RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

For the last few years, the stench of wokeness has enshrouded our nation – in schools, corporations, politics, and cultural institutions. It arrived under the names “Political Correctness” and “Diversity;” as it came in on T.S. Eliot’s “little cat feet,” unobtrusively, but seductively and relentlessly, backed by the arrogance of the self-righteous. While many of its proponents want a world where racism does not exist, where sexuality is a choice, and where a sustainable climate allows mankind to flourish, the world they have created has the absurdity of Gulliver’s travels to the kingdom of Balnibarbi and the island of Laputa.

It is the folly of wokeness that augurs its demise: that slavery defined our nation’s founding, and that racism infects all white people, at least those who do not hew to a progressive line; that biology does not define a man and a woman, and that gender is a choice; and that unless we all give up gas stoves and drive electric vehicles the world will become uninhabitable.

At the same time, we face real problems: failing public schools; a shrinking military; a permeable southern border; federal debt that, as a percent of GDP, is higher than at any point since World War II; persistent inflation; an aging population that will require more entitlement spending; a decline in global influence; a general sense of pessimism expressed in declining birth rates; and a President who, as Bruce Thornton recently wrote, “makes Chance, the Gardner look like Abraham Lincoln.”

Students score poorly on international tests in math, science and reading, and they fail questions regarding history and civics. We have been divided into tribes, into oppressors and the oppressed. Those who are seen as victims (and their heirs) are condemned to victimization for all eternity. California has considered reparations to descendants of slaves, including those five to seven generations removed.  Ignored is the instinct for people to better themselves. Neglected is the Biblical admonition from Ezekiel 18:20: “The son shall not bear the guilt of the father, nor the father the guilt of the son.”

https://amgreatness.com/2023/05/15/in-scathing-report-durham-finds-fbi-had-no-actual-evidence-of-collusion-to-justify-crossfire-hurricane-investigation/

In a damning 300-plus page report released Monday afternoon, Special Counsel John Durham said that the FBI had no verified intelligence or evidence to justify the Trump-Russia investigation into President Donald Trump’s campaign in the summer of 2016.

The Bureau’s Crossfire Hurricane probe was ostensibly opened to determine whether the Trump campaign coordinated with Russia to influence the presidential election. Former Attorney General William Barr appointed Durham to “investigate the investigators” in May 2019 when it became clear that the FBI’s Trump-Russia probe was a political “witch hunt” meant to hobble Trump’s campaign and then his presidency.

According to Durham’s report, “neither U.S. nor the Intelligence Community appears to have possessed any actual evidence of collusion in their holdings at the commencement of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.”

Notably, the report states, “on July 26, 2016, Clinton allegedly approved a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisors to tie Trump to Russia as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.”

Igor Danchenko, a Clinton subcontractor, invented the most explosive allegations in British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s dossier—including the so-called “pee tape,” and fraudulently sourced the rumors to Sergei Millian, an innocent Belarusian-American businessman.

Steele was hired by an Fusion GPS, an opposition research firm, on behalf of Perkins Coie, the law firm for Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016.  Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz concluded in December 2019 that the dossier played a “central and essential” role in the FISA Court’s approval of the FBI’s secret surveillance of former Trump campaign aide Carter Page.

Durham’s report noted the the FBI failed to corroborate any of the dossier’s key claims: “Our investigation determined that the Crossfire Hurricane investigators did not and could not corroborate any of the substantive allegations contained in the Steele reporting.”

The report added: “Based on the review of Crossfire Hurricane and related intelligence activities, we conclude that the Department and the FBI failed to uphold their mission of strict fidelity to the law in connection with certain events and activities described in this report.”

https://amgreatness.com/2023/05/15/hang-all-the-members-of-the-liars-club/

Federal prosecutors last week announced the indictment of U.S. Representative George Santos (R-N.Y.) on a host of charges, including misuse of federal campaign funds and wire fraud, almost all of them resulting from his pathological lies.  

Certainly, Santos deserved the attention of prosecutors for lying on federal documents and affidavits that may have helped him win a congressional seat as well as personal lucre. 

But if that’s the case, why haven’t federal prosecutors also gone after Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.)? She clearly lied her way into a Harvard Law School professorship and an erstwhile presidential candidacy by claiming, in part, quite falsely she was a Native American, supposedly Harvard’s first indigenous law professor. 

Her Senate colleague, Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), flatly lied (he said “misspoke”) about being a Vietnam War veteran. He never confessed to “misspeaking” about his résumé until caught. Both senators, apparently like Santos, gained political traction in their various campaigns from such lies, but the two apparently never put them in writing, or at least not as blatantly as did Santos. 

New Federal Standards? 

Are federal and states prosecutors now setting a new moral and legal standard by criminalizing Santos’ lies? If true, congratulations—it is long overdue. 

Now can we please extend the long arm of the law to reach far beyond a bit player like Santos? 

Why not reboot with the really big liars? Their lies far more undermined the integrity of our key agencies and indeed our national security. 

So let us start with John Brennan, the former CIA director. He lied on two separate occasions, in one case while under oath before the U.S. Senate. His untruths were not mere campaign finance fabrications. They involved falsely swearing that the CIA did not spy on the computers of Senate staffers (“Let me assure you the CIA was in no way spying on [the committee] or the Senate.”). He also lied that U.S. drone missions in prior years had not killed innocent bystanders (“There hasn’t been a single collateral death because of the exceptional proficiency, precision of the capabilities that we’ve been able to develop.”).  

Brennan, only when caught, admitted to both lies. But he faced zero consequences and, in fact, was soon rewarded with an on-air analyst job at MSNBC.  

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/joe-bidens-habitual-race-baiting/

Joe Biden ascended to cruising altitude over the weekend to issue a comprehensive critique of the evil lurking in his fellow countrymen’s hearts. In a commencement address before the student body at the historically black Howard University, Biden took the measure of American history and found much of it wanting.

The story of American life “has not always been a fairytale,” the president said of the straw man he came to bury. It is a narrative of constant struggle between “the best of us” and “the worst of us,” symbolic of the “harsh reality that racism has always torn us apart.” Speaking of the permanent conflict for the soul of the nation, Biden said it demands that Americans of good faith “stand up against the poison of white supremacy,” as he has. He reiterated that “the most dangerous terrorist threat to our homeland is white supremacy.”

Biden’s elision of the word “domestic” from his identification of white nationalists as the nation’s primary terroristic adversary forecloses on invoking the FBI statistics that might have justified a narrower claim. But to include this qualifier would have taken all the sting out of the president’s contention, which, despite his explicit insistence that his comments were not audience-dependent, was likely designed to reinforce negative racial assumptions.

Joe Biden long ago sacrificed the benefit of the doubt when it comes to his forays into racial agitation. We don’t need to sift through the annals of history for examples of his reflexive race-baiting — the notion that Republicans sought to put black Americans “back in chains,” the idea that African Americans who declined to vote for him “ain’t black,” the implicit contrast between Barack Obama, an “articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” and other “mainstream African American” political leaders. We need only look at the president’s record in his first term in office.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/05/15/the-great-debt-ceiling-deceit/

At the heart of all fearmongering over the debt ceiling “crisis” is the claim that if the federal government can’t borrow more money it won’t be able to pay interest on its existing debt, leading to a default.

But that’s poppycock. The government will collect more than a trillion dollars over the next three months. (It collected $638 billion in taxes in April alone.) That will be more than enough to pay interest on the debt. And it will be enough to pay all Social Security benefits, Medicare and Medicaid bills, welfare checks, food stamps. There will even be enough money to pay for Joe Biden’s new electric car subsidies.

There just won’t be any money left for anything else. Nothing for the military, infrastructure, education, the environment, law enforcement, or any other program the federal government currently operates.

That’s because, as it stands today, every penny collected in taxes goes to pay interest on the debt and a category described as “payments for individuals.” Everything else is paid for with borrowed money.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/free-daniel-penny-alvin-bragg-marine-jordan-neely-chokehold-subway-criminal-charge-6b6ad15f?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

When Daniel Penny stepped forward on a New York subway to protect his fellow commuters from an obviously deranged man, the former Marine sergeant couldn’t have imagined that two weeks later he’d be perp-walked in handcuffs before news cameras outside Manhattan’s Fifth Precinct.

In one of the worst decisions by one of America’s worst prosecutors, Alvin Bragg on Friday charged Mr. Penny, 24, with second-degree manslaughter. The charge alleges Mr. Penny killed Jordan Neely, 30, by acting recklessly in keeping him in a chokehold too long. Neely was familiar to authorities from his long rap sheet and his presence on a list of the top 50 homeless New Yorkers most in need of help.

At first glance it looked like a replay of George Floyd, the black Minneapolis man whose death at the hands of white police officers in 2020 sparked riots. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez played her part accordingly, quickly calling Neely’s death “a public execution.” Protesters blocked subway trains in Neely’s name.

But Mr. Bragg may be losing the narrative here. Even before Neely’s death, Mr. Bragg was notorious as a district attorney who would go easy on repeat offenders but throw the book at a bogeda worker defending himself against a thug—not to mention his political grandstanding in indicting Donald Trump. Now the American people see a prosecutor who can’t distinguish between a mentally disturbed man prone to violence and a law-abiding citizen who served his country in uniform.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2023/05/14/of-course-obama-knew-of-bidens-influence-peddling-schemes-heres-why-n1695322

In an interview with Lou Dobbs on his Great America Show podcast, House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) suggested that former president Barack Obama was well aware of the influence-peddling schemes of Joe Biden involving his family.

“I believe, Lou, that it’s because he knew what Joe Biden was doing the last year of his vice presidency,” Comer told Dobbs.

Last week, the House Oversight Committee disclosed a significant collection of evidence that suggests that Joe Biden and his family received financial contributions from Romanian and Chinese entities while he held the position of Vice President. These payments were divided into multiple transactions and channeled through a network of fictitious companies with no legitimate business activities apart from money laundering. These entities lacked tangible products or services to provide. The sole valuable asset they possessed was the ability to leverage the influence of Joe Biden.

Comer also said that Obama knew that Hunter Biden was bad news.

“He knew his son [Hunter Biden] was no good, and he knew this was nothing but a political liability not just for our country, not just for the democrat party, but for Obama’s legacy,” Comer explained. “Because a lot of this happened during the Obama administration.”

But perhaps the biggest reason why Obama was aware of the Biden family’s questionable business dealings was primarily that Joe Biden’s influence was only as effective as his capacity to persuade Obama to adopt particular policies. Vice presidents have little direct influence over policy, and even when they preside over the Senate or cast a tie-breaking vote, they’re implementing the policies of the president.

Let’s not forget that Obama specifically selected Biden as his running mate due to his perceived foreign policy experience. Given that foreign nations, especially adversarial ones, could perceive Biden as Obama’s primary foreign policy advisor, exploiting his influence was really about gaining access to Barack Obama.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2023/05/14/trust-n1695303

Among the most basic factors in what we may call the “practice of daily life” is one that is most easily forgotten or commonly neglected: trust. I mean, to begin with, trust in what we habitually regard as reliable without giving it a moment’s thought, as something we rarely doubt, let alone conceptualize. We seem to have little idea of the degree to which trust determines our every move, gesture and act. Trust, as James Bowman observes of honor in Honor: A History, is “reflexive” and at its core “inseparable from the human condition.”

Trust is instinctive in every moment of human existence. It is a faculty that we unconsciously exercise or apply to just about everything, irrespective of the unpredictable: that the approaching driver will stay in his lane, that the elevator will not stall between floors, that the manhole cover we walk over will remain solidly in place, that the balcony we sit under while having coffee in a sidewalk café will not collapse upon us (as happened to a couple in Montreal with grisly results) and will not give way under our feet (as happened to my university’s Faculty Club manager, who plunged to his death a few minutes after we exchanged the time of day), that the food we buy will not poison us, that the vaccine we take is not lethal, that our banker will not defraud us, that our doctor knows what she is talking about, that the ferry we board will not sink, that the microwave will not suddenly burst into flames (as happened to my mother-in-law), that the person we pass while jogging will not attack us — ad infinitum. We may be wary or nervous at times; nonetheless, trust goes so deep that it is the psychic motor powering all human action, even the most trivial.

In effect, trust is what philosopher David Hume in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding called “the apperception of customary conjunction.” If this were not so, the most mundane routines would be put on hold, as in the case of Russian novelist Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov, who never gets out of bed. We would not dare to cross the street. Every instant would be filled with paranoia. Trust is the cornerstone of sanity.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/05/14/deliver-us-from-reality/

“Because he can.” 

That’s the answer one has to give to those who ask how Alvin Bragg, a local district attorney in office by the slimmest of margins—and then only because of a huge subsidy from the anti-American billionaire George Soros—can get away with antics like indicting Donald Trump, a former (and, possibly, future) president of the United States, and, now, with charging former Marine Daniel Penny with manslaughter because he (along with at least two others) intervened to stop Jordan Neely from attacking fellow passengers on a New York subway. 

Because he can. As a friend remarked when digesting the spectacle of Penny being led away in handcuffs, totalitarian movements often start slowly, almost timidly, but as they gain power, they become more brazen. After a certain point, they do outrageous things just to intimidate the public and demonstrate their power.  

We now know that the FBI, the CIA, and other elements of America’s security apparatus intervened directly in the decision making of Twitter and other social media companies to influence the course of the 2020 election. One part of that intervention had to do with organizing 51 senior former intelligence figures to sign a letter declaring that Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation.” That was a lie. They knew it was a lie. It didn’t matter. They did it because they knew they could get away with it. 

The United States is on the verge of being inundated with thousands upon thousands of illegal aliens. Many are from South or Central America. Hundreds are from China, even though they are crossing that notional line we used to be able to call, without irony, our southern border. Why did the Biden Administration decide to enact a real-life Camp of the Saints invasion of the United States? Because it could. There was no immediate price to pay. 

In her classic study, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt makes several observations that bear on our current situation. “There is no doubt,” she observes, 

that the elite was pleased whenever the underworld frightened respectable society into accepting it on an equal footing. The members of the elite did not object at all to paying a price, the destruction of civilization, for the fun of seeing how those who had been excluded unjustly in the past forced their way into it. They were not particularly outraged at the monstrous forgeries in historiography of which all totalitarian regimes are guilty and which announce themselves clearly enough and totalitarian propaganda.

It’s not only the compact between the elite and the underclass that is relevant to our experience in the United States today. There is also the incontinent deployment of the word “democracy,” not as a term describing a specific form of political organization but rather as a cognitively empty but talismanic vocable around which political animus can be nurtured and set to work. The latest variation is Our DemocracyTM, dragged out whenever the process of political demonization needs a boost.