RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/article/no-more-special-counsels

Few innovations in American law enforcement have done more damage than “independent” prosecutors. Independent and special counsels have upended every presidential administration that has encountered them. They have never yielded benefits commensurate with their costs. They should be abolished.

From my perch at the White House Counsel’s Office, I was a front-row observer of, and direct participant in, Robert Mueller’s investigation of Donald Trump. What I saw then confirmed to me the fatal flaws of the special-counsel regime—flaws that, by now, should be obvious to everyone.

The current special-counsel regulation dates to 1999, the year Congress allowed to expire the Ethics in Government Act of 1978, which inaugurated the role of independent counsel. That 1978 statute, a post-Nixon ethics reform, created “independent counsels” who, once appointed, wielded the “full power and independent authority to exercise all investigative and prosecutorial functions and powers of the Department of Justice.” These independent counsels reported to nobody, and they could only be removed for “good cause” and “by the personal action of the Attorney General.”

By the turn of the century, this regime had achieved bipartisan notoriety, spurring multiple Supreme Court cases, prompting perhaps Justice Antonin Scalia’s finest opinion (his solo dissent in Morrison v. Olson), and enabling the endless prosecutorial stalking of executive-branch officials.

Congress’s letting the independent-counsel statute expire should have ended the matter. Yet rather than make a clean break, the Department of Justice made a grave, if understandable, error. It adopted a regulation maintaining independent prosecutors but housing them within the Department of Justice under the supervision of the Attorney General. The department believed it was improving the lapsed statute by continuing to exempt these “special counsels” from the attorney general’s “day-to-day supervision,” while making such prosecutors—unlike independent counsels—ultimately answerable to the attorney general for their investigative and prosecutorial actions.

Experience has proved this system to be no better. For one thing, it does not solve the biggest problem with independent prosecutorial offices—that prosecutors and agents join teams dedicated to pursuing a specific person or group of people. In these supremely political investigations, people who are politically hostile to the investigatory target invariably jump aboard.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-serious-business-of-comedy/

Late last year at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s annual Restoration Weekend event, Seth Dillon, CEO of the wildly popular, controversial satire site Babylon Bee, gave a keynote speech and knocked it out of the ballpark. He was entertaining and inspirational, a great Christian conservative culture warrior doing courageous work defending our First Amendment rights and skewering the idiotic madness of the left’s agenda.

I made sure to invite him on the Freedom Center podcast I host called The Right Take, where I have conversations with important conservative thinkers, writers, pundits, and storytellers about the intersection of politics and culture. On January 11th, the man behind the Bee, “the definitive source of fake news you can trust,” appeared on The Right Take and did not disappoint. His insights into, and tales of fighting, the culture war were such that I thought it worth posting an excerpt from our conversation in case you missed it or just don’t like listening to podcasts. Check it out below.

Mark Tapson: Seth, welcome to The Right Take.

Seth Dillon: Thanks for having me.

MT: I know you’re a busy guy and – I’m sorry, I don’t mean to assume your gender – so I’ll get right to it. In the book Rules for Radicals by the late, left-wing strategist Saul Alinsky, rule number five reads, “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. There’s no defense against it. It’s irrational. It’s infuriating.” Now, the left has wielded this weapon successfully against its political enemies for decades.

But the right has gone much of that time with no counterpart. I mean, in recent years, our side has had Greg Gutfeld, and he’s basically been it. Meanwhile, the left has had every late-night talk show host, basically the entire entertainment industry aligned against the right, with no real heavy-hitting pushback from our side until the Babylon Bee came along. And I think one of the important things the Bee has done for the culture war is that it’s proven that the left can dish it out, but they can’t take it, can they?

SD: They don’t like to be the object of mockery. There’s a number of reasons for that. I think that one of the reasons they don’t like mockery is because mockery does effectively undermine their ideas and their arguments, and they don’t like that, so they try to put a stop to it. We see them behaving like tyrants all the time.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/04/the_ministry_of_bs_will_see_you_now.html

I wonder if there is ever a moment while DHS Secretary Mayorkas is claiming that America’s borders are entirely secure and blaming “climate change” for the influx of tens of millions of illegal aliens into the United States when he thinks, “Wow, I am really full of BS.  I mean, it is simply amazing how much BS I shovel down the American people’s throats every single day.”

The notion that powerful people lie to the public is certainly not new.  You can go back through the centuries and find essays, songs, drawings, and folktales that all attest to the timeless truth that every generation sees its “rulers” as an unworthy camarilla of cutthroats, liars, backstabbers, and thieves.  Still, the lies being told today are just so brazen.  Damaging tornado?  That’s what we get for driving cars.  Too many white mathematicians?  Obviously another bout of “systemic racism” rearing its ugly head.  Trump’s beating Biden in the polls?  Duh — that’s because America runs on “hate”!  

Disney and other child-grooming companies keep telling us that the only way to protect America’s youth is to put them on puberty blockers and let them dance for skeevy adults.  We used to call those skeevy adults “pedophiles,” but now the medical community insists that we treat them with more respect.  I have trouble respecting a profession that wants me to respect child molesters.  I also have trouble respecting a profession that pushes experimental “vaccines” on patients without their informed consent.  The fact that so few physicians have taken responsibility for their unscientific and unethical behavior during totalitarianism’s favorite overhyped pandemic feels like a giant whiff and strike three for medicine.  Or maybe the white coats (“systemic racism” alert!) struck out four years ago when medical associations insisted that Antifa and BLM be allowed to burn down neighborhoods in the name of “social justice health,” while the rest of us were forced to stay inside and participate in the theatrical production of the “Great COVID Hoax.”  A lot of MDs have BS degrees.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/screaming-death-to-america-in-dearborn/

Old Joe Biden has stabbed Israel in the back in order to try to ensure that he carries Michigan in November, but at least some of the Muslims in the Great Lake State don’t exactly seem grateful. Friday was International Al-Quds Day, an orgy of global victimhood posturing and rage over Israel’s refusal to surrender to the Palestinian jihad, and in Dearborn, rallygoers observing the day demonstrated that if Biden actually cared about the wellbeing of the American people, he would have bigger things to think about in Michigan than the presidential election.

Dearborn’s International Al-Quds Day rally was streamed live on the Facebook page of the Arabic-English news site Dearborn.org. It seems to have been taken down from Facebook, but video of the entire rally is still available as of Sunday afternoon at Dearborn.org. Around the 40-minute mark of that video, as the crowd screams “Free, Free Palestine” and the genocidal “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will be Free,” an activist named Tarek Bazzi came to the podium. What he said should be a matter of grave concern to Old Joe, Merrick Garland, and the FBI — if, that is, anyone can convince them that someone who isn’t a “Jan. 6 insurrectionist” or “white supremacist” should warrant any of their attention.

“We’ve been asked in the past,” Bazzi said, “why are our protests on the International Day of Quds, why are they so anti-America? Why don’t we just focus more on Israel and not talk so much on America? Gaza has shown the entire world why these protests are so anti-America.” Bazzi went on to claim that the U.S. was bankrolling Israel’s war effort and running interference for Israel at the UN; he also referred to Hamas propaganda regarding alleged Israeli atrocities.

Reality had no part in this propaganda display, for if it did, Bazzi would have had to take note of the fact that the Biden regime has betrayed and abandoned Israel both at the UN and in regard to its overall war effort.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/04/09/heres-why-nobody-believes-biden-on-the-economy-anymore/

Friday’s jobs report has everyone excited. Everyone, that is, who is pulling for Joe Biden to win reelection. Outside that blinkered lot, the pain of Bidenomics is still very real.

“Today’s report marks a milestone in America’s comeback,” he said. “Three years ago, I inherited an economy on the brink” – a lie we’ve repeatedly exposed – “With today’s report of 303,000 new jobs in March, we have passed the milestone of 15 million jobs created since I took office” – another lie; as we noted last week, the economy has created only 5 million net new jobs under Biden, which is less than the number of jobs created during President Donald Trump’s first three years in office.

Biden goes on: “That’s 15 million more people who have the dignity and respect that comes with a paycheck.”

But wait. Even if that 15 million number was legitimate, does it mean that 15 million people got jobs?

Turns out, it doesn’t not by a long shot.

In a series of posts on X, Heritage Foundation economist E.J. Antoni explains what these numbers really mean. The picture is far from rosy.

Antoni dug into the jobs data and discovered that all the new jobs created in March were part-time. The number of full-time jobs actually declined a little. This trend has been going on for a while, which is why the average number of hours worked each week has been trending down for three years.

Why the surge in part-time employment?

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2024/04/08/who_should_compete_in_womens_sports_150762.html

“What is a woman?” “Can a man get pregnant?” Questions like those are frequently raised at Senate hearings for progressive nominees to the federal bench or Cabinet positions. Republicans pose them for a reason. They know the witnesses will fumble the answers.

Some try to wriggle out with circumlocutions, offering only convoluted mumbling. That works brilliantly for French academic articles but not so well for U.S. Senate hearings. Other witnesses, mostly judicial nominees, claim they cannot answer because the questions might come before them in future cases. They breathe a sigh of relief since their real motto is “Loose lips sink ships.”

Often, Republicans discover the witnesses have already proclaimed their views in opinion pieces, social media posts, or academic articles when they were appealing to like-minded audiences on the left. When the audience is more skeptical, however, they are less eager to repeat those answers or to defend them.

Progressive witnesses may not have answers, but ordinary voters certainly do. They tell pollsters that men cannot get pregnant. Shocking, I know. They think it is ludicrous to place tampons in men’s bathrooms, which some universities and elite high schools do now.

The question of “who is a woman?” is more vexed. The reason is that common sense and cultural tradition point in one direction (“he was born a male and that’s what he is”) but those are opposed by another tradition: our respect for human autonomy. The Western values of human autonomy and deference for individual choices mean we normally acknowledge an adult’s self-identification. (Here is a hard question, though. If my autonomy is to be respected on issues of self-identification, why can’t I simply identify myself as an African American or Native American, even if there is no DNA evidence of that identity? Why shouldn’t that be my choice, just like gender? Yet self-identification as a racial minority without that bloodline is fiercely condemned as a malicious fraud. Just ask Elizabeth Warren, Rachel Dolezal, or Ward Churchill.)

These issues are far from settled politically. If an adult male identifies as a woman, many people say, “So be it. Live and let live.” Others are more dubious. Still others reject it outright.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/04/08/is-the-great-illusion-in-ruins/

In 2021, Joe Biden was elected after a bitterly fought campaign that deposed the incumbent Donald Trump. Democrats eventually captured, for a time, both the House and Senate, ensuring the most left-wing government in modern American history.

Americans were then set to witness a great experiment. For the first time in their lives, a truly radical socialist program would supposedly fundamentally transform the way America dealt with the border, immigration, the economy, race relations, foreign policy, energy, law enforcement, crime, education, and social questions such as religion, gender, abortion, and schooling.

In a sense, we were all to be lab rats of sorts, to be experimented on by the radical left and their various critical theories. Now in the last year of the Biden term, we can see the results of that experiment—and the unfortunate disasters that followed.

But first, how was such a radical move to the left even possible in a center-right America?

The Democratic nominee, Biden, had earlier united the left, but only through a Faustian deal. The handlers of a nearly non compos mentis Biden had ushered all his 2020 primary rivals out of the primary races in unison.

But in exchange for their exits that ensured Biden the nomination, the left took over his general campaign—in which Biden was virtually relegated to his basement—and then set his agenda.

Who was running things?

The mysterious architects of White House ideology included, inter alia, the omnipresent, now-Washington-DC-dwelling Obamas, the old socialist gadfly Bernie Sanders, the fossilized tribunes of the black and Latino congressional caucuses, the DEI firebrand Squad, and the neo-socialist scold Elizabeth Warren.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/04/marxist_globalists_will_resort_to_terror_and_violence.html

It is important to understand that censorship does not occur in a vacuum.  It is a symptom of a worsening disease.  It is an early indicator of the political repression to come.  Like a canary in a coal mine, the criminalization of speech forewarns that State-sponsored terror and murder are not far away.  First, certain words and thoughts are banned.  Next, certain people are rounded up and imprisoned.  Finally, certain “enemies of the State” are executed quite publicly.  The imposition of fear supersedes the rule of law.  Terrorism undergirds social order.  Oppression replaces popular support.

What is happening in the West today is a concentrated push for global communism.  We could bicker about precise definitions — whether we are under attack from Marxists, socialists, Leninists, Trotskyites, Maoists, or other “revolutionaries” — but the end goal is clear.  A small group of global “elites” seek to use ideological and economic leverage to centralize political power and direct all human activity.  They seek the abolition of private property.  They seek absolute control over individual lives and local communities.  They are rebuilding twentieth-century totalitarianism with the privacy-destroying surveillance technologies of the twenty-first century.  

Most Western nations are working together to promote a public vision that achieves their private totalitarian goals.  Governments do not care about “hate speech”; they are dedicated to seizing control of the press, punishing dissent, censoring political opposition, and regulating public debate.  Governments do not care about “climate change”; they are dedicated to seizing control over all economic activity by first establishing a monopoly on available energy.  Governments do not care about “systemic racism,” “social justice,” or “income inequality”; they are dedicated to maximizing social divisions and distorting the meaning of fundamental rights, so that they may undermine long-cherished personal liberties.  Governments do not care about “gun violence”; they are dedicated to disarming their populations and making it impossible for them to fight back against tyranny.  Governments do not care about minimizing vicious and costly wars; they are dedicated to distracting their citizens with false threats to their personal security.  Governments do not care about maintaining the integrity and value of their monetary currencies; they are dedicated to printing and spending money that inflates household costs, taxes middle class savings, maximizes Wall Street profits, and increases welfare dependency.  Governments do not need to create central bank digital currencies to stave off economic disaster; they are dedicated to creating economic disasters, so that they can justify a future communist system that runs on privacy-destroying CBDCs.  

https://amgreatness.com/2024/04/07/navigating-the-vibe-shift-of-a-cultural-reckoning/

We have been hearing a lot about a “vibe shift” in American culture recently. The phrase has been around for a while. It gained new currency after the commentator Santiago Pliego wrote an essay about the phenomenon, and Tucker Carlson had him on his show to talk about it.

I recommend both.  For one thing, they offer notes of cheerfulness (I almost said “optimism,” but optimism is Dr. Pangloss’s failing) in the midst of our sea of gloominess and despondency. According to Pliego, Americans are awakening from their “dogmatic slumbers,” where the dogmas in question are the rancid pieties of the so-called “progressive” establishment. Have you checked your privilege today, Comrade? How are your pronouns holding up? What have you done to combat “whiteness,” “toxic masculinity,” and “climate change?”

The air of unreality is as unmistakable as it is noxious, and I think Pliego is right that the modification in the ambient vibrations—to the extent that one is underway—“is a return to—a championing of—Reality, a rejection of the bureaucratic, the cowardly, the guilt-driven; a return to greatness, courage, and joyous ambition.”

I like all those things—the items on the list of affirmations just as much as the tally of rejections.  Pliego admits that the shift he discerns may be ephemeral, though he is emphatic about his hope that the inklings of change he discerns are strong enough to last and effectively challenge what has become the dominant narrative in our culture.

I, too, have sensed a sea change abroad.  This forthright manifesto by Newsmax’s Carl Higbie is a representative declaration of the New Resistance.

But I also sense a robust resistance to the resistance, an increasingly agitated effort to tamp down and discredit anything or anyone that dares to wake up from wokeness.

That exercise in vibe stiffening takes place around the electric nodes of our culture war.  The carefully manicured narrative surrounding the January 6 entertainment, for example, has become increasingly tattered in recent months as revelation after revelation has undercut, contradicted, or exploded the official “insurrection” narrative. True, there were skeptics from the very beginning (I was one).  But the succeeding months and years—thanks in large part to the tireless efforts of investigative reporters like Julie Kelly and Darren Beattie—have knocked one pillar after the next out from under the official account of what happened during those few hours in and around the Capitol. Remember the “pipe bombs” that were supposedly planted by “insurrectionists” that day? It turns out they were almost certainly dummy explosives planted by government agents.

https://nypost.com/2024/04/04/opinion/up-close-and-too-personal-with-americas-fentanyl-epidemic-where-new-york-is-ground-zero/

It is very easy to find fentanyl in New York.The drug that in 2022 alone killed nearly 110,000 Americans is readily available right here on the streets of this city.Over the past the year, I’ve been investigating the spread of this lethal drug across this country .Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that has a potency many hundreds of times that of morphine.

Largely made in China, its strength means it is easy to transport huge quantities of the drug. It floods into this country, mainly through Mexico.

One recent evening in New York, I headed over to OnPoint, a supervised drug injection site in Washington Heights.

The controversial facility allows addicts to shoot up under “safe” conditions, with staff on hand to revive users if they overdose.

These “safe use” facilities are still in the experimental phase, with many critics as well as supporters.

But, inevitably, it is a meeting place for drug addicts.

And although people are not meant to deal drugs inside the facility, inevitably OnPoint is a focal point for people who are using the most lethal drugs.

Hanging around outside after dark, it didn’t take me long to find someone who was using fentanyl.

He led me over to the park opposite to show me where people were coming to meet dealers.

While I was there, I watched a steady stream of people (including a couple pushing a stroller) going into the darkened park. For one reason alone.

Then, right there in the middle of the street, this man started tourniquetting his arm, getting out a needle and burning something up in a container with a lighter.

What was it?

“Fentanyl,” he explained.