RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/laffaire-assange/

Julian Assange’s arrest inside the embassy of Ecuador in London would not have been possible had that country’s government not authorized the British police to enter its theoretically sovereign territory. The lesson is clear: if you plan to seek asylum in a foreign embassy, you should be careful to choose the diplomatic premises of a country (a) not likely to be pressurized into betraying you; and (b) comfortable enough to make a long sojourn tolerable.

The 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations reaffirmed the long-established principle of inviolability of diplomatic premises. The host-country’s police and security forces are not allowed access without a specific authorization of the chief of mission, which was granted in this case. Assange had spent almost seven years in the Ecuadorian embassy, after being welcomed there by the country’s former president Rafael Correa. The hosts’ political calculus has changed to his detriment over the past two years, however.

The British police arrested Assange supposedly for skipping UK bail seven years ago, but also—and far more importantly—under a previously secret U.S. indictment. The exact charge is for conspiracy, with Chelsea Manning, to hack into a “classified U.S. government computer.” Assange lawyer Barry Pollock said the allegations “boil down to encouraging a source to provide him information and taking efforts to protect the identity of that source.” Assange had predicted that this would happen years ago, and stated it as his reason for seeking asylum in the first place.

Sen. Joe Manchin (D, W.V.) gloated “He is our property!” when told of Assange’s arrest, and he accurately reflected the sentiment shared by the entire Beltway swamp, Democrats in particular:

Assange committed the unpardonable sins of embarrassing the establishment—from members of Congress to intelligence officials to the media. And he will now be punished for our sins. Despite having significant constitutional arguments to be made, it is likely that he will be stripped of those defenses and even barred from raising the overall context of his actions in federal court. What could be the most important free speech and free press case in our history could well be reduced to the scope and substance of an unauthorized computer access case.

Before becoming a fugitive Assange had unveiled a massive, likely unconstitutional NSA surveillance program potentially affecting all Americans. He later published emails that showed that the DNC and the Clinton campaign lied in various statements to the public, including the rigging of the primary for her nomination. As USA Today columnist Jonathan Turley says, “No one has argued that any of these emails were false. They were embarrassing. Of course, there is not crime of embarrassing the establishment but that is merely a technicality.” The American media machi

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14046/nation-of-islam-womens-march

Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam leader, stands for almost everything the Women’s March principles claim to deplore. He is a misogynist who wants to keep women in their traditional roles, he hates all LGBT people in an exceptionally vicious way, he is a black separatist, unlike the marchers, who call for unity between races, and has shown close support for a number of dictators, notably the late Libyan president Mu’ammar Ghadhafi, Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, and Cuba’s Commadante Fidel Castro — even though the Women’s March progressives seek reform through democratic means achieved through working hand-in-hand as free people.

Given that most of the values are those on which most liberals and conservatives agree, one might ask how three of the four board members of the Women’s March came to embrace Louis Farrakhan, praise him, and even attend his 2018 Saviors’ Day rally. These three were Linda Sarsour, Tamika Mallory, and Carmen Perez.

“Rank, vile, open, gutter-level anti-Semitism is apparently a pleasure that the progressive left is unwilling or unable to abstain from. Why?” — James Kirchick, Tablet, March 19, 2019.

It is well-known by some and wholly ignored by others that Islam has a long, sad history of antisemitism, a bigotry that originated in the seventh century CE (the first Islamic century) and has grown more vicious in the 21st. Combined with an almost universal anti-Zionism and bolstered by many on the political “left”, it is today the most ubiquitous and deadliest form of Jew-hatred. It takes the form, not just of insults, boycotts, and lawfare, but of wars, terrorist attacks, and calls for the destruction of the Jewish state and the genocide of the Jews.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/socialism-fails-every-time-11554851786

Self-described socialist Bernie Sanders has become a favorite of young voters by posing as an apostle of daring new ideas. Socialism, however, is anything but new. It’s hard to think of another idea that has been tried and failed as many times in as many ways or at a steeper price in human suffering.

The term “socialism” was coined by followers of Robert Owen (1771-1858), whom Karl Marx would label a “utopian socialist.” In 1825 Owen founded New Harmony, an Indiana commune, to demonstrate the superiority of what was first called the “social system.” The same year, Owen explained his experiment to a joint session of Congress attended by Supreme Court justices, President James Monroe and President-elect John Quincy Adams. Although Owen poured his fortune into it, New Harmony collapsed in disarray and recrimination within two years.

Owen’s son Robert Dale Owen salvaged the community by implementing what he called “a policy the very reverse” of socialism: “giving each respectable citizen every facility and encouragement to become (what every adult ought to be) a landed proprietor.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/elites-share-common-interests-changes-conventional-wisdom/

Conventional wisdom may change in a flash (remember ‘peak oil’?), but elites remain elites, united by common interests.
“All things are in flux.” — Heraclitus

The adage “nothing last forever” is an understatement. Far more accurate is something like “nothing lasts until next week.”

Saint-to-Sinner Silicon Valley

A decade ago, even most Republicans admired the rugged entrepreneurialism of the high-tech Masters of the Universe who had built a multitrillion-dollar, world-dominating Internet, and the computer, mobile-phone, online-sales, and social-media industries, defined by marquee companies such as Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Yahoo.

In turn, Democrats gave up their suspicions of big money, as they canonized liberal Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg. Their wealth was okay, since the creators of it were progressives and dressed like Woodstock hipsters as they spread their billions freely among progressive think tanks, foundations, and political campaigns.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/04/08/same-people-behind-iraq-war-lies-pu

For more than two years they misled us.

Exploiting fear and confusion after a shocking event, they warned that our country was in imminent danger at the hands of a mad man. They insisted that legitimate intelligence, including a CIA report issued a month before a national election and a dossier produced by reliable sources in the United Kingdom, proved the threat was real. The subject monopolized discussions on Capitol Hill, in the White House, and in the press.

They argued that the situation was so dire that it was straining our relationship with strategic allies. Any evidence to the contrary was readily dismissed. And anyone who questioned their agenda was ridiculed as a coward, a dupe, or a conspiracy theorist. The news media dedicated endless air time and column inches to anyone who wanted to repeat the falsehood.

But an investigative report released two years after the propaganda campaign began found no evidence to support their central claim. The CIA report was highly flawed. The official dossier, some concluded, was deceptive and “sexed-up.”

No, I’m not referring here to the Trump-Russia collusion hoax, although the similarities are nearly identical. I’m talking about the period between 2002 and 2004 when many of the very same people who recently peddled collusion fiction also insisted that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction—including material to produce nuclear bombs. On the heels of the horrors of 9/11, the United States and our allies waged war against Iraq in 2003 based primarily on that assurance.

But in 2004, a special advisor to the CIA concluded Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. There were no stockpiles of biological or chemical agents; no plans to develop a nuclear bomb. The main argument for the war had been wholly discredited. But it was too late: The conflict officially raged on for another seven years, including a “surge” of 20,000 more U.S. troops in 2007 at the behest of the late Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.). We still have a troop presence in Iraq to this day.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/a-radical-suggestion_2869905.html

I wouldn’t call it an out-of-body experience exactly, but I did get a thrill in reading the autobiography of former CIA Director Richard Helms, “A Look Over My Shoulder.” It served as strong validation of the line of research I followed to write my new book, “The Red Thread: A Search for Ideological Drivers Inside the Anti-Trump Conspiracy.”

Helms’ book explained that it’s this same line of research—which Helms followed in 2003—that helped identify Soviet agents.

Helms, who led the CIA between 1966 and 1973, was recounting a post-retirement luncheon he had with a World War II buddy from the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the CIA. It was the day before Helms was to meet with the CIA’s counterintelligence staff, and his old friend told him: “Remind them that no intelligence agency can for very long be any better than its counterintelligence component. And recommend that they chisel the words into the granite entrance out there.”

Helms continued: “He had a point. A quick glance in the rearview mirror shows that the most notorious traitors and successful spies in this century would have been barred from sensitive government work, or exposed early in their careers, had basic counterintelligence measures been taken.”

As Helms explained them, these basic counterintelligence measures include conducting precisely the kind of research I have put together under the rubric of “red threads” to build ideological profiles of leading persons in the anti-Trump conspiracy: Nellie Ohr, Christopher Steele, John Brennan, James Comey, and others.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-4-5-if-there-is-white-privilege-what-does-it-consist-of

You can’t have helped noticing that assertions of “white privilege” are all the rage on the left these days. Or maybe it’s “white male privilege.” For example, back in January, there was CNN’s Nia-Malika Henderson throwing down the “white privilege” gauntlet on Beto O’Rourke: “Beto’s excellent adventure drips with white male privilege.” Beto, of course, promptly acknowledged that Henderson was right, stating in Iowa on March 16, “As a white man who has had privileges that others could not depend on, or take for granted, I’ve clearly had advantages over the course of my life.”

When I first heard the term “white privilege” gaining currency, my initial reaction was to doubt that it could amount to much of significance. In my own experience, ever since I was old enough to notice, every institution that I came in contact with, to the extent I could tell, was making every effort it possibly could to attract and advance minorities candidates, particularly African Americans. In many cases, these efforts would clearly have the effect, explicit or implicit, of disadvantaging whatever white candidates were competing for a limited number of slots. For example:

Way back in 1968, when I was applying to college, elite colleges already explicitly practiced affirmative action. Although the details were closely guarded then as now, my own college (Yale) constantly boasted about its efforts to find and admit qualified minority candidates.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/04/07/all-the-progressive-plotters/

Right after the 2016 election, Green Party candidate Jill Stein—cheered on by Hillary Clinton dead-enders—sued in three states to recount votes and thereby overturn Donald Trump’s victory in the Electoral College. Before the quixotic effort imploded, Stein was praised as an iconic progressive social justice warrior who might stop the hated Trump from even entering the White House.

When that did not work, B-list Hollywood celebrities mobilized, with television and radio commercials, to shame electors in Trump-won states into not voting for the president-elect during the official Electoral College balloting in December 2016. Their idea was that select morally superior electors should reject their constitutional directives and throw the election into the House of Representatives where even more morally superior NeverTrump Republicans might join with even much more morally superior Democrats to find the perfect morally superior NeverTrump alternative.

When that did not work, more than 60 Democratic House members voted to bring up Trump’s impeachment for vote. Trump had only been in office a few weeks. Then San Francisco billionaire Tom Steyer toured the country and lavished millions on advertisements demanding Trump’s removal by impeachment—and was sorely disappointed when he discovered that billion-dollar-fueled virtue-signaling proved utterly bankrupt virtue-signaling.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-cultural-revolution-comes-to-north-america-11554661623

My friend Caylan Ford has spent her career advocating for international human rights and supporting victims of religious persecution. When I began speaking out against abuses in my native China, she helped me stand up to the Communist regime’s bullying. So I was excited when she decided to run for office in the Canadian province of Alberta.

But last month she had to withdraw after she became the target of a character-assassination campaign. Her adversaries and several reporters used quotes from private online conversations to portray her falsely as a racist.

She was quoted as describing a double standard whereby officials and media figures assert that the perpetrators of Islamist terrorism “do not represent Islam, that Islam is a religion of peace, etc.,” and look for explanations of how they went astray. When the terrorists are white supremacists, on the other hand, “attempts to understand the sources of their radicalization or their perverse moral reasoning is beyond the pale,” and anyone who wants “strong borders and immigration control” is “painted with the same brush” as the racists. Although she called white supremacy “odious” as well as perverse, a headline on the public broadcaster CBC’s website matter-of-factly described these as “white supremacist comments.”

https://freebeacon.com/blog/thinly-disguised-anti-semitism/

Again, do not worry: he is talking about Zionists, not Jews, so no anti-Semitism to see here.

A good rule of thumb is that, if you can take a statement and replace the words “Israel,” “Israeli,” and “Zionist” with “Jew,” “Jewish,” and “Jewish people,” and that statement then sounds like it came straight out of the Dark Ages or Nazi Germany, it is probably anti-Semitic. The same goes for replacing “Zionism” with “Judaism.”

Look at what happened to Alain Finkielkraut, the French Jewish intellectual, last month in central Paris. Finkielkraut was walking in the street when a group of protesters in the Yellow Vest movement cornered him. “Dirty Zionist, you’re going to die!” they yelled at the philosopher, along with “Go back to Tel Aviv!,” “Get lost, dirty Zionist shit!,” and “France is ours!” Now, it is possible that the protesters just hate and want to expel from France those who believe in Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, and not Jews themselves. After all, they did call Finkielkraut a Zionist. But, just to entertain me, try applying our rule, and come to your own conclusion.

All of the aforementioned incidents are, of course, anti-Semitic. Those who say otherwise have a very dark sense of humor, are hopelessly ignorant, or are probably the ones making such anti-Semitic comments in the first place. And that third group is no longer comprised only of fringe elements on the political left and right—the radical tenured professor and the former KKK leader, both of whom almost always share the same views on the Jewish state and the Jewish people.

Just look at Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the United Kingdom’s Labour Party, who in 2013 accused British “Zionists” of having two problems. “One is they don’t want to study history, and secondly, having lived in this country for a very long time, probably all their lives, they don’t understand English irony either,” Corbyn said at a conference promoted by Hamas, the Islamist Palestinian terror group. “They needed two lessons, which we could perhaps help them with.”

And then there is Rep. Ilhan Omar, who in 2012 tweeted, “Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel.” Omar has also accused American politicians of supporting Israel because of the influence of Jewish money, and has insinuated that American Jews are guilty of “allegiance to a foreign country,” meaning Israel.

Neo-Nazis and white supremacists, such as David Duke, use the words Zionist and Jew interchangeably. So do Omar, Corbyn, the Students for Justice in Palestine, and other like-minded progressives who despise Israel and do not believe in its right to exist as a Jewish state. In each case, one can see the bizarre, illogical obsession with, and the visceral, ingrained hatred of, Israel and Zionism. One can also see the conspiracy theories concerning the Jewish state. Israel secretly controls the media, the banks, and American foreign policy, according to these voices. It is a devilish state, somehow committing genocide against a Palestinian population that has actually grown since Israel’s founding. Israel is the Jew among nations, singularly worthy of scorn for its very existence.

But, remember, we are supposed to buy that none of this is anti-Semitism, because, supposedly, none of this is about Jews, just Israel and Zionists. Indeed, Western progressives will say their hostility toward Israel is actually about legitimate criticism of the Israeli government, despite all of its overlaps with traditional anti-Semitism. Do they not realize that judging Israel by a standard different from that applied to all other countries and accusing the Jewish state of cosmic evil are the two key features of anti-Semitism, at least now that hatred and persecution of Jews are based primarily on their nation-state, not their race or religion? And do they not realize that supporting efforts that seek Israel’s destruction as a Jewish state, like the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, is inherently anti-Semitic? Apparently not.

The worst part of this thinly disguised anti-Semitism is that Western society has accepted, even normalized, it. One can get tenure at an elite university, or enter Congress or Parliament, or even become a prominent pundit, by using blatantly anti-Semitic language. Just replace Jewish with Zionist and the Jewish people with Israel, and you are probably set. In some circles, you are an intellectual giant, an inspiration. And people wonder why most Jews think Israel is so important.

Students Supporting Israel at Columbia put the shameful depiction into context. “This kind of repugnant caricature of Jews is a sore reminder of blatant anti-Semitism from the dark ages of medieval Europe when anti-Semitic propaganda depicted Jews as satanic consorts and an incarnation of absolute evil,” the group wrote on Facebook. “Physically, Jews were portrayed as menacing, hirsute, with boils, warts, and other deformities, sometimes with horns, cloven hoofs, and tails. It is extremely painful to see that the same rhetoric is being used on the campus of an Ivy League university in the United States.”