RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/congress-in-a-five-hour-hearing-demands-0cf?token=

“Words cannot convey how chilling and authoritarian this all is: watching government officials, hour after hour, demand censorship of political speech and threaten punishment for failures to obey.”

The repressive objective of the Democratic-controlled Congress is to transfer the power to police and censor political discourse from these tech giants to themselves.

Republican members largely confined their grievances to the opposite concern: that these social media giants were excessively silencing conservative voices in order to promote a liberal political agenda (that complaint is only partially true: a good amount of online censorship, like growing law enforcement domestic monitoring generally, focuses on all anti-establishment ideologies, not just the right-wing variant). This editorial censoring, many Republicans insisted, rendered the tech companies’ Section 230 immunity obsolete, since they are now acting as publishers rather than mere neutral transmitters of information. Some Republicans did join with Democrats in demanding greater censorship, though typically in the name of protecting children from mental health disorders and predators rather than ideological conformity.

As they have done in prior hearings, both Zuckerberg and Pichai spoke like the super-scripted, programmed automatons that they are, eager to please their Congressional overseers (though they did periodically issue what should have been unnecessary warnings that excessive “content moderation” can cripple free political discourse). Dorsey, by contrast, seemed at the end of his line of patience and tolerance for vapid, moronic censorship demands, and — sitting in a kitchen in front of a pile of plates and glasses — he, refreshingly, barely bothered to hide that indifference. At one point, he flatly stated in response to demands that Twitter do more to remove “disinformation”: “I don’t think we should be the arbiters of truth and I don’t think the government should be either.”

https://amgreatness.com/2021/03/25/where-is-gop-outrage-over-justice-departments-capitol-probe/
The U.S. government now holds political prisoners in jail in the nation’s capital, and the party that purports to stand for freedom, liberty, and rule of law refuses to defend them.

A federal judge this week blasted a top Justice Department official for publicly bragging about the agency’s sprawling investigation into the January 6 Capitol melee. In an emergency hearing, U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta warned government prosecutors to keep quiet or face a gag order.

Mehta fumed over comments made in a television interview by former acting U.S. Attorney Michael Sherwin—he led the first two months of the nationwide manhunt for suspected “insurrectionists”—that could imperil the already shaky case against ten alleged members of the Oath Keepers. The lawyers of the defendants facing several charges including conspiracy, attended the virtual hearing on Tuesday.

“The Justice Department needs to understand that these types of public statements can jeopardize the integrity of a criminal case and affect the rights of the defendants,” Mehta said. (Sherwin reportedly is under internal investigation himself for giving the “60 Minutes” interview last week.) “No matter how much press attention this matter gets, it will be clear these defendants are entitled to a fair trial. The government, quite frankly in my view, should know better.”

The Obama-appointed judge, with those few sentences, said more to defend the rights of Trump-supporting protesters than the totality of Republican leadership in Washington, D.C.. Top Biden officials are accelerating the weaponization of powerful federal agencies against regular Americans who dared, not just to vote for Donald Trump, but also to doubt the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election. The Justice Department’s Capitol breach probe, its official name, gives cover to inflict severe punishment for those verboten acts and beliefs.

The same cabal that wielded its authority against the former president and his associates for more than four years has aimed its arsenal at hundreds of Trump supporters—yet the GOP remains silent.

Crickets from Congressional Republicans

Early on, Republicans joined Democrats in overhyping the events of January 6. “This failed insurrection only underscores how crucial the task before us is for our republic,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) preached in a statement released that evening. “They tried to disrupt our democracy. They failed. They failed to attempt to obstruct the Congress.”

Senator Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), in a typically dramatic speech the next day, claimed the Capitol “has been desecrated. Blood has been spilled in the hallways.” (He also warned we should not tell our children that American institutions “can’t be trusted,” despite all evidence to the contrary.)

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/america-at-the-end-of-empire-mark-tapson/

In a recent monologue on HBO’s Real Time, host Bill Maher called Americans a “silly people” for allowing themselves to be mired in culture war struggles, such as the politically correct cancelling of children’s books, while our superpower competition China is laser-focused on political, economic, and military dominance.

“You’re not going to win the battle for the 21st century if you are a silly people. And Americans are a silly people,” Maher asserted. He then referenced the latest “cancel culture” controversy – the woke mob’s targeting of children’s author Dr. Seuss over purported racism in his books: “Do you know who doesn’t care that there’s a stereotype of a Chinese man in a Dr. Seuss book? China. All 1.4 billion of them couldn’t give a crouching tiger flying fuck because they’re not a silly people. If anything, they are as serious as a prison fight.”

Maher pointed out that China has “built 500 entire cities from scratch, moved the majority of their huge population from poverty to the middle class, and mostly cornered the market in 5G and pharmaceuticals” in two generations. Meanwhile in America, “half the country is having a never-ending woke competition deciding whether Mr. Potato Head has a dick and the other half believes we have to stop the lizard people because they’re eating babies. We are a silly people,” he continued.

“Do you think China’s doing that, letting political correctness get in the way of nurturing their best and brightest?” Maher added. “Do you think Chinese colleges are offering courses in ‘The Philosophy of Star Trek, ‘The Sociology of Seinfeld,’ and ‘Surviving the Coming Zombie Apocalypse’? Those are real and so is China. And they are eating our lunch. And believe me, in an hour, they’ll be hungry again.”

Maher’s prescient lecture came just before the Chinese delegation ate their American counterparts for lunch at last week’s U.S.-China meeting in Alaska, telling Secretary of State Antony Blinken to his face that China does not view America as operating “from a position of strength.” With a new American President so decrepit he is shielded from the public by his handlers; with our southern border collapsing under tsunami of illegal aliens; and with Americans at each other’s throats in a not-so-Cold Civil War, China’s not wrong about that.

Unlike his fellow political propagandists on late-night TV, Maher occasionally comes down on the right side of an issue, and this is one of them.

https://redstate.com/sister-toldjah/2021/03/25/joe-biden-immediately-gives-his-handlers-nightmares-after-appearing-confused-at-times-during-first-presser-n350192

EXCERPT

““Tired”? Really? We all know what tired actually looks like, and it’s an insult to our intelligence to pass off Biden’s mid-sentence freezes as nothing more than being “tired.”

As I said yesterday, that the leader of the free world essentially had to be shamed into doing a formal press conference two months into his time in the Oval Office should set off alarm bells everywhere. But when you see how things get progressively worse during these events – no matter how tightly staged they are, it begins to make more sense as to why they’re keeping him on leash in carefully controlled settings.

It’s quite terrifying, to be honest, and the more it happens the worse it looks. World leaders seem to be taking notice, too, which makes all of this even more concerning. But Biden IS the POTUS, and he should be expected to be able to appear in public and before the press and to coherently answer questions.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Joe Biden does not just look unwell, he doesn’t appear to actually be well, either. It’s no wonder he’s turning over meetings with Vice President Kamala Harris to his Chief of Staff Ron Klain and kicking the press out when they try to get answers from him.

That they continue to ignore the elephant in the room here is a disgrace, made doubly so by the fact that they were questioning Trump’s mental fitness to lead well before he even took office.

Questions about Biden’s state of mind and mental health are issues the American people deserve answers to. It’s just too bad members of the mainstream press had an hour or so today to do just that, and not a single one of them took the opportunity to do so. They didn’t hesitate to do it with Trump, and they shouldn’t have any hesitancy doing it with this President, either.

https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2021/03/25/biden-presser-was-such-a-disaster-there-was-one-moment-that-showed-what-elder-abuse-it-was-n350185

Oh my gosh, as I type this, I’m watching this utter disaster that is the Joe Biden press conference.

It sounds like many in the press came ready with real substantive questions but Biden failed to show up with his mind, as my colleague Sister Toldjah just explained.

It seemed like he was trying to go from a script, he had reporters’ names on a list that he was calling on. Were there any prepared questions would be my question? Like this one that basically was Yamiche Alcindor praising him saying it’s his morality that’s causing them to come. Yeesh, propagandist.

He takes credit for that and then turns around and blames President Donald Trump for the surge.

But even with apparent preparation He was negative, when he didn’t know or couldn’t answer, which was a lot, he was combative with reporters, saying “Come on, man!”

It was awful, not sure how anyone could have thought he’d make it through it, it was a complete train wreck. He kept talking and talking and talking, but it was often just rambling gibberish.

But perhaps the mistake that was most emblematic of the huge problem he has is what he said about when he joined the Senate.

“With regard to the filibuster, I believe we should go back to a position with the filibuster that existed when I came to the United States Senate 120 years ago.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/biden-is-lying/

The Biden press conference was a train wreck and disgrace on the border. He repeated the Alejandro Mayorkas line that Trump was just pushing unaccompanied minors back into Mexico, when the truth is that they were flown home and handed over to social-service agencies in their countries. He then went even further, referring to Trump letting minors starve and die. He maintained that Trump hadn’t diminished the flow at the border, which is completely false. He gave no indication of any serious plan for us to do a better job of policing our own border, instead emphasizing building more shelters to house the migrants who are coming in record numbers. And he missed the point when a reporter asked a question about a small boy from Central America whose mother told the reporter she had sent him because she believed that Biden would let him into the United States. This performance would be roasted from beginning to end by fact-checkers — if they had any integrity.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/03/bidens-woeful-press-conference/

Reporters aren’t in the practice, obviously, of being particularly tough on President Biden. But at his first press conference as president this afternoon, Cecilia Vega of ABC News politely nailed him to the wall on a key failure of his border policy.

She told an affecting story of meeting a nine-year-old boy at the border who had walked to the U.S. from Honduras, and said that when she called the boy’s mother, the woman explained that she had sent him to the U.S. because she believed that Biden would let him into the country.

This, of course, is exactly why there’s been a surge at the border. Biden created an exemption in Title 42 — the public-health authority that President Trump had used to turn back migrants during the pandemic — specifically for minors, and predictably there’s been a surge of minors.

In evading this reality throughout the press conference, Biden resorted to a haze of misrepresentations, and inadvertently exposed the senselessness of his own policy.

In response to Vega, he echoed a distortion often made by his Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and said that Trump had dumped children into the Mexican desert. Except Biden made the charge even more lurid by alleging that Trump had let children starve to death.

This is a disgraceful and stupid charge. The Trump administration either flew back migrants to their home countries directly or handed them over to Mexican authorities to do the same. No one was pushed into the desert.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/and-the-nominees-for-best-civilization-are-11616685894?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

Progressive leftists are good at destroying traditions, careers and free expression. But after all the societal broken eggs, where’s the progressive omelette? Surely somewhere there must be a model of success given the confidence with which the wokesters of modern media condemn America’s constitutional republic.

A recent headline on this column invited readers to “Name a Great Civilization Created by Progressive Leftists.” Your humble correspondent is still happy to accept nominations and the submissions so far have been extremely interesting. The search continues for a progressive paradise. But what’s striking is that a number of left-leaning respondents—those who did not simply express resentment at the question—have nominated nations of Western civilization that are the typical targets of progressive ire. In fact a few leftists even cite the good old USA as a place created by the progressives of their day.

Perhaps this is encouraging, because it suggests that when pressed the cancel crowd acknowledges that it’s not unreasonable to judge people by the standards of their own times.

But on the substance, what about this argument that the United States of America is the answer to the question posed in that headline?

Princeton professor of jurisprudence Robert George runs the school’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. In response to an email inquiry he writes that “the claim that the American founders were ‘progressive leftists’ is absurd.” Here’s the rest of his response:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/congress-summons-its-speech-regulators-11616711928?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

On Thursday the CEOs of Facebook, Google and Twitter sat before the House Energy and Commerce Committee as Democrats thundered that they should censor more political speech, and what was notable was how routine this ritual has become.

The Journal reports this was Mark Zuckerberg’s “fourth appearance before Congress since last July, and the third for both Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Google’s Sundar Pichai. ” The gatekeepers of online expression increasingly resemble government regulators, navigating threats and exhortations from politicians.

The hearing topic was “disinformation,” and it followed the same committee’s hearing last month targeting conservative media. The term “disinformation” is elastic, covering anything from election and health hoaxes to political expression that Democrats disfavor. Rep. Mike Doyle, the subcommittee chair, said in his opening statement that the sites the CEOs oversee are “havens of hate, harassment, and division,” and declared, “we will legislate to stop this.”

That sentiment was echoed by Rep. Henry Butterfield, who said social-media platforms are “being used to undermine social justice movements.” He said Congress may have to “compel you, perhaps with penalties, to make meaningful changes” to employee composition.

Republicans also laid into the platforms, especially their impact on minors and progressive bias in moderation. But the message from the majority party was clear and unified: Clamp down on more political speech, pronto, or risk the consequences. Rep. Jerry McNerney said the removal of disinformation “isn’t happening quickly enough.”

Progressives have deputized Big Tech executives as de facto regulators of American debate.