RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://justthenews.com/accountability/political-ethics/silk-road-paved-cash-court-records-confirm-millions-flowed-biden

In the end, there really was a silk road of money that flowed from China to the Biden family’s coffers, despite Joe Biden’s insistence to the contrary.

The U.S. Attorney’s office in Delaware — which charged  Hunter Biden with tax and gun crimes last month — released to a federal court last week a now-scuttled plea deal that affirmed the presidential son got millions himself from Chinese sources in 2017-18 alone. That included money from a Chinese energy firm as well as legal payments from a Chinese executive convicted of bribery.

The records confirm reporting from investigative author Peter Schweizer’s book “Red Handed,” Just the News stories and investigations by Congress that date to 2020 when Sens. Ron Johnson, R-Wisc., and Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, revealed bank transfers from Beijing to Biden accounts.

Lawmakers told Just the News last week that the size of the payments from communist China and Joe Biden’s efforts to conceal them raise larger questions about whether such monies to his family caused the president to take actions like refusing to shoot down a Chinese spy balloon or shuttering the FBI’s main Chinese counter-intelligence program rooting out spies in U.S. academia.

The revelations raise questions whether Biden “would be sympathetic to the concerns of other nations or individuals based on previous relationships,” said Rep. Scott Perry, R-Penn., a member of the House Oversight Committee investigating the Biden family’s finances, “And whether that is generally viewed as being compromised.

“When you look at China and their Thousand Talents program, and other programs similar to that, where they pick key individual keys or key government individuals to compromise them, then the policy that would support the United States of America never happens because the individuals are compromised. That is what is so concerning about this,” Perry told the Just the News, No Noise television show last week.

U.S. Attorney David Weiss’ office in Delaware last week released the text of the Hunter Biden plea deal that Judge Maryellen Noreika rejected and which was scrutinized by critics over its broad immunity provision the Department of Justice was prepared to gift the younger Biden.

The description of Hunter Biden’s income in Exhibit 1 of the deal confirms much of the compensation he was previously alleged to have received from Ukraine and China and covers the period from 2016 to 2019. Overall, in 2017 and 2018 Hunter Biden received approximately $4.9 million from confirmed foreign sources.

https://victorhanson.com/the-remaking-of-america/

We are in the midst of one of the most radical revolutions in American history. It is as far-reaching and dangerous as the turbulent years of the 1850s and 1860s or the 1930s. Every aspect of American life and culture is under assault, including the very processes by which we govern ourselves, and the manner in which we live.

The Revolution began under the Obama administration that sought to divide Americans into oppressed and oppressors, and then substitute race for class victimization. It was empowered by the bicoastal wealth accrued from globalization, and honed during the COVID lockdown, quarantine-fed economic downturn, and the George Floyd riots and their aftermath. The Revolution was boosted by fanatic opposition to the presidency of Donald Trump. And the result is an America that is unrecognizable from what it was a mere decade ago.

Here are 10 upheavals that the Left has successfully wrought.

Free expression. In large swatches of American society—particularly the corporation, the media, the government, the public schools, and the university—it is suddenly dangerous to speak freely. At a DEI workshop, politely object that “whiteness” does not account for all the challenges of “marginalized peoples,” and you will become either ostracized, reprimanded, or perhaps fired.

Suggest to a class that man-made climate change and the state remedies for it, are still under debate—and your career and livelihood are endangered. In 2020, state that Covid lockdowns would do more eventual damage than the virus—and your career was through. Express doubt that there are more than two biological sexes, and if an athlete or high school principal you will be shunned or rendered professionally inert.

The government, in league with social media, censors the news. “Liberal” universities often first require McCarthy-era type “diversity” statements for one to be hired. Commissars review syllabi to spot incorrect or improper speech or insufficient DEI zeal.

https://victorhanson.com/the-u-s-is-in-real-decline-really-part-three-insecurity/

There are unfortunately other barometers of U.S. ossification.

America’s great strength was also its security. We were protected by two oceans and a similar English-majority speaking and constitutional state on our northern border. In the modern age, we used to insist on only legal immigration from an often corrupt and impoverished Mexico. No longer.

In just three years, the Biden administration destroyed the southern border, allowing seven million illegal aliens to enter without audit, despite a Covid epidemic, 100,000 Americans deaths attributable to the free importation of Mexican-produced fentanyl, and the multibillion-dollar cartels’ use of the border to levy fees on millions entering illegally.

The administration’s agenda seems to be homeostasis or symmetry. That is, when the southern United States resembles the poverty and corruption of Mexico, then illegal immigration will largely cease, given there would be no reason to emigrate to a place identical to one’s one, in terms of economics, security, and culture.

Aside from the border, the U.S. military is in decline. Its agenda is no longer just battle efficacy as a sure way to reaffirm deterrence, but a fast-track means to institutionalize a woke agenda, without the Sturm und Drang of federal and state legislative approval. Does the Pentagon have inestimable amounts of time, labor, and capital on its hands to indulge exploring white rage, abortion on demand, pregnancy flight suits, and transgendered surgeries? Did it so well plan the flight from Kabul or the maintenance of artillery shell stocks, that it could indulge such hot-button social issues?

Whereas the Left used to harangue Pentagon nominees about their revolving-door defense contractor board memberships and lobbyist roles, today they grow mute on such conflicts of interests—if the official in question has demonstrated a faithfully adherence to woke principles. And in circular fashion, that reality is known to officers up for promotions, who in turn make the necessary woke adjustments.

The discussion of future Joint Chiefs of Staff appointments center now not necessarily on their proven record of military excellence but to the degree they have been advocates of gay, transgendered, race, and gender agendas.

Unfortunately, this advocacy is not just positive, but negative as well. It entails an overt harangue about “white privilege,” “white rage,” and “white supremacy”—most famously voiced by Gen. Mark Milley and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in congressional testimonies—without supporting data confirming “systemic racism.”

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2023/08/07/authoritarian-lunacy-ex-rolling-stone-reporter-rips-into-jack-smiths-jan-6-indictment-against-trump-n2626742

Matt Taibbi has been a thorn in the side of the Left for his incisive commentary that’s shredded most of liberal America’s anti-Trump narratives. He’s a Russian collusion skeptic who regularly observed how his side has gone off the rails. He and other reporters have categorized the systemic censorship and political influence peddling at Twitter before Elon Musk’s takeover. These reports earned him the ire of congressional Democrats, but Taibbi is a classical liberal. And the former contributing editor for Rolling Stone probably offered the most even-keeled take on the January 6 indictment against Donald Trump. 

He noted it’s a layer cake: “a surreal mix of conventional law and authoritarian lunacy.” 

Taibbi points to where Special Counsel Jack Smith should have ventured if he wanted to slap Trump with a genuinely damning indictment. At least one that he feels would be more palatable to the public, who are beginning to see that most of the legal actions against the former president are driven by political bias and animus rather than facts. The January 6 indictment embodies everything we’ve come to expect from a corrupt Department of Justice. 

The ex-Rolling Stone reporter highlighted Trump’s calls to state officials regarding results, which are damning but irrelevant because that’s not where Smith went on this indictment. Mr. Smith’s way does seem to hinder legal free speech, overstepping as he’s done in the past with interpreting criminal statutes. Since the anti-Trump lawyers at DOJ went down this predictable path, Taibbi takes a blowtorch to the three big areas he feels rewrites law based on supposed evidence that he finds “bananas” (via Substack): 

Special Counsel Jack Smith’s indictment is a case within a case, a prosecutorial enchilada filled with things for people of all political persuasions to hate. The outside is a shell of a conventional conspiracy prosecution, and these parts are genuinely damaging for Donald Trump. Inside, it’s a deranged authoritarian fantasy, at times reading more like a 45-page Louise Mensch tweet than an indictment.