RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/twitter-files-thread-the-spies-who

After weeks of “Twitter Files” reports, the FBI issued a statement Wednesday.

It didn’t refute allegations. Instead, it decried “conspiracy theorists” publishing “misinformation,” whose “sole aim” is to “discredit the agency.”

3.    They must think us unambitious, if our “sole aim” is to discredit the FBI. After all, a whole range of government agencies discredit themselves in the #TwitterFiles. Why stop with one?

4.    The files show the FBI acting as doorman to a vast program of social media surveillance and censorship, encompassing agencies across the federal government – from the State Department to the Pentagon to the CIA.

5.    The operation is far bigger than the reported 80 members of the Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF), which also facilitates requests from a wide array of smaller actors – from local cops to media to state government.

6.    Thousands upon thousands of official “reports” flowed through the FITF and the FBI’s San Francisco field office.

7. On June 29th, 2020, San Francisco FBI agent Elvis Chan wrote to pair of Twitter execs asking if he could invite an “OGA” to an upcoming NGO-sponsored conference:

8.    OGA, or “Other Government Organization,” is often a euphemism for CIA, and according to multiple former intelligence officials and contractors.

9. Chuckles one: “They use it to seem mysterious to outsiders.”

10. “Other Government Agency (the place where I worked for 27 years),” says retired CIA officer Ray McGovern.

11. It was an open secret at Twitter that one of its executives was ex-CIA, which is why Chan referred to that executive’s “former employer.”

The first Twitter executive abandons all pretense to stealth and emails that the employee “used to work for the CIA, so that is Elvis’s question.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/our-bipartisan-apache-dance/

In early 20th century Paris, violent street gangs called Apaches became a popular cultural fad. Apache shirts and argot showed up in cabaret entertainment, fashion, and movies. Most famous was the Apache Dance, a pas de deux mashup of seduction and feigned violence in which the man slapped his paramour around and she pummeled him until the couple reconciled. The audience all knew that when they left the stage, they were heading for the same bed.

The recently passed omnibus budget bill that capped 2022 is a good reminder of the essential unity of our political guild, one obscured by the theater of “divisive partisanship” frequently decried by pundits. This current bill triples-down on the earlier near-trillion-dollar Inflation Reduction Act, and the near-third of a billion CHIPS Act that subsidizes the semiconductor industry–– “an embarrassing stew of accountability-free corporate welfare and government spending,” as the Wall Street Journal’s Kimberley Strassel reported on July 28. Republicans–17 Senators and 24 House members–voted for the bill.

Now comes the $1.85 trillion omnibus spending bill crammed with pork, aka once-banned “earmarks,” for Senators’ home states and House members’ districts. Additionally, the bill contains policies Democrats couldn’t pass through the “regular order” process of committee hearings, debates, amendments, and votes on individual bills. Republicans again, 18 Senators and nine House members, voted for the bill, with 226 House members voting by proxy. Rather than chagrin for facilitating this subversion of Congress’s Article 1 powers, Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said that he was “pretty proud” of achieving Republican “priorities” with yet another spending binge of money we don’t have.

How can a Republican who professes to be a conservative and champion of the Constitution be “proud” of  “woke” Leftist policies and “priorities” like “family planning/reproductive health including in areas where population growth threatens biodiversity or endangered species”? We all know that “family planning” and “reproductive health” are euphemisms for abortion. So taxpayers are going to be fleeced for $575 billion to sacrifice more human beings on the altar of “biodiversity.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/americas-blue-state-exodus-census-data-red-blue-lockdowns-pandemic-florida-california-economy-progressive-11671993469?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Texas and Florida make up about 15% of the U.S. population but accounted for 70% of its population growth this past year. That’s one of the revealing facts in the Census Bureau’s annual assessment of U.S. migration released last week. The biggest news is that the exodus from progressive-led states hasn’t slowed even as Covid lockdowns eased.

The U.S. population grew by about 1.2 million between July 2021 and July 2022, with foreign immigration accounting for a million of the total. Yet the Census Bureau found that some states still lost population because migration to other states exceeded foreign immigration.

California (343,230), New York (299,557) and Illinois (141,656) lost the most residents to other states, but New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Oregon, Massachusetts, Minnesota and Louisiana were also big losers. Where are all these folks moving?

Mostly to states with lower taxes, more affordable housing and a higher standard of living. Florida drew the most newcomers (318,855), followed by Texas (230,961), North Carolina (99,796), South Carolina (84,030), Tennessee (81,646), Georgia (81,406) and Arizona (70,984). More people moved to West Virginia than left for the first time in a decade.

Texas ranked first in overall population growth (470,708), followed by Florida (416,754), North Carolina (133,088), Georgia (124,847), Arizona (94,320), South Carolina (89,368), Tennessee (82,988), Washington (45,041), Utah (41,687) and Idaho (34,719).

One new trend is the migration from the Pacific Northwest. Between 2010 and 2020, Washington drew 371,258 newcomers from other states.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/12/26/what-did-nancy-pelosi-know-and-when-did-she-know-it/

The January 6 select committee finally released its long-delayed report late on December 23 after most Americans had happily turned away from politics to enjoy the Christmas weekend with family and friends. The Friday night news dump, a common tactic when government officials want to bury something controversial, was not exactly a vote of confidence in the panel’s ultimate work product.

As expected, the bulk of the 845-page document spun a well-worn tale that portrayed Donald Trump as the sole villain in a so-called “insurrection” the committee wants us to believe was engineered to keep him in the White House. Page after page included dramatic interpretations of snippets from witness testimony intended to bolster the committee’s preconceived conclusions.

Analysis of how law enforcement and intelligence services failed to prepare for the “attack,” a promise made by the committee in its original sell job to the public, is buried in a relatively brief appendix at the end. And despite confirmation the government was aware violence might occur—the FBI used a threat tag, “CERTUNREST2021,” purportedly to categorize in advance information related to January 6—federal and local agencies did not prevent what the Biden regime branded a terror attack comparable to 9/11. (FBI Director Christopher Wray’s name is not mentioned once in the report and it appears unlikely he sat for a transcribed interview.)

Even so, in the face of extensive evidence that those agencies were on high alert, committee members still faulted Trump: “Few in law enforcement predicted that the President of the United States would incite a mob attack on the Capitol, that he would send them to stop the joint session knowing they were armed and dangerous, that he would further incite them against his own vice President while the attack was underway, or that he would do nothing to stop the assault for hours,” the report dishonestly stated.

Another official who escaped accountability in the report is House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the lawmaker mainly responsible for protecting Capitol grounds. Committee members avoided any criticism of Pelosi, instead allowing her to write the foreword. (It’s also unclear whether committee investigators interviewed the speaker.)

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

Francis Fukuyama claimed, dubiously, that we are witnessing the end of history, with the universalization of liberal democracy as the final form of human government.  Yet we live in a world of worrisome pendulum shifts.  Republican congressional leaders disprove Fukuyama’s claim as they celebrate their stunning betrayal of the American people by supporting the passage of the $1.7-trillion McConnell-Schumer omnibus bill.  Rather than protect America’s southern border and comply with Congress’s constitutional duty, this bill moves the country farther to the left by explicitly funding a “woke” identity group supporting LGBT indoctrination in elementary schools, abolishing ICE, and defunding the police.  At the same time, this bill hands more power to a federal government dedicated to the preposterous claim that America is systemically racist.

This explosive proposition is aided and abetted by several additional contentions.  Dangerous contentions include claims that enforcing the United States Constitution fairly and equally, administering laws without focusing on visual identity, and advancing merit rather than identity-based preferences are forms of unconscious racism.  Such claims flourish because our overlords ignore the observation that truth is no defense against fools determined to believe lies.

Elites’ hysterical claims verify René Girard’s observation that concern for victims overwhelms modern culture and signals a genuine exhaustion of all other sources of authority.  Elites’ vulgar claims regarding race also ignore evidence showing that Asian-American women surpass white men in weekly earnings, as well as data showing that Syrian-Americans, Korean-Americans, and Filipino-Americans had significantly higher median household incomes than whites.  They also have higher test scores, lower incarceration rates, and longer life expectancies.  Indeed, African-born black women had higher earnings than U.S.-born white women.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/san-francisco-dying/

You may have heard the phrase, “Get woke, go broke.” It has become a common phrase in the past few years, mainly because it keeps proving itself true.

San Francisco is a prime example of the death spiral going broke puts cities, businesses, and people into.

The city has long been a bastion of liberalism. When it became fashionable after the death of George Floyd to defund the police, the city jumped at the chance. The people elected a prosecutor who was willing to allow criminals to go free.

This led to police resigning and crime in the city skyrocketing. Not only did violent crime rise, so did public drug use and homeless encampments because no one would enforce those laws.

The citizens and some government officials suddenly realized that police were needed. Politicians tried to refund the department as citizens called for police to enforce the laws.

The problem was the city has slipped into the death spiral. Even as politicians tried to pull it back, the crime problem led to citizens and companies leaving the cities in droves. San Francisco now has some of the lowest office occupancy rates in the country, “thanks to the tech companies that make the city’s lifeblood retreating to remote work, San Francisco has seen residents move to the suburbs – pushed also by rising crime,” the Daily Mail reported.

This has reduced the tax base, which means there is less money available to fund cities programs and services.

To compensate, programs and services will need to be cut or taxes raised. Both of which will drive more people from the city, leaving behind those most in needs of programs and less likely to be contributing much to the city’s coffers through taxes.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/12/27/twitter-americas-founders-and-free-expression/

Donald Trump’s declaration that he would run for president again in 2024 made me recall his previous tempestuous soap opera relationship with Twitter and “fake news.” And now we are living through the beginning of what could be an equally tempestuous soap opera triggered by Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. After all, the left has decided that with Twitter no longer under its control, it now prefers a “hands around the neck of Twitter” approach rather than a “hands off Twitter” approach. It makes it worth revisiting the relationship between Twitter, and the constitutional freedoms of expression America’s founders guaranteed citizens for insight.

If we applied the same standards America’s founders applied to speech and the press to current media that did not then exist, there would virtually never be a time to acceptably deny Americans’ those freedoms. And that remains true even for Twitter or when “fake news” or “disinformation” is invoked as justification. However, as a recent Orange County Register editorial put it, “Maintaining a commitment to free speech and resisting the temptation to suppress  contrary points of view is especially hard without an appreciation for why freedom of speech is important.” Let us consider that issue more closely.

The Constitution included freedoms of speech and the press because our founders knew freedom of expression was necessary to maintain liberty. They repudiated restrictions on the press because they remembered that colonial printers had been licensed, but licenses could be revoked and printers imprisoned (e.g., Benjamin Franklin’s brother, James). At the time, newspapers were the primary means of public communication, so they were insulated from political extortion from those who didn’t like what they printed. However, what was emphasized was freedom of expression, not the particular medium of expression used. If radio, TV and the internet existed in the 1770s, the principle behind freedom of the press would have been expressed more broadly.

To see this, you need only consider some of our founding generation’s own words, and those of their predecessors who greatly influenced their beliefs.

https://www.newsweek.com/fbi-gaslights-america-over-twitter-files-opinion-1769352

The FBI is gaslighting the American people over the stunning—if unsurprising—evidence that it engaged in a conspiracy with Big Tech to silence wrongthinkers in violation of the First Amendment, as the Twitter Files have revealed.

Meanwhile, in attacking those who refuse to be gaslit, the bureau is also telegraphing that it would respond to Congress investigating its hyper-politicization and weaponization with relentless information warfare.

The gaslighting comes in the preeminent law enforcement agency’s “move along, nothing to see here” response to the Twitter Files. It stated that “correspondence between the FBI and Twitter show nothing more than examples of our traditional, longstanding and ongoing federal government and private sector engagements.” The FBI, it says, “provides critical information to the private sector in an effort to allow them to protect themselves and their customers.”

Here is the kind of conduct the FBI wants you to believe is completely normal:

Grooming Twitter executives for months in advance of the release of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story to compel them to kill the story.
Referring myriad tweets concerning inherently political matters to Twitter’s censorship team for purging—so many tweets, in fact, that during one such bulk censorship request, a Twitter employee described the review of the “possible violative content” as a “monumental undertaking.”
Flagging specific Twitter accounts for the platform to take action against—up to and including suspension—apparently for engaging in thoughtcrime of promoting “civic misinformation” by making jokes related to the 2020 election.
Paying Twitter $3.4 million for its time and effort censoring Americans.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/12/a_federal_judge_essentially_says_parents_have_no_rights_over_their_children.html

Lenin is reputed to have said, “Give me four years to teach the children, and the seeds I have planted will never be uprooted.” Every parent knows this is true: Children are sponges, learning things incredibly quickly. These things then stick, for they are buried in the very deepest recesses of our brains. Today’s leftists are attempting to reinstitute this specific type of Leninism in America. They want your children, and your efforts to protest will be unavailing. A Massachusetts federal judge confirmed this last week, saying that it didn’t “shock the conscience” that a school secretly indoctrinated two children into transgenderism.

From the Daily Wire:

A federal judge has thrown out a lawsuit from Massachusetts parents who accused public school officials of hiding their children’s gender transitions from them.

U.S. District Court Judge Mark Mastroianni, an Obama appointee, criticized Ludlow Public Schools officials for allegedly hiding the pair of siblings’ gender transitions from their parents, but he said the officials’ actions do not “shock the conscience.”

“While the court is apprehensive about the alleged policy and actions of the Ludlow Public Schools with regard to parental notification, it cannot conclude the decision to withhold information” about the children from their parents meets the conscience-shocking legal standard in Massachusetts, the judge wrote in his December 14 ruling.

The case revolves around the fact that the school deliberately made the decision to keep from the parents the demands that they be treated as members of the opposite sex in junior high school:

The 11-year-old girl allegedly emailed school staff in February 2021 and announced that she wanted to go by a cluster of new pronouns.

“I am genderqueer. … My new name will be R**** … If you deadname me or use any pronouns I am uncomfortable with I will politely tell you … A list of pronouns you can use are: she/her he/him they/them fae/faerae/aer ve/ver xe/xem ze/zir. … Please only use the ones I have listed and not the other ones. I do not like them,” the girl wrote, her parents said in court documents.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/12/25/what-will-the-fbi-not-do/

The FBI on Wednesday finally broke its silence and responded to the revelations on Twitter of close ties between the bureau and the social media giant—ties that included efforts to suppress information and censor political speech. 

“The correspondence between the FBI and Twitter show nothing more than examples of our traditional, longstanding and ongoing federal government and private sector engagements, which involve numerous companies over multiple sectors and industries,” the bureau said in a statement. “As evidenced in the correspondence, the FBI provides critical information to the private sector in an effort to allow them to protect themselves and their customers. The men and women of the FBI work every day to protect the American public. It is unfortunate that conspiracy theorists and others are feeding the American public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency.” 

Almost all of the FBI communique is untrue, except the phrase about the bureau’s “engagements which involve numerous companies over multiple sectors and industries.” 

Future disclosures will no doubt reveal similar FBI subcontracting with other social media concerns of Silicon Valley to stifle free expression and news deemed problematic to the FBI’s agenda. 

The FBI did not merely engage in “correspondence” with Twitter to protect the company and its “customers.” Instead, it effectively hired Twitter to suppress the free expression of some of its users, as well as news stories deemed unhelpful to the Biden campaign and administration—to the degree that the bureau’s requests sometimes even exceeded those of Twitter’s own left-wing censors.

The FBI did not wish to help Twitter “to protect themselves [sic],” given the bureau’s Twitter liaisons were often surprised at the FBI’s bold requests to suppress the expression of those who had not violated Twitter’s own admittedly biased “terms of service” and “community standards.”

The FBI and its helpers on the Left now reboot the same boilerplate about “conspiracy theorists” and “misinformation” smears used against anyone who rejected the FBI-fed Russian collusion hoax and the bureau’s peddling of the “Russian disinformation” lie to suppress accurate pre-election news about the authenticity of Hunter Biden’s laptop.