RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/12/where-did-the-new-mad-left-come-from/

Utopianism is age-old, as are its tragic consequences — and we haven’t seen the worst yet.

B outs of extreme leftism are frequent in history. Plato’s Apology, Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, and Vladimir Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? — all offer us insight into the mind and methods of the hard Left.

America has experienced surges of mainstream anarchism, socialism, and communism, most profoundly during the late 19th century, amid the Great Depression, during the Soviet-American alliance of World War II and afterward, and in the 1960s. But rarely have these radical movements openly and without apologies made such inroads into and inside government and the establishment as during the past decade.We had earlier seen massive rioting, looting, and iconoclasm, similar to the chaos of summer 2020. But seldom did they continue with the de facto approval of mayors who restrained the police and turned their downtowns over to virtual occupiers setting up “autonomous” zones. Nor had we see seen city councils defund police operations. New York’s mayor Bill de Blasio and Seattle’s mayor Jenny Durkan were not so much hard-Left Democrats or socialists as they were anarchists who ceded control of parts of American cities to other anarchists.

We cannot recall any district attorney in memory who simply declared that an entire array of crimes no longer existed, and that those convicted of them would be let loose on the public. Yet Los Angeles County district attorney George Gascón recently announced that his office will not be charging anyone arrested for making criminal threats, possessing drugs and drug paraphernalia possession, being publicly intoxicated or under the influence of a controlled substance, loitering to commit prostitution, resisting arrest, or a host of other crimes.

In essence, Gascón simply overrode the California legislature and his own county statutes. He has made up his own laws in his own private fiefdom of Los Angeles County — a jurisdiction of over 10 million, larger than 40 states.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/12/courage-vs-covid-jack-kerwick/

The present year is the Year of Fear. It is the year of raw, wildly irrational fear. 

For sure, the inexhaustible fear-mongering on the part of opportunistic political partisans in the Government-Media-Industrial-Complex has exacerbated, exponentially exacerbated, the fears of tens and tens of millions of Americans. Yet the elites have not, strictly speaking, caused this fear.

They have only revealed it for all of the world to see.

To put this in terms with which most of us have long been familiar, the transformation of a cold virus into an existential crisis legitimizing the indefinite revocation of the United States Constitution and the reduction of the Land of the Free to an internment camp—and one in which its prisoners seem only all too happy to observe “Social Distancing” protocols while cowering behind their masks—has proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that most people really are ridden with fear.    

Fear is universal. It is at once necessary and desirable—as long as it is oriented toward objects that warrant its attention. 

In other words, when the fear is reasonable, when it is proportionate to the danger posed, it is fulfilling its natural function. 

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/12/covid_stats_show_that_very_little_covid_is_transmitted_through_bars_and_restaurants.html

When will the media and government officials show the actual scientific data, instead of just repeating the talking points, that they base all their strict mitigation and lockdown decisions on science? It’s clearly a lie. The answer is ‘never’ because neither facts nor science have mattered for a long time.

All that matters to this bunch is power over the people. Taking freedom and prosperity away is what power-hungry politicians and bureaucrats do.

On COVID, and its lockdowns, shutting down gyms, hair-cutters, bars, and restaurants, they’re particularly dishonest. Look:

What New York’s Contract Data Show:

Schools are safe, but living rooms less so during the pandemic. 

The vast majority of coronavirus cases in New York are spread by contact in living rooms and social gatherings, according to contact tracing data released on Friday by Gov. Andrew Cuomo. 

The data made public by New York officials offers one of the more specific glimpses into how COVID-19 is transmitted in the state.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/the-tragic-failure-of-william-barr_3617008.html?utm_source=partner

I used to be a big fan of Attorney General William Barr.Now, as of Dec. 14, 2020, he’s gone, effective Dec. 23, almost a month before the actual end of a Trump administration, assuming that happens.Technically, Barr resigned, accompanied by the usual complimentary letter to the president, but something obviously went wrong in his relationship with Donald Trump.

What was it?

William Barr certainly knew how to talk the talk. His October 2019 speech on religious liberty at the Notre Dame Law School is particularly eloquent and meaningful. If you haven’t heard it, maybe you should as a reminder of the person he could be.

That was the same AG who promised, what seems like decades ago, he would get to the bottom of the reprehensible, treasonous to many, origin of the Trump-Russia investigation, known hereabouts as Spygate.He assigned John Durham, a reputedly hard-nosed U.S. attorney from Connecticut, to uncover the sources of this outrage and bring the miscreants to justice.

Unfortunately, within that promise soon emerged a hint of trouble to come. Barr informed us that higher officials—meaning, of course, President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden—were not in Durham’s brief to investigate, although they had attended a fateful meeting in January 2016 from whence much may have flowed.

Some people were evidently above the law.

As justification for this, Barr made it seem he was trying to put an end to the politicization of the Department of Justice and the FBI—and maybe he was … in his own eyes.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16860/ag-william-barr

AG Barr was installed to manage President Trump and put him on a glide-path to defeat in last month’s election. President Trump did not select Barr to be his Attorney General — the choice was made for the President by professional Republican political operatives and then presented to him as the only acceptable and Senate-confirmable solution….

When Judicial Watch obtained Justice Department records documenting that 27 phones from the Mueller team were mysteriously “wiped clean” — what did Barr do? Nothing.

Barr allowed Republicans to look at each other, nod and then smile about “what was coming” — until it never materialized. No justice for Hillary, or Comey, or Strzok, or Brennan or the remaining 30–odd names in the coup litany.

In recent weeks I have asked, “Why Does Barr Let Wray Lie and Flout the Law?,” and “Will They Really Get Away With It?” Then, just a few days ago, we learned that Attorney General (AG) Barr hid two probes into alleged criminal conduct of Hunter Biden for months. Barr also announced that he could not see any election fraud — or that he could — but it wasn’t really that bad. Barr told the Associated Press, “To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election” [Emphasis added]. That’s like a mob witness answering, “I have no specific recollection, at this time.” It does not engender deep confidence and faith.

Keep in mind that while President Donald Trump was being impeached over the phony “Ukraine!” controversy, Barr and his FBI Director Wray were in the possession of Hunter Biden’s laptops (since December 2019) – loaded with who-knows-what Burisma information, etc., and did not utter a syllable. Are we beginning to see a pattern of conduct?

Many have wondered for months what, exactly, Barr was up to. He said some strong things supporting the president, then acted in a contrary manner. He talked a good game but seemed to miss a lot of glaringly obvious prosecution opportunities. Why? It seems we now have our answer.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/12/susan-rice-discover-networks/

On December 11, Joe Biden named Susan Rice to lead his White House Domestic Policy Council. Rice’s consistent track record of dishonesty, prevarication, and poor judgment stretches back decades.

By the time she graduated from Stanford University with a degree in history in 1986, Rice was already a committed leftist with a heart and mind full of racial grievance. That year, she wrote an 86-page book titled A History Deferred, which claimed that because most U.S. students were “taught American history, literature, art, drama, and music largely from a white, western European perspective,” “their grasp of the truth, of reality, is tainted by a myopia of sorts.” “The greatest evil in omitting or misrepresenting Black history, literature, and culture in elementary or secondary education is the unmistakable message it sends to the black child,” Rice elaborated. “The message is ‘your history, your culture, your language and your literature are insignificant. And so are you.’” Published by the Black Student Fund — an advocacy group for which Rice interned — A History Deferred served as a guide for elementary- and secondary-school teachers who aspired to teach “Black Studies” from an Afrocentric perspective.

In 1985 Rice was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship and subsequently attended New College, Oxford, where she earned a master’s degree in philosophy in 1988 and a Ph.D. in the same discipline two years later.

Praising the Dictator Robert Mugabe

While at Oxford in 1990, Rice wrote a 426-page dissertation praising, as “a model and a masterpiece in the evolution of international peacekeeping,” the 1979-80 British peacekeeping operation that had led to the political ascendancy of Zimbabwe’s bloodthirsty Marxist dictator, Robert Mugabe. In her dissertation, Rice lauded Mugabe as a “pragmatic, intelligent, sensible, gentle, balanced man” who possessed considerable “patience and restraint.”

Politicizing the Rwandan Genocide

Rice served on the Bill Clinton administration’s National Security Council from 1993-97, and as Clinton’s Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs from 1997-2001.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/12/14/essential-facts-about-covid-19/

Given the spread of misinformation about COVID-19, Just Facts is providing a trove of rigorously documented facts about this disease and its impacts. These include some essential facts that have been absent or misreported in much of the media’s coverage of this issue.

This research also includes a groundbreaking study to determine the lethality of COVID-19 based on the most comprehensive available measure: the total years of life that it will rob from all people. This accords with the Centers for Disease Control’s tenet that “the allocation of health resources must consider not only the number of deaths by cause” but also the “years of potential life lost.”

On one hand, these facts show that:

The average death rate for people who contract COVID-19 is well below 1% and is much closer to that of the seasonal flu than figures that were commonly reported by the press.
The average years of life lost from each COVID-19 death are significantly fewer than from common causes of untimely death like accidents and suicides.
The virus that causes COVID-19 is “very vulnerable to antibody neutralization” and has very limited ability to mutate, which makes it unlikely to take masses of lives year after year like the flu and other recurring scourges.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/12/15/this-is-not-america/

What is the United States of America? A society of elitists vs. the rest? A culture that’s given up on itself? A land of censorship? A nation in which policies and orientation are not merely matters of disagreement but causes of internal and irreconcilable turmoil? It was supposed to be none of these. But today it seems a foreign place, with more in common with the many dystopias of literature than anything the founders of a free nation ever imagined.

Just a single quick scan through the blogs and aggregators of the Internet makes us wonder who and where we are as a nation:

Many of those who hold political, economic, and cultural power favor the system of China, where a single-party autocracy “led by a reasonably enlightened group of people” who live privileged lives plan and execute a top-down national plan the entire country is expected to follow without objection.
At the same time, this class believes it is its job to oversee the decline of America.
Voter fraud and election theft have become normalized nationally rather than confined to big cities run by Democrat political machines.
Voters have put prosecutors who refuse to prosecute into office all over the country. It seems to be one man’s objective to foul our communities so completely that we’ll eventually go begging for tyrants to save us.
The Constitution is being tread upon by sort of tyrants we’ll be asking for in the name of keeping us healthy.
Voters have also put a team in the White House that will be beholden not to the country and Constitution it will swear to protect but to China.
Most of both the media and academia have become naked propagandists for one party rather than objective dispensers of news and even-handed educators.
Corporate America is becoming increasingly captured by woke forces and climate zealots, which makes life harder on the middle and lower classes.
Identity politics and a “social justice” are splitting the nation into warring tribes.
Our freedoms to speak and worship freely are being diminished almost daily.
Dissent from hard-left orthodoxy is punished by job loss, ostracization, and on occasion violence.
Rioters, looters and domestic terrorists are being coddled and even encouraged by the media, academia, and rotten-to-the core politicians.
As Pat Buchanan wrote last week, “we are two nations, two peoples seemingly separated indefinitely. Can a nation so divided as ours, racially, ideologically, religiously, still do great things together, as did the America of days gone by, to the amazement of the world?”