RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2023-1-24-biden-and-trump-classified-documents-scandals-progressive-talking-point-falls-apart

I have so far avoided weighing in on the Biden and Trump classified documents scandals, but I guess the time has finally come.

I’ve had a “Secret” clearance in my life, and almost all of the “classified” documents I have seen have been of very underwhelming significance. So when the Trump classified document thing blew up with the FBI raid of Mar-a-Lago back in August, I was not impressed. It reeked of something highly likely to be completely devoid of real world significance, but useful to Biden and the left because Trump would be put in a position of not being able to defend himself publicly without disclosing the contents of the documents. Meanwhile Trump as President had had complete authority to declassify the documents if he wanted, and his position was that he had done so. But even if Trump had a good or even excellent position that he had declassified the documents, he would not take the risk of disclosing their contents to defend himself. So it seemed like a total freebie for Biden to go on 60 Minutes in September and say “How could anyone be that irresponsible?”

Here is the picture that the Justice Department filed in court of the classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago:

Then on January 9 CBS News broke the story that a cache of classified documents had been discovered in a closet at Biden’s office at the “Penn Biden Center” in Washington, a supposed “think tank” funded by the University of Pennsylvania. Oops. “How could anyone be that irresponsible?”

This was not going to be an easy one to spin. But within a couple of days, the official talking point had emerged, as it always seems to do for the far left press. The official talking point was, this is different because Biden is “cooperating” with the government, whereas Trump was “resisting” the righteous efforts of the National Archives to get back the documents to which they are entitled and which only they can safeguard appropriately.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19340/world-economic-forum

People with fortunes have an economic incentive to hide them behind the appearance of benevolence, so as to avoid scrutiny while making those fortunes even bigger. Behind every “build back better” inch of the WEF’s “great reset” of the global economy is some corporate titan, banking behemoth, power-hungry politician, bureaucratic chieftain, or plain old aristocrat making money or gaining influence from the multitude of secret transactions buttressing the whole philanthropic charade.

They depend upon African slave labor for the mining of “green” raw materials and Chinese slave labor for the manufacturing of “green” technologies while simultaneously smearing as bigots anyone who objects to their open border policies flooding Western nations with endless cheap labor at home. Predictably, those most responsible for undermining labor groups at home while subsidizing slavery abroad are the same ones who lecture the world on racism, fair wages, and human rights.

Stick, meet carrot. They may fly on private jets, but at the end of the day, the World Economic Forum cabal is just the greatest collection of thugs organized crime has ever managed to put together in the same room, orchestrating the most effective schemes ever devised to force formerly free peoples to do exactly what they say.

In a more just era, anybody attending the WEF’s gatherings would be arrested for conspiracy to commit racketeering and fraud. Instead, because the “masters of our future” have invested heavily in the elections of the West’s most prominent leaders, presidents, prime ministers, legislators, and even military staffs are only too happy to champion their cause.

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres told his WEF audience that the world’s economy is in tremendous peril, while failing to point out that it has been the WEF’s own COVID-19 lockdown policies and attempts to use the pandemic as a “great reset” for transitioning the West from hydrocarbon to “green” energies that are responsible for much of the harm.

[T]he UN chief was more interested in making two other points: (1) there should be legal “accountability” for social media platforms that promote “false information,” and (2) politicians should force unpopular policies upon their populations for their own good.

In essence, the head of the globalists’ preferred international governing body demands that national leaders intentionally disregard the will of their people and implement a system for the criminalization of free speech, so that dissent magically disappears much like a protester in a “re-education” camp. These are the same WEF “elites” who then have the temerity to turn around and preach about “democracy” and “Western values.”

Sitting right next to “green” champion Al Gore, [Colombian President] Petro Urrego proclaimed that humanity must “overcome capitalism” if it is to survive. Given that Gore, a member of the WEF Board of Trustees, did not appear to disagree, it seems fair to say that Club Davos finds more to like in an “elite”-controlled version of communism (is there any other kind?) than a free market system in which ordinary people may thrive.

To coincide with its gathering, the WEF has published a report citing “misinformation and disinformation” among the most significant global “risks.” WEF members publicly predict that “hate speech” laws will soon come to the United States — in direct violation of the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment protections for freedom of speech. Calls are growing for tracking and enforcing individual “carbon limits” in the endless battle against Earth’s ever-changing climate. These same authoritarians push digital vaccine passports, contact tracing, mandatory use of experimental “vaccines,” and ubiquitous testing. And following the WEF’s determination that Westerners should transition to a diet of bugs, the European Union has now authorized the general consumption of house crickets. Censorship, mass surveillance, and bugs — welcome to the future, should the WEF get its way.

None of the WEF’s expansive programs for remaking the world according to its members’ interests sounds like anything free Westerners could ever voluntarily embrace. Surely that is why so many of the WEF’s speakers urge the forceful adoption of these policies regardless of public support. Perhaps that is also why the Chinese Communist Party recently applauded this year’s “Davos spirit.” Communists know communism when they see it, and in Klaus Schwab’s globalist oligarchy of “elites,” China likes what it sees.

https://www.city-journal.org/institutional-hostage-crisis

American institutions are in the midst of a hostage crisis. But the new hostage-takers don’t use tape, wire, or cuffs. Instead, they wield the even more powerful restraints of guilt, shame, and identity, which have allowed a small minority of left-wing activists to establish their ideology—notably, critical race theory—at the highest levels of institutional life.

For the past two years, I have explored the dynamics of ideological capture in a series of articles for City Journal that document the rise of critical race theory and coercive “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) programs in America’s schools, corporations, and government agencies. Now, I’m observing the same phenomenon from the inside, as a participant in Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s recently announced initiative to recapture the Sunshine State’s smallest public university: New College of Florida.

Since signing my oath as one of the newly appointed trustees, I have spent many hours in communication with administrators, faculty, students, and alumni. Many of these people have whispered to me about the “culture problem” at New College. They have described something resembling a hostage situation on campus, in which left-wing activist students have mobilized a grievance narrative and exploited the DEI-style bureaucracy in order to isolate, shame, intimidate, and expel anyone who dissents from the politics of social justice.

As an institution, New College has long known about the problem. A consulting firm hired by the previous university president pointed out that the campus had become an “echo chamber,” with left-wing students creating a hostile political atmosphere and using the college’s online forum to launch polemics against conservative and religious students.

And yet, little has been done. The adults have effectively ceded authority to the most aggressive, intolerant, and ideological members of the community, who wield the language of “trauma” and “diversity” in pursuit of a suffocating left-wing orthodoxy, which they use to justify a perpetual campaign to silence and exclude anyone on the wrong political end of the intersectional hierarchy.

The hostage dynamic is notable, and perhaps even more powerful, because it is unspoken. All of the New College employees with whom I have spoken acknowledge the “culture problem” in private—but none has been willing to raise the issue in public. They are afraid.

https://www.city-journal.org/predators-paradise

On a Saturday night in South Los Angeles, cars pull up and idle along the side streets of Figueroa, high beams ablaze, so that the drivers can get a good look at “the girls.” The women stand three astride in the middle of the street, in pasties and G-string bikinis under fishnet dresses. Draped over their shoulders are unzipped coats; even in temperate L.A., the night’s January chill is biting. In seven-inch Lucite heels, they teeter toward the driver of each car the way you might walk barefoot across gravel. Less than a block away, their pimps keep company on a sidewalk corner, in hoodies and loose jeans, watching their quarry, awaiting the payout. Absent is the one thing that might typically break up the party: a police car.

In early January, I joined Erin Wilson and Stephany Powell on a tour of “the track” on Figueroa, one of California’s busiest prostitution areas. For decades, Wilson, who volunteers for the anti-trafficking organization Journey Out, and her mother, Powell, have worked to combat human trafficking in Los Angeles and to help women and child victims escape this brutal world.

In our postfeminist era, prostitution is so often idealized—“sex work is work”—that it’s easy to overlook the gruesome reality of what it means to have a pimp, an arrangement closer to slavery than to any legitimate job. “The horror stories I could tell you about [prostitutes] being beaten and being choked and being burned and being gang raped,” said Vanessa Russell of Love Never Fails, an anti-trafficking nonprofit based near Oakland. “And the PTSD and all the mental health, the trauma bonding, the psychotic breaks. Maybe you’re somebody who likes to have sex more than once a day. But nine to 21 times with different guys, some that are like 90 years old that smell?”

“Nine to 21 times over what period?” I ask.

“One day,” she said. “That’s healthy living? I don’t think so. The body is not even made for that. Like the pelvic inflammatory disease that you see.” She ticks off the ways a woman’s body is subjected to microbial assault: the STDs, yeast infections, and UTIs that are frequent among the women she sees. Their hospital records prove, she says, that the human body is “not meant to have that much activity going on. And then the girls that are out there—where they’re being sold—they don’t even get to take showers in between.”

http://Don’t be fooled into thinking this is the first time Biden has sacrificed U.S. national security to protect his personal interests.

Long before classified and potentially compromising documents were discovered in President Joe Biden’s “think tank” office and Wilmington home and garage, the Democrat’s actions posed a threat to U.S. national security.

The discovery of even more top secret documents dating back to Biden’s time as vice president and senator sparked widespread concerns that the current president hid material that put U.S. national security at risk, potentially for decades.

Republicans worried — and even partisan hacks such as Democrat Rep. Adam Schiff conceded — that Biden’s harboring of classified documents in high-traffic, unsecured areas could have put Americans or the U.S. government at risk.

“Is it possible that national security was jeopardized here as many, including you, raised that possibility with the Mar-a-Lago documents?” ABC’s “This Week” co-anchor Jonathan Karl asked.

“I don’t think we can exclude the possibility without knowing more of the facts,” the disgraced former chair of the House Intelligence Committee replied.

It seems logical to investigate Biden’s recent scandal to ensure he didn’t compromise any sensitive material. But the truth is, he opened up the U.S. to a myriad of national security crises, abuses, and disasters long before news broke of his document scandal.

Since taking office, Biden, who is charged with ensuring the national security of the U.S., has put Americans and their security at risk countless times.

By openly pursuing a policy of escalation in the U.S.-funded proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, Biden and his administration have significantly increased the threat of nuclear war. A conflict that only ends on Ukraine’s terms and might result in a radioactive third world war compromises Americans’ safety and tax dollars.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/us-senate-democrats-refuse-to-meet-with-right-wing-members-of-netanyahu-government/

According to the Times of Israel, a delegation of Senate US Democrats arrived in Israel on January 17, and asked not to meet with MK Ministers Bezalel Smotrich, Itamar Ben Gvir or any members of their Otzma Yehudit party. The request was made by the office of Democrat Senator Jacky Rosen, to whom Haaretz refers as “pro-Israel.“ Yet in November 2021, Rosen visited the repressive, Muslim Brotherhood-supporting regime of Qatar. She had no problems meeting with Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani on her visit, despite the fact that he collaborated with the Chief of Hamas’ Political Bureau, Ismail Haniyeh, as recently as 2021. Haniyeh thanked Al Thani “for his continuous support for Palestine and the Palestinian people.” Al Thani has also stressed at the UN that Israel must “end its occupation,” and advocated for full solidarity “with the brotherly Palestinian people in their aspiration to achieve justice.” Yet the cowardly Jacky Rosen met with Al Thani while refusing even to dialogue with members of the Otzma Yehudit party within the Netanyahu coalition.

Otzma Yehudit means Jewish strength or Jewish power. The party platform “calls for the annexation of the West Bank, and for complete Israeli rule between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.” This platform is in direct opposition to the Palestinian goal of obliterating Israel from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, as often chanted in “free Palestine”rallies. After the manifest failure of the arrangements set forth in the Oslo Accords, the Otzma Yehudit platform should be applauded, not condemned by anyone who supports Israel’s right to exist and defend itself from those who would destroy it.

Far too many media outlets continue to reference the Otzma Yehudit as “far right” and “extreme” instead of simply by its name, thus editorializing on every news story. Most of these same media outlets did not refer to the Ra’am Party, a member of Israel’s last governing coalition, as an “extremist party,” despite its support for releasing Palestinian jihadi prisoners.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/01/24/chase-bank-closes-multiple-nyc-atms-early-due-to-crime-wave/

With crime on the rise in New York City, Chase Bank has announced that it will be shutting down numerous ATMs throughout the city earlier than usual.

CNN reports that the ATMs in question, which previously operated 24/7, will now close between 5 and 6 PM, in alignment with the hours when actual banks usually close on weekdays. A JPMorgan Chase spokesman added that some ATMs will close as late as 10 PM.

The bank said that the new policy will only affect a “small number” of machines throughout the city, but did not specify which locations or how many. The company cited “rising crime and vagrancy” as a primary motivation for the decision.

“We review our ATM hours on a case-by-case basis,” Chase said in a statement, “and for a variety of reasons may decide to temporarily close some overnight.”

At a press conference on Monday, Mayor Eric Adams (D-N.Y.) reacted to Chase’s decision by saying that “people don’t want to walk into the ATM and see someone urinating” or see someone screaming and yelling.”

“And that is what I’m saying I need to stop, because I don’t want my ATMs closing down. I don’t want people leaving our city. We have to create an environment that people are safe and feel safe.”

“Ensuring the safety and security of customers and employees has always been a top priority of the banking industry,” said the New York Bankers Association in its own statement. “As issues arise, NYBA and our members evaluate possible trends with the intention of working with banks, law enforcement and the local community toward solutions.”

New York City has been the epicenter of a rising crime wave that can be seen all across the country since the violent race riots in 2020. Overall crime in the nation’s largest city increased by 23.5 percent in 2022.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/divisive-and-diverse-you-cant-have-one-without-the-other/

“Diversity” and “Divisiveness” are perhaps our most important cant-words in both meanings of the word: “sanctimonious and hypocritical talk,” and “language peculiar to a specified group or profession and regarded with disparagement,” as the Oxford English Dictionary defines it. That certainly fits the political and media industries, which trade in duplicitous language that distorts the meanings of words in order to construct narratives that serve their ideological preferences and gain leverage over their political rivals.

For the “woke” Left, there are few goods greater than “diversity,” and not many worse crimes than being “divisive,” an offense limited to Republicans. But the abuse of these words reflects a misunderstanding of our political order, which is founded on the assumption that the young country’s complex diversity meant that diverse “passions and interests,” and a corruptible human nature would generate divisive factional struggles for power, the necessary corollary to genuine diversity.

Moreover, the “diversity” that progressives trade in is not real diversity, which comprises much more than superficial appearance. The American colonies were very diverse in ethnicities, religions, dialects, languages, folkways, cultures, and mores, the pluribus from which the American unum was comprised.

But this genuine diversity, which still characterizes the United States, is not what our “woke” institutions and ideologies mean by diversity. As David E. Bernstein writes in Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America,

“Modern America’s racial and ethnic classifications do not reflect biology, genetics, or any other biological source. Classifications such as Hispanic, Asian American, and white combine extremely internally diverse groups in terms of appearance, culture, religion, and more under a single, arbitrary heading. The government developed its classification scheme via a combination  of amateur anthropology and sociology, interest group lobbying, incompetence, inertia, lack of public oversight, and happenstance.”

The purpose of these classifications was to determine which political clients would be eligible for set-asides in government contracts and later, admissions to colleges, universities, and professional schools. This expansion came by dint of the 1978 Bakke decision, which papered over affirmative action programs’ blatant violations of the Civil Rights Act by creating “diversity” as a “compelling state interest” that justified ignoring the illegality of racial discrimination in the Civil Rights act. In the following decades, nobody, including subsequent Supreme Court decisions, has been able to provide a believable definition of “diversity,” or any empirical evidence of its contribution to improving desired educational outcomes or inter-ethnic relations. Yet this simplistic, vague, concept has become part of federal law and enjoys its enforcement powers.