RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2024/02/21/how_to_understand_trumps_jeremiad_against_nato_freeloaders_150529.html

Donald Trump sent a shiver through official Washington and America’s friends around the world recently when he once again fulminated against NATO allies who refuse to pay for their own defense. His specific target was NATO members that failed to meet their pledge of spending at least 2% of their GDP on their military. Their “free riding,” he stressed, is costly to the U.S., Britain, Poland, and other NATO members who pay more than their share.

The problem is not a new one, nor an easy one to solve. Rich allies in Western Europe have been free riding for decades. The U.S. has been complaining and coaxing them for just as long. Unfortunately, neither cajoling nor warnings have ever been enough.

The reason for that failure is simple. Allies who want to skimp on defense know that Uncle Sugar will ultimately pick up the tab, not out of generosity but out of self-interest. They know Washington has long considered it in America’s vital interest to defend Europe against Russian (or Soviet) aggression, whether France or Belgium pay their share or not. When countries know this, they can free load. And some do. They’ve got plenty of other uses for their money if the U.S. will pay for their defense.

This knotty problem is the essential background for Trump’s threat to allies who refuse to meet their NATO commitments. The former (and perhaps future) president was speaking to them and to isolationist voters in the U.S., not to Moscow, when he made his latest incendiary remarks. Although it wasn’t quite reported this way in the media, Trump claimed that when he was president the leader of one NATO nation in arrears on its funding asked if the U.S. would still come to its defense if it was attacked by Russia. Calling this bluff, Trump said no, adding that he would encourage Russia “to do whatever the hell they want” to any ally that fell short of meeting its alliance commitments.

President Biden denounced those comments as “dumb … shameful … dangerous … un-American.” One of Trump’s erstwhile national security advisors, John Bolton, added that the former president wants to withdraw entirely from the alliance.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2024-2-19-the-stalinist-new-york-attorney-general-scores-a-big-win-against-trump-for-now

Josef Stalin set the example for the world as the most ruthless practitioner of the art of using a thoroughly corrupt and subservient “justice system” to eliminate all political opposition. Many, many others have since followed Stalin’s lead. Current notable examples include the recent murder of Alexei Navalny in prison in Russia; Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido, who fled that country in late 2023 after his arrest was threatened by the Maduro regime; and Pakistan’s former Prime Minister and current opposition leader Imran Khan, convicted in January 2024 of “disclosing a state secret” and sentenced to 10 years in jail. Funny how the countries that engage in such practices virtually always have failed economies as well.

The United States has been remarkably free of such practices during its history. But we have seen a sudden complete reversal of that commendable history with the efforts of multiple political actors and prosecutors to use the courts to take down former President Trump. Readers here are likely familiar with the long list of such efforts, from the two federal Jack Smith criminal prosecutions, to the Fani Willis criminal prosecution in Georgia, to the Alvin Bragg criminal prosecution in Manhattan (supposedly for incorrectly recording the blackmail payment to Stormy Daniels in financial statements), to the many efforts to remove Trump from primary and general election ballots.

Of all the multitudinous “get Trump” efforts, the most proudly and nakedly Stalinist is the civil fraud case brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James. What distinguishes the James crusade from all the others, as political as those might be, is that the others all have had at least a pretext of investigating some known or suspected wrongdoing. With James, by contrast, from the start it has always been about finding some way, any way, to take out the man. James initially ran for AG in 2018 on a campaign explicitly promising to get Trump, who was President of the United States at the time. My first post covering James’s vendetta against Trump was on December 13, 2018, shortly after her first election victory and before she took office. That post quoted at length from an interview James had just given to NBC News. In her interview, James emphasized that her focus in office would be on somehow getting Trump, and she essentially conceded that she had no basis at the outset to believe that wrongdoing had occurred. A short excerpt:

“We will use every area of the law to investigate President Trump and his business transactions and that of his family as well,” James, a Democrat, told NBC News in her first extensive interview since she was elected last month. James outlined some of the probes she intends to pursue with regard to the president, his businesses and his family members. They include: – Any potential illegalities involving Trump’s real estate holdings in New York.

https://tomklingenstein.com/how-censorship-drives-the-woke-revolution/

The woke regime, like all totalitarian regimes before it, views your freedom of speech not as a right but as an obstacle. The suppression of dissent is a vital element of the power grab that will enable this regime to achieve its political goal: the establishment of group quotas as the organizing structure of American life, rather than individual merit and constitutional liberty.

What makes the group quota regime different from the tyrannies of the past is that it has access to mechanisms of political control that are entirely unprecedented in human history, thanks to the technological and social revolution of the last few decades. The migration of so much of our political life into the digital realm, the outsourcing of speech and information control to nominally private actors not directly bound by constitutional limitations, and the development of new tools for more efficient and effective manipulation — including, most recently, artificial intelligence — have created a perfect storm of censorship that is both more extensive and more subtle than that practiced by any previous authoritarian regime.

Those committed to individual merit and to the preservation of our constitutional order must first understand these mechanisms of control if they hope to combat them, and so preserve the hope of victory in the cold civil war against the group quota regime.

The information control apparatus that operates within the U.S. has the ability not only to censor facts but to construct pseudo-realities in which the truth itself becomes “disinformation.” Think of the narratives pushed by the woke regime regarding the origins of COVID-19, Hunter Biden’s laptop, or January 6th.  Alternative narratives, or pseudo-realities, were created about each of these events, then pushed by the media and supported by the government to silence discussion and suppress the facts. Those who spoke truthfully about these events were accused of spreading “disinformation” and were silenced. For the woke regime, individuals who challenge the constructed narrative or present facts that deviate from the prescribed ‘truth’ risk being labeled a “threat to democracy.” 

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/hunter-bidens-lawyers-accuse-federal-prosecutors-of-mistaking-sawdust-for-cocaine-in-evidentiary-photographs/

Hunter Biden’s attorneys are seeking to undermine special counsel David Weiss’s criminal prosecution by accusing his team of mistakenly identifying sawdust as cocaine in evidentiary photographs.

Biden’s attorneys, lead by Abbe D. Lowell, filed a motion in Delaware Tuesday to support his effort to compel discovery in his federal gun case. They criticized Weiss’s investigation by invoking the photographs and the indictment of a former FBI informant for making false allegations of bribery against Joe and Hunter Biden.

“Multiple sources have pointed out, and a review of discovery confirms, this is actually a photo of sawdust from an expert carpenter and it was sent to Mr. Biden, not vice versa,” the court filing reads.

“The prosecution was reckless in making such a hyperbolic and sensational claim in a public filing, which it surely realized would prejudice Mr. Biden in the public eye,” the motion continues.

A federal grand jury in California indicted FBI confidential human source (CHS) Alexander Smirnov Wednesday on false statement and obstruction charges. Smirnov is the CHS behind an FBI whistleblower form produced in June 2020 featuring allegations Joe and Hunter Biden took $10 million in bribes from Ukrainian oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky, the founder of Ukrainian energy firm Burisma Holdings. Senator Chuck Grassley (R.,Iowa) released the FBI document in July after the FBI allowed a select group of House lawmakers to view the document.

The indictment features text messages from Smirnov to his FBI handler disparaging then-Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. Smirnov was previously thought to be credible by the FBI and supplied information about Burisma in 2017 memorialized by a different whistleblower form.

Hunter’s lawyers used Smirnov’s indictment in an attempt to undermine Weiss’s case.

“The Special Counsel charged Mr. Smirnov with lying and obstruction, but the more interesting part of this story is not that Mr. Smirnov lied. It is more remarkable that beginning in July 2023, the Special Counsel’s team would follow Mr. Smirnov down his rabbit hole of lies as long as it did,” the motion adds.

“Disclosure about why the Special Counsel abandoned its June/July 2023 agreements with Mr. Biden and the role played by the Smirnov allegations may reveal flaws worse than mistaking sawdust for cocaine.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/lets-stop-fetishizing-article-5/

At a rally in South Carolina recently, Donald Trump made some comments about Nato that predictably launched the usual NeverTrump suspects into stratospheric dudgeon. Recalling a conversation he claims he had with a Nato “president of a big country,” Trump told him that if Nato nations continued to stint their military spending and kept failing to meet the 2% of GDP requirement, ‘“No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want. You gotta pay. You gotta pay your bills.’”

The Wall Street Journal claimed such typical Trumpian caustic hyperbole will be “the reason many Americans won’t vote for him again even against a mentally declining President Biden,” but this prediction is highly unlikely, unless the editors define “many Americans” as the bipartisan political elite. I seriously doubt that some Trumpian trolling will even be remembered by most voters eight months from now.

More important than squawking over Trump being Trump is the uncritical, reverential acceptance of the Nato Treaty’s Article Five, which is a classic example of what James Madison called a “parchment barrier”–– like most treaties, a political document whose terms will be regularly violated. Consider its actual language:

“The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognized by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.”