RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.thefp.com/p/lyndon-johnson-jfk-thanksgiving?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

We are fast approaching Thanksgiving, and many Americans, no doubt, are wondering what they have to be thankful for. 

There’s the skyrocketing cost of pretty much everything. Rising crime. Endless wars. And perhaps worst of all, this fear that we’re falling apart—that Democrats and Republicans can’t work together, that in the middle of the turkey and stuffing a brawl might break out between the “communists” and “fascists.” (There were no communists or fascists on the ballot this year, the partisan smears notwithstanding.)

Over the past year, there has been much talk about America being more divided than ever. It’s easy to forget, in the midst of all the emotion and politicking, that this is an exaggeration—to say the very least. There was the Civil War. And, of course, the Civil Rights struggles of the 1960s.

In the 1960s, political violence—including assassination—became an unavoidable fact of life in America. The first devastating and consequential assassination of the decade took place on November 22, 1963, when Lee Harvey Oswald murdered President John F. Kennedy in Dallas. 

That single act of violence has spawned countless conspiracy theories; fueled suspicion of the “military-industrial complex” (a suspicion that has morphed into antipathy toward the “deep state”); and driven what seems, at times, a permanent wedge between the government and the governed.

But, as always, events throw up remarkable people. And sometimes even people who do not seem all that remarkable become remarkable when history throws them into the fiercest fire.

Lyndon Baines Johnson was such a man. 

The Kennedy clan—aristocratic, with their Harvard pedigree and penchant for playing football at the family compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts—despised him. Johnson—born into a poor family in Texas Hill Country—despised them right back. JFK had tapped Johnson to be his running mate in 1960, because he needed a Protestant and a good old boy to hold the Democratic coalition together. Johnson, a masterful politician first elected to Congress in 1937, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was president, was mostly cut out of the very insular Kennedy inner circle. The relationship between the two men was purely transactional. 

On the day of the assassination, Johnson was with Kennedy in Dallas—riding two cars behind the president alongside his wife, Claudia “Lady Bird” Johnson.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/11/24/inside-trumps-second-term-mission-to-dismantle-the-administrative-state/

For many years, and in many places, I have been railing against the rise of what people like me have called “the administrative state,” “the deep state,” “the Syndicate.” In an essay called “The Imperative of Freedom” for the June 2017 issue of The New Criterion, I drew upon the work of the political philosopher James Burnham to point out that at least since the 1940s, real legislative power had been increasingly concentrated in what Burnham called “administrative bureaus,” not parliaments or Congress.

“‘Laws’ today in the United States,” Burnham wrote in The Managerial Revolution (1941), “are not being made any longer by Congress, but by the NLRB, SEC, ICC, AAA, TVA, FTC, FCC, the Office of Production Management (what a revealing title!), and the other leading ‘executive agencies.’”

And note that Burnham wrote decades before the advent of the EPA, HUD, CFPB, FSOC, the Department of Education, and the rest of the administrative alphabet soup that governs us in the United States today. As the economist Charles Calomiris pointed out in his short but important book Reforming Financial Regulation After Dodd-Frank (2017), we are increasingly governed not by laws but by ad hoc dictats emanating from semi-autonomous and largely unaccountable quasi-governmental bureaucracies, many of which meet in secret but whose proclamations have the force of law.

Article I of the Constitution vests all legislative power in Congress, just as Article III vests all judicial authority in the Court. The administrative state is a mechanism for circumventing both. In The Administrative Threat, the legal scholar Philip Hamburger describes this shadowy Leviathan as “a state within a state,” a sort of parallel legal and political structure populated by unelected bureaucrats. Binding citizens not through Congressionally enacted statutes but through the edicts of the managerial bureaucracy, the administrative state, said Hamburger, is “all about the evasion of governance through law, including an evasion of constitutional processes and procedural rights.” Accordingly, he concludes, the encroaching activity of the administrative state represents “the nation’s preeminent threat to civil liberties.”

https://openthebooks.substack.com/p/taxpayer-funded-censorship-how-government?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=775254&post_

Campaign season brought with it a steady stream of accusations that various parties and platforms were spreading misinformation and disinformation.

Most recently, the scandals at FEMA over avoiding homes with Trump signs was quickly slapped with a “misinformation” label…until FEMA itself admitted it had happened. MSNBC anchor Jen Psaki suggested “laws have to change” to combat the scourge.

With the misinformation category being weaponized across the political spectrum, we took a look at how invested government has become in studying and “combatting” it using your tax dollars. That research can provide the intellectual ammunition to censor people online.

Since 2021, the Biden-Harris administration has spent $267 million on research grants with the term “misinformation” in the proposal.

Of course, the Covid pandemic was the driving force behind so much of the misinformation debate. Sure enough, the feds have spent at least $127 million in grants specifically targeted to study the spread of “misinformation” — or to help people “overcome” it, so to speak — by persuading them to go along with Covid-related public health recommendations and mandates.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/11/25/day-1-pipe-and-drill/

Donald Trump has said that on the first day of his second term, he wants to “frack, frack, frack, and drill, drill, drill.” He needs to keep that promise – as well as reopen construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline, which the Biden administration blocked, just as the Obama White House did before Trump reversed the policy in 2017.

“Put us to work right now,” a laid-off worker who had been building the pipeline when it was shut down said earlier this year. “And you will see not only the fuel prices go down, but you will see the price of everything else go down with it.”

Showing that everyday Americans are more sensible about energy matters than at least half of our political ruling class, another worker said “we should be able to sustain ourselves and not depend on other nations raising their price and then affect us. That shouldn’t even be in the question.”

Those comments were made in March. November changed their outlook.

“It’s a breath of fresh air. We’re running on cloud nine,” said another former Keystone Pipeline worker.

“It will make a big difference as far as your energy cost, your food cost, your gas that you put in your cars. It is actually going to be the primary start of bringing everything … down for the American people that we have suffered so much in the last administration.”