RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2023/08/28/sleepy-joe-mails-it-in/

I rarely watch TV, but I check-in occasionally to understand the nonstop propaganda stream influencing normie America. During my visit, I happened to catch Joe Biden’s speech about the Maui wildfires.

It was shockingly bad. His delivery was lethargic and disinterested. His mumbling and inconsistent dropping of syllables reminded me of a kid struggling with third-grade phonics. He read off his notes, kept his head down, and did not emphasize anything appropriately.

Heroically giving up a day of vacation, he gave the impression of someone who was forced to pretend to care. This dreadful scene highlighted his earlier, insulting offer of $700 to displaced families, a pittance compared to their needs, and a mere fraction of the billions we have sent to Ukraine.

As usual, Biden made these events about him. This is a narcissist’s way of mimicking empathy. “Oh something bad happened to you, well something equally bad—worse actually—happened to me!” He thought a minor house fire, in which he almost lost his beloved Corvette, equaled the pain of people who just lost their homes and kids.

Obviously, I don’t think Biden or any president is responsible for natural disasters. These things happen.  Nor do I think, generally, the federal government should be the “go to” agency for handling the response to such events.  States and cities are supposed to take up the laboring oar on natural disasters. But you still expect the federal government to juice locals’ efforts, throw some funding around, and maybe say a few words that show solidarity.

Unfortunately, state government in Democrat-dominated Hawaii appears completely incompetent. The guy in charge of water decided to delay its release when it was requested for firefighting, possibly because of his earlier-stated concerns about equity. He resigned from office in ignominy (and probably fear).

There are also unexplained stories of police stopping people from fleeing or sending them back into danger. Some people suggest as many as 1,000 have died. This is not merely a tragedy, but a series of failures that deserve a thorough investigation.

The media frequently praises Biden for his world-famous empathy. He’s the lovable Uncle Joe, who can relate to the common man because of his humble beginnings and early-life tragedies.

This is all made-up propaganda. It is true, he had some difficult situations early in life, including the loss of his wife and daughter in a car accident. But, for years, he has milked these stories for clout, even as he repeatedly lost his cool with regular voters, frequently insulting them when they did not kiss the ring.

https://thefederalist.com/2023/08/28/if-democrats-criminalize-opposition-and-cripple-the-court-democracy-is-dead/

Only if a critical mass of Americans ‘know what time it is’ will there be any hope of combating this onslaught.

Democrats are seeking to land a one-two punch to cement their control of America today and for generations to come: Criminalize the political opposition and cripple the last authority to which the opposition might appeal in defense of its rights.

This is one way to understand two running lines of attack that may appear independent but are inextricably intertwined.

Criminalizing the Opposition

The first consists of the unprecedented, Soviet show trial-style “show me the man and I’ll show you the crime” “cases” conjured up against Donald Trump and two dozen others in his orbit, chiefly including his lawyers. The zealous prosecutors have many motives for torturing laws to hang them around the neck of the former president and GOP front-runner in the middle of a campaign — a frivolous and vengeful prosecutorial effort pursued arguably in violation of laws, norms, and core principles of justice.

While turning the First and Sixth Amendments into dead letters, these cases also effectively criminalize the seeking of office of anyone who might hold unauthorized views, the Republican contesting of elections or questioning of election integrity, and such Republicans’ legal defense.

“You can go to jail if you disagree with us, and particularly if you threaten our power and privilege,” our betters are saying through their chilling lawfare jihad. The point is that if Americans cannot be trusted to choose leaders within a narrow set of regime-approved bounds, the regime will have to force them upon us by hook or by crook. Locking up the opposition has always been a potential endgame for the ruling class in its war on wrongthink.

Jan. 6, 2021, was the beginning of that endgame. It served as a pretext to accelerate the war, as predicted at the time. It was also used to justify treating rioters with the “wrong” views not as everyday Americans-turned-petty criminals in a political protest that got out of hand, but as domestic terrorists.

https://victorhanson.com/who-destroyed-san-francisco-and-why-part-one/

It should have been impossible to wreck San Francisco.

It is the world’s most naturally beautiful city, with perhaps the most ideal bay, harbor, and ports of any coastal metropolis.

San Francisco is America’s premier window on the East. It serves as the natural conduit of commercial and cultural exchanges with the rising wealth of Asia and its dynamic economies in China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. During World War II, the Bay Area was the shipping point of supply to the Pacific Theater. The same role was true of the Korean and Vietnam wars, and could be again if China were to invade Taiwan.

The weather is mild year long. Mountains and shoreline are side-by-side. It is the gateway to the wine country of Napa, Mendocino, and Sonoma counties.

A mere decade ago, San Francisco downtown commercial property was among the most coveted and high-priced in the nation.

Prior generations had left behind once state-of-the-art clean and efficient mass transit. They built five majestic bridges across the 1,600 square mile sprawling bay and estuaries that connected the city and its environs to millions of suburbanites.

The city has access to the state’s main freeways that head out eastward, northward, and southward. Our ancestors long ago solved San Francisco’s water problems by importing vast amounts of potable water in aqueducts from the distant Hetch Hetchy and California Water Project mountain reservoirs.

Silicon Valley had slowly crept into San Francisco, suppling it with some of its trillions of dollars in market capitalization. Not long ago, some of the nation’s major corporations were based in the city itself, including Craigslist, the Gap, Levi Strauss, Lyft, PG&E, Charles Schwab, Salesforce, Twitter, Uber, and Wells Fargo.

Two great universities—UC Berkeley and Stanford—bookended the city. Both from their top-ranked graduate and professional schools turned out yearly scores of Bay-Area topflight engineers, computer scientists, doctors, lawyers, and business leaders.

https://dailycaller.com/2023/08/26/court-rules-biological-man-allowed-in-sorority/

A federal district court ruled Friday that a national sorority organization did not violate its own bylaws by allowing a biological man to live in a sorority house and dismissed the complaint from sorority sisters, according to court documents.

Kappa Kappa Gamma (KKG) sorority sisters sued the national organization in March for admitting a biological male into the University of Wyoming chapter, alleging that the national organization violated its bylaws and that 6 foot 2 biological male Artemis Langford, who identifies as trans, watched women in the house get undressed. Judge Alan B. Johnson of the United States District Court for the District of Wyoming, appointed by Republican President Ronald Reagan, ruled that the national organization can interpret its own definitions as it wants to and didn’t breach its housing contracts by allowing a biological man to board with women, according to court documents. 

The sorority sisters argued that KKG must enact new bylaws to define what a woman is and allow that into the sorority house, but the court disagreed. “Defining ‘woman’ is Kappa Kappa Gamma’s bedrock right as a private, voluntary organization – and one this Court may not invade,” the decision reads.

https://victorhanson.com/save-the-rule-of-law-by-destroying-it/

Some truths are so staggering in their ramifications that Americans simply shrug and tune them out as if strangers in a strange land.

Is their current bewilderment because modernist America is unrecognizable —a nonexistent border, downtown homeless juxtaposed to hipster professional elites, DEI racial essentialism, cities reverting to precivilizational wastelands, millions exiting blue states to red, an FBI and DOJ gone rogue, the normalization of violent theft and assault, biologically born men sandbagging women’s sports and their locker room privacy?

We are reaching the point where the once unbelievable has become the banal, as a single generation has done its best to undo the work of a prior 12 generations. Consider the following:

Three leftwing prosecutors are criminalizing politics with more than 90 simultaneous indictments of Donald Trump, the ex-president and currently the leading Republican primary candidate. While New York prosecutor Letitia James is hounding Trump with a $250 million state lawsuit against the Trump organization and family, on the pretense of supposedly Trump overvaluing his real estate and filing inaccurate financial statements.

Is there any Mafia don, mass murderer, or terrorist who has faced so many indictments or suits in so many jurisdictions at almost the same time?

The prosecutors’ immediate lawfare agendas seem transparent enough. They wish to bankrupt candidate Trump with endless legal costs, and humiliate him with his mugshot blasted over the Internet, and put endless Lilliputian legal ropes over a shackled candidate Gulliver, and inflate the ego and agendas of local prosecutors, and purportedly earn Trump empathy enough to win the nomination only to be hemorrhaged with still more indictments, gag orders, and court appearances to bleed him out in the general election.

Americans ask themselves questions whose answers are never given. Why are all these Trump prosecutors leftwing or with Democratic connections?

Would any of the 90 something indictments for “crimes” of years past have been lodged against a citizen Trump who had retired from politics?

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19923/a-tale-of-two-parties

Among his opening words of Charles Dickens’ classic novel, A Tale of Two Cities, he captures the enormous decisions, challenges, and choices that face people, institutions, and nations:

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times… It was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”

Those choices can lead either to chaos or triumph.

While much has been said about the recent Republican presidential debate, our nation’s most important focus would probably be better spent on the policies of the representatives currently running the United States of America. Many of these politicians and officials have created a tale of two profoundly different parties — in their policies, values and their vision for the country. What once was a party that might leave a voter disagreeing with certain issues, at least one could respect its core principles.

No more.

What once was the party of FDR, Truman, and Kennedy appears to be in the throes of being torn apart by those whose agenda seeks to make government — not the voters — ever more rich, more centralized, and more intrusive in our daily lives. They have increased the national debt, which now tops out at more than $32 trillion — more than the 2022 GDP of only $25 trillion. With interest on the debt of more than $1 trillion annually, it is capable of crushing America as no foreign nation ever could.

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

The illegitimate Deep State’s war against Donald Trump and MAGA-supporting Americans has taken on a stench of defeat similar to that of the Gallipoli campaign during the First World War.  In that botched attempt to take control of the Ottoman straits and seize Constantinople, the Entente powers suffered roughly 300,000 casualties over a year of desperate fighting just to make it off the beach.  It is rightly considered a colossal failure of military planning and execution and a symbol of deadly Establishment hubris.  The Battle of Gallipoli began in 1915.

A century after Gallipoli, Donald Trump descended the golden escalator in the atrium of Trump Tower to announce his candidacy for president of the United States.  Hillary Clinton and the Democrat-controlled corporate press immediately encouraged his efforts, convinced that his nomination would doom the Republican Party.  When he finally did clinch the nomination, the same corporate news media that had insincerely sung his praises for most of the previous year quickly turned all their firing power against him.  They executed one fake news story after the next in order to sink his chances in the general election and shamelessly pushed the Russia collusion hoax propaganda created out of thin air by Hillary Clinton’s campaign operatives and Barack Obama’s corrupt Intelligence Community.  

First the Establishment busybodies not so subtly supported Trump’s rise in the Republican Party, and then they set out to annihilate him — a man who had run in many of their same social circles and had been recognized for decades as an American icon and pop-culture celebrity.  Obama adviser David Plouffe wrote emphatically: “It is not enough to simply beat Trump.  He must be destroyed thoroughly.  His kind must not rise again.”

His warning to fellow “insiders” was too late.  Inflated by hubris and driven by the delusion that they had created and could therefore crush Donald Trump, the Establishment Class did not understand that it had unwisely undertaken this century’s version of the Gallipoli campaign.

Of all the politicians in America, why did toads such as David Plouffe, Bill Kristol, and communist CIA chief John Brennan eventually see Donald Trump as such a threat?

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fbi-escalates-deadly-violence/

On August 9, “The FBI shot and killed a Utah man who allegedly made online threats to kill President Joe Biden and New York prosecutor Alvin Bragg.” In establishment media reports on the FBI action, “allegedly” gets a workout.

The FBI shot dead Craig Robertson, a 74-year-old woodworker who had allegedly threatened other politicians, including Gavin Newsom and just about every Democrat except Jimmy Carter. Reports on the shooting did not include original-source documentation of the alleged threats.

According to NBC, the FBI received a tip from “a social media company” pertaining to a user called @winston4eagles. The FBI believed the person with that user name to be Robertson. He allegedly told the FBI to get a warrant and they showed up at his house in force in the early hours of August 9.

Video of the engagement does not reveal whether Robertson was armed or fired shots before the FBI shot him dead. The FBI claims Robertson brandished a .357 revolver but it was “unclear if Robertson fired the weapon.” This was hardly the only unusual aspect of the killing.

Threats to the president of the United States are normally handled by the Secret Service. The Service told reporters the action against Robertson was an “FBI-led effort.” As it happens, deployment of deadly force is longstanding FBI practice.

This month marks 31 years since the FBI deployed massive military force against a single family. For choosing to live in rural Idaho, U.S. Army veteran Randy Weaver and his family were smeared as “white separatists.”

In the Ruby Ridge siege of 1992, brought on by an ATF entrapment scheme, the FBI deployed some 400 heavily armed agents, helicopters, and armored personnel carriers against Weaver and his family. The rules of engagement allowed deadly force against any family member seen with a firearm, but in effect it was shoot on sight.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/silk-road-armin-rosen

Despite its chaos and dysfunction, or perhaps as a direct result of it, New York City is an infinity of different paradises. The bleacher bums at Yankee Stadium and the bird-watchers in the Central Park Ramble have each found their utopias. Bushwick, land of amoral excess, is a mile from the part of Williamsburg where everyone is a strict Satmar Hasid. And of course there are differences, mostly visible only to Hasids themselves, between the ideal of structure and meaning on display on Lee Avenue in Williamsburg and the ones evoked in the side streets off 13th Avenue in Borough Park a few miles south, where other mystically inflected Jewish notions of the good life hold sway.

One such vision is expressed through Mitchell Silk’s townhouse. It has a pantry that doubles as a Pesach kitchen, which is a less typical feature than the nearby cabinet of silver Judaica or the dining room display of photos from the old country, great-grandparents looking severe and half-dreaming under babushkas and frock coats. But Silk is among the very few Nadvorna Hasids with a shelf of books in Chinese.

The shelf is in a skylit office built atop the townhouse’s roof, separate from the impressively spotless two floors where his wife and eight children live. This cube-shaped room has an exercise bike and is at eye level with a loudspeaker on top of a nearby school that announces the arrival of Shabbat every week. When I visited him, Silk, the first Hasidic Jew ever to hold a Senate-confirmed position in the U.S. government, wore cuff links bearing the seal of the U.S. Treasury Department.

Silk, now 61, served as assistant secretary of the Treasury for international markets in Donald Trump’s administration. Beginning in the  mid-1980s, Silk helped pioneer the highly specialized field of China-related trade law.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/08/27/trumps-job-for-vivek-czar-in-charge-of-swamp-drainage/

It’s only been a few days since the first GOP debate, but already the kettle of journalist-vultures have gorged themselves on the carrion, their frenzied wake having picked the corpses bare. Alas, this feeding famishes the craving it seeks to satisfy, so we are left with sticky piles of bones, gobbets of contradictory opinion, and precious little enlightenment. We all know that when it comes to the so-called “rule of law” in this country, “the process is the punishment.” When it comes to spectacles like the Fox News-sponsored GOP debate, the process seems to be the point.

It is, I am sure you will agree, rather a pointless point, but the very pointlessness of the exercise was clearly the cherished goal.  Why else would all those producers and technicians and lovingly coiffed and pressed interlocutors Bret Baier and whatever the bleached-blonde Fox mannequin who sat next to him was called: why serve up all that fatuousness just to hear them hector the candidates with a smorgasbord of silly questions followed by the admonition: “You have 30 seconds” or “You have one minute” to answer?

I happen to have Harry Jaffa’s Crisis of the House Divided on my desk at the moment. It is an account of the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858. Each of the seven debates lasted about three hours. One candidate would open with a 60 minute statement, to which  the other would answer with a 90-minute response. The first speaker ended with a 30-minute rejoinder. I am trying to picture what Abraham Lincoln’s response to the instruction “You have 30 seconds to reply” would be. I can’t really do it, but I suspect it would be unprintable.

As I have said elsewhere, I suspect that future historians will draw a line under this snazzy pseudo-debate, marking it down as the beginning of the end of the entire genre. Given the changes in how people get their news today—not from television, mostly—this terminus a quo was probably foreordained anyway. But it was confirmed by the simultaneous broadcast of Tucker Carlson’s interview with the only serious Republican candidate for president, Donald Trump.

The bean counters tell us that about 12.4 million people watched the FoxNews debated; that’s down from about 25 million back when Trump participated in 2020 and 2016. It took only a few hours before Tucker’s interview with Trump had racked up more than 220 million views.

I am not quite sure what that number means, other than many more people tuned into Tucker than digested what Asa Hutchinson or Chris Christie or Tim Scott or Doug what’s-his-name from North (or was it South?) Dakota had to say.

Opinions vary about the performances of the A-list participants in this B-list event.