RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/libertarian-betrayal-bruce-bawer/

Don’t laugh, but once upon a time I was so naïve that I thought libertarians were really about liberty.

I even thought that they had an important raison d’être. Back in the day when some of us were uneasy both with GOP preaching on social issues and with Democrat statism, the libertarians seemed to offer a sensible place in between. I also remember having the impression that, even if you disagreed with them on some issues, at least they were ideologically consistent, which meant that they were principled.

But then I met some libertarians. I liked and respected a few. But others proved to be world-class oddballs, misfits, potheads, and crackpots. If they weren’t hatching plans for independent countries built on abandoned oil rigs, they were writing mad, elaborate political manifestos that seemed to have zero to do with liberty. And some were well-nigh indistinguishable from your standard-issue leftist, like the self-described “bleeding-heart anarchist” and “libertarian socialist” (!) whose savage review of The Victims’ Revolution, my 2012 critique of identity studies, in Reason, the libertarians’ flagship rag, could have been written by any multicultural academic.  

People used to write pieces asserting that most Americans were really libertarians but didn’t realize it. Some even said we were approaching a “libertarian moment” when this silent majority would finally take over. But I eventually came to see that while libertarians were thick on the ground in Washington, D.C., they had few constituents outside the Beltway – aside, that is, from the corporations that paid their think tanks to spew out principled-sounding arguments for policies that would line their pockets. 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/whos-afraid-of-amy-coney-barrett-11602629853?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

The Senate confirmation hearings for Amy Coney Barrett may lack for political drama, but they are still instructive. They are revealing the deep fault lines over the Supreme Court, and how Democrats view it as a mini-legislature to achieve policy goals, rather than a real judicial body.

Democrats are asking very little about the actual law or Judge Barrett’s jurisprudential thinking. Instead, one after another, Democrats have used their time to focus on a parade of policy horribles if she is confirmed. And for emotional effect, they brought along photo displays of children and women who would supposedly be her victims on health care, abortion, gun violence and more.

All of this distorts the role of a judge, who has to rule based on what the law is, not on what she would want it to be. “Judges can’t just wake up one day and say ‘I have an agenda. I like guns. I hate guns. I like abortion, I hate abortion’ and walk in like a royal queen and impose their will on the world,” Judge Barrett said Tuesday. But that is lost on Democrats, who are treating the hearings like a campaign rally.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/10/13/will-all-the-name-brand-people-who-pushed-the-russian-collusion-conspiracy-get-off-scot-free/

The Russian collusion hoax has fallen apart more every day. And we haven’t heard a word of comment from any of the people responsible for pushing it and helping fracture this country.

A year ago, the story dominating headlines was the allegation that President Donald Trump had colluded with the Russian government to win the 2016 election. The idea of impeaching President Trump due to these allegations was gathering steam, with accusations from elected officials and beyond that the president of the United States was a Russian puppet, a Manchurian candidate installed by Vladimir Putin, and even an agent of a hostile foreign power for the last 30 years.

You don’t need to be a fan of Trump to be outraged about the Russian collusion conspiracy. But it’s a mark against your patriotism, your judgement, or your intellect if you aren’t. Beyond just being perhaps the most defining political scandal of our time, the hoax gets under my skin because I fell for it. And I’m enormously angry for having been duped.

Now that this narrative has been proven false and possibly influenced by actual Russian disinformation, it is time to revisit how it was created and dominated U.S. politics for so long, as well as demand justice for its perpetrators.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/the-fragments-of-a-civilization/

Government crimes and coverups, a corrupt media, a candidate hiding and lying to the public, and plans to undo the foundations of the republic.P iece by piece, our civilization is beginning to disassemble. And the agents of fragmentation are as obvious as the efforts to conceal them are frantic.

In nonchalant fashion, we learned last week from newly released government documents that Hillary Clinton’s campaign team cooked up the Trump-Russia collusion hoax as a way of diverting attention from her own ongoing embarrassing email scandals.

Clinton, through three firewalls, paid foreign ex-spy Christopher Steele to create a bogus smear-Trump dossier. Steele, who had no data on, or information about any such collusion, apparently drew largely on fabrications dreamed up by a former Russian spy working at the liberal Brookings Institution. The convoluted conspiracy baffled even the sneaky Russians, who were confused when they got wind of it — possibly through the direct participation of one of their own assets.

Did we then spend millions of dollars on Robert Mueller’s nearly two-year investigation, a wild goose chase consuming millions of collective media hours hyping fantasies, and paralyzing an administration for three years — all for Hillary Clinton’s machinations, the apparent true and only Russian colluder?

John Brennan’s CIA intercepted Russian concerns over such a ruse. He even briefed President Obama on the Clinton caper. Yet the U.S. investigatory and judicial branches did not stop Clinton’s efforts to subvert a rival’s campaign. Indeed, many of the highest officials of the Obama administration shortly joined her efforts to seed the fraudulent Steele dossier throughout the Obama government and thus into the media as well — their efforts peaking in timely fashion right before the November 2016 election.

Translate all that, and the evidence grows that Hillary Clinton, in felonious fashion, paid for the Steele dossier to subvert an election and, after the election, to destroy a presidential transition and indeed a presidency itself — government efforts that historians one day will assess as the most intense effort on record to destroy a U.S. president.

https://spectator.us/scott-atlas-blasts-critics-trump-comeback-rally/?utm_source=

Dr Scott Atlas, a member of the White House coronavirus task force, is slamming critics who deemed President Trump’s comeback rally in Florida unsafe, alleging that they have an ‘agenda’ separate from health concerns.

Atlas, who is also a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, told The Spectator in an interview Tuesday that the President met the standard of care necessary to be cleared for public events. According to the Center for Disease Control, individuals who have COVID-19 may be around others if it has been 10 days since their symptoms first appeared and if they have gone 24 hours with no fever without the use of fever-reducing medication. However, various media outlets criticized the fact that the mask-less president had not yet tested negative for the virus when he scheduled the rally.

‘He meets that [CDC] definition,’ Atlas told The Spectator. ‘I don’t even know what the controversy is about him being outside, doing his job. I mean, he’s like all other Americans. He knows he has to go to work. And he’s not infectious. He’s not contagious.’

https://spectator.us/lockdown-incredible-vanishing-world-health-organization/?utm_source=

‘Lockdowns just have one consequence that you must never ever belittle, and that is making poor people an awful lot poorer’

The lockdown is dead…long live the lockdown?

In an interview last Thursday on Spectator TV, WHO special envoy David Nabarro warned seven months too late that the ubiquitous global response to the coronavirus pandemic might be a bit of an oopsie-daisy:

‘We in the World Health Organization do not advocate lockdowns as the primary means of control of this virus,’ Nabarro said. ‘Lockdowns just have one consequence that you must never ever belittle, and that is making poor people an awful lot poorer… It seems that we may well have a doubling of world poverty by next year. We may well have at least a doubling of child malnutrition.’

Now, there was nothing astonishing about Dr Nabarro’s claims. It’s been obvious since April, when Sweden’s outbreak crested, that lockdowns are not necessary to manage the coronavirus danger. And it’s been obvious since the US lost 6.6 million jobs in one week that lockdowns are an elaborate form of economic suicide. In fact, it was obvious before a single lockdown was ordered. Only a government bureaucrat with six weeks of paid vacation and a salary set by statute could believe that the economy can simply be turned off and on with no consequences.

So it wasn’t Nabarro’s words that were remarkable. What was remarkable was that they were coming from the World Health Organization. It was so remarkable, in fact, that Cockburn suffered a crisis of confidence. WHO’s track record on predictions is so abysmal that you could build a tidy fortune asking it to pick football results and then betting the opposite way. The same organization which suggested the coronavirus couldn’t spread person-to-person, which attacked travel bans as bigoted and which doubted the existence of Taiwan, now suddenly says that lockdowns are bad policy? That’s the best argument possible in favor of lockdowns being excellent policy.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16624/socialist-states-of-america

What was troubling 24 years ago is now at a fevered pitch. What was then a disturbance is now a revolution. What was then subversion is now a coup….. “Journalists” within the news media do not report factual developments, and those who do find their Internet presence suppressed by the social media giants. Many enlightened liberals are participating naively in their own destruction in a fashion and on a scale not seen since 1917 Russia.

One party is effectively saying it will pack the courts, including the Supreme Court, with politically friendly judges, so that the judiciary will be an extension of one political party rather than part of a system of checks and balances, the separation of powers or a co-equal branch of government. One party is openly saying it will remove the electoral college, so that sparsely populated, rural states would be totally outvoted by cities. One party is openly saying that it would add more states, such as Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico, to provide it with more Senators to create a permanent one-party rule. And one party is openly saying it would reverse core parts of our Bill of Rights so we could be jailed for free speech, or for owning a gun to defend ourselves, as the minutemen did, against “enemies foreign and domestic.”

This was the situation that brought about the downfall of Venezuela: the government confiscated guns, then people had no way of protecting themselves when the storm troopers showed up.

We have had a good run as a democratic republic – but the country is in danger of being fundamentally and permanently disfigured in a way that will make it unrecognizable. The crime and the cover-up will have been successfully completed. No scrutiny, no justice, no consequences, no memory, no country. The real shame, as in Venezuela, is that many will not even notice until it is too late.

Attorney General William Barr is on a Capitol Hill whispering campaign to select Republicans, telling them that US Attorney John Durham will not move against the anti-Trump coup plotters before election day. One wonders if he has bothered to tell President Donald J. Trump. The consequences for the republic are dire. We slide ever closer to being a failed state. When the justice system is compromised – and it is – we are no better than any other banana republic. No exaggeration. In mid-July, Obamagate indictments were overdue. It is mid-October.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/10/13/covid-19-lockdowns-have-been-a-disaster-end-them-now/

Lockdowns to slow or even halt the coronavirus pandemic have been the focus of an intense debate since early this year. But in recent weeks and months, both the scientific and economic discussions have come down hard on one side: The lockdowns have been an immense failure, costing the economy trillions of dollars and, more importantly, thousands of lives. Time to put an end to this craziness.

For those who don’t recall, the initial lockdowns were sold to the public as an emergency move to “flatten the curve” for 15 days during March to keep hospitals from being overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients. Americans, wanting to do their part, grudgingly agreed to the two-week suspension of normal economic and social activities.

Unfortunately, governors used the opportunity to keep their economies closed indefinitely, in some cases clearly for political reasons. In California, where the shutdown has been devastating, recent re-opening guidelines included “equity measures” ranging from gauging neighborhoods’ “tree canopy” to alcohol availability and voting statistics.

To be absolutely clear, these benchmarks have nothing whatsoever to do with COVID-19. They are merely an effort by far-left California Gov. Gavin Newsom to pander to his increasingly extreme base of voters.

Such arbitrary actions have severe economic consequences. A recent research paper from the American Institute for Economic Research found substantial damage to the U.S. economy’s various sectors at the state, local and national levels. including measures of GDP, imports, exports, business formations, unemployment, industrial output and capacity use,

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2020/10/chicago-gets-its-deadliest-month-25-years-95-daniel-greenfield/

Black Lives Matter. Say their names. Rest in power.

Last month, Chicago recorded its deadliest September in more than 25 years as the city approaches 600 homicides in 2020 with a quarter of the year still left to go.

The Chicago Police Department on Thursday reported there were 81 homicides last month — the most for any September since 1993 when there were 84 — as well as 309 shooting incidents and 400 victims.

Through the first nine months of 2020, Chicago has reported 2,470 shootings — which have left 3,110 victims — and 588 homicides. The city already surpassed 2019’s homicide total by the end of August.

The number of September 2020 shooting incidents and shooting victims are also up 48% and 60%, respectively, over September 2019 totals.

Shootings and murders are up 50%. And they’re beating the nationwide increases. The victims are mainly “people of color”.

  The nation’s second-largest county has recorded more homicides this year than in all of 2019, the majority of which – 95% – were people of color, the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office announced this week.

Sorry, these are not the black lives that Democrats are looking for.