RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/10/28/elon-musk-and-the-great-fear-of-free-speech/

So he’s done it. The richest man in the world and self-styled ‘free-speech absolutist’ has taken over Twitter. The bête noire of illiberal liberals has got his hands on social media. Cue meltdown. Listening to the woke set you’d be forgiven for thinking that the gates of hell had been flung open and every manner of evil and blasphemy will now pour forth. Twitter could become a ‘soap box for hate speech’, fretted one media outlet yesterday. It really is extraordinary how much some people fear freedom.

Elon Musk hinted at his takeover of Twitter with a real-life pun. ‘Entering Twitter HQ – let that sink in!’, he tweeted on Wednesday, alongside a vid of him bringing a literal sink into the Twitter offices. But the Twitterati don’t need hammy rich-geek humour for Musk’s conquering of Twitter to ‘sink in’. The horrifying prospect of a Musk-run social media, of a tad more liberty online, of women being allowed to call men men, and of Trump being let loose once more to fire off spicy tweets, has been sinking into their minds since this was all first floated a few months ago. Twitter could become a ‘cesspool of hate speech and disinformation’, whimpered a writer for the New York Times in April. Cesspool! You say ‘freedom of speech’, they hear ‘cistern for the storage of human shit’.

‘The bird is freed’, Musk tweeted following his $44 billion takeover. He has reportedly started turfing out the old guard. Apparently the boss, Parag Agrawal, is gone, as are other chief execs. And even though he’s made it pretty clear that he’s not so absolutist on free speech after all – Twitter ‘obviously cannot become a free-for-all hellscape’, he said yesterday – still the freedomphobes are petrified. Musk’s ‘idea of “free speech”’ will help to ‘ruin America’, says a frantic writer at the New Republic this week. ‘The fascists will take over’, apparently. There you have it – freedom is fascism.

The most striking thing about Musk and Twitter is the demented reaction to it. Musk himself is not going to singlehandedly restore the hard fought-for liberty to utter. It will take more than online ventures by a contrarian billionaire to turn back the tide of censorship, cancellation and social shaming for wrongthink that have become such a key and horrid feature of Anglo-American political life. Musk’s plan for Twitter is sensible, not revolutionary. It is ‘important to the future of civilisation to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence’, he said in his note of reassurance to advertisers yesterday. That town square should not be a ‘hellscape’, he said, where ‘anything can be said with no consequences’. A town square, you say? With people talking? Fetch my smelling salts.

Who could possibly be affronted by such a polite, classical-liberal vision? And yet affronted people are. Loads of them. Hysterically so. Their dread of Twitter without moderation is intense. ‘Twitter without content moderation… means lies and disinformation will overwhelm the truth’, says that New Republic piece. We’ve come a long way since John Milton’s 1644 cry against the censorship of the press: ‘Let Truth and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worst in a free and open encounter?’ Today’s woke set did. In their eyes truth will always be bettered by bullshit in an open clash. If only they knew how much this told us about the corrosion of their own faith in humankind, about the decay of their trust in ordinary people and our capacity for reason and goodness, I think they’d stop saying it.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/will-a-biden-go-to-prison-instead-of-trump/

Soon after he announced his run for President in June of 2015, the Democrats – along with their obedient lap dogs in the media – went after then New York City businessman Donald J. Trump hammer and tongs.

In collusion with elements of the “Deep State” within our own Federal government, fabricated accusation after fabricated accusation was hurled at then candidate Trump.  Once he was elected President, the left’s smear machine went into overdrive.

Why?

The main reason being that “They” – meaning the Democrats, the entrenched Republican-elites, and the Deep State – could not control him.  Ever.  President Trump was not part of the DC “Club” or “Cabal.”

He didn’t need their fawning approval nor their special interest connections or money.  He was in it to put forth what he believed to be the best policy initiatives designed to benefit the vast majority of the American people.  Most especially the working and middle-class.

As far as President Trump was concerned, it was: “Damn the partisan; special interest; and corrupt-liberal-media torpedoes.  Full speed ahead.”

Except…if you are instituting policies to help protect the vast majority of the American people, you will invariably expose numerous politicians as outright frauds, while identifying countless organizations and individuals greedily feeding from the tax-payer trough at the direct expense of the American people.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-completes-twitter-takeover-11666918031?mod=hp_lead_pos1

Agrawal and Ned Segal are out as takeover begins; billionaire visited headquarters this week
Elon Musk fired several Twitter Inc. executives after completing his takeover of the company, according to people familiar with the matter, capping an unusual corporate battle and setting up one of the world’s most influential social-media platforms for potentially broad change.

Mr. Musk fired Chief Executive Parag Agrawal and Chief Financial Officer Ned Segal after the deal closed, the people said. Mr. Musk also fired Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s top legal and policy executive, and Sean Edgett, general counsel. Spokespeople for Twitter didn’t comment.

Hours after those actions, Mr. Musk tweeted: “the bird is freed” in a seeming reference to Twitter, which has a blue bird as its logo.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/10/27/biden-tells-an-absurd-whopper-claims-average-price-of-gas-was-5-00-when-he-took-office/

Joe Biden was caught telling a ridiculous, easily disproven lie during a speech on the CHIPS Act in Syracuse, New York, on Thursday, claiming the price of gasoline was “over five dollars” when he took office, when it was actually only $2.39.

“The most common price of gas in America is $3.39 down from over five dollars when I took office,” Biden told the audience. “We need to keep making that progress by having energy companies bring down the cost of a gallon of gas that reflects the cost of paying for a barrel of oil.”

According to Fox Business, “the national average price for a gallon of regular gasoline in the week ending on Jan. 25, 2021, shortly after Biden took office, was $2.39,” and “the average price for a gallon of regular gasoline didn’t reach $5.00 until June 2022, well over a year after Biden took office.”

The current national average for a gallon of regular gasoline is actually $3.76, over 30 cents more than Biden claimed Thursday, Fox Business reported.

Upon taking office, Biden immediately halted construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, which would have delivered up to 700,000 barrels of oil per day into the U.S. from Canada. He also put hurdles in front of oil companies, increasing regulations for oil and gas leases, froze new drilling permits and stopped leases on federal lands.

He ran his whole campaign on destroying the energy industry, and prices started going up almost immediately after he entered office.

During the same speech, Biden also claimed  that “the price of inflation is down.”

https://thefederalist.com/2022/10/27/publishing-professionals-we-must-censor-amy-coney-barrett-to-save-free-speech/

More than 350 literary workers—agents, editors, publicists, and writers—have signed an open letter demanding Penguin Random House drop publication of Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s upcoming book. It should be noted, that there are some legitimate editors on the list, but many signees –-“Leslie” and editorial interns and so on –- are not exactly Nan Talese. And yet, the document, brimming with nonsensical, contradictory, confusingly reasoned claims, is a useful window into the increasingly authoritarian mindset of the cultural American left.

The letter argues that Random House has a duty to stop the publication of ACB’s book to save free speech. “This is not just a book that we disagree with, and we are not calling for censorship,” says the letter, titled “We Dissent.” “We cannot stand idly by while our industry misuses free speech to destroy our rights.” It quotes British leftist David Puttnam, who contends that the media has a duty to “balance freedom of expression with wider moral and social responsibilities.”

That’s the rub, of course: who gets to decide the contours of the “wider moral and social responsibilities” and the “misuses” of free speech? Even if we formed a consensus on those alleged duties, one of the reasons (real) liberals treat speech as a neutral principle is to protect dissent and challenge conventional wisdom. Rationalizing censorship as a means of protecting people from harmful ideas is as old as censorship itself.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-gift-hillary-clinton-needs-for-her-75th-birthday/

“The best gift Hilary Clinton could give herself — and the rest of us — on her 75th birthday would be to remove herself from public life.”

Today is Hillary Clinton’s 75th birthday, as Luther noted. Earlier this week, the former first lady, U.S. senator, secretary of state, and current not-president celebrated with “about 100 of her top donors and longtime supporters at the St. Regis in New York to talk about her future,” Teddy Schleifer of Puck reported. No, she won’t be running for anything. But she is thinking about her legacy. So “she has been pitching donors on a new philanthropic entity called the Hillary Rodham Clinton Leadership Project,” according to Schleifer. He continues:

The new Clinton initiative will both highlight what Clinton has already done, particularly for women around the world, and serve as a new home for Clinton to talk about her own philanthropic work going forward—on democracy, global health and leadership development.

So Hillary spent her birthday figuring out how to profit from the same brand-driven, elite-level arbitrage that she and her husband have depended on ever since the end of his presidency. (And before that presidency’s end.) Points for consistency, I guess. What certain people and institutions see in Hillary, so much so that they continue to pointlessly reward and elevate her — as a paragon of “leadership!” — well after her political utility has expired, is beyond me.

When it seemed likely that she would become president, all those donations to the “Clinton Global Initiative” — since dried up — at least made a crude political sense, even as they were the quintessence of modern elite corruption. A President Hillary — just typing the words suffices to make one shudder, especially this close to Halloween — would be someone you’d want to have exchanged favors with. But failed-candidate Hillary? The one who spends her days stewing about the past and engaging in the same kind of election denialism she condemns when it comes from the other side? What’s the point?

Indeed, the best present Hilary Clinton could give herself on her 75th birthday would be to remove herself from public life. She should spend her remaining years in pleasant quietude, being with her grandchildren, going on walks, and tinkering with powered-exoskeleton builds. Her retirement would double as a welcome gift for the rest of us.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/10/26/the-switcheroos-of-the-two-parties/

Our two parties have both changed, and that explains why one will win, and one lose in the midterm elections.

The old Democrats have faded away after being overwhelmed by radicals and socialists.

Moderates who once embraced Bill Clinton’s opportunistic “third way” are now either irrelevant or nonexistent.

Once considered too wacky and socialist to be taken seriously, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the performance-art “squad,” the radicals of the Congressional Black Caucus, and Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and her hard progressive wing are today’s Democratic Party kingpins.

The alienating radicals of Antifa and Black Lives Matter often serve as the new party’s shock troops on the streets. They opportunistically appear to push the party to embrace no-bail laws, defunding the police, and the destruction of the fossil fuel industry. 

Since none of those positions poll even close to 50 percent with the public, the Democrats routinely either slur their opponents as racists, nativists, and climate denialists or obsess on another Trump psychodrama distraction from the Russia collusion hoax to the Mar-a-Lago raid.

What “blue dog” centrists are left in the Democratic Party either keep mum or, like Tulsi Gabbard, flee in disgust. 

Donald Trump also recalibrated the Republican Party and helped to turn it into a nationalist-populist movement that would rather win rudely than lose politely. The MAGA agenda pushed Jacksonian deterrence rather than unpopular nation-building abroad. It finally focused on fair rather than just free trade.  Republicans now unite in demanding only legal immigration and promoting domestic investment rather than globalist outsourcing and offshoring. 

In response, many of the old Bush-Romney country-club wing left in disgust. Others licked their wounds as fanatical NeverTrump something or others. 

Both parties have also been radically changed by additional issues of class, race, and wealth. 

Compare the income profiles of voters, whether by ZIP codes or congressional districts. A once lunch-bucket carrying, union member Democratic Party has become the enclave of three key constituencies. 

First, there is the subsidized and often inner-city poor. 

Second, the meat of the party, is the upscale, bicoastal professional and suburban credentialed classes. 

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/10/26/the-economy-will-never-prosper-under-biden-heres-why/

Voters who think that putting Republicans in control of the House and Senate will make a big difference for the economy are in for a rude awakening. President Joe Biden has unleashed the regulatory Leviathan. Lawmakers will be hard-pressed to stop the damage.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) just this morning released its hugely valuable report called “10,000 Commandments,” which is a compendium of the regulatory state. In it, CEI Vice President for Policy Clyde Wayne Crews lays out the terrible truth about Biden’s regulatory zeal.

The first thing you have to understand about federal regulation is how massive it already is, with compliance costs that total more than $1.9 trillion a year.  

That’s bigger than Canada’s entire GDP. It’s bigger, in fact, than all but seven nations in the world. It works out to almost $15,000 per household.

And it is growing at a ferocious pace. From 1995 to last year, regulators issued a total of 114,821 new rules.

The cost of complying with this mountain of mandates is on top of the $6.3 trillion the feds spent this year, which means the true cost of government equals roughly a third of the nation’s economy.

Some Republican presidents have tried to whittle this down, but Democratic administrations always come into office well prepared to reinvigorate regulators.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/new-gatekeepers-woke-michael-lind

“On or around December 1910, human character changed,” wrote Virginia Woolf. Between 2010 and 2012, American culture changed. Within a few years, what had been obscure concepts in politicized university departments like gender studies and ethnic studies became orthodoxy not only in the academy, media, and the nonprofit sector, but also in the boardrooms of national and global corporations, banks, and in professional associations like the American Bar and Medical associations.

In 2010, if you had said that unisex bathrooms in public schools were necessary to accommodate nonbinary students, hardly anyone, even among progressives, would have known what you were talking about. Then in 2016 the Obama Education Department suddenly threatened to cut off federal funding to K-12 schools that did not allow students suffering from gender dysphoria to use bathrooms reserved for the opposite sex. The Obama Justice Department threatened to sue North Carolina for passing a law requiring people to use bathrooms corresponding to the sex on their birth certificates. By the time it rescinded the law, HB 2, in 2017, the state of North Carolina had lost billions of dollars thanks to simultaneous boycotts by the National Basketball Association, the National College Athletic Association, Deutsche Bank, PayPal, and other corporations and financial institutions.

In isolation, the transgender controversy might have been viewed as a strange aftershock of the gay rights movement, which achieved its much more moderate goals of civil and marriage equality for gay men and lesbian women by the first decade of the 21st century. But the imposition of transgender ideology through economic compulsion by the federal government and major private sector institutions was only the beginning. It was followed by the march through the institutions of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) based on “critical race theory” (CRT), a sectarian ideology that holds that all whites and “white-adjacent” Asian Americans, no matter how poor and powerless, are “privileged,” while all Black and Hispanic Americans, no matter how rich and powerful, are “marginalized” members of “underserved communities.”

By the 2020s, at one university after another, applicants for faculty positions were required to submit “DEI statements,” listing the ways that they would personally advance this particular ideology through their work as teachers and researchers. Campus commissars were appointed to ensure that faculty reading lists and guest speaker panels had the appropriate race and gender makeup. In corporations, banks, universities, and government agencies, the relatively anodyne “diversity training” of the late 20th century, designed to minimize the possibility of racial or sexual discrimination lawsuits, gave way to DEI trainings. The goal of such exercises was not to promulgate knowledge of specific anti-discrimination rules and procedures, but to engage staff in Maoist-style struggle sessions designed to break down the personalities and identities of non-Hispanic white Americans and Asian Americans through confession of “microaggressions” and “racial privilege.”