RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/prof-jason-hill-at-the-freedom-centers-restoration-weekend/

Jason Hill:

I often start my talks with an epigraph and it goes something like this. The barbarians are not at the gates and the jungles are not approaching the cities. The barbarians are inside the cities and the jungles are our cities. The barbarians move openly among us like sinister ghouls, dressed in suits and ties, dresses, and stilettos that can hurt and do hurt the pavements. They are wicked men and nefarious she-devils. But America, the most exceptional and unprecedented phenomenon in history, is in an age of moral crisis, an age of nihilism in which values and the good are destroyed for the sake of destruction and because America is good. Our culture today is unfortunately bankrupt, destitute, intellectually bankrupt, morally bankrupt and spiritually bankrupt.

Now whether we believe in the great reset, the council of stakeholders, the financial cartel, the stakeholders of global capitalists, the machinations of the World Economic Forum, ESG logic, the climate catastrophists, the open board of globalists who, with full forethought of malice, aid and abet the genocide of our young people through the importation of drugs, including fentanyl, and the infiltration of gang cartels and the crime and the civic destabilization that come with them, in order to place a republic on the verge of a nervous breakdown is irrelevant.

https://thefederalist.com/2022/12/01/a-gop-with-backbone-would-support-elon-musk-punish-apple-and-fight-for-free-speech-on-twitter/

Instead of speaking out against Apple, Republicans have been disturbingly silent, which means they still have no idea what time it is.

Apple’s threat to remove Twitter from its App store for the crime of being a slightly more open forum for free speech under Elon Musk has been met with a chorus of outrage and substantive threats of congressional action by Republican leaders.

Just kidding. Republicans have barely said anything about it, and establishment Republicans have said nothing at all. With the exception of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who offered his opinion on a matter outside his purview as a governor, Apple’s threat to crush Twitter has been met more or less with silence, even from members of the GOP who consider themselves conservative. (Sen. Mike Lee, to his credit, tossed out a tweet saying Apple’s threat makes the case for the Open Apps Markets Act. But he’s the exception to the rule.) And though Apple leaders apparently smoothed over the “misunderstanding” with Musk on Wednesday afternoon, we have all seen this pattern: Big Tech’s anti-speech aggression always turns out to be a “mistake” or “misunderstanding” as soon as enough people notice.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2022/11/what-american-conservatism-exists-to-conserve/

EXCERPT

Have you noticed that almost every progressive initiative subverts the American nation, as if by design? Explicitly so in opening national borders, disabling immigration controls and transferring sovereignty to international bureaucracies. But it also works from within—elevating group identity above citizenship; fomenting racial, ethnic and religious divisions; disparaging common culture and the common man; throwing away energy independence; defaming our national history as a story of unmitigated injustice; hobbling our national future with gargantuan debts that will constrain our capacity for action.

But my program would also address causes of national political disorder in which recent conservative politicians have been fully complicit. This would include returning to a balanced federal budget outside of wars and other emergencies; redirecting federal spending from personal entitlements and income transfers to public goods such as national defence and infrastructure; withdrawing the collective-bargaining privileges of public-employee unions; and instituting a stable currency—not 10 per cent or 5 per cent inflation, nor even the current goal of 2 per cent inflation that quintuples prices in a single lifetime, but 0 per cent.

And my nationalist program would include not only measures that reinstitute the historical tried-and-true but also thoroughly modern innovations. These include universal school choice, which would give all parents the wherewithal to direct resources to the schools they think best for their children, and initiatives to mobilise science and enterprise to dominate China in advanced computation, communications and weaponry and to repatriate production of national essentials such as pharmaceuticals.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/12/02/the-elites-war-on-food/

A few months back, stories of “suspicious” fires at food-production plants raged across the media. The narrative said the sites were being sabotaged to disrupt the food supply. And it was most likely wrong. But that doesn’t mean there is no effort on the part of Western elites to put the peasants on a strict diet.

Most by now have seen reports that Dutch officials are closing as many as 3,000 farms in the Netherlands, the world’s second-largest exporter of agricultural products by value even though it’s only slightly larger than Maryland, to comply with crackpot European Union carbon dioxide emissions rules. It’s possible that eventually more than 11,000 farms will be shut down, and 17,600 forced to sharply cut their livestock numbers.

On our side of the Atlantic, the malefactors are also busy. Just the News is reporting that the Environmental Protection Agency is quietly quadrupling the regulatory cost of carbon emissions in a new war on fossil fuels, which is, of course, also a war on the food supply.

“If you think about the fact that they would impose this damage factor, let’s say on farmers, because it applies to fertilizer,” Louisiana Solicitor General Liz Murill said on the John Solomon Reports podcast. “Fertilizer emits nitrous oxide. So fertilizer is a big contributor. If every family farmer now is going to have to pay more to obtain fertilizer to fertilize crops that feed us, well, what’s that going to do to the price of food?”

Are these mere coincidences, entirely unrelated, isolated events?

https://amgreatness.com/2022/11/30/if-you-really-wanted-to-destroy-the-united-states-then/

First, you would surrender our prior energy independence. 

Reduce new gas and oil leases on federal lands to the lowest levels of any president in history. Cut back production at precisely the time the world is emerging from a two-year lockdown with pent-up consumer demand. 

Make war on coal and nuclear power. Drain the strategic petroleum reserve to make the pain for consumers more bearable for midterm election advantage.

Cancel the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge oil and gas field. Block pipelines like the Keystone oil pipeline and the Constitution natural gas line.

Overregulate and demonize frackers and horizontal drillers. Ensure there is less investment for their exploration and production. 

Make use of internal combustible engines or fossil fuel power generation prohibitively expensive. Achieve a green oil-dependency along the lines of contemporary Europe.

Second, print trillions of dollars in new currency as the lockdowns end, demand rises, and consumers are already saturated with COVID-19 subsidies. Keep interest rates low, well below the rate of inflation, as you print more money. Ensure that passbook holders earn no interest at the very time prices skyrocket to the highest per annum level in 40 years. 

“Spread the wealth” by sending money to those who already have enough, while making it less valuable for those deemed to have too much. Ensure runaway high prices to wean the middle class off its consumerism and supposedly to inspire them to buy less junk they don’t need. Damn the rich in the open and in the abstract, court them in the concrete and secret of darkness.

Third, end America’s physical boundaries. Render it an amorphous people and anywhere space. End any vestigial difference between a citizen and resident. Up the current nearly 50 million who were not born in the United States —27 percent of California’s population—to 100 million and more by allowing 3 million illegal aliens to enter per year. 

Fourth, destroy the public trust in its elections. Render Election Day irrelevant. Make proper auditing of 110 million mail-in/early ballots impossible. Normalize ballot harvesting and curing. 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/americans-are-losing-trust-in-the-military-reagan-institute-survey-11669848047?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

The current era is marked by fading trust in U.S. institutions, but confidence in one pillar has held up: the military. But now even that is eroding, and the question is whether the brass will get the message.

The Reagan Institute releases an annual survey of public attitudes on national defense, and this year only 48% reported having “a great deal of confidence” in the U.S. military in results first detailed here. That’s down from 70% in 2018, and within the margin error of last year’s 45%.

This is consistent with other surveys. Pew Research this year noted a 14-point drop since 2020 in Americans who said they had a great deal of confidence in the military to act in the public’s interest.

The Reagan poll asked Americans what is driving the decline. It isn’t the ability to carry out missions or win in a fight. It is “things going on outside the core competencies of the military,” says Reagan’s Roger Zakheim. “Call it politicization, call it wokeness,” but that’s where “you can connect the dots.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19177/presidential-trojan-horse

U.S Senator Joseph Manchin has been playing both sides against the middle for the past year and it appears that game is about to end.

This year Manchin offered his vote to pass the so called “Inflation Reduction Act” in return for Senate leadership support of legislation that would loosen regulations now impacting energy pipeline construction in his home state of West Virginia. In some earlier era in Washington, that kind of Capitol Hill give-and-get would have gone unnoticed, just another deal being cut with taxpayers’ money before lunch in the Senate dining room.

That was then. This is now.

Manchin’s vote essentially gave the Biden Administration a blank check, spending hundreds of billions of dollars wherever and whenever they want as the White House ramps up their reelection bid. If one is permitted to say so, a citizen would have to be beyond naïve to believe that this blizzard of federal cash will all be accounted for on behalf of projects that actually strengthen the republic. No one knows that better than Manchin, as he cut his deal with Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer in a scene from “Advice and Consent.”

Now, Manchin’s side deal is in trouble. Political observers say his Republican colleagues spotted his political expediency some time ago and have little reason to support his proposal even if less regulation is a shared ideology

Manchin should not be surprised that his side deal is in serious trouble: he has wobbled across the political spectrum during 2022. It became obvious that he had no north star that guides his political goals. Rather, he seeks to cut deals with whomever he can for the purpose of advancing his own immediate agenda or, as he should, what he perceives as that of his state and constituents. Perhaps that worked in another era but not when, due to justifiable widespread skepticism over election integrity, the future of our democracy is at risk.

One wonders if Manchin wanted a Senate legacy: at 75, he will face a spirited challenger in 2024, whomever the Republicans select. If permitting reform was approved by the Senate he would use it as the cloak needed to ward off voter anger over an “Inflation Reduction Act” that could well be a Presidential Trojan Horse filled with dollars for states that are important when counting electoral votes.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/11/the_new_wokeist_faith.html

The website of the American Psychiatric Association says:

Psychological attempts to force a transgender person to be cisgender (sometimes referred to as gender identity conversion efforts or so-called “gender identity conversion therapy”) are considered unethical and have been linked to adverse mental health outcomes.

The official position of the APA is that a man who thinks he is a woman is not necessarily deluded, and it would be unethical to treat him as if he were.  It is, in other words, entirely possible for a person who carries an X and a Y chromosome and who is, therefore, biologically male to be, nevertheless, mentally female — a woman “trapped in a man’s body.”

The website continues: “Medical affirmation may include pubertal suppression for adolescents with gender dysphoria and gender-affirming hormones like estrogen and testosterone for older adolescents and adults.” (Emphasis added.)

We who still cling to reality are accustomed to viewing this sort of lunacy as, well, lunacy.  It appears that almost overnight half of America has gone mad.  We are at a loss to explain how otherwise rational, highly accomplished persons like those at the APA could ever have come to believe something that is so self-evidently contrary to reality.  Well, they are not mad.

The story begins in an unlikely time and place. Long before the civil rights movement of the 1960s, American leftists had set their sights on disaffected blacks as potential allies in their campaign against capitalism and Americanism.  The success of this alliance at forcing the defenders of the American Republic into retreat — the Civil Rights Act of 1964, for example, partially nationalized private businesses in the name of racial integration — persuaded the Left to begin striking alliances with other disaffected minorities.  Thus did the Left abandon their commitment to purely economic revolution, and thus was born cultural Marxism.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/biden-mute-protests-demand-freedom-world

What does the United States stand for? With Joe Biden in the White House, absolutely nothing.

Apparently, we don’t stand for freedom. As brave citizens in China desperately protest that country’s heinous lockdowns and censorship, a spokesman for the Biden administration says that the White House is “going to watch this closely.”  

We don’t stand against human rights abusers. As crippling energy prices threaten the president’s approval ratings, Biden’s emissaries travel to Venezuela, allowing an easing of sanctions and resumed oil exports from a murderous regime that happens to have the world’s largest oil reserves. 

Amnesty International has called out the Maduro government for “extrajudicial executions, excessive use of force, arbitrary detentions and torture and other ill-treatment against those perceived as critical of the government” but the Biden government needs oil. 

We don’t stand for peace in the Middle East. Too small-minded to accept the extraordinary success of the Abraham Accords achieved under President Trump, which created new alliances in the region and ring-fenced Iran, the Biden team continues its pursuit of a new nuclear deal with Tehran. The Biden White House resolutely ignores Iran’s past history of cheating on its nuclear commitments; astonishingly, it allows Russia to act as an intermediary.

We also seemingly don’t stand with women’s rights. Violent and widespread protests in Iran over the killing of a young woman arrested for not wearing a hijab have reportedly resulted in hundreds of deaths and the blinding of hundreds more by rubber bullets and metal pellets fired by security forces. 

The White House, other than issuing the usual supportive pablum, has been largely AWOL. Biden inadvertently boasted on the campaign trail that “We’re going to free Iran” but his team soon walked back the comment, saying that we merely “stood in solidarity” with the protesters. 

https://victorhanson.com/leftwing-hysteria-and-the-art-of-the-psychodrama-part-one/

What follows is an extended analysis of how the Left obtains power without agendas that win popular support, and how such aggrandizement inflames social relations and national unity.

The progressive media—which constitute the majority of print newspapers, network news, public radio and TV, Google/Apple/Yahoo news, and the best-funded online venues—have fused with the hard-left Democratic Party. Most in the media, like most Democrats, accept the reality that the progressive, and increasingly neo-socialist, agenda does not and will never win majority support.

Americans want a closed border, a crackdown on crime, fossil-fuel independence, control of inflation and drunken spending, and an end to the woke cancel culture.

So how does the fusion media/political Left obtain power? Usually by the politics of distraction and feigned crises—perhaps better defined as the art of the psychodrama.

Daily the Left scans the news. It ceaselessly ferrets out any story that can be sensationalized and distorted to frighten, to anger, or to confuse the public into thinking America is a racist, sexist, homophobic, and downright awful place run by an elite, rich cadre of prejudicial, white-male Christian nationalists.

And then, presto, social media fuels the agreed-on lie. Television news accelerates it. And print journalism distorts it—all part of an agenda to justify radical changes (“fundamental transformations”) in America otherwise impossible.