RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://victorhanson.com/the-biden-clans-con-is-coming-to-an-end/

Despite years of Biden family and media disinformation, we are finally learning that Joe Biden really did fire Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin for looking into state corruption involving the oil company Burisma and Hunter Biden—and ultimately Joe Biden himself.

As Vice President, Biden, in his own words, bragged that he had threatened to cancel the deliverance of American foreign aid to Ukraine unless Shokin was dismissed.

So what is the Congress to do now—un-impeach and exonerate an innocent impeached Donald Trump, and instead impeach a guilty Biden for essentially the same allegations?

After all, the Left redefined the impeachment bar in 2019 as leveraging foreign aid to Ukraine to benefit one’s political career.

And that is exactly what Joe Biden did to ensure his son could continue to raise millions for the Biden family with foreign governments, while being shielded from political consequences.

An impeached Trump also was accused of using the power of government to go after his likely 2020 presidential rival by suggesting that Joe Biden and his family were corrupt, and should be investigated by Ukrainian officials for fraud and bribery.

Despite Joe Biden’s denials, Trump was right: there was plenty of evidence to link Ukrainian unwarranted payoffs going into Biden family coffers.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/08/21/actually-joe-all-your-objectives-were-failures/

“Name me a single objective we’ve ever set out to accomplish that we’ve failed on. Name me one, in all of our history. Not one!”

-President Joe Biden, August 16, 2023 

Joe Biden in one of his now accustomed angry “get off my grass” moods dared the press to find just one of his policies/objectives that has not worked. Silence followed.

Perhaps it was polite to say nothing, given even the media knows almost every enacted Biden policy has failed.

Here is a summation of what he should instead apologize for.

Biden in late summer 2021 sought a 20th anniversary celebration of 9/11 and the 2001 subsequent invasion of Afghanistan. He wished to be the landmark president that yanked everyone out of Afghanistan after 20 years in country. But the result was the greatest military humiliation of the United States since the flight from Vietnam in 1975.

Consider the ripples of Biden’s disaster. U.S. deterrence was crippled worldwide. China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea almost immediately began to bluster or return to their chronic harassment of U.S. and allied ships and planes. We left thousands of allied Afghans to face Taliban retribution, along with some Western contractors.

Biden abandoned a $1 billion embassy, and a $300 million remodeled Bagram airbase strategically located not far from China and Russia, and easily defensible. Perhaps $50 billion in U.S. weaponry and supplies were abandoned and now find their way into the international terrorist mart.

All our pride flags, our multimillion gender studies programs at Kabul University, and our George Floyd murals did not just come to naught, but were replaced by the Taliban’s anti-homosexual campaigns, burkas, and detestation of any trace of American popular culture.

Vladimir Putin sized up the skedaddle. He collated it with Biden’s unhinged quip that he would not get too excited if Putin just staged a “minor” invasion of Ukraine. He remembered Biden’s earlier request to Putin to modulate Russian hacking to exempt a few humanitarian American institutions. Then Russia concluded of our shaky Commander-in-Chief that he either did not care or could do nothing about another Russian invasion.

The result so far is more than 500,000 dead and wounded in the war, a Verdun-stand-off along with fortified lines, the steady depletion of our munitions and weapon stocks, and a new China/Russia/Iran/North Korean axis, with wink and nod assistance from NATO Turkey.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/georgias-trump-indictment-partisan-political-hit-job/

How is it a criminal enterprise to challenge the results of a razor-thin election?

How is it a criminal enterprise if the first amendment protects it?

The sweeping 98-page document charges Former President Trump and nineteen others with various felony charges for actions that occurred in the frenetic time immediately following the 2020 Presidential Election, an election Trump officially lost by the slimmest of margins: 0.23% and 11,779 votes.

For those of us who live here in Georgia, there was a palpable feeling that something was wrong. This was the first election where we had ballot drop-off boxes spread all over with nobody keeping an eye on them. There were daily reports of ballot harvesting in nursing homes. There were mysterious water leaks where the votes were being counted, poll watchers were reporting a lack of access to the count, and the counting seemed to stop and start for no apparent reason. Cynics suspected the pauses were meant to figure out how many votes Joe Bide still needed to carry Georgia.

Once Georgia was officially called for Joe Biden, President Trump, and his team immediately cried foul and began looking for ways to challenge and even overturn the election. There did not seem to be a coherent legal strategy to get into court and challenge the election. However, one lawsuit filed in Fulton County sought to challenge 147,000 absentee ballots to see if any were illegitimate. The plaintiff was not Donald Trump. This suit alleged evidence of fraudulent ballots and improper ballot counting in Fulton County. Nine Georgia voters filed it. These voters never had their day in court because the judge dismissed the case without hearing the Plaintiff’s evidence on the grounds that they “lacked standing.”

Trump appealed to Georgia’s Secretary of State by calling and imploring him to take action to correct the perceived fraud given the razor-thin margin of defeat. In addition, Trump listened to advice and counsel from a variety of lawyers, including Attorney General Bill Barr, Rudy Giuliani, and John Eastman, to name a few.

Bill Barr reportedly told Trump the election was clean, and he lost fair and square. It remains a mystery how Barr came to this conclusion without investigating Trump’s claims of fraud. Meanwhile, Eastman and others reportedly advised Trump that it was plausible to contest the election by imploring Vice President Pence to disregard the slate of electors from Georgia (and other places) in favor of an alternate slate of Trump electors when counting the electoral college votes. For this strategy to prevail, any alternate electors would need to have their names submitted by the constitutional deadline of the 4th Wednesday in December 2020. So, in Georgia and other states, Trump supporters presented themselves as alternate electors on the theory that if any of the fraud claims could be sufficiently proven, the Vice President would be able to count the Trump Electors.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2023/07/an-abc-of-woke/

Originating as black American parlance for resisting racial and social inequality, Woke has morphed into a generic term for radically left-wing social and political awareness. According to Perry Bacon Jr. of the Washington Post it represents the following doctrines for the American Left: rejection of American exceptionalism; a claim that the United States has never been a true democracy; a claim that non-white people (“people of colour”) are victims of systemic and institutional racism; that white Americans enjoy “white privilege”; that African Americans deserve reparations for slavery and post-enslavement discrimination; that disparities among racial groups are explained by discrimination; that US law enforcement agencies are designed to discriminate against people of colour and so should be defunded, disbanded or at least heavily reformed; that women suffer from systemic sexism; that individuals should be able to identify with any gender or none; that US capitalism is deeply flawed.

Bacon’s list is not definitive, but the common subtext of Wokeism is invariably victimhood. This is a psychologically determined attitude, considered by Wokeists to transcend any contrary empirical evidence. Professor Jean-François Braunstein of the Sorbonne has remarked that Wokeism offers theories of knowledge that validate feelings over facts. Sometimes celebrities empathise with victimhood by claiming it for themselves. Prince Harry wanted us to believe that he had been “cut off” financially by his father, despite having been able to buy a multi-million-dollar Californian mansion; he also claims to “want his family back” and an apology from it, picturing himself as the injured party after insulting the royal family repeatedly in public.

Victimhood is now also becoming an excuse for violence by fringe groups with a dubious and anti-science agenda, for example “trans-activists”. Generational victimhood relating to climate change holds white civilisation responsible for creating global warming in the industrial revolution and exporting climate-damaging technology to the rest of the world, which is not therefore responsible for climate damage and should be paid reparations. Little or no mention is made of the astonishing benefits to mankind yielded by the industrial revolution, or of the self-critical culture of free countries that made them the first to urge action against climate change (as also against slavery).

Although European countries have quite different political and social features from America, they have imported Woke ideology pretty much wholesale. Even France, arguably the country least susceptible to Wokeism due to its “universalist” tradition, which in principle is blind to people’s colour and origin, has now got an incipiently woke Minister of Education. Pap Ndiaye told Le Monde that he did not experience racism growing up in France and only “realised that [he] was black” when he was twenty-five and studying in the United States. Indeed, importation to Europe happens chiefly through academia, where mediocre scholars have weaponised Woke ideology as a way of advancing their power by targeting individuals and institutions that can be presented as insufficiently conformist to Woke assumptions.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2023/08/23/the-summoning-rituals-of-the-left-n1721490

The malignant playbook of the contemporary left is generally considered to be Saul Alinsky’s 1989 “Rules for Radicals,” and there is certainly much truth to the story of the book’s destructive influence. But the source text for social and political upheaval is Richard Cloward and Francis Fox Piven’s far more detailed and authoritative 1997 manual, “The Breaking of the American Social Compact.”

The Cloward-Piven strategy seeks to hasten the fall of the free market and the republican structure of government by overloading the administrative apparatus with an avalanche of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis mode and eventual economic collapse. Choking the welfare rolls, for example, would serve to generate a political and financial meltdown, break the budget, jam the bureaucratic gears, and bring the system crashing down. The fear, turmoil, and violence accompanying such a debacle would provide the perfect conditions for fostering radical change.

We see the strategy in action today, forging a situation that was unnecessary from the start via a series of tactical steps, among which: the campaign against productive farming; the so-called 15-minute city herding people into condo-congested urban centers where they are readily supervised and mastered; open borders allowing for a refugee tsunami to alter the character of the nation; a censoring and disinformative media rendered corrupt to the core; the mandating of useless masks or plausibly toxic vaccines; and the implementation of a digital currency in which citizens’ spending can be monitored, restricted, or even frozen. Such phenomena have no basis in even the remotest necessity but are essential in order to prepare the ground for an imminent totalitarian state.

This is the rationale for the so-called COVID pandemic and the bugbear of “Climate Change.” A bad flu season affecting mainly the elderly with comorbidities is not a viral pandemic, as Dr. Vernon Coleman ironically shows. The climate is always changing as a matter of course — the term “climate change” is a gross oxymoron; the thesis of anthropogenic forcing obscures the fact that carbon is material for life and nitrogen for farming. COVID and Climate are tactical phantoms that have nothing to do with reality and everything to do with social control. The Clowardly rePivening put in place by the Democrat Party has only one aim: to create a crisis out of thin air and then seek to defuse it by creating a real crisis that advantages only the Party. It is the diabolical form of creation ex nihilo.

Thus, a ginned-up pandemic is a perfect excuse for mail-in ballots and ballot harvesting, especially if the voter rolls have been flooded with uncountable and counterfeit names and the voting stations have been commandeered. There is no immigration chaos unless a chain system is entrenched and the border is left wide open. There is no such thing as “white supremacy” unless it is apodictically proclaimed and false-flag operations are carried out. There is no need for costly, largely ineffective, and harmful renewable energy installations unless drilling has been rendered illegal and the oil pipelines have been shut down to avoid a bogus climate catastrophe. The bible of the Democrat left begins: Let there be a crisis. And there was a crisis.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/08/23/government-funded-science-journal-admits-over-2600-of-its-papers-may-have-exaggerated-claims/

A top science journal that receives funding from the federal government was recently forced to admit that well over 2,000 of the research papers it has published contain “exaggerated claims.”

As Just The News reports, over 2,600 papers from the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s (AAAS) peer-reviewed journal Science were closely scrutinized by rival research journal Scientometrics. In the subsequent study, it was determined that, from 1997 to 2021, the journal saw a 40% drop in the use of “hedging” words.

In scientific research and other forms of academic writing, “hedging” words refers to terms and phrases such as “could” or “appear to,” in order to provide some room for doubt rather than depict absolute confidence. In 1997, there were roughly 115.8 examples of hedging for every 10,000 words. However, by 2021, that rate had fallen to just 67.42 per every 10,000.

Responding to the criticism, the news division of Science acknowledged that this new research “suggests a worrisome rise of unreliable, exaggerated claims.”

The non-profit watchdog group Influence Watch reports that “the federal government is the largest identifiable source of funding for AAAS,” as the association has received roughly $3.3 million per year from the federal government between 2008 and 2017, in addition to many other grants the association received.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19919/justice-requires-fair-procedures

“Justice, justice you shall pursue,” the Bible commands (Deuteronomy 16:20); and that, in doing justice, one must not “recognize faces.”

The late US Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter once observed that the history of liberty is largely a history of procedural fairness. Our constitution embodies that history by reading “the due process of law.”

Lately, however, many so-called progressives have been willing to ignore procedural safeguards and due process in their campaign to get former President Donald Trump — to misuse the law in an effort to prevent the leading Republican candidate from running against the incumbent candidate for president. In doing so, they are violating the second principle of justice: “Do not recognize faces.” That commandment is the basis for the blindfolded statute of justice.

Some progressives who would ignore procedural safeguards to get Trump acknowledge that this is because they regard him as especially dangerous and therefore undeserving of due process. Special injustice for an unjust man!

Injustice, once practiced against an unjust person, will serve as precedent for deploying it against just persons.

Another weapon is scheduling. They are trying to get convictions in friendly locations before the 2024 elections, and willing to risk reversal on appeal, which would occur only after the election. Accordingly, they are seeking very early trial dates…. No decent defense lawyer would agree to try a case with so little time to prepare. Yet a group of prominent “get Trump” Republican lawyers has filed a brief supporting that unconstitutional rush to injustice.

These and other “get Trump” lawyers should read the Judeo-Christian commands to do procedural as well as substantive justice, and not to recognize faces. If they follow those wise commands, they will stop trying to “get Trump” or potentially any of us. Instead, they will pursue justice without regard to the face, name or party of the person being investigated and prosecuted.

Whatever one thinks of former President Donald Trump, everyone who cares about liberty for all must oppose the weaponization of laws and procedures that are aimed at him, lest the weapons be turned on us.(Image source: iStock)

“Justice, justice you shall pursue,” the Bible commands (Deuteronomy 16:20); and that, in doing justice, one must not “recognize faces.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/08/where_are_the_650_children_of_king_kamehameha_elementary_school.html

Governor Josh Green, while pushing the climate change narrative on news show Face the Nation, said that King Kamehameha Elementary school burned to the ground. He said that 650 students attended the school. How many are accounted for?

Residents of the scarred island told me that everything on the news is a lie. The mayor of Maui, Richard Bissen, said that 850 people are still missing. The same day the governor said 1,100 are missing. If they actually know how many are missing, then they must know who is not. Where are the children of Lahaina?

The truth is they have no idea how many people are missing because there is no way to gauge how many tourists were in Lahaina when the fire swept through. And in 2022, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Hawaii had the fourth highest homeless rate in the nation and most of them, I am told, were in Lahaina.

Bissen was asked by reporters ten days after the disaster how many children were missing. He responded: “I don’t know.” When pushed by increasingly angry reporters he said he’d tell them if he knew. He knows or has a good idea. His body language says so.

It is now common knowledge that the schools were closed that day and children were either home alone or with grandparents since their parents were all at work.

We have all seen the hundreds of burned-up cars lining the single road in and out of Lahaina, yet the politicians claim that only 111 people have died. So where are all the elementary-aged kids? The inept mayor doesn’t want people to know.

We are told that cars melted in the heat in the 2000-degree heat. A body is cremated at between 1400-1600 degrees. The smaller the body the less time it takes. Ashes and bones were shoveled into body bags, according to residents, and they ran out of the 450 bags they had. But only 111 people died?

Stationed on the neighboring island of Oahu are 27,000 military troops who could have been sent immediately to help:10,000 Marines at Marine Corps Base Hawaii, 12,000 Navy sailors, and 5500 Air Force personnel at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam. That was not done.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/washington-admits-fraudulent-accounting-again-53587f09?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

You have to laugh or cry when the Congressional Budget Office issues an occasional reminder that lawmakers use bogus accounting to hide from taxpayers the true cost of federal programs. Give CBO credit for honesty as it points out how required official estimates are at odds with real-world bookkeeping. Last week CBO explained how its new report on federal support for consumer and business lending measures the downside:

The report shows two kinds of estimates: those currently used in the federal budget, which are made by following the procedures specified in the Federal Credit Reform Act of 1990 (FCRA), and those referred to as fair-value estimates, which measure the market value of the government’s obligations…
Using FCRA procedures, CBO estimates that new loans and loan guarantees issued in 2024 would cost the federal government $10.9 billion over their lifetime. But using the fair-value approach, CBO estimates that those loans and guarantees would have a lifetime cost of $76.7 billion.

The fair-value estimate is 10 times what Beltway accounting claims?! This suggests a fraud so large that it might persuade even former Enron adviser Paul Krugman to rescind his 2021 endorsement of “budget chicanery.”

A government that habitually embraces such financial shenanigans over decades could someday run up a debt of $32.7 trillion.

Now that someday has arrived, the question is when the reckoning will occur. Dan Clifton of Strategas writes in a note to clients today that “the next president will face a once in 40-year shift in monetary policy, fiscal policy, and geopolitics that requires serious governing.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/08/the_ruling_class_sits_atop_a_boiling_pot.html

In the history books, great social revolutions are often distilled into digestible reasons for their emergence.  Rising unemployment, widespread illness, cultural upheaval, and rapid technological change have all been diagnosed as the proximate causes for various sudden shifts in society.  If you look past those antiseptic historical autopsies, though, and concentrate on the feelings and passions of the people who experienced the revolutions firsthand, you will find another symptom present in every single movement for great change: popular rejection of ruling class lies.

People despise lies, especially lies that have had the effect of making them feel foolish.  People despise lies so much that they will go out of their way to pretend obvious lies are somehow still based in truth.  It is much more comfortable to believe that governing institutions continue to make “honest” mistakes than to accept that those institutions abandoned honesty a long time ago.  It is easier to spin one lie away with yet another soothing lie than to accept the darker, harder, bitter truth.  However, officially sanctioned lies tend to coagulate in the body politic much like spike proteins clotting in the blood until, eventually, the whole system just bursts.

When that happens, people become rightly mad.  They are mad not only because they finally recognize that their government has been engaged in massive deceptions, but also because they are ashamed for having defended obvious lies as truths for far too long.  Rage is the inevitable result — a rejection of the people and institutions responsible for such degrading self-delusions.  And when rage arrives, a peculiar thing tends to happen: fewer and fewer ruling-class heirs remain to defend the status quo.  History records successful revolutions when the previous system’s liars rebrand themselves, recede into the background, or simply disappear.

Whatever else you might think about our current historical moment, one observation is inescapable: rage is in the air.  And how is the ruling class responding?  Instead of turning down the temperature under a boiling pot already spilling over, it is frantically pressing down an iron-laden lid and hoping the pressure won’t build.  The vast majority of Americans believe that their elections are tainted by fraud, but the ruling class chooses to see nothing.  Rising political dissent is met with government-engineered censorship and false imprisonment.  Popular opinions against illegal immigration and unnecessary wars and for energy independence and less government regulation are entirely ignored.  The people’s wants and needs are scorned, while the unaccountable bureaucracy imposes its will upon the unwilling.  Just as every other deposed ruling class has done in the past, our ruling class has chosen to stand on top of the lid barely containing society’s boiling pot of passions, buoyed by the false notion that raw force will make that pot less likely to explode.