RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/article/what-does-the-student-intifada-want

With few exceptions, college and university presidents were slow and ineffective in responding to the protests and encampments on their campuses this spring. Their passivity calls to mind the character Gottlieb Biedermann in Max Frisch’s play The Fire Raisers, who, hearing about a series of local arsons, refuses to believe that the men who manipulated their way into occupying his attic could be the perpetrators. Deceived by feelings of guilt, Biedermann is unwilling to throw the men out or believe that they are dangerous—even when they tell him exactly what they are doing. Remaining in denial to the end, he hands them the very matches they use to incinerate his home.

Too often, when faced with the fervent demands and outlandish behavior of student demonstrators, university officials allowed them to violate institutional policies, disrupt academic life, and harass Jews. When presidents finally acted, many negotiated with the protesters and capitulated to their demands. Even those who rightly called the police often failed to impose serious consequences on the disrupters. In the end, few protesters face meaningful sanctions for their extended violations of campus policies and, in many cases, the law.

Yet, the protesters and their allies complained about “authoritarian” crackdowns, betrayals of democratic values, and free-speech violations as their camps got cleared away. Their complaints can be attributed partly to ignorance; a student speaker at Harvard University’s commencement, for example, proclaimed to a cheering crowd that the university had violated students’ “right to civil disobedience,” a right she genuinely seemed to believe that they had. One poll showed that more than half of those who said they supported chanting “From the river to the sea” were unable to name the river and the sea to which the chant referred. When a young woman at New York University was asked what she wanted the university to do, she turned the question to her friend: “Why are we protesting?”

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/06/19/conformity-is-the-enemy-of-free-speech/

The Gaza solidarity encampments that spread across US universities earlier this year showed that free speech is under threat from all sides. Intolerant ‘pro-Palestine’ students wanted to exclude Zionists, Jewish students and anyone not fully committed to their cause from campus. They were happy to disrupt university life and to prevent classes and lectures from taking place. At the same time, some on the pro-Israel side called for these protests to be forcibly shut down, for demonstrators to be arrested and for Israelophobic speech to be censored or punished. Those who are consistent in their support for free speech are becoming rarer by the day.

Greg Lukianoff – president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) – returned to The Brendan O’Neill Show last week to discuss the need for a radical revival of free speech. What follows is an edited extract from the conversation. Listen to the full thing here.

Brendan O’Neill: Where does the left-right divide currently fall on the question of free speech?

Greg Lukianoff: One of the reasons I’m worried about the future of freedom of speech, in the United States and beyond, is that there used to be a contingent of the left that unapologetically defended free expression. These people were always in tension with those totalitarians who believed that, if society was governed by enlightened people like them, censorship would be justified. For the most part, I grew up at a time when freedom of speech was actually considered a left-wing value. But with totalitarian thinking winning on the left and the rise of the populist right, there’s no natural constituency for free speech today other than the centre.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/our-intel-agencies-celebrate-pride-by-prioritizing-nail-painting-over-national-security/

Under the Biden administration, America has taken many wrong turns, but what may prove to be one of the most consequential is quite simply the fact that we are becoming a fundamentally unserious nation, one that is throwing away its self-respect, its dignity, its gravitas, if you will, in the name of embracing the emasculating gender ideology that has become the tip of the spear of the cultural Marxist subversion of America.

To demonstrate this tragic state of affairs, let me share with you something at the Daily Wire which caught my eye, an exclusive there regarding how President Biden’s intelligence community is celebrating the so-called “Pride Month” of June with, among other activities, free trans flag manicures for agents who would otherwise be occupied with our national security.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) is an agency which oversees the rest of the intel community, including the CIA, FBI, NSA, and intelligence departments in each branch of the military. It is celebrating Pride Month – an entire month devoted to the mandatory celebration of transgressive sexual proclivities – by inviting intelligence agents to have the transgender flag painted on their nails, participate in a “Pride Ally Challenge,” and learn all about non-binary identity from a “Filipinx” activist. (The “x,” for those are blessedly ignorant of such things, is a non-binary suffix that gender activists are desperately trying – and failing – to normalize.)

The Daily Wire came into possession of a document which outlines nine different Pride Month activities which occurred on June 4th during work hours. So at a time when intel officers should have been focused on thwarting terror plots or investigating violent political movements like Antifa, they had the opportunity to have their nails painted with trans flags, or even to learn how to crochet their very own pride flags!

The document reads,

For nail painting, we’ll have our pro team of FVEY artistes ready to decorate you ready for Pride Month, with the option of celebrating pride or trans flag colors. If you don’t normally paint your nails, or have never done so, all the better! We’ll do everything for you, and you might just love it. What better way to show your allyship to the community?

Cringeworthy, to say the least. FVEY, by the way, is an awkward acronym which refers to the Five Eyes Intelligence Alliance of the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. This reference suggests that intelligence agents from those countries may have been invited to the nail painting event as well.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/06/the_censorship_industrial_complex_and_how_it_has_the_internet_in_its_grip.html

Since the 1960s, the military-industrial complex has influenced and driven American policy to profit cynically from conflict and war.  But in this decade, a new complex has arrived, one that is far more dangerous to American values.  It is the censorship-industrial complex (CIC), which has gained tremendous control over the internet.

When the internet-backed World Wide Web was created in 1989, it democratized information and connectedness.  Through rapid commercialization, it unleashed unlimited possibilities and economic growth.  Equally, it became a haven of free expression, debate, and creativity.  These ideals crystallized into the five principles of the 2012 Declaration of Internet Freedom: non-censorship; universal access; freedom to connect and create; the right to privacy and control of personal information; and protection for technology and innovation.

But governments and the elites that control them were quick to move in, sensing the threat to their authoritarian instinct.  At work since 2016, the pernicious CIC gained strength during the Covid-19 pandemic, amplifying government-approved narratives that favored the agenda of the elites.  Furthering the advance to the Great Reset, it now works to color content and discourse in the leftist hues that disguise the intent and operations of the global elites.

Mike Benz, a former State Department official who now heads the Foundation for Freedom Online and is a staunch campaigner against the CIC, reveals that the complex is controlled by the State Department, the Defense Department, the CIA, MI6, and Brussels.  The turning points, according to him, were the Brexit referendum, the election of Donald Trump, and elections in the Philippines, in all of which the internet played an important role.  Therefore, it was decided to end free speech on the internet and control the flow of information.  Since the American government was hamstrung by the First Amendment, NGOs and fronts were enlisted for “doing the dirty work.”

https://amgreatness.com/2024/06/17/how-left-wing-conspiracies-work/

Since 2016, there has been a clear pattern to left-wing conspiracies—beyond the obvious fact that they traffic in lies, stereotypes, and paranoia to serve precise political agendas.

We now know that the conspiracy to cook up the Russian-collusion hoax—Donald Trump allegedly conniving with Vladimir Putin to rig the 2016 vote—was perpetrated by the Hillary Clinton campaign. Its funding was hidden by the Democratic National Committee, the law firm Perkins Coie, and Fusion GPS.

The Russian “disinformation” laptop hoax—the notion that the same Russians four years later created a fake Hunter Biden laptop to smear the Biden family on the eve of the first 2020 debate—was jumpstarted by the Biden campaign’s then-chief foreign policy advisor, current Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

There was never much evidence that a wayward bat or pangolin in a meat market birthed the COVID-19 pandemic, despite the efforts of China, Western and international health officials, and Dr. Fauci’s health bureaucrats to spread that lie.

The January 6th riot was certainly wrong and buffoonish. But the idea that it was an insurrection aiming to violently overthrow the U.S. government was also a left-wing myth fueled by the Democratic House leadership and the media.

All these schemes have their commonalities:

1) They are aimed at achieving political objectives.

False claims of Russian collusion likely drained millions of votes from the 2016 Trump candidacy.

A later conservative poll found that Russian disinformation may have swung enough voters to ensure a 2020 Trump loss. It certainly saved Joe Biden in the first debate when he faced the American people and flat-out lied about the laptop, quoting “experts” that his own team had rounded up to legitimize his obvious untruths.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-strange-finances-of-bidens-terror-ambassador/

When Israel took out a top Hamas terrorist, Hady Amr warned that “every Israeli” would pay. And that America would too.

That was less than a year after 9/11. By Oct 7, when Hamas launched its murderous ethnic cleansing assault, Amr had become Biden’s Special Envoy to the ‘Palestinians’.

Formerly employed by a Qatari front group, a state sponsor of Hamas, Amr, a Muslim immigrant who grew up in Saudi Arabia, had advocated for a deal with Hamas.

“I was inspired by the Palestinian intifada,” Amr wrote, making no secret of his hatred for America and Israel. The Muslim immigrant found his way into the State Department under Obama. But then he mysteriously also appeared on the list of Biden’s top bundlers.

Freedom Center Investigates had broken the Amr story and exposed his extremist activities, but there was still one big question hanging overhead. Where did all that money come from?

It’s not unusual for donors to be picked as ambassadors, but those donors are usually wealthy people selected as envoys to friendly nations with no policymaking role. Amr however had bundled money and was then picked for a policymaking position to empower Islamic terrorists.

Hady Amr’s financial disclosures reveal an estimated net worth of between $17 to $61 million.

How does a former ambassador amass those kinds of assets?

Last year, Amr drew a salary of $183,000 from the State Department. As he did in the last two years. And in 2016 when he was working under Obama, he was earning $160,000 a year. While that may seem like a lot of money to ordinary Americans, no one becomes a millionaire on such a salary while living and working as a government official in Washington D.C.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/06/the_feds_are_itching_to_j6_us_again.html

After New York’s sham “justice” system procured a ridiculous felony conviction against President Trump, a lot of leftist commentators predicted that his supporters would erupt in violent mayhem.  When MAGA Americans failed to riot in the streets like Antifa goons and pro-Hamas jihadists, it was easy to sense Democrats’ disappointment.  Biden’s campaign has been desperate for an explosive J6 or Charlottesville incident to use to slander Trump’s voters as violent extremists.  MAGA did not take the bait.

This was a wise decision.  Although millions of Americans are deeply offended by the Democrats’ lawfare tactics and justifiably worried that prosecutors’ political targeting has irreparably damaged the rule of law, they must also avoid stepping into new traps that could jeopardize their freedom.  As the Gestapo FBI and the Democrat-led Deep State become more desperate to rig the 2024 election in Biden’s favor, they will seek to create situations that enrage MAGA voters.  Not only does Chris Wray’s secret police force have a financial incentive to hunt down Trump-supporters as “domestic terrorists,” but also the Biden regime is eager for swing-state independents to forget about how Democrats’ anti-Semitic shock troops recently took over college campuses.  It is difficult to paint ordinary Trump voters as “dangerous” when ordinary Biden voters are threatening Jews, toppling statues, and burning down buildings.

Never let an enemy choose the time or place for confrontation.  

A lot of Americans learned that lesson the hard way on January 6, 2021.  Hundreds of thousands of patriotic, civically minded, and law-abiding citizens showed up in D.C. to protest 2020’s mail-in ballot fraud and demand free and fair elections.  What they did not know is that Nancy Pelosi’s Democrats, Mitch McConnell’s Decepticons, and the Gestapo FBI-DOJ were salivating at the opportunity to frame them as “domestic terrorists.”  

The whole breach of the U.S. Capitol — if one can even use “breach” to describe an event that included Capitol Police officers holding doors open for smiling tourists — was over in a few hours.  Still, as if reading from the same bad movie script, everybody from Congress’s Hamas Caucus to President George W. Bush immediately referred to the incident as an “insurrection.”  It was readily apparent to anyone with a brain that the Uniparty Club had engineered another Russia Collusion–type hoax intended to prevent President Trump from ever running for re-election.  By pushing the propaganda of an armed rebellion and a spurious interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment, the permanent “ruling class” transformed a political protest into a premeditated opportunity to bar Trump from office and tar his supporters as violent extremists.  From a distance, the whole disgusting exercise in cognitive warfare resembled a cackle of vicious D.C. hyenas bleeding out unsuspecting MAGA prey.  

https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2024/06/13/bidens-ghostwriter-admits-he-obstructed-investigation-of-joe-biden-n4929885

Joe Biden avoided facing charges of mishandling classified information because Special Counsel Robert Hur determined that a jury would see him as an “elderly man with a poor memory” who lacked the “mental state of willfulness.” However, there was an unresolved issue regarding Biden’s ghostwriter, to whom Biden disclosed classified information while working on his memoir.

According to the Hur report, “after learning of the special counsel’s appointment in this matter, Mr. Biden’s ghostwriter deleted audio recordings he had created of his discussions with Mr. Biden during the writing of Mr. Biden’s 2017 memoir”; however, Hur decided not to charge him with obstruction of justice.

Joe Biden’s ghostwriter has now admitted that he deleted those recordings from his interviews with Joe Biden partly so Hur’s team could not use them in the investigation into Biden’s handling of classified documents.

According to a transcript released by the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project, ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer wouldn’t tell the FBI how much the investigation influenced his decision to delete the recordings.

“The outside observer is going to look at this and say, Mark Zwonitzer, President Biden’s friend, ghostwriter, collaborator learned of the special counsel’s investigation, saw this was happening and then deleted all these audio recordings,” the agent said. “I just need the truth on this one … That was part of your motivation, at least something you were aware of when you did this?”

“I’m not going to say how much of the percentage it was of my motivation,” Zwonitzer replied, adding, “I was aware that there was an investigation.” He went on to note that he was “very concerned” about being hacked by those who would then spread the audio all over the internet, but said that was mainly because there was “a lot of personal stuff and emotional stuff about Beau,” Biden’s late son. He said out of an abundance of caution, he “took the audio files subfolder from both the G drive and [his] laptop, and slid them into the trash.”

Zwonitzer noted that deleting audio files was standard practice, and not just something he did in Biden’s case, saying, “I generally save transcripts but I haven’t over the years ever saved audios.” He went on to admit he deleted the files after becoming aware of the investigation, and that after doing so, he didn’t tell anyone, nor did nobody reach out to him asking about it.