RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/06/06/those-who-oppose-capitalism-are-the-enemies-of-freedom/

By now, much of the country has heard or read about the City University of New York law school graduate who was allowed to unspool a spiteful tirade as the school’s commencement speaker. She made a number of vile statements, but her call to “fight against capitalism” stood out to us. She and her fellow travelers know what few casual observers are aware of, that is, an attack on capitalism is an attack on liberty.

Condemning capitalism is nothing new in this country. We’ve heard the angry criticisms all of our lives, and they weren’t novel when we were young. It’s tragic, really, that so many in the West see the tension between “capitalists” and their ideological opponents as merely a conflict between ideas about which economic system we should have.

But it’s more than that. It’s a battle between freedom and subjugation.

Capitalism is not an economic system imposed by government in the way socialism or communism or any form of Marxism or planned economy is imposed on people against their will. Capitalism is merely the economic activity that men will engage in when left alone, when they are free to act as they wish. It is spontaneous, ordered and entirely organic. 

When men are free to trade with each other without government intrusion, they will inevitably seek and sell capital. And why wouldn’t they? It is their nature. Innovators and entrepreneurs hungry to make their ideas flesh need capital to fund their ventures. Those who have capital see opportunities to reap profits, so they trade their capital in an open market for profits to be realized later.

This is not exploitation but the manifestation of liberty. Ludwig von Mises wrote in his 1952 “Planning for Freedom” essay that “planning and capitalism are utterly incompatible.” The former is “conducted according to the government’s orders” while the latter follows the plans of entrepreneurs “eager to profit by best filling the wants of consumers.”

Von Mises also noted in the same essay that “the idea that political freedom can be preserved in the absence of economic freedom, and vice versa, is an illusion.”

https://amgreatness.com/2023/06/02/left-wing-authoritarianism/

The daily issue of Lisa DePasquale’s “Bright” political newsletter never disappoints. Her May 31 edition was quite an eye opener. To wit, via the New York Post, DePasquale highlights the findings of a study titled, “Understanding left-wing authoritarianism: Relations to the dark personality traits, altruism, and social justice commitment”:

The study published in Current Psychology suggests that left-wing extremism is associated with toxic, psychopathic tendencies and narcissism [and] found a link between higher levels of left-wing authoritarianism and higher levels of narcissism. The authors coined the term ‘dark-ego-vehicle principle’ to describe the phenomenon where individuals with dark personality traits are attracted to political and social activism as a means to satisfy their ego-focused needs rather than working towards social justice and equality. The study also noted that some activists use social justice as a guise for unhinged behavior and prioritize self-presentation, moral superiority, and social status over genuine social causes.

This makes sense. After all, one need only think of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and other left-wing monsters to see the “dark-ego-vehicle-principle” at work in the capture of organizations and movements, and their subsequent implementation of purges and democides. Yet, even on a smaller scale, one can see numerous instances of organizations of all political and apolitical stripes being captured to varying degrees by their most narcissistic and aggressive left-wing members, leading to the group’s increasing left-wing authoritarianism and, in some instances, embrace of violence, at the expense and/or eclipse of its original goals. 

This study of left-wing authoritarianism constitutes a validation of John O’Sullivan’s “First Law”:

All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing. I cite as supporting evidence the ACLU, the Ford Foundation, and the Episcopal Church. The reason is, of course, that people who staff such bodies tend to be the sort who don’t like private profit, business, making money, the current organization of society, and, by extension, the Western world. At which point [Robert] Michels’s Iron Law of Oligarchy takes over—and the rest follows.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/06/jim_jordan_takes_on_a_corrupt_legal_establishment.html

On June 2, the internet was filled with reports of House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan’s letter of June 1 to Attorney General Merrick Garland seeking information as to the FBI’s role in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation of President Trump’s handling of classified information.  That the FBI was given a role in this matter by Garland is obvious from the FBI’s SWAT swoopdown on the president’s Florida residence last August.   

Here are selections from the Jordan letter. First, the opening paragraph:

“On May 12, 2023, Special Counsel John Durham released a report detailing the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) failings in opening and conducting an investigation — code named “Crossfire Hurricane” — into debunked allegations of collusion between Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and the Russian government. The extent of the FBI’s bias and reckless disregard for the truth, which Special Counsel Durham laid out in painstaking detail, is nothing short of scandalous. The FBI has tried to dismiss the report’s findings by claiming to have “already implemented dozens of corrective actions” to prevent similar misconduct in the future. The FBI’s window dressing is not enough. The Special Counsel’s report serves as a stark reminder of the need for more accountability and reforms within the FBI. Accordingly, as Congress conducts oversight to inform these legislative reforms, we write to ensure the Justice Department act to preserve the integrity and impartiality of ongoing investigations from the FBI’s politicized bureaucracy.”

Chairman Jordan rightly described “the FBI’s bias and reckless disregard for the truth” in its earlier probe of President Trump, as “nothing short of scandalous” and underscored “the need for more accountability and reforms within the FBI.”  And to end the politicization of the FBI — under Garland’s stewardship, it is fair to infer.

“Public trust in the FBI is low.  Recent examples of political bias in FBI and Department of Justice operations show that the so-called “corrective measures” the FBI instituted after Crossfire Hurricane have done nothing to address, let alone cure, the institutional rot that pervades the FBI. It is clear that Congress must consider legislative reforms to the FBI, and the Committee has been engaged in robust oversight to inform those legislative proposals. In the interim, however, due to the FBI’s documented political bias, the Justice Department must ensure any ongoing investigations are not poisoned by this same politicization.”

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2023/06/02/end_american_gerontocracy_149306.html

President Joe Biden’s viscerally jarring fall on Thursday in Colorado Springs, while on stage dispensing diplomas to new U.S. Air Force Academy graduates, underscores a terrifying reality: The octogenarian denizen of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, palpably in the throes of debilitating mental and physical senescence, is not well. The sight of the commander-in-chief physically falling in front of a graduating Air Force Academy class, no less, is outright depressing to active-duty servicemen and telegraphs national weakness to America’s many adversaries abroad.

Make no mistake about it: Joe Biden is an absolutely massive liability as president of the United States, in charge of the nuclear football and primarily responsible for issues of war and peace. His vice presidential junior sidekick and would-be successor, the cackling nincompoop Kamala Harris, may well be totally insufferable, but this column has argued — and still maintains — that Biden should resign for the good of the country. At a bare minimum, it is foolish and selfish in the extreme for the doddering dolt from Delaware to seek reelection in 2024.

Biden’s Centennial State fall is hardly the only recent example of a high-ranking senior citizen appearing less-than-stellar in the public eye. The 89-year-old Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), whose political career first began in 1970 (one year before Biden’s), recently missed over two months of senatorial work while recovering from a nasty bout of shingles and encephalitis. When she finally made her way back to the Capitol, Feinstein, in the words of a May 18 New York Times article, “appeared shockingly diminished.” Since returning, the now-wheelchair-bound Feinstein has required additional staff assistance to merely cast her votes and has apparently forgotten she was ever out of commission to begin with: “No, I haven’t been gone,” she told Slate on May 16. Come again?

Overall, an incredible 68% of U.S. senators in the current Congress are aged 60 or older. The single most popular subgroup, at a whopping 34% of the putative “world’s greatest deliberative body,” is the sexagenarians — most of whom are old enough to receive Social Security benefits. The constitutional minimum age for being a U.S. senator is 30, but the cumulative share of senators in the current Congress under the age of 50 is a paltry 10%. There are three times as many senators in the current Congress aged 70-79 than there are senators aged 30-39. That ought to be alarming — these men and women are charged with decisions pertaining to declaring war and assessing our most sensitive intelligence, among other crucial matters. As for the U.S. Supreme Court, Amy Coney Barrett is the youngest justice at age 51, and five of the nine black-robed oracles are old enough to potentially receive Social Security benefits.

https://justthenews.com/government/congress/comer-wins-fbi-relents-agrees-deliver-subpoenaed-memo-alleging-biden-bribery

Facing a potential contempt of Congress vote, FBI Director Christopher Wray relented and has agreed to bring a subpoenaed document from the Biden family investigation to Capitol Hill for lawmakers to inspect on Monday, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer announced Friday.

The document in question, an FD-1023, contains uncorroborated allegations that an informant provided the FBI in June 2020 alleging that Joe Biden, when he was vice president, was engaged in a bribery scheme to change US policy in return for $5 million to his family’s businesses, lawmakers have said.

Congress was alerted to the document by an FBI whistleblower who raised concerns the allegations were never fully investigated. Comer and Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa demanded to see the document, and Comer followed with a subpoena.

As recently as Wednesday, Wray indicated he would not turn over the document in compliance with the subpoena, but would let lawmakers come read it at the FBI. But a deal was struck late Thursday for the FBI to bring the document to the Capitol, officials said.

“Chairman Comer will receive a briefing from the FBI and review the document on Monday,” his committee told Just the News in a statement. “Chairman Comer has been clear that anything short of producing the FD-1023 form to the House Oversight Committee is not compliance with his subpoena. This unclassified record contains pages of details that need to be investigated further by the House Oversight Committee.”

In a statement to Just the News, the FBI said it wanted to accommodate Congress while also protecting sensitive confidential human source information that often is recorded in memos even before it is corroborated.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/debt-ceiling-bill-budget-military-spending-biden-kevin-mccarthy-senate-pentagon-45db6323?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

The debt-ceiling bill passed the Senate on Thursday evening with 63 votes, though not before several Senators warned about its cuts to military spending. They have a point that will have to be addressed.

Republicans succeeded in reducing domestic discretionary spending, but the political price was agreeing to President Biden’s defense budget request of $886 billion for 2024 and $895 billion in 2025. That’s a 3% nominal increase in 2024, and it at least breaks the Democratic Party’s long-time demand that every defense dollar be matched with one for social welfare.

But Mr. Biden’s number is a real cut in defense after inflation. The deal means U.S. spending on the military could fall below 3% of the economy for the first time since the height of the post-Cold War peace dividend in the late 1990s.

No one thinks the world is more tranquil today than in 1999, as Vladimir Putin prosecutes the first European land war in 80 years. The Biden budget shrinks the U.S. Navy to 286 ships by 2025—as China ramps up to a 400-strong fleet designed to subdue Taiwan.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/05/nyc_law_promotes_fat_pride_and_size_freedom.html

In his works on rhetoric, Aristotle said that a speaker can hope to persuade his audience only if the message is underpinned by logos, an appeal to reason; pathos, an appeal to emotions; and, above all, ethos, the appeal that derives from the speaker’s own character and credibility. On that last, vital count, Mayor Eric Adams of New York City (NYC) failed miserably last week as he signed legislation (Intro. 209-2022 A) banning discrimination by weight and height in employment, housing, and public accommodations.

But before we get to Adams’s hypocrisy, let us look at the grievance of size discrimination per se. Manufactured and overblown by ‘woke’ activists, it stands on shaky ground. Body-positive activism denies the fact that being overweight is unhealthy and upends attempts by healthcare professionals to drive home the message that there is a strong connection between obesity and a host of conditions such as hypertension, high LDL cholesterol levels, diabetes, coronary heart disease, stroke, gallbladder disease, kidney failure, and cancer. The Center for Disease Control (CDC) says there is a well-established connection between obesity and morbidity and mortality.

By blaming society for the misery felt by outliers in weight, height, or other physical traits, body-positive activism diverts them from the hard work of changing what can be changed and accepting what cannot. With faddish references to “fat pride” and “size freedom” and spurious charges of “fat shaming,” many people choose to reject a rather obvious salubrious solution: adopting a healthier lifestyle.

Fortunately, the new law permits height and weight standards to be used in situations in which job performance necessitates certain physical traits.  For example, law enforcement, firefighters and defense forces constitute categories with requirements that would be exempt from the strictures of Intro. 209-2022A.  Similarly, the bill permits operators of public accommodations to consider height and weight criteria as part of what is reasonably necessary for normal operations.  With these broad-brush exemptions, it’s hard to discern what purpose the law serves.

Now for Adams and his compromised ethos. The mayor, a former police officer who has been a crusader for healthy eating and fitness, ended up making a statement of questionable veracity while announcing the new law: “Science has showed (sic) that body type is not a connection to if you’re healthy or unhealthy. I think that’s a misnomer (sic) that we are really dispelling.”

https://amgreatness.com/2023/06/01/george-soros-and-the-new-york-city-subway-tragedy/

The tragic death of Jordan Neely and the despicable legal lynching of Daniel Penny are not random events.

Democrats have instituted globalist-inspired programs and policies, transforming major cities like New York into dystopian hellscapes. Public safety has been abandoned. Predatory criminals, the drug addicted, and the violently mentally ill roam the streets and subways with impunity. Police are either absent or passive spectators. States attorneys protect criminals instead of their victims.

The result is law-abiding citizens have been left to survive on their own. And when heroes like Daniel Penny stand up to protect their lives and those of their fellow citizens—they are crushed.

The Common Thread of Evil 

The common thread of evil which runs through every social catastrophe in America can be traced to George Soros—the dark soul of the Democratic Party.

Every Soros-financed initiative is designed to facilitate the destruction of the roots of Western culture and the foundation of American civilization. His objective is to tear down society by unraveling our culture, values, and traditions. That twisted vision is now the platform of the Democratic Party. 

Here are some items from Soros’ globalist playbook that are already destroying America with links to the front organizations he finances to implement it. 

Open borders.
Subverting the rule of law by financing the election of pro-criminal states attorneys.
Drug legalization.
Normalizing mass homelessness, untreated mental illness, and drug addiction.
Defunding the police.
Perpetuating the big lie of “systemic police racism.”
Prison abolition.
Institutionalizing the antiwhite racism and perpetual black victimhood of critical race theory.
Spreading transgender ideology and the depraved genital mutilation and castration of children.
Unlimited abortion in America and globally.
Global legalization of prostitution.
Euthanasia.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-student-loan-write-off-congress-vote-house-senate-supreme-court-29c2fb4f?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

The Supreme Court will soon rule on the legality of President Biden’s unilateral decision to write down $400 billion in student-loan debt. If anyone doubts why the President dodged Congress on the issue, recent votes make clear that he would have lost.

The Democratic Senate voted Thursday, 52-46, to endorse a Congressional resolution to overturn the Biden write-off. That followed a 218-203 vote in the House a week earlier to do the same.

With a wave of his hand last summer, Mr. Biden canceled $10,000 to $20,000 in debt for some 40 million borrowers, though he had earlier conceded it was “pretty questionable” that he had the power to do so. Nancy Pelosi, then House Speaker, also said two years ago that “it would take an act of Congress, not an executive order, to cancel student loan debt.”

Who cares about the law when an election is nigh? The White House claims it has sweeping authority to forgive student debt under an obscure 2003 law to help veterans, and this is the claim the High Court is judging. But Mr. Biden’s transparent political goal was to buy the votes of young people who have student debt. While the write-down might have played well in Berkeley, Calif., it rankles most Americans who didn’t go to college or who sacrificed to repay their loans.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/05/31/is-the-sleeping-conservative-dragon-finally-waking-up/

Conservatives and traditionalists are often exasperated at the ongoing woke cultural revolution in their midst.

How can America be turned upside down, as it is, when there is little public support for the things happening around us?

They don’t see much backing for the current wide-open borders and unchecked illegal immigration, yet it continues.

Conservatives feel that most Americans reject the trend of biological men dominating female sporting events.

They fear American jurisprudence has become now vastly weaponized and warped.

Certainly, Donald Trump will be more likely indicted by a politicized New York City prosecutor for supposedly overvaluing his net worth over a decade ago than would be a current violent street criminal clubbing a subway commuter.

In 2020 torching a federal courthouse or massing at the White House grounds, in efforts to get at the president, earned either few arrests and little or no jail time. In 2021, if one entered the Capitol and illegally paraded around like a buffoon, he could get a five-year prison sentence.

Traditionalists feel that sky-high energy prices, out-of-control urban crime, a depressed economy, high interest rates, and a politicized FBI, CIA, Justice Department, and Pentagon are all needlessly self-created messes.

How then did these extremist policies that have little popular support become institutionalized?

Conservatives, by their nature and unlike the Left, are more inclined to accept existing institutions rather than to radically alter or destroy them.

They were asleep at the wheel in 2020, when left-wing-funded lawsuits radically transformed Election Day in many states into a mere construct. Some 70 percent of the electorate in key precincts voted by mail or early, with far fewer ballot audits or authentication.