RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-persistence-of-the-left/

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 sparked a wave of optimism and triumphalism across the West. Our nuclear-armed rival and ideological enemy had suddenly disappeared, taking with it the shadow of nuclear apocalypse. But for the Left, since 1917 the Soviet Union had been the locus of the hopes and dreams of leftist collectivism. Now history, understood as an ideological game of thrones, had ended, dashing that hope. Liberal democracy, private property, and free-market capitalism had prevailed, and no credible alternative remained.

This optimism was expressed by George H.W. Bush in 1991, when he celebrated this “new world order, where diverse nations are drawn together in common cause to achieve the universal aspirations of mankind––peace and security, freedom, and the rule of law.” Yet the demise of the USSR did not mean the end of various Marxist ideals like collectivism and the “command economy,” which haven’t just survived, but in recent decades have grown stronger under progressivist rule.

How is it that an ideology so graphically repudiated by history and so bloody in its application, has managed to endure, especially in the West, which has provided the greatest and most widespread prosperity, political equality, and freedom in human history?

The survival of the Left has nothing to do with the intellectual coherence or truth of its ideas. Leftism is predicated on dubious, if not wildly absurd, assumptions and ideas about human nature and motivation: secularism, philosophical materialism, determinism, and the technocratic fallacy that “science” can discover and exploit the timeless forces and laws of human progress and social improvement. The latter claim in particular has been repudiated by Marxism’s ghastly toll of 100 million dead, and millions more enslaved in gulags and forced-labor camps like the ones we see today in Communist China’s Xinjiang western region, where more than a million Muslim Uighurs are being subjected to forced labor and brutal “re-education.”

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2022/12/21/you-have-to-watch-rand-pauls-twas-the-week-before-christmas-n1655507

Sen. Rand Paul has written his own retelling of the classic poem “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas,” called ‘”Twas the Week Before Christmas” about the $1.7 trillion omnibus bill, and performs it in a video, which is currently going viral on social media.

The senator from Kentucky is seen donning a red blazer before a backdrop of a Christmas tree and a fireplace. “‘Twas a week before Christmas and all through the Senate and House, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse,” he begins. “The earmarks were hung by the chimney with care, in hopes that Saint Nicholas soon would be there. The senators were nestled all snug in their beds, while visions of pork danced in their heads.”

As for the rest, well, just watch the video.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/12/22/biden-should-be-fired-so-americans-can-have-jobs/

The Biden White House bragged in July that the economy added more than 1.1 million jobs in the second quarter. The Scatter Brain in Chief said that from April through June “we created more jobs than in any quarter under any of my predecessors in the nearly 40 years before the pandemic.” Now we learn that the real number of jobs added was only about 1% of that.

Maff are hard.

According to the Federal Reserve Bank in Philadelphia, “in the aggregate, 10,500 net new jobs were added during the period rather than the 1.12 million jobs estimated by the sum of the states.”

The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Current Employment Statistics estimate of a little more than 1 million new jobs was also a bit off, says the Philly Fed.

Not only did the administration celebrate the “new” jobs in the spring, Biden’s allies were so excited they could hardly keep their pants on. In October, the headline of a Center for American Progress post promised “The Swift Jobs Recovery Under Biden Will Have Long-Lasting Benefits for Workers.” At roughly the same time, The New Yorker gushed that “Biden Heads To The Midterms With 10 Million New Jobs,” while Yahoo senior columnist claimed in October “no other president comes close to matching his record on jobs.” 

Now it’s possible the Philly Fed is wrong and the higher numbers are more accurate. If so, it would be a miracle. Biden’s policies are not designed to create jobs.

On his first day at work as president, Biden killed 70,000 jobs by pulling the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline. In doing so, he might “have set a single-day record for the number of jobs killed by an American president.

https://nypost.com/2022/12/20/american-kids-are-in-the-grip-of-a-gender-contagion/

American kids are in the grip of a gender contagion. New research from the Ethics and Public Policy Center reveals that the number of prescriptions for puberty blockers to under-18s doubled between 2017 and 2021.

The data, based on information gathered from insurers, provide the clearest picture to date of the booming industry of gender butchery being practiced on American minors.
In this medical Wild West, a well-oiled campaigning machine with tentacles into nonprofits, schools and even the White House recruits healthy kids and spits out sterilized simulacra of the opposite sex, often with lifelong health issues.

Concerned parents, meanwhile, are bullied into compliance with threats of suicide — and the “treatments” themselves don’t even make their victims happier. A recent study by the UK campaign group Sex Matters found puberty blockers and hormone treatments do no more to improve teens’ mental health than a placebo.

And yet, as the EPPC numbers show, demand continues to soar. Why? The driver seems to be a toxic blend of teen angst, educator activism and Internet addiction.

Puberty is often tough, and most teens are now exposed to hardcore porn at a young age via smartphones. Many add this corrupted picture of sexual relations to mental health and body issues — then seize on “LGBTQ+” activism in schools and the wider culture as a refuge.

Digging deep for a rainbow “identity” of their own, many more stumble upon forums and YouTube influencers that inspire with “before” and “after” images and tales of how transition will take all the angst and pain away.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19253/fusion-power

It may prove to be as historic as the harnessing of fire, invention of the wheel, or the channeling of electricity. It will certainly rank on a par with the first release of nuclear energy in an experimental Chicago reactor or its first test as an atomic weapon near Los Alamos, New Mexico.

It is the first successful experiment to extract power from controlled fusion.

It may take a decade or more to convert their successful experiment into commercially available power, but what it offers is an inexhaustible, readily available source of clean energy that eliminates pollution, greenhouse gases, or radioactive waste from the current generation of nuclear reactors. In short, it has the means to be as powerful and transformative than any advance in energy technology mankind as ever deployed to run its society.

Fusion occurs within our Sun and the stars that fill our night sky. The process combines hydrogen atoms, turning it into helium and producing the sunlight that allows civilization to exist orbiting some 93 million miles from the Sun. In an effort to replicate that law of physics, American scientists have used reactors and lasers to determine how they can harness its enormous power. (It has been estimated that a modest container of the “fusion fuel” is equivalent to one million gallons of oil, generating some 9 million kilowatt hours of electricity.)

As we discovered with the invention of the atomic bomb, physics can’t be kept as a national security secret. The Soviets were working on trying to figure out how to harness fusion for something other than a hydrogen bomb more than half a century ago. Before the fall of the Soviet Union, there was even a mutual assistance program announced by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev.

But leadership in energy technology is crucial to a nation that is founded on freedom and committed to remaining a global superpower for good. America has already invested hundreds of millions of dollars into fusion research and it is beginning to pay off in this most recent announcement of a breakthrough. New and expanded research efforts are being announced by America’s scientific community in concert with universities such as MIT and with Western nations. They are suggesting the first commercial power station might come online as early as the 2030s.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/reflections-on-america-at-the-end-of-2022/

November 22, 1963, was the first day of my life of which I have substantial memories: Mrs. Gibbons, my ample, white-haired second-grade teacher from Central Casting, wheeling the giant blond-wood TV set into the classroom so that we could watch some dull educational program; the sudden interruption for breaking news from Dallas, which we all followed avidly during the hour or so that was left of the school day; the anxious minutes during which I ran all the way home, convinced that the murder of a president must portend something absolutely horrible, at the very least the veritable collapse of society; my even greater anxiety when, unprecedentedly and apparently in confirmation of my fear, my mother didn’t respond to my increasingly urgent knocks at the door; and the immense relief I felt when she called out from across the street, where she was watching the terrible news with the neighbors, and where I, too, would spend the next several hours, experiencing a turning point in human history.

The day that President Kennedy was assassinated marked an end to what, in retrospect anyway, seems like an innocent and harmonious era in American life and the beginning of a period – one in which we still live – during which American society has been marred, sometimes more than others, by political doubt, division, and distrust and by growing disagreement on fundamental questions. A few days ago, on the December 15 episode of his show on Fox News – about which more later – Tucker Carlson noted that the phrase “conspiracy theory” had not been in common usage until 1964, when it began to be used to describe people who resisted the Warren Commission’s conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone in killing the president and that Jack Ruby had acted alone in killing Oswald.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/wanted-elon-musk-for-instigating-journalism-and-humiliating-brights/

Ever since Elon Musk publicized Twitter’s “crown jewels”––the evidence for its various forms of censorship of conservatives, and its collusion with the FBI, Homeland Security, and the White House to damage Donald Trump and promote Joe Biden before the 2020 presidential election––he has been hysterically vilified by social and legacy media, and threatened by the White House for taking the First Amendment seriously and exposing the moral and professional bankruptcy of storied news outlets like the New York Times, Washington Post, NBC, and CNN.

And now, in a poll of Twitter users Musk held Sunday in response to pushback on his ban on Twitter users  promoting other social media sites, 55% voted that Musk should step down as CEO. Musk has pledged to abide by the results, tweeting, “The question is not finding a CEO, the question is finding a CEO who can keep Twitter alive.”  Fortunately, Musk still own the company and can maintain Twitter’s role as the virtual town square that respects free speech.

Such flak is what one gets for defending the foundational rights of any government that empowers the masses to participate in politics and hold accountable their political rulers, and that protects the people from the tyranny of elites whether plutocratic or technocratic. But free speech is also critical to the proper practice of science, which relies on public debates over challenges to scientific claims.

Musk has gone beyond just standing up for our unalienable right to speak our minds, and for exposing the government’s unconstitutional assaults on the First Amendment. His brash and insulting defense has come at the expense of the cognitive elite who fancies themselves “brights” because they have college degrees and professional credentials––a class that needs to be humiliated for their overweening arrogance and toxic credentialism.

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

Now that we’re approaching the three-year anniversary of COVID-1984’s global demolition (or “Great Reset” in World Economic Forum parlance), reality looks very different from what many people once perceived it to be.  Raise your hand if you thought “free” nations would declare the authority to close millions of small businesses until they went bankrupt and folded.  Or whether never-before-used, experimental cocktails of mRNA “vaccine” would be coercively injected into citizens.  Did you think governments would conspire to cover up “vaccine”-related injuries and deaths?  Did you expect that the Canadian government would take the unprecedented steps of invoking the Emergencies Act and seizing the private bank accounts of Freedom Convoy protesters in order to intimidate peaceful Canadians and quell dissent?  Did you predict that in the United States and throughout the West, public debate would be targeted and censored if that speech contradicted governments’ official public health “narratives”?  Did you know that COVID communism would end up being more contagious than the virus?

If you still have your hand raised, then you are part of a humble minority who were worried about the West’s accelerating attacks against personal liberty even before the rise of COVID-1984.  If you had your eyes unexpectedly opened during the last three years, though, it is all the better to have you seeing clearly now.  Around the world, the WuFlu pandemic and governments’ coordinated responses to use this health scare as a transparent pretense for ushering in the WEF’s beloved “Great Reset” have awakened hundreds of millions of people who might otherwise still be sleeping.  While our puppet master oligarchs have achieved a great deal in a short time, their in-your-face mobilization efforts to “fundamentally transform” the world have also commanded new, unwanted attention.  A growing share of the population finally understands that we are in an ongoing battle between self-government and global government and that friends of freedom must dig in their heels for the long haul.

https://thespectator.com/topic/deep-state-donald-trump-saga-january-6/

As I have said before, I hope that the new Congress, which begins its session in just a couple of weeks, will continue the work of the January 6 Committee, minus Liz Cheney and the other kangaroos. The New York Times, in its best slant-the-news-while-appearing-magisterial modality, described the Committee’s 100-plus-page “Executive Summary” as a “report into the effort to overturn the 2020 election.” But surely the far greater attempt to impact the 2020 election was the FBI’s infiltration of Twitter and other social media platforms, Mark Zuckerberg’s half a billion dollars distributed like alms to NeverTrump sororities in battleground cities, etc., etc.

All that should be the work of the new Congress. The old Congress wasn’t interested in the truth. They were interested reminding us plebs who is in charge — hint, it is not “We the People” — and, above all, they were committed, as Lonesome Liz Cheney herself put it, to “making sure that Donald Trump never gets near the Oval Office again.”

Someday, when all the smoke clears, future historians will be busy investigating how it was that a flamboyant real estate developer called Donald Trump went from being the most improbable presidential candidate since Andrew Jackson (or, maybe, since the founding of the republic) to being the most investigated and calumniated president in history.

The entire bureaucratic machinery of the state was surreptitiously mobilized against this one individual. It is only gradually that we are learning about this. Remember the Russia Collusion Delusion? The country spent tens of millions of dollars conducting a sham investigation that hobbled Trump during his first term.

https://www.nysun.com/article/the-founders-would-have-been-appalled-at-the-january-6-committee?utm_

Democrats violated the prohibition on attainder to try to force a prosecution of President Trump.

The final act of the January 6 committee, voted on in broad daylight, represents, to us, the final act in a process that the Founders of America had tried to prohibit — a process of attainder, meaning a trial on criminal charges by the legislature. It is prohibited to the Congress in Article I, Section 9. And by our lights, referring President Trump and his colleagues for criminal prosecution is an evasion by the Congress.

We understand that we are the only newspaper banging this drum (not an entirely novel situation for us). Nor are we without illusion in respect of how serious the moment is. It’s decidedly possible that the Justice Department will seek an indictment against Mr. Trump and alleged confederates and try them on charges that could put them away for years. That would be deeply divisive, as the Wall Street Journal argues, though a jury would have the last word.

It might — it’s a long shot — be possible for Mr. Trump to press a constitutional objection, double jeopardy, on one charge on which he was referred, incitement to insurrection. That’s because of Article I, Section 3 of the Constitution, which says the “party convicted” in an impeachment trial shall nevertheless be liable and subject to indictment, trial, judgment and punishment, according to law. It might present a problem in prosecuting Mr. Trump.