RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/01/stealth_jihad_is_alive_and_well_.html

Thirteen years ago, the Center for Security Policy Press published Shariah: The Threat to America, Report of Team BII.  They pointed out that “[t]he most important entity promoting Islamic supremacism, shariah, and the caliphate… is the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), or in Arabic, the Ikhwan.” 

Moreover, “The MB defined this form of warfare as ‘civilization jihad’ in its strategic document for North America [.]”

The “Movement” is a ‘settlement’ process to establish itself inside the United States and, once rooted, to undertake a ‘grand jihad’ characterized as a ‘civilization jihadist’ mission that is likewise led by the Muslim Brotherhood.

Specifically, the document explained that the civilization jihadist process involves a ‘grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated [.]

Known as “stealth jihad” it is meant to “employ whatever tactics are most expedient… and take control of the political authority.” [emphasis mine].

Despite this warning, rather than go full force to root out this campaign, U.S. national intelligence, law enforcement, and security leadership hid the Islamic origins of jihadist terrorism from the public.  In fact, for years, “senior Pentagon commanders have labored to define the threat out of existence.”

So it should be no surprise that “The Muslim vote may have helped secure Democratic Party control of the Senate.”  Consequently, the Red-Green Alliance is in full force.

In 2018, Trevor Loudon explained “how Muslims intent on fundamentally transforming America have achieved an ominous beachhead in Minnesota, thanks in large measure to that state’s long-dominant radical left.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/attacking-reparations-from-the-left/

The push for reparations may be upon us once again. While outgoing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi voted last year for a bill that would create a commission to study the issue, incoming Democrat House leader Hakeem Jeffries is far more energized about it, being one of the bill’s earliest supporters and having testified at a related congressional hearing that white reconciliation has “a long way to go” and that reparations will help the country “march[] to a more perfect union.”

Meanwhile, according to the press release of a reparations symposium held a couple weeks back—an insiders’ event attended by the bill’s lead sponsor Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee as well as CNN Legal Analyst Areva Martin, among 60 others—there is a “tremendous number of local reparations initiatives that are springing up nationally.” Topping the day of talks was likely last week’s recommendation from California’s reparations task force to pay out to black slave descendants in the state a total of $569 billion or $223,200 apiece. Following that news, New York Democrats announced they will be pushing for something similar.

My, has the left changed. According to the “old school” World Socialist Website (WSW), reparations for black slavery has the odor of a “financial” and “political scam”; one utilized by the uber-cynical Democratic Party to divide the working class in order to win corporate support and electoral gain. While hard socialists, WSW are pre-woke leftists, and their critiques of the performative, racial politics of today’s Democrats is about as biting as anything conservatives can produce. They do deserve attention.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-mandate-for-2023-and-118th-u-s-congress/

The pre-Christmas vote by the U.S. House and Senate to pass the $1.7 trillion Omnibus Spending Bill at a time when America’s balance sheet is in its worst condition ever is a sign post that financial collapse cannot be far away. Our nation is now technically bankrupt with liabilities significantly exceeding assets. And it gets worse every year with national debt now growing on a long-term annual basis at 8% or more, while assets (GDP) are growing on average at only 2.5 to 3% annually. Politically, our federal government is operating at ever new levels of dysfunction and corruption with diminishing accountability to the Constitution in either the spirit or the letter of the law.

Consider: the widespread failure of elected officials to uphold their oath of office; the political weaponization of the Justice Department and the FBI; the unequal two-tiered practice of justice and law enforcement; the flood of illegal immigrants and criminal enterprises into the United States as a direct result of willful federal government policy; and the violation of the First Amendment by federal agencies such as the FBI, DOJ, DHS, the CDC and DOD, who have engaged in covert operations against American citizens that include media manipulation and psy-ops.

With a new Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives it is time for action and results.

There are two priorities for the new Congress. First, it needs to write and pass bills that fix the biggest problems—like crime and the southern border—that will improve the lives of all Americans. Second, Congress needs to hold public hearings for discovery of causes of our nation’s dysfunction and corruption. The House of Representatives is well suited for this because of the breadth of its committee structure and because it holds the purse strings that can withhold funding for government agencies who fail to be transparent and cooperate. Simultaneous and separate hearings on different areas of failure and corruption, can produce findings, deliver policy solutions and personnel recommendations and prosecutions well before the 2024 election.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/01/03/the-war-on-trucks-trucking-and-truckers-and-other-modern-conveniences/

In the same way our “superiors” think that their food comes from the grocery store rather than a farm or ranch, they must believe that those items magically appear on the shelves. Otherwise, why would the ruling class, made up of and zealously backed by elites, go to war against trucks?

Just before Christmas, the Biden Environmental Protection Agency finalized a rule that it calls a “key step toward accelerating zero-emissions future,” and part of “​​the historic Clean Truck Plan, which is moving America’s highly polluting heavy-duty trucking fleet towards low-carbon and electric technologies.”

Enforcement of course will mean fewer trucks on the road. For many drivers, the cost of working under the new regime will be too high.

“Truckers and manufacturers warn that the rule is too stringent and costly, and that compliance could send higher prices through the economy that is already suffering from high energy costs and high inflation,” says the Institute for Energy Research.

The Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association warns that “if small business truckers can’t afford the new, compliant trucks,” they will keep their older, less-efficient trucks, or simply “leave the industry entirely.”

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/01/01/its-time-to-give-the-diversitycrats-their-marching-orders/

Have we reached peak woke – or will the cult of intersectionality grow even bigger in 2023?

If you think of the woke movement as fundamentally religious in nature, one way of answering that question is to see what the duration was of comparable outbreaks of religious fervour in our recent history. According to Wikipedia, there have been four ‘Great Awakenings’ in the past 300 years, the first lasting about 25 years, the second and third 50 or more, and the fourth in the 1960s and 1970s lasting about 20.

Most people trace the origins of the current ‘Great Awokening’ to roughly around 2013, meaning we’ll be celebrating its 10th anniversary this year. One reason for thinking it might be peaking is that its growth has been accelerated by social media and – presumably – its decline will be, too. Twitter, in particular, has been one of the chief platforms for promoting woke ideology, as well as for punishing those who dissent from it, and that is bound to change now that Rocket Man Elon Musk is in charge.

The woke cult’s appeal is partly rooted in the idea that it is of a piece with the Zeitgeist, that the woke are ‘on the right side of history’, and that those resisting it will inevitably end up looking foolish and out of date.

Fortunately, there were signs in 2022 that being woke is no longer as ‘on trend’ as it was, and that could be a serious blow to its authority. Take, for instance, the fact that the unashamedly patriotic Top Gun: Maverick was the highest-grossing film of the year, beating out an endless stream of woke offerings. Once the victory of the social-justice warriors ceases to look historically inevitable, many of the less committed will fall by the wayside.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2022/12/acknowledge-the-good-limit-the-damage/

Excerpts:

The Calvinist urge to virtue-signal membership in the elect can make life nigh-unliveable for the independent thinker. Let me offer a quote:

In our times, from the highest class of society down to the lowest, every one lives as under the eye of a hostile and dreaded censorship. Not only in what concerns others, but in what concerns only themselves … [people] do not ask themselves—what do I prefer? or, what would suit my character and disposition? or, what would allow the best and highest in me to have fair-play, and enable it to grow and thrive? They ask themselves, what is suitable to my position? what is usually done by persons of my station and pecuniary circumstances? or (worse still) what is usually done by persons of a station and circumstances superior to mine?

That was John Stuart Mill, writing in 1859, at the height of a previous wave of Calvinist revival remembered as the Great Awakening. Our present-day Great Awokening has nothing on that era, except perhaps an even greater speed of communication. The Big Three causes in the 1850s were the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage and temperance. And the Calvinists of the Great Awakening did pretty well. I won’t preach temperance to the members of the Union, University & Schools Club, but two out of three ain’t bad. Like statue-tumblers today, the social Calvinists of the Great Awakening pursued their causes with a religious fervour, and like statue-tumblers today, they wanted someone else to foot the bill. The abolitionists wanted slave-owners to bear the costs of the unravelling of the slave economy; in the UK they failed, while in the US they succeeded. The suffragists wanted women to get the vote while the men went to war (and it might be remembered that, from ancient times, the prerogative of voting was tied to bearing mortal responsibility for the actions voted). The prohibitionists wanted an instantaneous end to alcohol, without making any provisions for the people whose businesses and jobs would be lost through its prohibition; it was perhaps this failure to plan any transition that doomed America’s fourteen-year experiment with temperance.

Abolition, suffrage, temperance, acknowledgment of country, LGBTQIA+ rights, climate catastrophism—obviously, these are not to be found in the theology of John Calvin. They are our society’s virtue signals; our society’s indications of membership in the elect, not his. They are the tenets of our specifically Anglo-American liberal religion.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19261/big-tech-censorship

Republicans’ first order of business this coming 118th Congress must be to introduce a legislative firewall between the White House — and its offshoot federal law enforcement agencies such as the Department of Justice and its offshoot, the FBI — and private social media companies.

The dissemination of news and the facilitation of public discourse is central in any democracy that allows genuine participation on the part of its citizens. Open public dialogue is a “public good”, or something which, like clean air, benefits everyone equally and greatly.

Providers of public goods are generally regulated under common carriage laws. The Communications Act of 1934, for instance, allowed AT&T to enjoy monopolistic power over the public good it provided: the interconnecting of the American people by way of a unified, national standard for telephone communication.

In exchange for enjoying monopoly power, and to ensure that public goods truly remain beneficial to the public, special duties or restraints are generally imposed on such companies.

With companies such as Compuserve and AOL in mind, Congress sought to hand out special liability relief with the idea of promoting two public goods: an internet characterized by a wide dissemination and diversity of ideas; and an incentive system for platforms to create family-friendly environments.

Unfortunately, in the ensuing case law that has been built up in dealing with Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, two giant, related problems have emerged, both involving a misreading of a landmark court decision: Zeran v. AOL.

The first problem is that what Congress intended when it comes to protecting social media companies from liability tied to defamatory messages posted on their platforms has been greatly expanded and now encompasses virtually any and all decisions regarding “content moderation”, such as removing the accounts of epidemiologists with whom Dr. Anthony Fauci, the FBI, CIA, and possibly other federal agencies, might disagree.

The second problem is that the “good faith” condition Congress imposed on these companies to ensure against arbitrary or biased content-removal decisions has been completely erased. It is now never applied to social media companies at all.

Both problems can be traced to a misunderstanding and incomplete reading of Zeran v. AOL.

As a result, as Michigan State University law professor and former Commerce Department telecom official Adam Candeub writes, “social media platforms are now treated like they’re above the law.”

Thankfully, this can be easily changed, even at the regulatory level. Non-discrimination policies need not create a “wild west” scenario. To a large extent, people really do not need moderators to curate what they see on social media. They are free to do that themselves.

Removing the distortive “curators”, editors, “fact-checkers” and middlemen from the information process — and reaching people who previously have been sheltered from diverse opinions — will likely not tear people apart. It might even help to bridge misunderstandings and fill in a few gaps. That, perhaps, is the ultimate public good.

The ongoing ‘Twitter Files’ revelations show that Republicans’ first order of business this coming 118th Congress must be to introduce a legislative firewall between the White House — and its offshoot federal law enforcement agencies such as the Department of Justice and its offshoot, the FBI — and private social media companies. Last summer’s revelations of government pressuring social media executives into blocking users not toeing the official line on COVID was as clear an example of unconstitutional “state action” as any. Courts have long ruled the government cannot pressure private entities, as an “agent of government,” into censoring what itself cannot.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-foreign-billionaire-funds-dems-hunter-biden-defense/

“We are proud Americans speaking up against an extreme agenda that is putting money and power over everyday Americans,” Courage for America’s mission statement claims.

If you have any doubt whatsoever that CFA is an American organization, its home page is decorated with a flag draped over a barn. The ‘O’ in its logo even includes flag symbolism.

CFA has announced that it’s “forming a council of proud Americans” to fight Republican investigations into the foreign business dealings of Hunter Biden and the rest of the Biden clan.

Waving the flag to cover up the intimidation of elected officials investigating dirty deals with Chinese and Russian oligarchs is a new low even for Biden and his cronies.

Will Hansjörg Wyss, the Swiss billionaire allegedly backing CFA, be on the council of proud Americans? It would be awkward for the foreign tycoon to sit on a “council of proud Americans” since he is not, as far as even the media has been able to determine, an American citizen.

Instead, he appears to be living in America under an investor visa.

That hasn’t stopped the wealthy European from using his fortune to drastically influence American politics with the complicity of the IRS, the FEC and the rest of the government.

This wouldn’t be the first time that Wyss, who was accused of getting rich while killing patients, has broken the rules. And nothing says “proud Americans” fighting for “every American” like a secretive organization that doesn’t list its staff and appears to be funded by a foreign billionaire.

Wyss co-founded Synthes, a medical device manufacturer focused on repairing broken bones. In 2010, Synthes pled guilty to illegally experimenting on patients: its president, and its spine division president and two other executives were sentenced to prison. Even though a manager testified that Wyss had made the decision not to go through clinical trials, and owned half the company, he was not charged and has gone on funding the extreme causes of the Left.

https://www.city-journal.org/the-last-institutions

When Pennsylvania’s Department of Human Services announced in 2019 that Polk and White Haven Centers, two large state-operated institutions for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, would close by November 2022—claiming that moving residents to “community-based settings” would better honor their “inherent worth and dignity”—it spelled the end of two campuses that had housed the intellectually and developmentally disabled for more than 50 years. It also sparked a political fight between disability-rights activists, who hailed the closures as a step toward full inclusion for people with disabilities, and many residents and their families, who feared losing what they considered their and their loved ones’ homes.

Residents like Alma were caught in the middle. Alma has mild to moderate intellectual disabilities and had lived at Polk Center for nearly 50 years. She was a favorite of facility staff—talkative, kind, joyful—and one of the facility’s most senior residents, who saw the century-old campus transform from what critics called an overcrowded, understaffed warehouse into a federally licensed care facility for people with disabilities.

Alma loved the people at Polk. She made crafts for staff and her fellow residents, most of whom were more significantly disabled. When nonverbal residents tried and failed to signal their needs, Alma knew them well enough to translate their requests to staff. She also loved the place: the grounds, the campus, the community that had grown up around the maze of Chateauesque brick buildings in rural Venango County. She sorted letters in the facility’s mailroom, tended plants in its greenhouse, and hung around the Polk canteen in her wheelchair, greeting staff and residents as they passed through to grab coffee or candy.

When staff told Alma in 2019 that Polk Center would close, she wept. When legislators, government officials, and others toured the campus in the months after the announcement, she told them, “Polk needs to stay open. This is my home.” As the months passed, families and employees attended hearings in Harrisburg, begging the state to keep Polk and White Haven open. Disability-rights advocates and department officials countered with messages about the need to “move forward” and embrace “community-based services.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/12/forget_you_22.html

Doesn’t it seem as if the ignoble nobles running our country into the ground are working overtime to dump extra loads of misery before the year ends?  Now that they’ve plunged the country into an energy and heating crisis by tilting at “climate change” windmills, coal was too valuable to waste on these scrooges’ Christmas stockings.  Let them survive on frozen wind turbines and snowdrift-covered solar panels!

While I have done my best to celebrate the Christmas season and ignore the commie curmudgeons bah-humbug-ing all around, it has felt as if government-worshiping Krampus creatures have been let loose (or are they trans-Krampus, demon-worshiping leftists wearing antlers and spreading Marxist hate?).  Consider the parade of horribles unleashed during just the last few weeks:

Congress passed a two-trillion-dollar spending monstrosity that looks like little more than a long list of bribes and IOUs come due.  The same Uniparty Republicans that could never find spare change for President Trump’s border wall have seen fit to fund every leftist fever pitch imaginable.  Scrutinizing the 4,155 pages of omnibus filth and its 3,213 Democrat earmarks, writer Deroy Murdock bluntly concludes that “Mitch McConnell transformed the Senate GOP into a wishing well for Democrats.”

Handicapping incoming House Republicans’ budgetary powers for the next year, the exercise in printing and burning U.S. dollars (and exacerbating inflation) protects the borders of foreign countries all over the world, while going out of its way to make sure America’s are left wide open.  Manchurian McConnell defends sending another forty-five billion dollars to Ukraine as “morally right,” while Americans from coast to coast are struggling to survive unchecked inflation, unaffordable food and fuel prices, crumbling infrastructure (actual bridges and roads, not the “reparations” and “climate change” hooey leftists now define as “infrastructure”), unguarded borders, the further impoverishment of once-prosperous blue-collar towns, an emotionally-crippling rise in suicides and fentanyl-related overdoses, COVID-1984-initiated wealth destruction, and the prospect of a looming monster recession (which we entered months ago but must not acknowledge — silence, citizen!).