RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/clean-house-fbi-justice-department/

The two most striking features of the FBI’s unprecedented raid on Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home are its bold intrusiveness and the public’s mistrust of the Bureau’s honesty and integrity. The Department of Justice could have used low-profile subpoenas to force Trump to turn over any documents, including the most sensitive ones. It didn’t. Instead, it sent carloads of federal agents to search the former president’s house. That raid was also unusual in a second sense. Although mishandling federal documents is a felony, it happens with some frequency, alas, and is almost never subject to full-scale raids.

The blowback has been a Category 5 storm. The damage has grown because the FBI and Department of Justice remained silent for three days, refusing to explain their actions.

Now, the FBI or DoJ are busy leaking their justification, alleging (anonymously) that Trump took highly-classified nuclear secrets when he left office. That would be a grave matter, if true, but it raises several obvious questions. One is whether he really did wrongly remove such materials. The second is whether less-invasive means could have been used to retrieve them. The third is whether the real purpose of the raid was to collect materials for other investigations, such as January 6 and Trump’s efforts to delay Joe Biden’s certification as president. Seized materials can be used in other investigations, but it is illegal to get warrants for one purpose when your real purpose is something else. The fourth is public skepticism about the government’s explanations.

The blowback and public mistrust are nothing new. The past few years have been hurricane season for the FBI. The Bureau and, to a lesser extent, the Department of Justice have destroyed their reputations and undermined the public trust essential for law enforcement in a democracy.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/08/13/a-token-of-the-managerial-age-bewails-trumps-surge/

I was chatting with a politically mature friend today who, in the course of some delighted words about Attorney General Merrick Garland, reminded me that in his famous “evil empire” speech of 1983, Ronald Reagan quoted a few choice lines from the preface of C. S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters. “The greatest evil,” Lewis wrote, is not now done in any Dickensian “dens of iniquity” or even in “concentration camps and labor camps.” Such brutish moral cesspools, Lewis says, are rather “the final result” of the encompassing evil evoked in his awesome (in the old sense) satire. 

On the contrary, the evil he has in mind is “conceived and ordered . . . in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice.” Men, that is to say, like Merrick Garland, a lugubrious embodiment of the “Managerial Age,” the “world of ‘Admin’” that Lewis so abhorred. Here, he suggested, is the home office of Hell, “something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business con­cern.”

The reason, by the way, my friend’s words about Merrick Garland were “delighted” was because of the huge, if inadvertent, boost the attorney general has just given to Donald Trump’s political prospects. 

Monday’s FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Palm Beach residence, was probably the single biggest boon to his stature among voters since he left office in January 2021, bigger even than the partisan witch hunt over which future CNN hostess, Liz Cheney, has been presiding with such ostentatious zeal.

This is obviously a concern among the beautiful, well-pressed people with white collars and clean fingernails who hate Trump. Employing a ju-ju they recognize but do not understand, Trump has time and again demonstrated an uncanny ability to goad his would-be attackers into contortions of self-immolation. 

https://www.city-journal.org/the-elite-panic-of-2022

On April 18, U.S. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle struck down the federal requirement for wearing surgical masks on airplanes, in airports, and while riding mass transit. Online videos showed passengers and airline staff ripping off their masks and celebrating in mid-flight. Given the accumulated frustration of two years of pandemic travel, the reaction was understandable.

Far more remarkable was the vehemence of those opposed to the ruling. Judge Mizelle was unfit for office, they said. She was too young, at 35; she was unelected; she was a single, unrepresentative voice. Worst of all, she was an “activist Trump judge” and thus branded with the mark of the beast. Rescinding government policy—the kind of thing that American judges engage in with abandon, and usually to progressive cheers—in this instance was condemned as a usurpation of the powers of the executive branch.

Judge Mizelle had crashed an exclusive party reserved for people of higher caste. “The CDC has the capability, through a large number of trained epidemiologists, scientists, to be able to make projections and make recommendations,” said Anthony Fauci, bureaucratic czar of all things Covid-19. “Far more than a judge with no experience in public health.”

That was the heart of the matter. Fauci embodied a bureaucracy and political class that, with the active support of the media, had converted the public’s fear of infection into a principle of elite authority. Under this principle, only trained scientists can make projections and recommendations. The writ of government stretched as far as the boundaries of scientific truth—and those boundaries were, of course, determined by government agencies. It wasn’t just a question of specific policies like lockdowns and vaccine mandates. At stake was the restoration of the public’s habit of obedience that had gone missing during the Trump years.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/fbi-rubicon-donald-trump-mar-a-lago-raid/?utm_source=Spectator+World+Signup&utm_campaign=15c8b91727-

Everyone knows that in January 49 BC Julius Caesar, about to lead part of his army across the Rubicon river, said “Alea iacta est,” “the die is cast.” Except that, according to Plutarch, what he really said was “Ἀνερρίφθω κύβος,” “let the die be cast,” and he did not so much say it as quote it, since the already-proverbial line came from the Greek playwright Menander. Anyway, in bringing an army across the stream that separated cis-Alpine Gaul from Italy proper, Caesar had committed treason. In crossing the Rubicon he had crossed a line, sparking the civil war that engulfed Rome and formalized the end of the Republic that had, as Caesar himself noted, been dead in all-but-name-only for decades.

Contemplating the recent actions of our secret police, known to some as the FBI, I have often wondered where to locate their Rubicon. Was it when they conducted a dawn raid against Roger Stone, having been careful to alert CNN beforehand so they could be on hand to publicize the attack? Maybe it was when they burst into the apartment of Project Veritas’s James O’Keefe, throwing him out in the hallway in his pajamas, while they ransacked his home looking for a diary kept by Joe Biden’s daughter? Or perhaps it was when they arrested former Trump aide Peter Navarro, throwing him in handcuffs and leg irons before depositing him in jail? Or when they accosted the lawyer John Eastman and confiscated his cell phone? That seems to have become a favorite pastime of the FBI, seizing people’s cell phones. Just a couple of days ago, they took Representative Scott Perry’s phone. “But,” you point out, “Perry is a Republican and Trump ally. He has no property rights.”

Well, there is that. But still, I keep wondering: where is our Rubicon? Where is the line that, once crossed, signals, definitively, the end of one thing and the beginning of something else?

I hesitate to make any predictions about that because I have been wrong about it so often in the past. “Surely,” I have thought, “this is it. The American people will not stand for this.”

But then they do. James Comey was OK. So was Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Kevin Clinesmith and Michael Sussmann. The FBI does something outrageous. There are little eructations of unhappiness. Then people go back to their lattes and put it out their minds.

https://thefederalist.com/2022/08/12/merrick-garland-doesnt-care-about-the-rule-of-law-just-ask-hunter-biden/

Biden’s Justice Department has done anything but apply the rule of law ‘evenly, without fear or favor.’ Hunter Biden is Exhibit A.

Attorney General Merrick Garland addressed the FBI’s raid of former President Donald Trump’s Florida residence on Thursday afternoon, three days after the Department of Justice embarked on an unprecedented escalation of its persecution of political opponents.

“Faithful adherence to the rule of law is the bedrock principle of the Justice Department and of our democracy,” Garland said. “Upholding the rule of law means applying the law evenly, without fear or favor. Under my watch, that is precisely what the Justice Department is doing.”

President Joe Biden’s Justice Department, however, has done anything but apply the rule of law “evenly, without fear or favor.” Hunter Biden is Exhibit A.

In September of 2020, Senate investigators published an 87-page report detailing Hunter Biden’s extensive overseas networks with a series of potential conflicts of interest. The investigation included episodes of potentially criminal business activity flagged for the Justice Department such as a six-figure shopping spree financed by Chinese business leaders. The report also unearthed evidence of “organized prostitution and/or human trafficking.”

https://amgreatness.com/2022/08/12/american-stasi/

Monday’s shocking images of police sirens blaring outside Mar-a-Lago, former President Donald Trump’s magnificent Palm Beach, Florida, estate, will not soon be forgotten.

Much has already been said and written about the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago that precipitated those sirens: “outrageous,” “unprecedented,” a “crossing of the Rubicon” moment. Regrettably, all of that is true. The siccing of the national law enforcement apparatus to execute a pre-dawn raid on a top partisan rival—especially when that rival is the head of state’s predecessor and perhaps-likely future opponent—is a contemptible act of raw political bloodlust. It is an act far more befitting a crumbling hellhole like Venezuela, or a third-world country in sub-Saharan Africa, than it is the land that was to be, per Benjamin Franklin’s alleged quip, “a republic, if you can keep it.”

America, it seems, won the Cold War only to see its own federal law enforcement/national security apparatus morph into a version of the old East German Stasi—and barely three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, to boot.

Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Thursday “press conference,” remarkably defensive and defiant in tone, did not dispel any concerns or assuage any critics. (Those critics, incidentally, include even former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang and disgraced former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.) The scuttlebutt is that Trump was hoarding deeply secretive, classified information deep in the bowels of Mar-a-Lago, in violation of the Presidential Records Act. But the back-and-forth between the National Archives and Trump’s personal legal team surrounding the boxes of material, entirely routine for an ex-president when it comes to things like establishing a presidential library, was by all accounts unfolding amicably: A subpoena was issued this spring, Trump’s lawyers were cooperative and archivists had already recalled 15 boxes earlier this year.

Furthermore, the Presidential Records Act isn’t even a criminal statute, and probable cause for the violation of a criminal statute is the necessary precondition for a magistrate to sign off on a search warrant. As the case may be, the magistrate who signed off on this particular warrant, Bruce Reinhart, is a Jeffrey Epstein-connected ex-defense attorney who just so happened to donate thousands of dollars in 2008 to then-presidential candidate Barack Obama. Go figure.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/08/the_bs_lies_and_hoaxes_just_keep_on_coming.html

The bullsh*t, lies, and hoaxes just keep on coming, courtesy of leftist politicians, media, academia, and our now politically weaponized government institutions.

To wit: failing and flailing CNN just admonished other media outlets not to call the FBI’s raid on Mar-a-Lago a raid. Instead, they encouraged them to call it a “judge-approved search.” That makes it sound as if the dozens of armed Federal Bureau of Inquisition Investigation agents were given the okay to go find Waldo. Instead, they apparently cracked a safe and rummaged through the former First Lady’s closet during their nine-hour scrutinizing of former President Trump’s home. After forcing Trump’s lawyers to stay outside and asking Mar-a-Lago employees to turn the CCTV cameras off (a request which they, rightfully and thankfully, denied).

“Judge-approved search?” Yes, and let’s call pedophiles “minor-attracted persons.” Oh, that’s right; some on the left already do. Why not call criminals “justice-involved individuals?” Oh yeah, they do that, too. Did CNN react with such credibility and restraint when covering Trump’s actions and statements? Did CNN’s reporters go out of their way to use words designed to defuse controversy and give Trump the benefit of the doubt when characterizing his intentions? What a bunch of B.S.

Example number two: speaking in the White House East Room recently, President Biden said: “I just want to say a number. Zero. Today, we received news that our economy had zero percent inflation in the month of July. Zero percent.” Huh? That’s a flat-out lie. The annualized inflation rate did dip slightly in July, but only to a still historically high 8.5%. Memo to President Biden: 8.5 is more than zero. Zero is your IQ.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/08/the_tragic_irony_of_the_rushdie_stabbing_at_chautauqua_.html

I started getting texts Friday morning from people on the scene at the Chautauqua Institution in Western New York, one from my sister-in-law, an ER nurse at a nearby hospital: “Salman Rushdie was stabbed at Chautauqua, flown to Erie, could not get bleeding stopped.” I know the area well. I have a summer home in Chautauqua (pronounced sha-TAWK-wa.) County, the site of my 2000 novel, the then futuristic 2006: The Chautauqua Rising.

A celebrated writer, the 75-year-old Rushdie has been living under a fatwa since February 14, 1989, the day that Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini decided that Rushdie’s novel, The Satanic Verses, was “blasphemous against Islam.” He was a regular visitor to the Chautauqua Institution. The fact that Rushdie would be stabbed at Chautauqua is perversely and tragically ironic.

In the way of background, a Methodist minister founded the institution on Chautauqua Lake in 1874. It served as a campground meeting for summer school teachers and proved popular enough that by century’s end, traveling “chautauquas” were bringing progressive enlightenment to citizens around the nation.

I set the climatic scene of 2006 at the institution itself. The book tells the tale of a grassroots “rising” that anticipated the Tea Party insurgency of 2009-10 and the MAGA movement of more recent years. When I wrote the book I was unaware that a quiet insurrection was brewing on the institution grounds. A group known as Chautauqua Christian Fellowship (CCF) had emerged to correct the Institution’s political and theological leftward drift.

The same year that my novel was published, 2000, the institution accelerated that drift by selecting the Rev. Joan Brown Campbell to be its director of religion. A longtime apologist for Fidel Castro, Campbell had made news the year before her appointment by orchestrating the forced return of Elian Gonzalez to Communist Cuba. At the time of Campbell’s retirement in 2013, one of her woke acolytes toasted Campbell, saying, “When Janet Reno is looking for someone really tough to get on the [Elian] case you have some sense of whom we are dealing with here. Don’t Mess With Joan.”

Upon her arrival at Chautauqua, Campbell embarked on two contradictory missions, one public, one private. Publicly, she championed “interfaith dialogue,” specifically an outreach to Muslims known as the “Abrahamic Initiative.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-low-can-gutter-politics-go-post-traumatic-stress-disorder-democrat-attack-ad-treatment-mental-health-herschel-walker-senate-11660309595?mod=MorningEditorialReport&mod=djemMER_h

Mr. Walker, a retired National Football League running back, is the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in Georgia and author of “Breaking Free: My Life with Dissociative Identity Disorder.”

My former wife, Cindy, and I gave a TV interview in 2008 to share our story—not about the glory days of football but about the pain of my mental-health struggles and their effect on our marriage. It was uncomfortable to bare our souls like that. Mental illness carried more of a stigma back then. It was hard to admit you needed help and even harder to get it.

She helped me through the hardest time of my life. Because our story ultimately was one of healing, forgiveness and redemption, I knew that if we came forward, we could convince others that there is no shame in asking for help. I hoped we would help people who were struggling and maybe even save a few lives.

I think we did. That interview was part of my life’s mission to advocate for mental-health awareness and treatment. I wrote a book about my experience—every painful detail. I visited military bases around the world to deliver the message that seeking treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder isn’t a sign of weakness but of self-awareness and strength. I met with youth groups and mental-health organizations. I continue to do everything I can to end the stigma. I always say I would much rather listen to a friend talk about his struggles than go to his funeral.

Now I’m running for office, and my struggle has become the subject of a dishonest attack ad. Produced by a group that calls itself the Republican Accountability Project and supports my Democratic opponent, the ad uses clips of the 2008 interview in which my former wife describes things I did when we were married and my mental health was at its worst.

https://spectatorworld.com/book-and-art/the-attack-on-salman-rushdie-is-an-ominous-warning/

The news coming from New York State that the author Salman Rushdie has been stabbed onstage is both frightening and grim.

It is frightening because, without full details of how seriously injured Rushdie has been, it is tempting to fear the worst. Media reports initially suggested that Rushdie was well enough to walk off stage, but the news that he has been transported by air ambulance to a hospital after being stabbed in the neck suggests his injuries are severe. It is grim because any violence being done to a public figure is abhorrent, but in the case of Rushdie, it is almost inevitable that this particular incident has been occasioned by one of the most notorious cause celébrès that has ever been seen in the publishing world, namely the publication of The Satanic Verses in 1988.

When the book was published, Rushdie was already an established literary novelist, a Booker Prize winner for Midnight’s Children, whose every book was making waves in both British and American publishing. It was therefore either a bold or provocative move to write a novel that led to Rushdie being accused of blasphemy. A fatwa was declared upon him at the beginning of 1989 by Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran, which began a tidal wave of violence that included Rushdie’s Japanese translator being murdered, his Italian translator being seriously injured and his Norwegian publisher being shot. There was even a massacre in Turkey, resulting in the deaths of 37 people, and the intended target, Rushdie’s translator Aziz Nesin, only escaped death because his would-be assailants were unable to recognize him.

Leaving aside the literary merit of The Satanic Verses — it is not Rushdie’s most accessible, though certainly his most discussed — it represents a truly vile step for totalitarian thought that an author could be forced into hiding from his would-be killers, as Rushdie was for many years.