RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/stacey-lennox/2021/01/23/unity-watch-sorry-president-biden-the-honeymoon-is-over-before-it-even-started-n1406795

Most of the time, a new president gets at least a short honeymoon period. President Joe Biden is not so lucky. His approval is already underwater at -2 in Rasmussen’s Daily Presidential Tracking Poll. Usually, the country settles down after the election and gives the nation’s new leader the benefit of the doubt. Even President Trump entered the Oval Office with a +2 approval rating, which increased through the end of January 2017. President Obama went in at +8 in 2008.

It was a whirlwind of activity for President Biden in his first 72 hours. He signed an executive order to allow biological men and boys to enter women’s spaces and compete with them directly in employment, education, and sports. With the stroke of the pen, he killed the Keystone XL pipeline and even reversed President  Trump’s prohibition on the Chinese Communist Party’s involvement in the U.S. power grid.

The world is also getting more dangerous with alarming speed. China has breached Taiwan’s Air Defense Zone with multiple bombers and fighter jets. We have seen continuing riots in Portland and now one in Bellingham, Washington. Biden ended the so-called “Muslim Ban,” which actually restricted travel from several countries that provide material support for terror or don’t have the ability to vet their citizens. And ISIS just claimed responsibility for an attack inside Baghdad.

The last three days have been like drinking from a firehose as the Biden administration works to erase everything since 2016 as quickly as possible. While there is no way to find out how Americans feel about the full range of issues, Rasmussen has polled a few.

Sixty percent of Americans are expecting fuel prices to rise under President Biden. A rise in crude oil prices is already increasing costs at the pump in Texas, and they will likely trend up nationwide. While this increase will hit personal finances, rising energy prices will also make American manufacturing less competitive globally. The trend will worsen when Biden increases the amount of environmental regulation. The same poll shows that 51% of likely voters oppose Biden’s decision to cancel the Keystone XL pipeline. This number includes 58% of non-affiliated voters and more than three out of four GOP voters.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/tulsi-gabbard-domestic-terrorism-bill-is-a-targeting-of-almost-half-of-the-country/

EXCERPTS:

“When you have people like former CIA Director John Brennan openly talking about how he’s spoken with or heard from appointees and nominees in the Biden administration who are already starting to look across our country for these types of movements similar to the insurgencies they’ve seen overseas, that in his words, he says make up this unholy alliance of religious extremists, racists, bigots, he lists a few others and at the end, even libertarians.”

She said her concern lies in how officials will define the characteristics they are searching for in potential threats.

“What characteristics are we looking for as we are building this profile of a potential extremist, what are we talking about? Religious extremists, are we talking about Christians, evangelical Christians, what is a religious extremist? Is it somebody who is pro-life? Where do you take this?” Gabbard said.

She said the proposed legislation could create “a very dangerous undermining of our civil liberties, our freedoms in our Constitution, and a targeting of almost half of the country.”

“You start looking at obviously, have to be a white person, obviously likely male, libertarians, anyone who loves freedom, liberty, maybe has an American flag outside their house, or people who, you know, attended a Trump rally,” Gabbard said.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/biden-nothing-we-can-do-to-change-trajectory-of-covid-19-pandemic-in-next-months_3668351.html

The U.S. government can’t do anything to change the trajectory of the COVID-19 pandemic in the coming months, President Joe Biden claimed on Friday.

“There’s nothing we can do to change the trajectory of the pandemic in the next several months,” Biden said during a speech at the White House.

COVID-19 is the disease caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, a novel coronavirus. The disease has contributed to the deaths of some 400,000 Americans in the past year, according to federal health data.

Biden’s remark prompted criticism. “Haven’t we been told for months that restrictions and mandates were necessary to change the trajectory of the pandemic in the next several months?” former Rep. Justin Amash (L-Mich.) wrote in a tweet.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/01/so_who_ordered_the_national_guard_troops_stuffed_into_the_icy_underground_parking_garage.html

Following the strange inauguration of Joe Biden, some 25,000 to 65,000 National Guard troops brought in to guard the Capitol were in for a string of insults.  First, their loyalty was questioned.  Then their professionalism was questioned.  And with no clear purpose for so many of them to protect the Capitol, it was clear they were being used for photo op props, not the service they were sworn to.  They found themselves there not to chase off rioters, but to bolster Democrats in their political purpose of smearing Republicans as insurgents. 

The final insult came when someone ordered them to get lost from the Capitol.  Like discarded props, or no longer welcome valets, more than a thousand were ordered into an icy underground parking garage to stay out of sight, out of mind.  They had no heat, just one bathroom for 5,000 personnel, and only one outlet.  They had no internet and no beds, forcing them to sleep on hard ground in 38-degree cold.  COVID was present, making the harsh conditions a potential superspreader event.

Upstairs the beautiful people in monochrome colors, heat, fancy bathrooms, and tons of snacks carried on as usual.  It’s good to be the elite.

According to Politico, who asked a Guardsman what was going on:

“Yesterday dozens of senators and congressmen walked down our lines taking photos, shaking our hands and thanking us for our service. Within 24 hours, they had no further use for us and banished us to the corner of a parking garage. We feel incredibly betrayed,” the Guardsman said.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/01/22/dems_spell_unity_c-a-n-c-e-l_145093.html#2

The Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was the crisis Democrats were waiting for, and they are not going to waste it. Those few hours of lawless mayhem became unimpeachable proof that the muddy smears they’d thrown against Donald Trump supporters were all true.

Through the funhouse mirror of hyper-partisanship, that angry mob of thousands became all 74 million Americans who voted for Trump in November. The crowd’s explicit anger over the 2020 election was cast as an implicit push for white supremacy.

Never mind that almost all prominent Republicans and conservatives recoiled from the violence and immediately condemned it, or that one of the main organizers of the rally was a black Arab American. There’s enough scattershot evidence for Democrats and their allies to add “demonstrated violence” to their list of conservative crimes and justify a radical program of repression. While Joe Biden issues calls for unity, many of his allies are waging a scorched earth campaign to silence all who oppose them.

Since the violent attacks, left-leaning tech companies have been given a free hand to quash dissent. On Jan. 8 Twitter permanently suspended President Trump’s account and later purged more than 70,000 accounts it said were affiliated QAnon, whose members subscribe to various conspiracy theories and question the integrity of the government.

That same day it was reported that Facebook removed the #Walkaway Campaign, which featured testimonials from Democrats who had left the party because of its hard-left turn. Facebook deemed this “hateful, threatening, or obscene.” On Jan. 10, Amazon pulled the plug on the libertarian social media platform Parler because a handful of its estimated 2.3 million active users were connected to the violence.

Government is also policing thought. On Jan. 18, the New York Times reported that the Pentagon “is intensifying efforts to identify and combat white supremacy and other far-right extremism in its ranks.” Network news reported that several unnamed National Guardsmen were pulled from the ranks of those protecting the Capitol after the FBI said it discovered fringe political views in their social media footprint or digital communications with friends.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/dark-money-helped-pave-joe-biden-s-path-to-the-white-house/ar-BB1d1oDe

(Bloomberg) — President Joe Biden benefited from a record-breaking amount of donations from anonymous donors to outside groups backing him, meaning the public will never have a full accounting of who helped him win the White House.

Biden’s winning campaign was backed by $145 million in so-called dark money donations, a type of fundraising Democrats have decried for years. Those fundraising streams augmented Biden’s $1.5 billion haul, in itself a record for a challenger to an incumbent president.

That amount of dark money dwarfs the $28.4 million spent on behalf of his rival, former President Donald Trump. And it tops the previous record of $113 million in anonymous donations backing Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney in 2012.

Democrats have said they want to ban dark money as uniquely corrupting, since it allows supporters to quietly back a candidate without scrutiny. Yet in their effort to defeat Trump in 2020, they embraced it.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/01/22/breaking-norms-and-precedent-biden-attempts-to-purge-career-intelligence-official/

Pelosi, Schiff, and Biden have politicized a career intelligence community position by demanding the removal of a national security professional.

Hours after President Joe Biden delivered his inaugural address promising to bring unity and healing to the country, his administration began a politically charged attack on a highly respected, newly appointed career intelligence official over fears he would be insufficiently loyal to Democratic partisans. The attempted purge has thus far followed the playbook publicly laid out by top Democrats and their left-wing media enablers.

In a stunning violation of precedent, Biden’s National Security Agency (NSA) placed General Counsel Michael J. Ellis on administrative leave pending a Defense Inspector General investigation of his recent appointment, as well as an unspecified claim of mishandling of classified information. Ellis has maintained a top security clearance, without any blemish, for more than a decade. He is a trained classification official both as a military officer and civilian.

While Ellis has prominent defenders from his many years of service in the intelligence community, his detractors include high profile participants in the Russia collusion hoax, proponents of former National Security Advisor John Bolton’s attempt to publish classified information in a book, and some of the individuals who orchestrated the Ukraine impeachment effort.

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-moronic-firing-of-will-wilkinson

Will Wilkinson is about as mainstream and conventional a thinker as one can find, and is unfailingly civil and restrained in his rhetoric. But yesterday, he was fired by the technocratic centrist think tank for which he worked, the Niskanen Center, and appears on the verge of being fired as well by The New York Times, where he is a contributing writer. This multi-pronged retribution is due to a single tweet that was obviously satirical and sarcastic and for which he abjectly apologized. But no matter: the tweet has been purposely distorted into something malevolent and the prevailing repressive climate weaponized it against him.

Neither Wilkinson nor his tweet are particularly interesting. What merits attention here is the now-pervasive climate that fostered this tawdry episode, and which has unjustly destroyed countless reputations and careers with no sign of slowing doing.

During the Bush and Obama years, Wilkinson worked at the libertarian CATO Institute but, even then, he was not much of a libertarian. As he himself explained, he is far more of a standard-issue neoliberal that one finds everywhere throughout DC think tanks, the op-ed pages of large newspapers, and the green rooms of CNN, just with a bit wonkier style of expression and a few vague libertarian gestures on some isolated issues. That self-description was in 2012, and he since then has become even more of a standard liberal during the Trump era, which is why the Paper of Record made him a contributor opinion writer where he published articles under such bold and groundbreaking headlines as “Trump Has Disqualified Himself From Running in 2020.”

On Wednesday, the night of Joe Biden’s inauguration, Wilkinson posted this now-deleted tweet in which he was obviously not calling for violence. He was instead sardonically noting that anti-Pence animus became a prevailing sentiment among some MAGA followers over the last month, including reports that at least a few of those who breached the Capitol were calling for Pence’s hanging on treason grounds, thus ironically enabling liberals and MAGA followers to “unite” over that desire:

The next morning, a right-wing hedge fund manager and large-money GOP donor, Gabe Hoffman, flagged this tweet and claimed to believe that Wilkinson “call[ed] for former Vice President Mike Pence to be lynched.” Hoffman also tweeted at Wilkinson’s New York Times bosses to ask if they have “any comment on your ‘contributing opinion writer’ calling for violence against a public official?,” and then tweeted at Wilkinson’s other bosses at the think tank to demand the same.