RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.”                                                                                                                    Essay, The New York Times
                                                                                                                                                  Henry Wallace
                                                                                                                                              “The Danger of American Fascism”

                                                                                                                                                          April 9, 1944

While Wallace, then Vice President of the United States, was writing of the dangers of Fascism, his words apply today to extremists on both sides of the political aisle – Progressive/Marxists on the left and Neo-Fascists on the right – those who campaign under the mantle of service but who, in reality, seek power for themselves and the state. Keep in mind, at the time Wallace wrote, the Soviet Union, with its Communist ideology and its totalitarian practices, was our ally in the fight against Germany’s Nazis. Because his socialist leanings were not broadly popular, Wallace was dropped by FDR as his choice for Vice President in favor of Harry Truman in the 1944 election. In 1946, in the early days of the Cold War, Wallace left the Democrat Party over Truman’s hard line with the Soviet Union and joined the Progressive P

Power is an aphrodisiac, whether exercised by an individual, a cabal, or a mob. It has always existed in politics, in varying degrees. In a letter to Anglican bishop Mandell Creighton on April 5, 1887, Lord Acton (1835-1902) wrote: “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” High political office carries enormous influence – the ability to financially reward backers (as well as oneself) – that many find irresistible. While there are principled individuals who run for office for the purpose of “giving back,” we live in a time of career politicians, those who have spent their careers either in elected or appointed office. We also live in a time of polarization where slogans substitute for reason and violent protests for debate.

Power and the corruption that often accompanies it are not limited to one party. But single party states and cities, with an absence of competition, are more likely to attract corrupt individuals. A Wikipedia map of the U.S. shows twenty red states, twenty blue states, with seven others either leaning red or blue, and three that are purple. Of the five most populous states, three are blue – California, New York and Pennsylvania – one is red – Texas – and one is purple – Florida. BallotPedia notes that seventeen of the country’s twenty largest cities are Democrat-run. Corporate monopolies are not good for consumers, and government monopolies are not good for citizens.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/06/24/the-logic-in-all-the-madness/

Most Americans believe it is unhinged to deliberately destroy the border and allow 10 million illegal aliens to enter the country without background audits, means of support, any claims to legal residency, and definable skills. And worse still, why would federal authorities be ordered to release repeat violent felons who have gone on to commit horrendous crimes against American citizens?

Equally perplexing to most Americans is borrowing $1 trillion every 90 days and paying 5-5.5% interest on the near $36 trillion in ballooning national debt. Serving that debt at current interest exceeds the size of the annual defense budget and may soon top $1 trillion in interest costs, or more than 13% of the budget.

Why would the United States suspend military aid to Israel as it tries to destroy the Hamas architects of the October 7 massacres? Why would it lift sanctions on a terrorist Iran? Why would it suppress Israel’s response to Iran’s missile attack on the Jewish homeland? Why would it prevent Israel from stockpiling key munitions as it prepares to deal with the existential threats posed by Hezbollah?

Why would the Biden administration cancel key pipeline projects and put vast swaths of federal lands rich in oil and gas off limits to production, even as it further drains the strategic petroleum reserve? Why not pump rather than drain our own oil from strategic stockpiles?

Why would the Biden White House’s counsel’s office meet with Nathan Wade, the former paramour chief prosecutor in the Fani Willis Fulton County prosecution of Donald Trump? Why would the third-ranking prosecutor in the Biden Justice Department step down to lead Alvin Bragg’s Manhattan prosecution of Donald Trump? Why would the Biden Justice Department under Attorney General Merrick Garland select Jack Smith as a special prosecutor of Donald Trump—given his past failures as a special counsel and known political biases?

Nihilism only explains so much. A better explanation is that the Biden administration and its handlers knew that there was a good chance that most of their policies would prove unpopular and might even jeopardize Biden’s reelection.

But they also were confident the changes were of such magnitude that the United States would either become—in the infamous phrase of Barack Obama—“fundamentally transformed” or force the next Republican administration to adopt such tough medicine that it would prove untenable politically and the malady would still prove mostly impossible to undo.

After all, how would a Trump administration deal with 10 million illegal aliens who entered the US without audit or legality? Where are they? How would they be found and deported? How many court suits in blue-jurisdictions before blue judges would have to be overcome?

https://www.frontpagemag.com/you-owe-100000/

America is now almost $35 trillion in debt. That means every American owes $100,000.

The Biden administration doesn’t care. They want to spend more.

Already they are spending so much that they’re increasing our debt by a trilliondollars every 100 days.

President Donald Trump was no better. His administration increased our debt by almost $8 trillion.

This will not end well.

Last year, we hit a new ugly milestone: Americans must pay $1 trillion per year just for interest on our debt.

That’s more than we spend on defense — on infrastructure, education, poverty programs … everything, but Social Security and Medicare.

If we didn’t waste these trillion dollars on interest, we could give $3,000 tax cuts to every man, woman and child to use as they please.

Worse, America’s spending growth is unsustainable. You can stretch a rubber band farther and farther, but eventually, it will break.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/blue-morning-inherited-future-demographics

In The Emerging Democratic Majority (2002), John Judis and Ruy Texeira argued that college-educated professionals and nonwhites, along with a minimum number of working-class whites, could form the basis for Democratic hegemony in national politics. As Judis and Texeira point out in their new book, Where Have All the Democrats Gone? (2023), Democratic strategists and journalists adopted a distorted, dumbed-down version of their thesis in which the Democratic Party could do without working-class non-Hispanic white voters at all. Conversely, the modest decline of Hispanic and Black voter support for the Democrats in the last few elections has led some to suggest that a racial realignment is underway that might enable Republicans to emerge as the party of the “multiracial working class.”

A more plausible explanation, however, is that Joe Biden has always been an unpopular candidate made more unpopular by inflation and botched immigration and foreign policies—and that he is likely to win anyway. Most demographic trends still favor the Democrats and hurt the Republicans. Democratic constituencies continue to grow as shares of the American electorate, while core Republican electoral blocs are steadily declining.

Consider the interaction between voting and religious belief. According to 2024 polling data, Republicans win supermajorities among only two religious groups—white evangelical Protestants (85%) and Mormons (75%)—while eking out bare majorities with white nonevangelical Protestants (58%) and Catholics (52%). All of these Republican-leaning religious communities are dwindling. As a share of the American population, white evangelical Protestants have shrunk by roughly a third from 33% in 1999 to only 21% in 2021. In only 15 years, from 2007 to 2023, Mormons also declined by about a third as a share of the U.S. adult population, collapsing from 1.8% to 1.2%. Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are no longer the majority even in Utah. Since 2007, the Republican-leaning white Catholic share has dropped by 8 percentage points.

If demographic trends favor Democratic hegemony, why not maximize immigration? Why not expand the welfare state to enable illegitimacy? Why not pass out affirmative action bribes to newly invented official nonwhite ‘races’ like MENA?

https://tomklingenstein.com/fauci-was-just-a-symptom/

Editor’s Note: Since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, Anthony Fauci has emerged as a living symbol of federal abuses: lockdowns, mask mandates, and myriad other arbitrary restrictions that unduly burdened the lives of ordinary citizens. Yet there is nothing exceptional about the former NIAID head; he is merely one of countless bureaucrats in Washington who feel entitled to rule their countrymen by the mandate of expertise. Jeffrey H. Anderson reviews RFK Jr.’s recent book on America’s most controversial doctor and concludes that Fauci is not just a bad scientist, but an embodiment of the grave threat posed by a new regime to our Constitution and our way of life.

The mainstream press corps prefers to deal with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. by pretending that he doesn’t exist. This is true both for his presidential campaign—which is thought to pose too much of a threat to President Biden to risk acknowledging it—and for his popular book, The Real Anthony Fauci.

Relegated to Skyhorse Publishing, which Wall Street Journal film critic Kyle Smith describes as “something of a refuge for the cancelled,” Kennedy’s book nevertheless cracked the top 15 on the New York Times hardcover nonfiction best-seller list for 15 consecutive weeks—topping out at #7. Yet apparently it did not merit space in the Times for a review. Wikipedia quickly dismisses The Real Anthony Fauci as a “controversial” book by a “conspiracy theorist” who unjustifiably “attacks” Fauci and “offers disinformation.” 

In truth, however, Kennedy’s book is a valuable and generally well-researched indictment of the public health establishment, and more broadly of anti-republican rule by “experts.” While the book’s claims should not be taken as gospel in the way that the credulous press corps hangs on Fauci’s every muddled word, Kennedy shows impressive willingness to stand strong against the current, and his informative and rather countercultural book is very much worth a read. He makes a compelling case that—from AIDS to Covid—Fauci and friends have been pursuing their own agenda at the expense of the American people.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/06/21/cheap-fakes-bidens-defenders-are-getting-desperate/

Do you think Joe Biden might be a bit… doddery? Are you worried about the leader of the free world appearing to fade out during public events, mix up the names of politicians and accidentally say explosive things – only for them to be contradicted by his carers (sorry, staffers). Then I regret to inform you that you’ve been fooled – you poor, low-info soul – by right-wing ‘cheap fakes’.

This is the new coinage the White House is using to dismiss allegedly selectively edited videos of Joe Biden, 81, already the oldest US president in history, apparently showing his age at a series of public events. Over recent weeks, a string of clips have gone viral of Biden appearing to ‘freeze’. There was Biden at a Juneteenth celebration, looking like a cardboard cut-out of himself as people bopped beside him. There was Biden at the G7 summit in Italy, wandering in the wrong direction during a world-leader photo-op. Then there was Biden onstage at a Hollywood fundraiser, being gently led off stage by Barack Obama.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre slammed the clips earlier this week as partisan disinformation. ‘They are cheap fakes’, she said, ‘and they are done in bad faith’. Her claim, and that of the ‘fact-checkers’, is that conservative tweeters and journalists made these incidents look much worse than they actually were by editing or cropping out key context. ‘The right-wing critics of the president have a credibility problem because… the fact-checkers have repeatedly caught them pushing misinformation, disinformation’, Jean-Pierre said. She even used the phrase ‘deepfakes’ at one point, thus falsely suggesting the clips might have been outright digital fabrications. (With more than a little irony, Jean-Pierre later had to clarify her misleading comments.) The left-leaning media have also leapt to Biden’s defence, with CBS News running a stern segment on the ‘cheap fakes’ and liberal sites amplifying the White House’s rebuttals.

On social media, liberal and conservative accounts have naturally been poring over these videos like they are mini Zapruder films, arguing the toss and accusing one another of misrepresenting Biden’s behaviour. That this is what political debate has been reduced to is frankly a bit depressing. For what it’s worth, the viral G7 clip definitely did misleadingly crop out a parachutist, who Biden was walking towards to give him a thumbs up, thus making it look like he was just aimlessly wandering off. But at the risk of being labelled a Trumpist wingnut, I dare say Biden doesn’t look exactly sprightly in any of these videos, whatever way they are spliced. Sure, maybe he was just taking in the applause onstage in Hollywood, as his defenders have suggested, but he was then led off stage by his old boss. Okay, he may not have fancied dancing on Juneteenth, which is his aides’ explanation for that bit of ‘freezing’, but he did go on to slur his words during his speech.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20723/california-legalized-drugs-cartels

Six years after California legalized marijuana, the bodies keep piling up. Earlier this year, six men were murdered in the Mojave Desert. Four of the men had been burned after being shot with rifles. In 2020, seven people were killed at an illegal pot operation in Riverside County.

Violence like this was supposed to disappear after legalization. Legalization advocates argued that making the drug trade legal would end the grip of the cartels. Instead, the legal market has failed, and the cartels are taking over sizable parts of California and the rest of the country.

California’s legal drug revenues have fallen consistently, as have those in other legal drug states including Colorado, whose model helped sell the idea that drug money would fix everything.

Despite falling revenues, Colorado legislators brag about $282 million in drug revenue. That number may sound high, but it’s a drop in the bucket considering the money that the state and cities like Denver are spending on homelessness, drug overdoses and law enforcement.

While the legal drug business is also collapsing in California, the state is spending a fortune fighting marijuana even as it tries to tax it. Gov. Gavin Newsom paradoxically promised to close the budget deficit with $100 million in drug revenue, meant to be used to fund law enforcement and fight substance abuse. The state seized over $300 million in illegal pot this year and uses satellite imagery and heavily-armed raids to fight untaxed marijuana.

But despite all those efforts, illegal marijuana has won and legal marijuana has lost.

https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/education/bragg-drops-trespassing-charges-against-nearly-all-columbia-protesters

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg dropped charges on Thursday against most of the Columbia University protesters who were arrested for trespassing in Hamilton Hall in April.

Nearly 50 people were charged with criminal trespassing after they staged a multi-day protest on the Manhattan campus of the Ivy League school. But 31 of those cases were dismissed on Thursday due to a lack of evidence, according to NBC News. Prosecutors said another 14 of the 46 cases will be dismissed if the defendants do not have any other arrests in the next six months.

The court said the person who will remain charged is James Carlson, who has two other separate cases opened against him. One of those charges is flag burning, and he is not associated with Columbia University.

Hundreds of protesters initially engaged in the protests, which was centered on the U.S. response to the war in Israel. But the 46 who were charged had illegally occupied Hamilton Hall towards the end of the protest, despite warnings that they were trespassing. Of the 46 charged, at least 14 were undergraduate students at Columbia, nine were graduate students, and two were employees. 

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/06/21/bidens-fiscal-crisis-is-far-worse-than-we-thought/

Nothing should shock us anymore, but the latest Congressional Budget Office report did. Released this week, the report shows that the nation is in vastly worse financial shape than anyone thought just a few months ago. And the report makes clear who is to blame.

The CBO’s latest “Budget and Economic Outlook” projects that the federal deficit this year will top $1.9 trillion. That’s $408 billion higher – a 27% increase – than what the CBO thought it would be just four months ago.

This will make the 2024 deficit the biggest ever recorded in American history – not counting the two years of panic-induced COVID-19 spending sprees – and will mark the third consecutive increase in deficits under Biden. (See the chart below.)

It’s also highly unusual for the CBO to make such a huge correction to its forecast.

The nonpartisan office routinely produces a budget and economic forecast at the start of the year, and then an update mid-year. Normally, these don’t vary much. In Trump’s first three years, for example, the average variance between the first forecast and the final deficit was just $73 billion.