joe Biden pretended to be mortified by it. But there’s a reason Biden seemed so energetic and focused Monday night. The Court might just have done him and his reelection campaign a huge favor. At least, Biden thinks so.

In his very brief remarks, Biden called the ruling a “dangerous precedent.” He said it “continues to the Court’s attack on a wide range of long-established legal principles.” He quoted Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s inflammatory opinion which said “With fear for our democracy, I dissent.”  I concur, Biden said.

His performance was a striking contrast from last Thursday’s disaster.

But Biden was actually celebrating this decision because it gave his campaign a shot in the arm it desperately needed. He now has a whole new way to scare voters about Trump.

Biden argued that because the president will “no longer be constrained by the law,” the only limits on executive actions “will be self-imposed by the president alone.”   

Biden, in an obvious attempt to equate himself with George Washington, said it was a display of the first president’s character that he believed presidential power was not absolute and that power resides with the people.

“Now, over 200 years later, today’s Supreme Court decision, once again will depend on the character of the men and women who hold that presidency that are going to define the limits of the power of the  presidency because the law will no longer do it.”

Do you get where he’s going with this?

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/06/biden_s_failing_brain_exposes_deep_state_treachery.html

I know the country’s going to hell in a handbasket.  Inflation is killing working-class families.  Illegal immigrants are raping and murdering little girls.  “Woke” corporations are pushing “transgender” madness on young children.  Public schools are telling students that they will not survive the “climate apocalypse.”  Biden and the build back better buffoons in control of Western governments are doing everything they can to drag us into WWIII.  Still, if you are a Trump supporter who believes the status quo must go, Thursday’s presidential debate was awfully fun.

Perhaps you couldn’t bring yourself to watch the event “live” because you knew CNN was going to do everything it could to prop Biden up and tear Trump down.  If that is the case, then surely you were happy to awaken the next morning and find your usual newsfeed filled with two types of headlines: one recognizing Trump’s winning performance and the other recounting Biden’s total humiliation.  For all of you suffering daily out there, I hope the words provided momentary relief. 

You knew that Biden lost his marbles long ago, but the propaganda press has been telling the world that he’s just fine for years.  For those people who rely upon Deep State programmers to tell them what to believe, seeing Biden disintegrate on the debate stage must have been stunning.  Mainstream news corporations have been covering up Biden’s mental infirmities for so long that too many Americans watched Biden struggle to form sentences for the first time.  Just as reporters in the first half of the twentieth century lied to the American people about FDR’s reliance upon a wheelchair, reporters in the first quarter of the twenty-first century have lied to the American people about Biden’s debilitating dementia.  On June 27, the lid on journalists’ barrel of Biden-protecting lies shot right off.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/cultural-marxism-a-century-old-and-thriving/

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—harbored a deep disdain for capitalism and traditional morals. Unfortunately, the professors did not stay in their homeland long. Adolph Hitler’s rise to power forced them out of Germany, and they reemerged at Columbia University in New York City in 1935.

And a century later, the malign effects of their teachings are still with us.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), Critical Race Theory (CRT), Black Lives Matter (BLM), gender indoctrination, wokeism, etc., fade in and out of the news cycle, but they have established a secure foothold in the nation’s culture, notably in our schools.

Cultural Marxism is still pervasive in a significant number of our colleges. In Illinois, legislators want to embed racial considerations into state appropriations for public universities. According to its website, Yale’s Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry faculty are told to place “DEI at the center of every decision” when making hires.

There are a few bright spots, however. Public universities in Texas, Florida, and Utah have banned DEI. However, those decisions came from state governments, not from the colleges themselves.

At MIT, a private university, President Sally Kornbluth confirmed in May that the school would “no longer require diversity statements in faculty hiring.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/biden-white-house-is-proud-to-have-tyler-on-the-team/

Tyler Cherry has been newly appointed as Associate Communications Director at the White House. He is distinguished by two things. First, there is his hatred of the police — any police, all the police, the very idea of the police. During the Baltimore riots in 2015, he tweeted that he was “Praying for #Baltimore but praying even harder for an end to a capitalistic police state motivated by explicit and implicit racial biases. In another tweet he wrote “Time to recall that the modern day police system is a direct evolution of slave patrols and lynch mobs.”

Second, there is his virulent hatred of Israel. He tweeted on July 25, 2014 that he’s been “Cheersing in bars to ending the occupation of Palestine – no shame and f– your glares #ISupportGaza #FreePalestine,” Cherry wrote on July 25, 2014. And there is much more in that vein, including his calling for an end to American support for Israel. He sees Israel not as a tiny, imperiled country surrounded by enemies but, rather, as a nasty little Sparta that deserves to disappear.

His hatred of the police, and of Israel, were expressed in 2500 tweets that he deleted between June 23 and June 24 — I can well imagine his panicky attempt to get rid of all that incriminating evidence of his hideous views — but alas for Tyler Cherry, if screen shots were taken of some of those tweets, they can be retrieved. And there are other ways as well to retrieve more than a handful. And I have no doubt they will be.

Here is Tyler Cherry’s description of Tyler Cherry, posted at LinkedIn. It is a perfect specimen of its type, where bland bureaucratese and shameless self-advertising blend seamlessly.

My experience in political and communications strategy helps me untangle the complexities of today’s hyperpartisan, fragmented, and fast-paced media ecosystem into effective, winning messages. Working at the intersection of politics, policy, and advocacy, I have crafted and executed strategic communications plans for dozens of governmental, political, non-profit, advocacy, corporate, and legal organizations, including earned, paid and digital media strategy, crisis communications, speechwriting, debate and hearing prep, litigation strategy, and thought leadership and brand-building.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/06/30/scotus-rulings-biden-trump-debate-shake-up-political-landscape/

What a week it’s been! We started off with Justice Amy Souter Barrett writing the SCOTUS ruling in Murthy v. Missouri.  At issue was whether it was okay for the federal government (the FBI and related elements of the American Stasi) to pressure social media and data-hoovering companies (Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc.) to suppress opinions they didn’t like about things like COVID, the 2020 election, and the Jan 6 jamboree at the Capitol.

Just to be clear about this: it is not okay for the government to do this, but that’s not what Justice Souter Barrett said.  She did not quite come out and say it was okay.  She left that bizarro opinion to her colleague Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who, during the oral argument phase of the case, said to plaintiff’s counsel: “My biggest concern is that your view has the First Amendment hamstringing the federal government in significant ways.”

Memo to Justice Jackson: “hamstringing the federal government,” i.e., limiting its prerogatives and ability to intrude upon the lives of its citizens, is the very point of the First Amendment.  That’s why we have a First Amendment.  Indeed, it is a large part of why we have a constitution: to protect citizens from the coercive power of the state.

Justice Barrett was not quite so forthright.  She argued that the plaintiffs “lacked standing.” If Louisiana and Missouri lacked standing to defend their citizens in this case, who or what would have standing?  That was part of the burden of Justice Alito’s robust dissent, in which he was joined by the other adults on the Court, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch. As the legal commentator Jonathan Turley put it, “The government is engaging in censorship by surrogate… They have made a mockery of the limits of the First Amendment.”

Justice Barrett was not done making those of us who supported her nomination to the Supreme Court regret our support.  In Fischer v. United States, one of the most important cases before the Court this session, the issue was whether it was okay to use an Enron-era law that was designed to prohibit destroying evidence to go after January 6 defendants (and that ex officio perpetual defendant, Donald Trump).  This was the famous, or infamous, “obstructing an official proceeding” charge that we heard so much about while the FBI was arresting grandmothers and other tourists who were in the Capitol that day, and which official but illegally appointed bag man Jack Smith has so handsomely availed himself of in his vendetta against Trump. The case was decided Friday, 6-3, but Barrett weighed in with a dissent.

It used to be that the FBI and other members of the law enforcement fraternity would discover a crime and then pursue the perpetrators. Now, as the dragnet sparked by the January 6 protest shows, “law enforcement” means identifying people the regime doesn’t like and then combing through the statute book to see what laws might apply, or be twisted to apply, to them. It’s a refreshed, Americanized version of the venerable principle articulated by Stalin’s head of the secret police, Lavrentiy Beria: “Show me the man,” said Beria, “and I will show you the crime.”

Another major case, also decided Friday, overturned the 1984 case Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, which in effect handed legislative power to the alphabet soup of federal agencies.  By striking down Chevron, the Court dealt an important blow to “the administrative state,” that parallel government populated by unelected, largely unaccountable bureaucrats who have increasingly been the ones who ran our lives: promulgated the rules by which we were required to live and imposed the fines and other sanctions should we fail to do so. Article One of the Constitution begins by vesting “All legislative Powers . . . in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.”  Chevron bypassed that stipulation by stealth, rendering Congress more and more ceremonial as distinct from a legislative body.

https://tomklingenstein.com/in-search-of-an-american-aristocracy/

Editor’s Note: The first step in winning a war is to recognize the fact that you are in one. This means, first and foremost, to come to know your enemy and his goals. In a recent essay for this site, Glenn Ellmers and Ted Richards of the Claremont Institute make a compelling case that the present enemy—the “woke” or group quota regime—is a totalitarian threat, and that its aims are nothing short of revolutionary. While our own troubles may seem far removed from the hard totalitarianism of the twentieth century, Ellmers and Richards argue that the six traditionally accepted elements of totalitarianism are already present in woke America. What’s more, they identify three factors that are unique to the tyranny of the present day.

The American regime was founded by intellectual giants: men like John Adams and Thomas Jefferson who, even in their devotion to equality, recognized the necessity of great men for the preservation of a republic. In an important way, argues Micah Meadowcroft, the regime change underway has been defined by the replacement of this natural aristocracy with a “global elite” untied to America or its constitution. This is the seventh in a series of nine contributions by leading experts on the nine defining elements of what Ellmers and Richards dub “Totalitarianism, American Style.”

When in 1813, early in the epistolary reconciliation of their twilight years, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson shared their mutual preoccupation with the idea of a natural aristocracy, they could not set aside biography entirely. As Jefferson concluded, despite their abiding differences of opinion, “We acted in perfect harmony thro’ a long and perilous contest for our liberty and independence. A constitution has been acquired which, tho neither of us think perfect, yet both consider as competent to render our fellow-citizens the happiest and the securest on whom the sun has ever shone.” 

Regardless of whether, as Jefferson proposed, autochthonous aristoi were the source and summit of republican liberty or, as Adams worried, lions and eagles whose ambitions must be bound by the chains of a mixed regime, they had both been as younger men the best of their colonies and come together with others like them to bring forth a new nation. They were our Founding Fathers and, without hereditary title, an American aristocracy.

Today, there is no American aristocracy worth the term, and despite breathless liberal fantasies about President Trump, no lions or eagles either. We do not even have an American elite, except in the most basic social science sense. Instead our civic life is managed by a global elite, functionaries of what, as Glenn Ellmers and Ted Richards described in the opening salvo of this series, an international order “in which American sovereignty becomes insignificant.” 

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/supreme-court-rules-in-favor-of-biden-administration-in-landmark-social-media-censorship-case/?

The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in favor of the Biden administration in a landmark case dealing with government involvement in social-media censorship, finding that the plaintiffs lacked the standing to sue.

Justice Barrett wrote the majority opinion asserting that two states and five social-media users do not have standing to contest the level of coordination between government agencies, nonprofits, and tech platforms in restricting content on social media.

“We begin—and end—with standing. At this stage, neither the individual nor the state plaintiffs have established standing to seek an injunction against any defendant. We therefore lack jurisdiction to reach the merits of the dispute,” the majority opinion reads.

The landmark Murthy v. Missouri content-moderation case came about from a lawsuit by Missouri and Louisiana against the Biden administration over federal agencies working with social-media platforms and third-party nonprofits to censor conservatives online.

Last July, a district court ruled that federal agencies could not communicate with social-media companies or nonprofits with the purpose of coercing them into restricting speech. The Fifth Circuit partially upheld the injunction last fall and found multiple federal agencies violated the First Amendment.

“This evidence indicates that the platforms had independent incentives to moderate content and often exercised their own judgment. To be sure, the record reflects that the Government defendants played a role in at least some of the platforms’ moderation choices. But the Fifth Circuit, by attributing every platform decision at least in part to the defendants, glossed over complexities in the evidence,” Barrett said of the Fifth Circuit’s ruling.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/is-equality-of-opportunity-even-realistic-in-a-free-society/

There is a popular rejoinder in our society to the ideal of equity: equal results from unequal causes, and equal rewards for unequal performance.

A popular canard that has become constitutive of equality dialogue is that the United States was built not on equality of outcomes or even economic equality. It is devoted to equality of opportunity. But we should begin to re-think the concept of equality of opportunity. I would submit that even equality of opportunity is a politically untenable goal in a free society.

Equality of opportunity sounds like a beautiful thing to most people and, in an ideal utopia in which all persons were blessed with equal abilities and exercised their choices and judgments in a consistently rational and productive manner, one could imagine such an ideal being approximated. But what is an opportunity?

An opportunity is a set of circumstances that makes it possible to do something and achieve a goal. When I say that I have an opportunity to do something, I am describing a state of affairs in which the execution of action directed towards a phenomenon (some tangible thing in the world) will result in the realization of a goal I have set for myself.

When people speak of equality of opportunity they are speaking of those tangible things (a job, an education, a meeting with someone important who can advance their cause etc.—the material conditions that are required for the realization of a goal) that must avail themselves to each person equally. To put it another way, it is believed that a society or state must ensure that the circumstances and the conditions conducive to achieving goals are equally available to all persons. And for this project to be successful, we have to be committed to the idea that equality of opportunity is predicated on equalizing all chances of success.

https://behindtheblack.com/behind-the-black/points-of-information/reparations-taking-money-from-people-who-never-owned-slaves-and-giving-it-to-people-who-never-were-slaves/

The effort to justify the new fad of forcing all Americans today to pay blacks reparations for the evil of slavery that was eliminated a century and a half ago at the cost of more than 600K lives continues. A recent published study by two “Didn’t Earn It” (DEI) academic elites at the Harvard Kennedy School attempts to justify the distribution of reparations now by claiming that the U.S. has a long history of paying out money to harmed individuals. From the paper’s abstract:

[T]he United States has a long-standing social norm that if an individual or community has suffered a harm, it is considered right for the federal government to provide some measure of what we term “reparatory compensation.” In discussing this norm and its implications for Black American reparations, we first describe the scale, categories, and interlocking and compounding effects of discriminatory harms by introducing a taxonomy of illustrative racial harms from slavery to the present. We then reveal how the social norm, precedent, and federal programs operate to provide victims with reparatory compensation, reviewing federal programs that offer compensation, such as environmental disasters, market failures, and vaccine injuries. We conclude that the government already has the norm, precedent, expertise, and resources to provide reparations to Black Americans. [emphasis mine]

The highlighted word is key to understanding the fundamental intellectual dishonesty of these incompetent Harvard academics. In their paper they use numerous examples of cases where the government has provided compensation to actual individuals — such as veterans, individuals harmed by radiation from nuclear tests, and those who lost their pensions due to bankruptcy or mismanagement of their pension funds — and then claim this proves paying reparations to the community of blacks, based merely on their race and the past existence of slavery, is within traditional American jurisprudence.