RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/gorsuch-condemns-the-breathtaking-use-of-emergency-powers-during-covid/

Justice Neil Gorsuch has penned a passionate polemic against the emergency powers that were widely used during the Covid-19 pandemic, saying that while they may have solved some problems, they created many others.

Gorsuch’s statement came in the Supreme Court’s final word on the effort of a group of states to challenge the end of Title 42, which allowed migrants to be expelled on public-health grounds. Last December, the conservative justices blocked the administration from lifting Title 42 and scheduled oral arguments. However, the justices removed the case from the argument calendar in February after the Biden administration announced it planned to end the Covid-19 national emergency. The justices closed the book on the case Thursday, days after Title 42 expired.

Gorsuch dissented in December and was relieved at the Supreme Court’s decision to render the case moot. He wrote that he does not discount the concerns of states like Arizona, a party in the case, about what is happening at the border. However, he said, “the current border crisis is not a COVID crisis.”

According to Gorsuch, the states attempted “to manipulate our docket to prolong an emergency decree designed for one crisis in order to address an entirely different one,” adding that the Court took a serious misstep in granting certiorari in December.

But for the justice, Title 42 was only one part of a much larger problem of emergency powers being misused.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2023-5-17-what-are-the-three-worst-things-you-could-possibly-imagine-the-federal-government-of-president-ever-doing

The recurring themes at this blog all concern one or another badly misguided government policy that ends up being counter-productive or even greatly destructive of the welfare of the people. Examples include: undermining a functioning energy system in a delusional attempt to control the weather; spending vast sums on “anti-poverty” programs that never reduce poverty even a little; or indoctrinating young children and university students with idiotic and failed Marxist dogma.

All of these themes (and many others that I have covered) are individually important, even very important, measured by potential harm to the well-being of the people. But, however bad government actions in each of these areas may have been, there are even worse things that the government and/or the President can do.

So let’s step back from the news of the day, and consider in the abstract what could be the very worst possible things that the federal government or the President might do. Granted, that category could include things highly unlikely to be tried, like commandeering the military to execute a coup installing the President as dictator, or having the military drop nuclear bombs on U.S. cities. So I’ll impose as a condition to today’s challenge that we limit ourselves to things that a President or bureaucracy might actually try. Still, to qualify for the category of “very worst,” the potential actions must go beyond things that merely immiserate and impoverish the people — which after all could be reversed by a subsequent Congress and President — and reach the level of undermining the entire basis for our republic.

With the stated limitations, here are the three worst possible things that I can think of that the government or President might try:

The forces of law enforcement and national security could be enlisted into the political process on behalf of one political party, to undermine the ability of any opposition ever to win an election.

The President and/or his family could take massive payments from major geopolitical adversary powers, thus essentially making the President a paid agent of the nation’s adversaries.

The President or members of the government could engage in explicit efforts to foment racial strife based on false accusations.

I solicit any ideas that readers may have for things that may be even worse than the ones I have enumerated. But these are the three worst that I can think of.

https://nypost.com/2023/05/18/fbi-dropped-probes-into-claims-clinton-accepted-foreign-bribes/

The FBI had at least four open criminal investigations into Hillary and Bill Clinton that were suddenly dropped in the months before the 2016 presidential election, special counsel John Durham’s recently released report shows.

The bombshell report released by Durham — which concluded that the bureau’s probe into former President Donald Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia was “seriously flawed” — also shed light on the quashed probes.

The feds had been looking into claims that foreign countries and other individuals were trying to influence the Clintons through donations to their namesake non-profit and Hillary’s presidential campaign.

Three of the FBI’s four investigations that were launched in early 2016 were looking into allegations that the Clinton Foundation has a hub of “criminal activity.”

Those federal probes originated from field offices in Little Rock, Arkansas, Washington, DC and New York — all of which opened audits into the charity as Hillary was in the midst of her presidential run.

The Little Rock and New York offices were investigating a claim that an outside commercial industry “likely engaged a federal public official in a flow of benefits scheme, namely, large monetary contributions were made to a non-profit, under both direct and indirect control of the federal public official, in exchange for favorable government action and/or influence,” according to the Durham report.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/special-counsel-john-durham-report-robert-mueller-donald-trump-russia-collusion-bf7023c8?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Special counsel John Durham’s report on the Russia collusion fiasco deserves more attention than it is getting, and its critics are dismissing it for one big reason: The 306 pages describe the great failure of original special counsel Robert Mueller.

Mr. Mueller was named special counsel in May 2017, after Democrats and media claimed Donald Trump fired FBI director Jim Comey to stop the bureau’s investigation into the Russia collusion tale. Mr. Mueller hunted for evidence that Mr. Trump was a Russian mole but couldn’t find it. Now the Durham report makes clear that the Mueller team failed to investigate how the collusion probe began as a dirty trick by the Clinton campaign and how the FBI went along for the ride.

The report includes evidence that those engaged in the FBI’s initial Crossfire Hurricane probe and Democratic attorneys used their positions on the Mueller investigating team to cover up the FBI mess. Among Mr. Mueller’s initial hires were FBI agent Peter Strzok, FBI analyst Brian Auten and FBI lawyer Lisa Page—all at the epicenter of the Crossfire fiasco.

Of Mr. Mueller’s 18 attorneys, several worked in the Obama Justice Department during the Crossfire probe, including Andrew Weissmann—a highly partisan Democrat who attended Hillary Clinton’s 2016 election night party. They had a strong incentive to hide the truth.

https://www.thefp.com/p/the-fbi-trump-durham-report?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

For the last seven years, conventional wisdom has told us a singular story about the FBI and Hillary Clinton. That story had a clear headline: the FBI was out to get her. 

Let’s go back to 2016, when the FBI was investigating both major presidential candidates in the run-up to the election. 

At the time, the bureau was looking into Donald Trump’s campaign’s ties to Russia as well as Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server when she was secretary of state.

In July of 2016, FBI Director James Comey announced that no charges would be brought against the Democratic nominee. Then, eleven days before the election, he said that in light of new information having surfaced, the Clinton investigation had been reopened. Finally, on November 6, two days before Election Day, Comey announced that the matter was closed—again.

To this day, Democrats remain convinced that Comey’s second to last announcement—which, we can all agree, was ham-handed—cast a pall over the campaign, tipping the scales in favor of the Republican nominee.

It’s a neat story. But it’s only half of it.

That’s the big reveal in Special Counsel John Durham’s 306-page Report on Matters Related to Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016 Presidential Campaigns, which came out late last week. 

If the Durham report shows anything, it is that the FBI leadership bent over backward to protect Clinton’s campaign while launching a full investigation into Trump’s campaign on the thinnest of pretexts. In other words, the FBI was not really the Clinton campaign’s persecutor, as so many insisted over the past few years, as much as its protector.

“The speed and manner in which the FBI opened and investigated Crossfire Hurricane during the presidential election season based on raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence,” the Durham report observes, referring to the FBI investigation into the Trump campaign, “reflected a noticeable departure from how it approached prior matters involving possible attempted foreign election interference plans aimed at the Clinton campaign.” 

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/reflections-on-the-revolution-in?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Reflections on the revolution in the west

In the 1990s, I managed to secure for myself entry to an inner circle of hell by arguing that, in general, children were best served by being brought up by their own father and mother. Of course, I said, some marriages would always fail; and of course, many lone parents did a heroic job in bringing up their children. But surely it was best to avoid such disadvantage wherever possible. This was denounced as heartless, cruel, anti-feminist and, of course, right-wing.  

Somewhat to my surprise, therefore, I was approached by a TV producer to make a film about my views on the destruction of the nuclear family. Since I was already cancelled in the best circles, I asked the producer why he wanted to publicise my views. “You’re so reactionary, you’re now in the very vanguard of progress”, he replied.

Given what I went on to say in subsequent years about the destruction of education, multiculturalism, the demonisation of men, Islamisation and anthropogenic global warming theory, I obviously became so progressive I managed to advance to the very end of time itself and met myself coming back.

The onslaught on the traditional family was an early example of a world turned upside down, in which certain kinds of disadvantage became a human right; victim status weaponised bullying and bigotry against those who were denied this status; and untold numbers of children were sacrificed on the altars of mass fatherlessness, the wilful promotion of ignorance in the classroom and the infantilisation of adults.

This all-out onslaught on the nation and its core social and moral norms has created our age of unreason. Language has been hijacked and evacuated of meaning.  Anti-racism means people are now judged, and damned, not for the content of their character but for the white colour of their skin. People with male genitalia are said to be women and are indeed hailed as female role models. Dissent means vilification, character assassination and intimidation.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/05/18/look-ahead-not-backwards-to-hold-the-justice-department-accountable/

Release of Special Counsel John Durham’s report on law enforcement and intelligence misconduct related to the 2016 presidential election has been met with outrage, recriminations, and a justified amount of vindication for those, including President Donald Trump, who helped expose the brazen operation from the start. 

Trump is taking a well-deserved victory lap, to the extent one can be had, punctuated with angry denunciations of the scandal’s perpetrators. Conservative media is carefully dissecting the report to confirm once again the existence of what can only be described as a legitimate seditious conspiracy—not the phony January 6 sort—concocted by the country’s most powerful interests to take down a duly elected president. U.S. Representative James Jordan (R-Ohio), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, invited Durham to testify next week.

Unfortunately, the collective reaction is an exercise in futility. No one, as many observers readily admit, will be held criminally responsible. The corrupt scheme’s collaborators receive book royalties, speaking fees, and coveted gigs at cable news outlets and nonprofits rather than lengthy prison sentences despite Senator Rand Paul’s wishcasting. 

Some, including Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, populate the upper echelons of the BIden regime. Biden himself played a key role in perpetuating the destructive lie.

But relitigating the past in the public square, as vindicating as it may feel, is fruitless. The same corrupt elements are still at work, taking aim not just at Trump but his allies and voters in the shadow of another national election. Trump summed up the current threat in a message posted Wednesday morning on Truth Social.  

Trump’s unjustified optimism in the final sentence notwithstanding, he is correct. Attorney General Merrick Garland’s handpicked special prosecutor, a man who has not been seen in public since his appointment more than seven months ago, is hauling everyone from Mar-a-Lago maids to former Vice President Mike Pence before grand juries considering charges against Trump for his role in January 6 and the handling of classified documents. A steady drip of leaks from Special Counsel Jack Smith’s office keeps Trump’s suspected criminality on the front pages; at the same time, Smith refuses to disclose the names of taxpayer-paid staff conducting the unwieldy investigations.

Federal indictments are imminent.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-dirty-money-behind-the-lynching-of-clarence-thomas/

The country is witnessing the second high-profile lynching effort of Justice Clarence Thomas. Even while the media ignores the millions from foreign nationals passing through shell companies to the Biden family, it has pushed invented scandals for Thomas while demanding his resignation to make way for a radical leftist Biden court appointee.

While no one expects anything but lies and smears from the media, few are aware of how the smear campaign against Justice Thomas was organized and who is funding it.

Before it was splashed all over the media, the Clarence Thomas smears were mostly generated by ProPublica with articles such as “Clarence Thomas’ Secret Life of Luxury” then rebroadcast by the media in stories such as “ProPublica: GOP megadonor paid private school tuition for grandnephew of Justice Clarence Thomas” which keep the smear campaign going.

While the media is deeply interested in who paid for Thomas’ grandnephew’s education, it’s uninterested in where the money that funds ProPublica’s smear campaign is coming from.

ProPublica has amplified the coverage of Harlan Crow, a conservative donor who is friendly with Thomas, but is less interested in discussing some of the men who back its operations. Its leftist smear campaigns are funded by the man who helped bring down the economy with his abusive tactics, a former Enron executive and FTX crypto-fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried.

The money that brought down banks is now trying to bring down a Supreme Court Justice.

ProPublica is a leftist nonprofit set up as an “ethical watchdog” by Herbert Sandler, listed by Time Magazine, as one of the 25 people to blame for the financial crisis of 2008, and more bluntly by Saturday Night Live as, ““people who should be shot”. (In a sign of the power and influence of the Sandlers, the SNL skit was quickly censored and cannot be found on NBC.)

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/05/19/the-past-week-proves-it-democrats-are-the-brainless-party/

If Republicans are the stupid party – and you will get no argument from us here about that – perhaps the correct label for today’s Democratic party is “brainless.” Witness what it did in just the past few days:

President Joe Biden showed up at the pro-abortion EMILY’s List gala, where he said “I also want to thank my buddy Kamala who I work for up in the White House for leading on this issue.”

This is not the first time Biden has mistaken Harris as president. The fact that she could be president is worse, since there are few in public office as dimwitted as she. Recently, Harris offered this pearl of wisdom at an event honoring National Small Business Week: “Some of our younger small business owners actually self-identify as entrepreneurs. They’re small business owners also.”

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman, the darling of the left, had this to say to a witness during a Senate Banking Committee hearing this week:

“Is it a staggering responsive … responsibility … that the the head of a bank could literally could literally crash our economy. Astonishing. That’s like if you have, I mean like … and, and they also realize is that-that-that now they have, it’s in the guaranteed a guaranteed way to be saved, by again by no matter no matter how, you know. So, it’s, it’s, you know, isn’t it appropriate that the those kinds of this kind of control should be more stricter to prevent this kind of thing from going? Or should we just go on and start bailing and sailing whoever bank, regardless of how however there’s their conduct is?”

https://victorhanson.com/institutions-breaking-bad/

As a general rule, the Left eventually destroys everything it touches.

It sees all institutions as ideological fodder, to be warped and twisted, as a necessary means to serve higher political ends. Think of an institution that started out in theory as at least neutral, apolitical, and benign, and then ponder how utterly corrupt it has become.

Public Broadcasting. The public was delighted over a half-century ago with the novel idea that it could enjoy drama, documentaries, and in-depth news—without soap and car commercials (as if something can ever be “free” without consequences). Who did not enjoy the importation of Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation or the multi-episode version of Robert Graves’ I, Claudius?

Remember the first decade of the MacNeil/Lehrer Report? It was a mostly honest liberal version of the news, delivered by two professional journalists, both superior to a Dan Rather or Peter Jennings.

But by the new millennium, the non-political programming began to become overtly ideological. “Nature” documentaries began plugging manmade, disastrous “global warming” to “climate change” to “climate chaos” themes. The PBS NewsHour house “conservatives” were more liberal than most Democrats of the age.

The quirky Garrison Keillor’s liberal, but interesting radio show, A Prairie Home Companion was finally Trotskyized by #MeToo, along with the blotted-out name of Keillor himself.

Many originally thought that NPR might resemble a more lavishly funded form of a mostly nonpartisan C-SPAN, as envisioned, say, by the talented, fair-minded, and astute Brian Lamb of Booknotes. But listen to NPR now and one would conclude that transgenderism is the new normal, that about four people voted for Donald Trump, that BLM/Antifa are similar to the Elks or Rotary, and the dossier is still “Russian collusion,” and Hunter’s laptop remains “disinformation.”