RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/columns/stephen-kruiser/2020/11/18/the-morning-briefing-congress-needs-to-slay-big-techs-3-headed-monster-n1154627

I feel like we have been here before when it comes to Big Tech overreach.

Oh wait, that’s because we have.

Twitter CEO Jack “Great Rasputin’s Beard” Dorsey and Facebook CEO Mark “Bowl Cut” Zuckerberg were back for another virtual get-together with some senators again on Tuesday, this time in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

I am beginning to lose count, but I know that this is at least the third time since the summer that members of Congress and the CEOs have staged one of these political kabuki theater performances. The pattern is familiar: Zuckerberg doesn’t remember much, Dorsey shows up stoned but with plenty of stalling, sometimes nonsensical answers. Then Ted Cruz ABSOLUTELY DESTROYS them, which makes for some good blog traffic.

After that, the Jack and Zuck show gets back to business as usual.

Tyler covered yesterday’s latest “Cruz vs Dorsey” moment:

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) took Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to task over his company’s suppression of the bombshell New York Post report on Hunter Biden’s emails linking Joe Biden to his son’s notorious business deals. In a Senate hearing on Tuesday, Cruz pressed Dorsey on how Twitter could possibly claim not to be a publisher when it selectively applied its hacked materials policy against the Biden story but not against the New York Times article on Trump’s tax returns.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/11/hypocrisy_alert_obama_won_first_election_by_challenging_voter_fraud.html

The first question the fawning Scott Pelley of 60 Minutes asked former president Barack Obama during their interview this past Sunday was this: “What is your advice in this moment for President Trump?”

Pelley was referring specifically to Trump’s continued challenge to the posted results of the November 3rd election. “When your time is up, then it is your job to put the country first and think beyond your own ego and your own interests and your own disappointments,” Obama pontificated. “My advice to President Trump is if you want, at this late stage in the game to be remembered as somebody who put country first, it’s time for you to do the same thing.”

More specifically, Obama insisted that Trump should have conceded no more than two days after the election. “When you look at the numbers, objectively, Joe Biden will have won handily,” Obama continued. “There is no scenario in which any of those states would turn the other way and certainly not enough to reverse the outcome of the election.”

Although Pelley was interviewing Obama about his new memoir, A Promised Land, neither of the two obviously thought it prudent to share with viewers how Obama won his first political campaign, a story that Obama tells in his new memoir.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/11/obamas-ridiculous-call-for-speech-police/

The ex-president shows again he’s a deeply unserious man with an outlandishly un-American proposal.

F un game: Imagine President Obama’s litany of bitter grievances expressed not in the imitation deepthink of middlebrow magazines and their compassion for good government, but in the somewhat earthier demotic of his successor. Take this example, from Obama’s recent BBC comments to promote his third book on his favorite subject:

There are millions of people who subscribed to the notion that Joe Biden is a socialist, who subscribed to the notion that Hillary Clinton was part of an evil cabal that was involved in pedophile rings. I think at some point it’s going to require a combination of regulation and standards within industries to get us back to the point where we at least recognize a common set of facts before we start arguing about what we should do about those facts.

Obama, apparently referring to Facebook posts and other non-mainstream sources of information, is saying the United States should have a regulatory body empowered to stop anyone from publicly stating opinions with which he disagrees (“Biden is a socialist”) or assertions for which there is no evidence (Hillary Clinton was involved in a pedophile ring). Let’s be honest here: What Obama is saying is crazy. It’s a triple-layer cake of crazy with whipped craziness on top. He might as well tweet out: “We would win every election if it weren’t for the FAKE NEWS who will be DEALT WITH!!! My new DEPARTMENT OF FAKE NEWS BLASTERS will shut them up FOREVER!!!”

It’s crazy that Obama thinks the existence of a free press is, on balance, worse for his party than for Republicans; it’s crazy that Obama, a former constitutional-law lecturer, thinks there is some previously unnoticed truth clause in the First Amendment; it’s crazy that he thinks his idea would pass muster with a judiciary that is at the moment more supportive of the free exchange of ideas than in any previous period in American history, especially given the current makeup of the Supreme Court; it’s crazy that Obama thinks that Clinton narrowly lost her bid for the presidency, and Biden narrowly won his, because swing voters decided either that Biden is a socialist or that she is in league with pedophiles. It’s also crazy that Obama hasn’t noticed there are already “standards within industries” to limit the spread of information uncongenial to Obama’s party, revealed in Twitter and Facebook’s publicly admitted efforts to stop the New York Post’s reports about the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop from spreading, a determined effort by mainstream-media outlets to ignore or downplay the story, and the startling admission by the editor of the New York Times that he removed accurate information from an already-published story centering on a sexual-assault allegation against Joe Biden because Biden’s campaign complained.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/11/dr-death-becomes-biden-coronavirus-advisor-don-feder/

Maimonides, the great 12th century codifier of Jewish law, said: “The good doctors will go to hell first,” because skilled physicians will be tempted to play God.

Enter Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, a member of Biden’s recently-announced Coronavirus Advisory Committee. The architect of Obamacare, and brother of former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, is one scary dude. Kindly, Old Doc Emanuel is an advocate of health care rationing for the elderly.

In a 2014 article for The Atlantic, “Why I hope to Die at 75,” Emanuel wrote: “Living long is also a loss. It renders many of us if not disabled, then faltering and declining, a state that may not be worse than death but is nonetheless deprived. It robs us of our creativity and ability to contribute to society …. We are no longer remembered as vibrant and engaged but as feeble, ineffectual, even pathetic.”

When he became prime minister in 1940, Winston Churchill was 66. He was 71 at the end of World War II and 77 when he became prime minister for a second time in 1951. Feeble, ineffectual and even pathetic aren’t words generally associated with Britain’s greatest wartime leader. Ronald Reagan was 70 when he took the helm in 1981.

The problem here isn’t that Emanuel doesn’t want to live past 75, but that he doesn’t want the rest of us to live beyond that age either. In 2009, medical ethicist Wesley J. Smith wrote that Emanuel “explicitly advocates rationing based on what appears to be a quality of life measurement.”

https://www.city-journal.org/whats-next-for-antifa

Before the election, the Southern Poverty Law Center warned that a Georgia militiaman had said that a “rigged election” would lead to rebellion, and that the Oath Keepers militia would monitor polls nationwide to ensure that only U.S. citizens voted. The New York Times likewise asserted that an “army” of Trump supporters would “go into the polls and watch very carefully” in Philadelphia. Notwithstanding President Trump’s allegations of ballot irregularities, including in Philadelphia, none of the pre-election predictions of right-wing mayhem was borne out.

Many of these predictions were predicated on Trump’s alleged call to violence during the first debate, when he told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by.” The Proud Boys, a men’s club that includes members of all races, self-describe as “Western chauvinists” and are certainly uncouth. They hold rallies for Trump and oppose things like “drag queen story hour” for children at public libraries. They exist, however, in a dialectic with Antifa, the far-Left militant group that doxes “fascists” and engages in violence against both property and persons. For Antifa, fascist is a catchall term that includes anyone who believes in private property and sees a place for police in a functioning society.

Antifa differs from other far left-wing groups, including the Democratic Socialists of America, in that it explicitly endorses “physical confrontation” in order to deny freedom of speech and assembly to its opponents. Antifa was relatively unknown in the U.S. until Trump’s 2016 presidential victory. Its most notable action in 2017 was preventing Ann Coulter’s speech at the University of California, Berkeley, by threatening clashes with campus security and Coulter’s Proud Boy bodyguards. Later that year, members of Antifa were mixed in with the large and varied group protesting the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where one person was killed by a white supremacist in a vehicular attack. Last year, Antifa beat up journalist Andy Ngo, who was reporting on a Proud Boys rally in Portland.

In most cases, Antifa’s violence is employed against innocuous demonstrators. For example, African-American Proud Boy Philip Anderson organized a pre-election protest against tech censorship of conservatives in San Francisco. A Black Lives Matter supporter wearing Antifa-style black-bloc garb punched Anderson, knocking out his front teeth. In September, Antifa member Michael Reinoehl targeted and murdered Trump supporter Aaron Danielson in Portland following a car parade.

https://patriotpost.us/articles/74934-a-justice-speaks-out-2020-11-16

It’s no surprise that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s speech last week to The Federalist Society’s National Lawyers Convention received little coverage in the popular press. Why would it? Alito lacks the rhetorical flourish and the mischief-making wit of his late Supreme Court colleague Antonin Scalia, and he was speaking a language — the language of Liberty — that those in the Leftmedia neither understand nor appreciate.

Nor, it seems, are a majority of Justice Alito’s colleagues on the High Court fluent in that language.

In this respect, Alito seems like a quietly but firmly conservative version of the late Democrat Senator Paul Wellstone, who often took a friendly swipe at his consensus-seeking colleagues. “I’m from the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party!” he’d roar. Similarly, it seems, Justice Alito is from the conservative wing of the Supreme Court’s conservative majority.

“The pandemic has obviously taken a heavy human toll,” Alito began. “Thousands dead, many more hospitalized, millions on employed the dreams of many small business owners dashed. But what has it meant for the rule of law? I’m now going to say something that I hope will not be twisted or misunderstood. But I have spent more than 20 years in Washington, so I’m not overly optimistic. In any event, here goes. The pandemic has resulted in previously unimaginable restrictions on individual liberty. Now, notice what I am not saying or even implying: I am not diminishing the severity of the virus’s threat to public health. And putting aside what I will say shortly about a few Supreme Court cases, I’m not saying anything about the legality of COVID restrictions. Nor am I saying anything about whether any of these restrictions represent good public policy. I’m a judge, not a policymaker. All that I’m saying is this, and I think it is an indisputable statement of fact: We have never before seen restrictions as severe, extensive, and prolonged as those experienced for most of 2020.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/beijing-sees-biden-as-someone-susceptible-to-chinese-influence-expert_3580446.html

The Chinese regime would be happy to see a new U.S. administration without President Donald Trump, according to historian Victor Davis Hanson.

If Democratic Party candidate Joe Biden wins the election, Beijing would also press harder on its U.S. allies in the Asia-Pacific region, said Hanson, who is a senior fellow at the Stanford University-based think tank Hoover Institution.

On The Epoch Times’ “American Thought Leaders” program, Hanson said that Beijing sees Biden as someone that would work with the communist regime—“a sign of weakness to be exploited.”

While many media outlets have declared Biden the winner of the presidential election, The Epoch Times will not call the race until all results are certified and any legal challenges are resolved.

Hanson analyzed Beijing’s view of the election: “I think they’re gonna be much more confident now because of the Biden victory, because I think their chief nemesis and biggest worry is gone, if Trump loses.”

The Trump administration has confronted the Chinese Communist Party on a range of issues, including unfair trade practices, espionage, malign influence in the United States, security threats posed by Chinese technology, and human rights abuses in Xinjiang and Hong Kong.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/11/16/biden-covid-advisor-those-older-than-75-should-get-vaccines-last/

American’s should be deeply troubled that a man Biden is looking to for advice on COVID is someone who hopes to die at 75 and has publicly supported rationing care for the elderly.

One of Joe Biden’s early actions after corporate media claimed he was president-elect was to name members of a task force to recommend actions about COVID-19. Most of the names were neither famous nor infamous, but for one: Ezekiel “Zeke” Emanuel, whose fame comes from family connections (he’s the brother of former Obama chief-of-staff and former Chicago mayor, Rahm Emanuel) and the infamy gained from a 2014 Atlantic article, “Why I Hope to Die at 75.”

Now, to be clear, Zeke did not argue for a “Giver”-style “release to elsewhere” of all 75-year-olds. He explicitly states opposition to legalizing euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide. And the initial paragraphs of his article emphasize that this is what he wants for himself: “I am talking about how long I want to live and the kind and amount of health care I will consent to after 75.”

But he should have stopped there. Instead, in that article, he expounds on the vastly-reduced ability of older people to “contribute” or to be “productive.”

What’s more, he writes that “Our living too long places real emotional weights on our progeny” — not merely in terms of caregiving needs, but because “there is much less pressure to conform to parental expectations and demands after they are gone” and because “living parents also occupy the role of head of the family [and] they make it hard for grown children to become the patriarch or matriarch.”