RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thespectator.com/topic/cunning-democrats-lawfare-trump/

It saddens me to admit it, but the evidence is too overwhelming to dismiss: Democrats are significantly more cunning than Republicans.

I say “Democrats,” but that is an imprecise, even a misleading, designation. Party affiliation is not now, if it ever was, a really accurate predictor of ideological coloration.

What I mean are those people, most of whom happen to belong to the Democratic Party, who have been bitten by the bug of extremism, who are fired by revolutionary fervor, who regard every opponent, every contrary opinion, as a “by-any-means-necessary” fire alarm.

It is an attitude that has stirred their creativity, also their vindictiveness.

Hercules had to undertake twelve supposedly impossible labors. Donald Trump is fast catching up.

It would never have occurred to me — or, I’d wager, to anyone on my side of the ideological aisle — to transform through the alchemy of political bile a normal business proceeding into a high-profile trial in which a verdict of fraud was handed down and an eye-watering fine of hundreds of millions of dollars imposed even though there was no one defrauded.

But that was exactly what happened to Donald Trump.

Similarly, who on the conservative side would have been clever or malicious enough to elevate a nondisclosure agreement into a thirty-four-count felony indictment? The alchemists of old would have been impressed by that power of transmogrifying the base matter of political spleen into electoral gold.

That, anyway, is what District Attorney Alvin Bragg and the compromised Judge Juan Merchan are hoping to accomplish with the so-called “hush-money” trial of the former president.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/05/the_network_behind_the_pro_hamas_disruptions.html

How did anti-Israel protests erupt within a month of the Hamas-led October 7 massacre?  How did university campuses in America turn into tent cities of keffiyeh-clad youth calling for the liberation of Palestine, the annihilation of Israel, and death to Jews?  If you suspect these protests are well orchestrated and funded, you are right.

Behind them is a coalition of radical leftist and Islamist groups drawing sustenance from the vast dark money network of Neville Roy Singham, and linked through him to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).  This has been confirmed by a 34-page report from the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), an affiliate of Rutgers University.

Analyzing open-source data using proprietary software, the NCRI’s multidisciplinary teams identify emerging threats to civil society.  The NCRI report describes Singham as a “known conduit for CCP geopolitical influence.”  As early as 1974, when he was 20, Singham was the subject of an FBI investigation for links with groups inimical to U.S. interests.

He is now based in Shanghai and, with his wife Jodie Evans, uses corporate entities and philanthropic hedge funds to channel money for fomenting unrest in free societies.  His network “exploits regulatory loopholes in the U.S. nonprofit system” to fund a) media groups promoting anti-American narratives, and b) “seemingly grassroots activist movements,” such as those behind the pro-Hamas protests.  The report says the network is a “significant concern to the internal stability” of the U.S.

Its alarming assessment:

While nominally focused on Israel, the current protests can be better understood as a well-funded initiative driving a revolutionary, anti-government, and anti-capitalist agenda, with the leading organizations serving as versatile tools for foreign entities hostile to the U.S.

The unrest is likely to continue through summer and until the presidential election.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/while-military-families-go-hungry-pentagon-wastes-billions-on-equity/

Last year the United States Army recommended that military service members struggling with inflation should apply for Food Stamps. This year, the Military Family Nutrition Access Act was introduced in the Senate to make more military families eligible for food stamps.

In the past, Senate members and elected officials had tried to get military families off food stamps. Measures like the “Remove Service Members from Food Stamps Act” in 2000 set out to boost military pay. Bush and Gore both promised to end the need for food stamps and the number of personnel on food stamps dropped into the low thousands. It’s now over 20,000.

Instead of ending the need for food stamps, politicians are trying to make them easier to access.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration has better ideas for where to spend the defense budget. The Pentagon is asking for $114 military to fund its DEI initiatives which would focus on  “ensuring our entire workforce lives by fundamental values that bolster unit cohesion”. This is a euphemism for leftist political indoctrination which has already gravely undermined morale.

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion is a term that represents replacing merit and equality with government intervention or ‘equity’ to achieve the ‘correct’ outcomes through measures such as affirmative action, penalizing people based on their race and spreading the idea that differences in outcomes are due to ‘systemic racism’ and ‘whiteness’ that have to be stamped out.

The millions will be spent on, among other things, fighting “problematic behaviors” and force officers to impose “a climate of inclusion that supports diversity” that ”is free from problematic behaviors.” Not only is the Defense Department determined to function like a college campus, but it wants to spend over $100 million to wreck what’s left of morale in the military.

https://spectator.org/the-anti-woke-counterrevolution-is-spreading/

Writing in this space five months ago, I argued that an anti-woke counterrevolution was starting on American campuses. While that is certainly even more true today, I am seeing increased signs of a more widespread revolt against relentless attacks on traditional American values such as respect for free speech and private property, as well as a reverence of God, hard work and assessing people on the basis of meritorious accomplishment.

Many revolutions are ultimately followed by a counterrevolution: the Russian Revolution was ultimately reversed, albeit after seven decades; the Protestant Reformation sparked a Counter Reformation; France went through several dramatic regime changes in the two centuries after its Revolution of 1789, including five forms of democratic republics. Similarly, in America a progressive movement contemptuous of traditional American values has captured college campuses, spreading to other sectors of life including churches and private business, but now the collegiate counterrevolution is beginning to take hold. As progressive-provoked excesses multiply on campuses and well beyond, many ordinary citizens are saying “enough is enough.”

Let’s start with the oldest continuous Western institution, the Roman Catholic Church. News stories are appearing how young Catholics are yearning for a return to traditions prevailing before the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s, wanting fewer guitars at masses and more traditional rituals, including the use of Latin. In the leftist college town in which I live, Athens, Ohio, even the priests are amazed at the growth in young person mass attendance and their push for reviving old traditions dating back centuries. New Protestant denominations that emphasize God and traditional values like the Ten Commandments, and that downplay political activism, are booming, with local students telling me services are very well attended. Old-line large Protestant denominations like the Methodists that have increasingly tolerated values inconsistent with traditional Christian practices are suffering membership losses and undergoing internal civil war, especially over whether to sanction same sex marriages.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/staff/don-feder/

President Barack Obama said he wanted to “fundamentally transform” America. President Biden is more ambitious. He wants to abolish America. In three years, he’s made an impressive start.

The left doesn’t want to govern. It doesn’t want to compete in the marketplace of ideas. It wants to turn this country into a “woke,” broke shell of its once great self.

We no longer have borders, even the semblance of safety in our cities, an impartial system of justice, or a military capable of defending us. The Ten Commandments have been replaced by three — diversity, equity and inclusion.

Mr. Biden doesn’t fit the image of a revolutionary — no bristling beard or fierce mustache, no hours-long harangues. He can barely stand unsupported for more than a few minutes. But a lifetime of rage has given him an appetite for destruction. Instead of rule or ruin, it’s rule to ruin.

At least 10 million have entered the country illegally under this administration — more than the population of 36 states. They include over 20,000 Chinese nationals, mostly men of military age, and hundreds on the terrorism watch list. Their contribution to America may be seen in the actions of the six “migrants” who stomped two cops in Times Square in January.

In the latest Rasmussen Reports, 57% of likely voters said the purpose of porous borders is to keep the Democrats in power. Not coincidentally, 14 states do not require any form of ID to vote.

Political power aside, open borders are chaos for the sake of chaos.

Cities such as New York, Chicago and Los Angeles have been turned into cesspools of homelessness, drug abuse, crime and mental illness. San Francisco, which has maps to help pedestrians navigate piles of poop, now provides homeless alcoholics with wine, beer and vodka.

No one is safe on streets ruled by criminals and crazies. Random acts of violence are hardly news anymore. More police have been killed in the line of duty in the past three years than in any similar period on record.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/05/19/the-dodgy-data-behind-the-dei-crusade/

DEI has been pitched to Americans as an effort to foster workplace harmony. But if a scathing new report is anything to go by, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) is nothing more than a cynical marketing ploy founded on corporate doublespeak. And the Biden administration has fallen for it.

An exposé published by the College Fix this week reveals that at least 51 federal agencies have justified their DEI policies by citing four studies by McKinsey and Company, an American consultancy firm. These glossy studies – ‘Diversity matters’, ‘Delivering through diversity’, ‘Diversity wins’ and ‘Diversity still matters’ – make the so-called business case for DEI. But critics are now eviscerating McKinsey’s research as shoddy, agenda-driven and riddled with weak data.

Take a new rule from the Department of Labor’s Employee Benefits Security Administration, enacted in January last year. This rule expands the application of environmental, social and governance (ESG) criteria – used to measure a company’s ‘social impact’ – to government pension funds. Essentially, this means retirement-fund managers now have to put ESG considerations at the heart of their investment decisions. Supposedly, this is because companies with a good ESG score will deliver the best returns. What research is this claim based on? You guessed it: two McKinsey studies that suggest ‘social responsibility’ is the golden ticket to productivity.

Economist Alex Edmans, professor of finance at the London Business School, has slammed the Department of Labor for clinging to McKinsey’s dubious work. He argues that the department had ‘already decided’ its preferred policies and ‘searches for any study that will support this idea, regardless of its quality’. ‘McKinsey is a consultancy, not a research organisation’, Edmans concludes. ‘The goal of its papers is marketing rather than scientific inquiry.’

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/05/20/sorry-but-dow-40000-isnt-worth-celebrating/

The headline in the Wall Street Journal typifies the reaction to the Dow Jones Industrial Average closing above 40,000 for the first time in its history — “Dow at 40000 Is Welcome News for President Biden.”

The Journal calls it “the latest sign the economy has shrugged off the threat of recession,” and says it’s “welcome news for President Biden, whose approval — and re-election prospects — are being held down by public dissatisfaction with the economy …. The Dow is up nearly 30% since Biden was inaugurated in January 2021. That is slightly higher than where the Dow was at the same point in Donald Trump’s presidency.”

The Biden campaign couldn’t have said it better! In fact, the first thing his campaign did was parrot that opening, with a post on X mocking Donald Trump in a split screen showing Trump predicting a market crash should Biden get elected and the clips of broadcasters popping Champagne corks as the Dow crossed 40,000.

Hitting 40,000 is, to be sure, an important milestone — even if it’s just psychological. It means the Dow has officially doubled in value in just over seven years (from 20,000 in early 2017 to 40,000 last week). That’s less than half the time it took to double from 10,000, which it hit in April 1999.

https://tippinsights.com/bidenflation-soars-to-19-2-eroding-americans-purchasing-power/

President Biden, a seasoned politician, has failed miserably in tackling inflation, and it is nearly certain that he can’t wave a magic wand and tame the beast before November. So, he has embarked on an alternate strategy to pin it on Trump. The President, famous for his tales about the “bad dude” Corn Pop, calling a voter at a campaign stop a “lying dog-faced pony soldier,” the death of his uncle Finnegan due to ‘cannibalism’ in Papua New Guinea, and how the xenophobia of Indians and Japanese impede progress, keeps claiming that inflation was nine percent when he took office, even though it was 1.4%.

When President Biden first made the claim, we dismissed it like Special Counsel Robert Hur as coming from a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” He has now repeated the claim several times, and we wonder why none of his economic advisors or Nobel Laureate economist friends have corrected him.

Americans know the truth, and the claim comes across as malarkey in plain Biden speak.

The dark reality of Bidenomics is 19.2% inflation under the President’s watch, which is 5.9% annually. When he took office, inflation was at just 1.4%. Since March 2021, it has stayed above the Federal Reserve’s 2% target (38 consecutive months.).

Under Biden, the federal debt has increased by $6.9 trillion. The Federal Reserve printed money out of nothing to finance his spending spree. The increased money supply without a corresponding increase in goods and services reduced the value of each dollar, causing prices to rise quickly and leading to high inflation, effectively acting as a hidden tax on everyone.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/05/19/the-new-anti-americanism/

I wonder if Empire—the nearly 500-page reader-proof tome by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri—is about to make a comeback. The book has long-since disappeared into well-deserved oblivion.

But when it was first published some twenty years ago, it took the world—at least the gullible world of academia and adjacent media middens—by storm.

The venerable literary Marxist Fredric Jameson opined that it was “the first great new theoretical synthesis of the new millennium.” The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek—a plausible replacement for Jameson as the world’s trendiest academic Marxist—declared that it is “nothing less than a rewriting of the The Communist Manifesto for our time.”

Further down the intellectual food chain, Emily Eakin, a journalist for The New York Times, delivered herself of an ecstatic summary, simultaneously certifying and increasing the book’s prestige. Perhaps, she speculated, it is the “Next Big Idea,” the successor to structuralism and deconstruction in the halls of literary academia. It is too soon to say for sure, she cautioned, but, possessed as it is of “the formal trappings of a master theory in the old European tradition,” the book “is filling a void in the humanities.”

Neither blurb writers nor cultural journalists write under oath, of course. But even with all of the appropriate discounts, this is an exceptional outpouring. At the time, Hardt was a thirty-something associate professor in the literature program at Duke. His co-author, Antonio Negri (1933-2023), was  an Italian political philosopher in his late sixties who is described on the book’s dust jacket as “an independent researcher and writer and an inmate at Rebibbia Prison, Rome.” I will say more about Negri below.

Empire’s combination of owlish scholarly pretentiousness, on the one hand, and bristling Communist militancy, on the other, more or less guaranteed it at least a respectful audience in the academy.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/05/which_makes_better_soldiers_dei_or_assimilation.html

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) is divisive, as it emphasizes differences based on race, ethnicity, biological sex, gender identities, etc., which is opposed to the time-tested, traditional military culture emphasizing unity, teamwork, selflessness, sacrifice, and assimilation into the warrior ethos.

May 1969, a commercial bus full of sleepy recruits stopped during darkness at Fort Ord, CA. Two Drill Instructors (DIs) jumped on the bus and started screaming, “get off my bus, you dirtbags, and line up outside.” A diverse assortment of now wide-awake young men lined up in four rows and then shuffled/marched to sterile appearing billets with a platoon of 50 recruits in each open bay, gray double-decker bunks with sheets and a wool blanket on both sides of an aisle running down the middle of the bay. They were awake until 0200 scrubbing the billet floors and latrine; up at 0530 the next day.

The next day they marched with DIs yelling commands, to the long quartermaster warehouse to be issued clothing and gear. But, first a stop at the barber building with a line of barbers ready to buzz hair off which they did quickly leaving about 1/4 inch on the top and almost none elsewhere.

Inside the quartermaster building there was a long countertop with mostly civilians on the opposite side manning issue stations; the recruits moved from one station to the other getting standard Olive Drab issue clothes which they stuffed into duffle bags. Sizes for fatigues, socks, t-shirts, boots, etc. were based on the calibrated eyeball estimate of the QM guy behind the counter. The heavy duffle bags were carried back to the billets where the contents were arranged in foot and wall lockers, dress right dress, according to the SOP, inspected and enforced by the DIs.

All of this was done to erase the “back on the block” civilian mentality and quickly replace it with “you’re in the Army now” and don’t forget it mindset. No more personal identities, no more it’s about me, it is now about the “Green Machine, your ass is mine” and your personal identity as a civilian does not matter; it no longer exists — you are now part of the machine — you have one color — Green.