RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/05/mask-nation-and-experts-jack-kerwick/

The Internment of 2020, otherwise known by the Orwellian nomenclature of “Social Distancing” and “Shelter-in-Place,” has always been nothing more or less than an exercise in social engineering unprecedented in American history for both the magnitude of its reach as well as the speed with which it’s been executed.

What we have witnessed over the span of the last two months or so is “the fundamental transformation” of the United States that has long been the prize on which the left has had its eye.

Whether the political and media elites who authored this dark chapter of our national life by stoking and exploiting the fears of tens of millions of American citizens will succeed in relegating forever to the dustbin of history the mode of existence we enjoyed just eight weeks ago is left to be seen. 

Those fears, though—those wildly irrational, paralyzing, life-denying fears—have hurled the country into the Age of the Great UnReason.

And nothing illustrates the contradictions of the age more than the Establishment’s position(s) on the wearing of masks.

As recently as March, during an interview with 60 Minutes, none other than Dr. Anthony Fauci insisted that there is “no reason” whatsoever that anyone except for the health care providers who “really need” them should “be walking around with a mask.”

https://amgreatness.com/2020/05/25/the-curious-flynn-kislyak-call-gets-curiouser/

It is likely that Kislyak, like so many other Obama-friendly foreigners, was in cahoots with the Democrats to entrap Team Trump before and after the election.

The infamous phone call between then-incoming National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak, like so many tales of Russian collusion, is not as it first appeared.

In light of new evidence, it’s likely there’s no truth to the running narrative about the December 29, 2016 phone call that has been the basis of Flynn’s legal nightmare for more than three years. The case against the three-star general, concocted by Barack Obama’s corrupt FBI, centers on the accusation that Flynn discussed U.S. sanctions with Kislyak and later lied about it to the FBI.

And now that we know Flynn’s name in the call was never masked—as the Washington Post reported last week, it was surveillance conducted by the FBI, not by national security officials—Kislyak’s involvement deserves more scrutiny. 

Let us first dispel with the notion that Barack Obama imposed “sanctions” to retaliate for the Kremlin’s alleged election interference. The word “sanctions,” in fact, never appears in Obama’s executive order, which was issued the same day as the Flynn-Kislyak call and more than seven weeks after Election Day; the (barely) three-page document is filled with irrelevant gobbledygook. It was a slap-on-the-wrist, or as one senior Obama aide called the measures, a “symbolic” gesture.

I repeatedly have suggested that Kislyak was a willing partner with the Obama White House in executing the Russian collusion hoax. Kislyak served as the Russian ambassador to the United States for the entirety of Obama’s presidency; he visited the Obama White House at least 22 times.

Press reports describe Kislyak as a longtime Beltway insider, connected to the most powerful people in Washington. “I personally have been working in the United States so long that I know almost everybody,” Kislyak boasted in 2017. 

He was especially tight with his onetime American counterpart, Michael McFaul, an Obama bestie who was sworn in as U.S. ambassador to Russia in 2011 by his then-boss, Hillary Clinton; McFaul is the architect of Obama’s “reset” policy with the Kremlin.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/05/cooking_the_books_on_covid19_deaths.html

Fox News, and other cable networks, run a COVID death count ticker on the side or bottom of the television screen just as they show the major stock indices during the business day. Why are they so obsessed with deaths from the Chinese virus?

Most peoples’ moods are already melancholic over the unending economic shutdown, along with social distancing, masks, and restrictions on movement and assembly not normally seen in free societies. Why don’t news networks show a tally of recovered patients rather than deaths?

Aside from the morbid, “If it bleeds, it leads” mantra that guides much news reporting, the media wants to pin each death on the tail of President Trump. Twitter has a #TrumpDeathCount hashtag to blame every single death on the president, the more the merrier. This is ahead of the fall presidential campaign where Democrats will attempt to blame the entire Wuhan virus mess on Trump, from the economic devastation to the total number of deaths.

https://babylonbee.com/news/governor-whitmer-orders-citizens-to-barbecue-indoors

LANSING, MI—Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer has ordered all citizens to barbecue indoors this Memorial Day.

The executive order restricts all Memorial Day barbecue celebrations to inside only.

“You’re more than welcome to celebrate your freedoms with a barbecue as long as you don’t go outside,” she said, wagging her finger like a school teacher. “Naughty boys and girls hold barbecues outdoors where the big, scary coronavirus can get them. Good boys and girls barbecue inside where it is safe.” 

Anyone who disobeys the order will be put on time-out and sent to bed without any dessert. Those who continually disobey will be grounded and have their Nintendo privileges taken away.

At publishing time, sources had confirmed this restriction would likely be extended through Labor Day 2025.

https://legalinsurrection.com/2020/05/wuhan-virus-watch-all-the-catastrophic-predictions-about-reopening-georgia-florida-and-texas-were-spectacularly-wrong/

Today’s update will begin with a summation of the predictions about a coronavirus catastrophe following the economic reopening of Georgia, Florida, and Texas: They were spectacularly wrong!

Three large Southern states that moved aggressively to reopen amid the coronavirus crisis have seen new cases and deaths largely hold steady since then — despite several controversies over some of their data.

In Georgia, where Gov. Brian Kemp bucked the White House and local officials to lift a stay-at-home order on April 24, the state reported 862 cases on Thursday, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

That was less than the 946 new cases counted on Wednesday, but helped spur a slight rise in a seven-day rolling average that’s been basically trending downward since the start of the Peach State’s reopening.

…Florida — which was among the last states to impose a coronavirus lockdown, on April 2 — hit a record 1,413 new cases on April 16, followed by a record 83 deaths on April 28, according to the Tallahassee Reports website.

Since the state began reopening on May 4, its seven-day average of new cases is essentially flat, according to a chart published by the New York Times.

…In Texas, there were 945 new cases on Thursday, for a total 52,268, according to the Texas Tribune.

The seven-day average of new cases rose fairly steadily from around 1,000 on May 1, when Gov. Greg Abbott began lifting the lockdown he ordered March 19, but began dipping on Sunday and is now around 1,250, according to a chart prepared by the Tribune.

https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/499394-the-covid-19-shutdown-will-cost-americans-millions-of-years-of-life

Our governmental COVID-19 mitigation policy of broad societal lockdown focuses on containing the spread of the disease at all costs, instead of “flattening the curve” and preventing hospital overcrowding. Although well-intentioned, the lockdown was imposed without consideration of its consequences beyond those directly from the pandemic. 

The policies have created the greatest global economic disruption in history, with trillions of dollars of lost economic output. These financial losses have been falsely portrayed as purely economic. To the contrary, using numerous National Institutes of Health Public Access publications, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Bureau of Labor Statistics data, and various actuarial tables, we calculate that these policies will cause devastating non-economic consequences that will total millions of accumulated years of life lost in the United States, far beyond what the virus itself has caused.

Pandemics have afflicted humankind throughout history. They devastated the Roman and Byzantine empires, Medieval Europe, China and India, and they continue to the present day despite medical progress. 

The past century has witnessed three pandemics with at least 100,000 U.S. fatalities: The “Spanish Flu,” 1918-1919, with between 20 million and 50 million fatalities worldwide, including 675,000 in the U.S.; the “Asian Flu,” 1957-1958, with about 1.1 million deaths worldwide, 116,000 of those in the U.S.; and the “Hong Kong Flu,” 1968-1972,  with about 1 million people worldwide, including 100,000 in the U.S. So far, the current pandemic has produced almost 100,000 U.S. deaths, but the reaction of a near-complete economic shutdown is unprecedented.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/coronavirus-china-max-baucus-shilling-for-beijing-propaganda-machine/

Max Baucus has compared President Trump to Joseph McCarthy and Adolf Hitler on Chinese state television.

  S ince the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, former U.S. ambassador to China Max Baucus has given a series of interviews to Chinese state media outlets in which he criticized the American response to the crisis in a rather provocative manner. Notably, he cast the Trump administration’s insistence on assigning blame to Beijing for the coronavirus pandemic as the rhetorical equivalent of Nazism in the 1930s and the “Red Scare” of the 1950s.

Baucus, a Democrat who also served as a U.S. senator from Montana from 1978 to 2014, first compared Trump’s attacks on Beijing to the rhetoric used by Joseph McCarthy and Adolf Hitler in a May 6 appearance on CNN. Subsequently, he became very popular with Beijing’s propagandists and has since repeated the accusation in at least four interviews with Chinese state media.

“Joe McCarthy [and] Adolf Hitler were making statements based on nationalism . . . riling people up, making people believe things that were really not true,” Baucus told the state mouthpiece Chinese Global Television Network on May 12, initially reported by the Washington Free Beacon. “The White House and some in Congress are making statements against China that are so over the top and so hypercritical, they are based not on the fact, or if they are based on fact, sheer demagoguery, and that’s what McCarthy did in the 1950s.”

The U.S. is entering “a kind of an era which is similar to Joe McCarthy” and “a little bit like Hitler in the ’30s,” Baucus told China’s state run Global Times from his home in Montana a few days earlier. “Today, people kind of like to see China get criticized, which is unfortunate, because I think, basically, the American people like the Chinese people, just like Chinese people . . . like American people.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/susan-rices-mysterious-email-11590103327?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

“The larger truth here is now undeniable: The Obama Administration spied on the political competition, it continued that spying even after Mr. Trump was elected, and then it tried to cover up what it had done. If Mr. Trump had done anything remotely similar, folks would be calling to bring back the guillotine.”

‘I know nothing about this.” That’s how Susan Rice, President Obama’s national security adviser, responded when asked on PBS’s NewsHour in March 2017 “whether Trump transition officials, including the President, may have been swept up in surveillance of foreigners at the end of the Obama administration?”

Now we know that denial wasn’t true. The evidence comes from her own hand. In her last minutes in government, on the day of Donald Trump’s inauguration, she sent herself an email to memorialize an Oval Office meeting two weeks earlier. Its attendees included Barack Obama, Joe Biden, FBI Director James Comey, Acting Attorney General Sally Yates and herself. A newly declassified paragraph from that email quotes Mr. Comey talking about the monitoring of Trump adviser Michael Flynn’s conversations with then Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

The timing of that meeting is illuminating. The day before, Jan. 4, 2017, internal FBI documents show the bureau was planning to close its investigation into Mr. Flynn’s ties to Russia because agents had found no evidence of wrongdoing.

The day after, on Jan. 6, Mr. Comey gave his now notorious briefing to President-elect Trump. He mentioned the lurid claims from the Steele dossier. But, incredibly, Mr. Comey did not tell the incoming President the concerns he had expressed the day before to President Obama about the danger of Mr. Flynn’s passing classified information to the Russians. No doubt that is because he wanted to keep from Mr. Trump that the FBI was investigating his team.

DELIVERED AT ARLINGTON CEMETERY

My fellow Americans:

Memorial Day is a day of ceremonies and speeches. Throughout America today, we honor the dead of our wars. We recall their valor and their sacrifices. We remember they gave their lives so that others might live.

We’re also gathered here for a special event — the national funeral for an unknown soldier who will today join the heroes of three other wars.

When he spoke at a ceremony at Gettysburg in 1863, President Lincoln reminded us that through their deeds, the dead had spoken more eloquently for themselves than any of the living ever could, and that we living could only honor them by rededicating ourselves to the cause for which they so willingly gave a last full measure of devotion.

Well, this is especially so today, for in our minds and hearts is the memory of Vietnam and all that that conflict meant for those who sacrificed on the field of battle and for their loved ones who suffered here at home.

Not long ago, when a memorial was dedicated here in Washington to our Vietnam veterans, the events surrounding that dedication were a stirring reminder of America’s resilience, of how our nation could learn and grow and transcend the tragedies of the past.

During the dedication ceremonies, the rolls of those who died and are still missing were read for 3 days in a candlelight ceremony at the National Cathedral. And the veterans of Vietnam who were never welcomed home with speeches and bands, but who were never defeated in battle and were heroes as surely as any who have ever fought in a noble cause, staged their own parade on Constitution Avenue. As America watched them — some in wheelchairs, all of them proud — there was a feeling that this nation — that as a nation we were coming together again and that we had, at long last, welcomed the boys home.