RUTHFULLY YOURS

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

Five to six years ago, I was corresponding online, on a regular, frequent basis, with several strong conservatives.  We all advocated for policies like smaller central government; lower taxes; First, Second and Tenth Amendment freedoms; restrictions on abortion; strict control of our borders, including merit-based immigration; and many other standard conservative positions.

That was then.

Along came the 2016 presidential campaign, and the finalists were Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump.  As expected, most conservatives, as described above, were enthusiastically supportive of Trump.  Unexpectedly, however, there was a significant proportion of conservatives, or those who claimed to be, who were not only opposed to Trump, but vehement “NeverTrumps.”  “Anybody but Trump” was their mantra.  And they meant it.  Anybody. 

Why this is so is a mystery not yet fully explained.

In recent encounters (online) with some of them, I was amazed at their glee, caustically expressed, that Donald Trump had left the White House.  According to them, Trump was the devil.  He did nothing right.  He made everything worse.  He locked children in cages, then went golfing.  He was Islamophobic and xenophobic.  He was destroying the environment.  He was recklessly risking nuclear war with North Korea and Iran.  He was colluding with the Russians.  He sold much of our scarce uranium to the Russians (oh, wait — that was Hillary, but even so, Trump was bad).

There is so much more and so little room here.

And it all had to be true, because all the leftist “news” outlets were saying so.  They wouldn’t lie.  They were unbiased, science-oriented, purveyors of fact, weren’t they?

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/01/28/democrats-want-biden-to-be-the-dictator-they-said-trump-was/
They have a maniacal need to rule….

Donald Trump was treated by the opposition party and media (we repeat ourselves) like no other president in our memory. He was called a dictator, a tyrant, an authoritarian, and a fascist, to name a few childish invectives hurled his way. Of course his adversaries were projecting. It’s the Democrats and their media collaborators who yearn for absolute power.

Trump was accused of being a dictator at the same time he was trying to weaken the federal government through tax cuts and deregulation. The agitators – the elected, unelected, functionaries, and self-appointed – who made the allegations were never required to explain why a dictator would undermine his power base by downsizing the government under his charge; how a tyrant could be impeached twice; how an authoritarian failed to expand his authority during a pandemic; how a fascist brokered peace deals in the Middle East; how someone routinely called “Hitler” willingly walked away from his “dictatorship” after losing an election; how screaming heads could insult him and his family without fear of punishment.

Yet Trump was a dictator just because they said he was. Questioning the proposition is not allowed.

Meanwhile, Charles Schumer, the New York Democrat and Senate majority leader, said Monday “it might be a good idea for President Biden to call a climate emergency” because there are “many, many things under the emergency powers of the president” that “he could do without legislation.”

Even without declaring a climate emergency, Biden is already moving in the direction Schumer laid out for him, signing 33 executive orders within his first week. This is only months after Biden said “you can’t [legislate] by executive order unless you’re a dictator. We’re a democracy. We need consensus.” 

So now we know what could be reasonably assumed: He’s just another pen-and-phone president who doesn’t need the hassle of the legislative process to rush through his party’s agenda.

https://twitter.com/paulsperry_/status/1354242289535766535?s=11

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Paul Sperry@paulsperry_
·Obama is behind those 30 executive orders. Biden is just the pen. #Jobama

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/01/27/biden-supreme-court-reform-463126

The Biden administration is moving forward with the creation of a bipartisan commission to study reforms to the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary.

The commission will be housed under the purview of the White House Counsel’s office and filled out with the behind-the-scenes help of the Biden campaign’s lawyer Bob Bauer, who will co-chair the commission. Its specific mandate is still being decided. But, in a signal that the commission is indeed moving ahead, some members have already been selected, according to multiple people familiar with the discussions.

Among those who will be on the commission are Cristina Rodríguez, a professor at Yale Law School and a former deputy assistant attorney general in the Obama Department of Justice, who will join Bauer as co-chair. Caroline Fredrickson, the former president of the American Constitution Society, and Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor and a former assistant attorney general in the Bush Department of Justice, will also serve on the commission, those familiar with discussions said.

Fredrickson has hinted that she is intellectually supportive of ideas like court expansion. In 2019, she said in an interview with Eric Lesh, the executive director of the LGBT Bar Association and Foundation of Greater New York: “I often point out to people who aren’t lawyers that the Supreme Court is not defined as ‘nine person body’ in the Constitution, and it has changed size many times.”

https://thefederalist.com/2021/01/27/donald-trump-fought-for-us-now-its-our-turn/

Back in the early days of the Donald Trump phenomenon, whenever he supposedly got out of line a recurring joke about him was, “But he fights.” The pundits laughed. The poor rubes suckered by Trump were supposedly taken in by some canard that he was a fighter. But the fact is he was, he won a lot of those fights, and his voters are better off for those wins.

When the spurious allegations of long past sexual misconduct from now Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh emerged, conventional wisdom said his nomination was over. Pre-Trump, that would have been exactly right. He would have been thrown under the bus in the time it took a Sandy Koufax fastball to reach the plate. It was the smart play. But instead Trump fought.

Moving the American embassy to Jerusalem, as U.S. presidents have promised for, well nigh my whole life and never delivered on, was accomplished. This was supposedly going to retard the prospects of peace in the Middle East. Instead, Trump achieved the historic normalization of relations between Israel and several Arab states. That happened because he fought.

Since the late 1980s we have assumed that opening trade to communist China would liberate the repressive state there. We did that even after Tiananmen Square. It didn’t work. We now have a China even more committed to repressing its people. Our workers lost out over those decades of acquiescence to China. Trump started a trade war. He fought.

The pro-transgender movement has now convinced the left there is no difference between a biological man and a biological woman. Joe Biden signed an executive order making sure that girls have to compete against boys in sports. Trump ordered the exact opposite of this, compelling the federal government to respect the scientific idea of biological sex. He fought.

Against all odds, Trump reduced American troop levels overseas, especially in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. He protected our soldiers. He proved something that seemed almost impossible: the idea that a sitting president doesn’t have to start new wars. In less than a week, Biden is increasing troop levels overseas. Trump fought.

https://spectator.us/topic/oligarchy-america-rome-athens-jeff-bezos/

The fog of the Trump wars is lifting, the road from COVID-19 rising before us, the outlines of the 21st-century American system emerging. Like the bankruptcy in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, the change has happened ‘Gradually, then suddenly.’ The age of the democratic republic is over, the age of the American oligarchy beginning.

Oligarchy is the ‘rule of the oligos’, the few: the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a self-sustaining elite. It sounds quaint, classical even, as though it couldn’t happen here because it already happened there. But it has, in fact, already happened here. Augustus Caesar, who made himself Rome’s first emperor in 27 BC, would recognize the symptoms of our American novelties. The cult of the founding fathers and the cult of entertainment. The elites divided by violent factionalism and united by naked venality. The decay of republican virtues. The widening of the wealth gap and the rise of the populares, the members of the ruling class who rebel in the name of values already overthrown. And then, when all seems lost, Oligarchy in America the rise of the imperial oligarchy that offers to restore law and order, but installs a different law and a new order.

Oligarchy happens here because it happens everywhere. It is a recurring reality, the precursor of mob democracy in Plato’s Republic; the alternative to liberal democracy in modern China, Russia and the European Union; the endless present in Arab and African states. The Chinese oligarchy is ‘market-Leninism’ under the ‘princelings’ of the party, from whose ranks Xi Jinping emerged to become a quasi-emperor. The Russian oligarchy is a post-communist, sub-czarist parody of democracy whose winners, the looters of the energy sector and the graduates of the spy services, first returned ‘oligarch’ to modern use in the Nineties. The European states were creating their oligarchy too in that decade, in the unaccountable imperial technocracy that is the European Union. The Nineties were not the decade of the triumph of liberal democracy. They were the decade when oligarchy, illiberal, liberal or semi-liberal, conquered the globe.