RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/political-principle-or-class-prejudice-bruce-thornton/

As important as the invention of representative government in ancient Greece was, the creation of democracy was even more revolutionary. Allowing the non-elite masses––those lacking an aristocratic lineage or great wealth––to become citizens and participate in governing the state has characterized most constitutional free governments since then. Even totalitarian states pay the homage of hypocrisy to that ideal by including “democratic” or “republic” in their countries’ names.

A byproduct, however, of that innovation has been endemic class warfare, the struggle for political preeminence that challenges the ideal of political equality, the corollary of political freedom. This conflict was present at the birth of the United States in the convention to write the Constitution, and in the subsequent public debates over its ratification. Particularly over the last century, the growth of federal power and its technocratic administrative apparatus has intensified this traditional conflict between what Woodrow Wilson deemed the “wise few” and the “foolish many.”

Yet today’s technocratic, credentialed managerial elite must still pay lip-service to notions of citizen equality and sovereignty, even as the they lessens the freedom and autonomy of the people, states, and civil society. The rise and presidency of Donald Trump sparked such intense, irrational bipartisan animus in part because he highlighted and crudely mocked those elite pretensions and specious rhetoric of equality, and still today has the support and loyalty and almost half the voters.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/08/10/fbi-r-i-p/

The FBI is dissolving before our eyes into a rogue security service akin to those in Eastern Europe during the Cold War.  

Take the FBI’s deliberately asymmetrical application of the law. This week the bureau surprise-raided the home of former President Donald Trump—an historical first. 

A massive phalanx of FBI agents swooped into the Trump residence while he was not home, to confiscate his personal property, safe, and records. All of this was over an archival dispute of presidential papers common to many former presidents. Agents swarmed the entire house, including the wardrobe closet of the former first lady. 

Note we are less than 90 days out from a midterm election, and this was not just a raid, but a political act. 

The Democratic Party is anticipated to suffer historical losses. Donald Trump was on the verge of announcing his 2024 presidential candidacy. In many polls, he remains the Republican front-runner for the nomination—and well ahead of incumbent Joe Biden in a putative 2024 rematch.  

In 2016 then FBI Director James Comey announced that candidate Hillary Clinton was guilty of destroying subpoenaed emails—a likely felony pertaining to her tenure as secretary of state. Yet he all but pledged that she would not be prosecuted given her status as a presidential candidate. 

As far as targeting presidential candidates, Donald Trump was impeached in 2020 ostensibly for delaying military aid to Ukraine by asking Ukrainian officials to investigate more fully the clearly corrupt Biden family—given Joe Biden at the time was a likely possible presidential opponent in 2020. 

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

America has been on the road to totalitarianism for some time now. Totalitarianism has two schools. Old school totalitarian governments wield power openly. They use the apparatus of the state against their own citizens, arrest and hold political prisoners without due process, and violate people’s right to privacy in their own homes. In short, as Vaclav Havel observed from Communist Czechoslovakia in 1978, old school totalitarianism grants itself legitimacy “from the numbers… of armed… soldiers and police.” 

In addition to all the above, new school totalitarianism, what Havel called post-totalitarianism, farms out power to subsidiaries who do their dirty work for them, and who through shame or threat of violence force the commercial and corporate class to play nice or pay the price. This, of course, is just an earlier version of cancel culture which has a rather long and grimy history.

Havel’s example of the greengrocer is an example of how new school totalitarianism works. Havel’s grocer simply places a sign in the window of his shop which says, “Workers of the world unite!”

“Why does the grocer put the sign in the window?” Is he a truly concerned about the unity of workers around the world? Is he enthusiastically trying to educate the public? Is he trying to alter public opinion? No, probably not. He’s probably never even really thought about it very much, and it’s unlikely that the sign even represents his real opinion.

It’s much more probable, Havel argues, “That the poster was delivered to our greengrocer from the enterprise headquarters along with the onions and carrots. He put them all into the window simply because it has been done that way for years, because everyone does it, and because that is the way it has to be. If he were to refuse, there could be trouble. He could be reproached for not having the proper decoration in his window; someone might even accuse him of disloyalty. He does it because these things must be done if one is to get along in life.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/08/10/vladimir-putin-meet-joe-biden/

Any remaining doubt that America is over was laid to rest Aug. 8, 2022 – 6 feet under.

With the not just “unannounced,” but unprovoked, unprecedented, unprincipled and unpardonable violation of the home and property of a former head of state and potential future presidential candidate, this nation is no longer the United States. It is die Deutsche Demokratische Republik, and the Justice Department and FBI are the Stasi, KGB and Chinese Ministry of State Security rolled into one.

And any question whether the Biden-Harris-Schumer-Pelosi occupation regime in Washington is illegitimate was equally dispatched by its latest outrage.

Legitimate governments, operating with the consent of the governed, do not (per Julie Kelly of American Greatness) feel the need to awaken “hundreds of Americans … before dawn” deploying “dozens of armed FBI agents and military-style vehicles to capture even nonviolent protesters.”

Nor hold these non-violent protesters – many escorted into the Capitol by the Capitol Police – in solitary confinement for 18 months or more.

Nor force these “broken men and women” to “plead guilty to low-level misdemeanors such as ‘parading’ in the Capitol in an attempt to end their legal torture, only to be sentenced to prison time by judges … who then berate them from the bench as if they had committed the most heinous of crimes.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/08/11/do-the-political-elites-intend-to-starve-people-to-death/

Sri Lanka is the case study. Cruel and pointless green agricultural policy has caused a crisis of hunger, shortages, rising prices, a crippled economy, and violence. The country’s president and its prime minister were chased from the country, and have been replaced. It should be a lesson to the rest of the world. Instead, it’s more likely a preview of the future.

What happened in Sri Lanka – “the systematic destruction of Sri Lankan agriculture by a regime so focused on appearing environmentally conscious that it blinded itself to the humanitarian disaster it was creating” – is also taking place in the Netherlands, one of the world’s top producers of farm products. There, policymakers have placed limits on agricultural waste emissions, which the eco-zealots are now at war with. The “tractor-riding rebels” understandably rose “up against their government.” What else should be expected when the rules could force as many as 30% of producers out of business?

Farmers in Spain, Ireland, and New Zealand are also rising up. It’s more than enough for any open-minded lawmaker anywhere on Earth to look at these events and rethink the policies that have caused such turmoil. But not Justin Trudeau, Canada’s Boy Prime Minister, who like the rest of the immature left is fixated on making points with the “right” people, as if he never left high school. Despite the clear warning signs, he’s moving “ahead on fertilizer reduction as provinces and farmers cry foul,” the Toronto Sun has reported. There are factions that must be impressed.

Gary Baise, an Illinois farmer and trial lawyer, recently wondered in Farm Futures if the U.S. will be the next country to adopt hunger and higher food prices as public policy.

https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2022/08/10/ct_port_authority_project_costs_255m_corrupted_by_unethical_gifts_846549.html

The Connecticut Port Authority’s remaking of New London’s State Pier is costing $255.5 million and is the subject of a wide-ranging federal probe of several construction projects that were overseen by Gov. Ned Lamont’s administration.

Connecticut newspaper The Day reported that Attorney General William Tong is investigating a controversial grant in 2020 — a $523,000 success fee given to a marine consulting firm, Seabury PFRA, “for its role in choosing the politically connected operators of the port of New Haven to run the competing New London port,” the newspaper said.

An employee of the consulting firm had served on the port authority board of directors until right before his firm got the large contract.

The Seabury firm agreed to pay $10,000 in fines for violating ethics codes by giving gifts to two port authority employees and a board member, the Office of State Ethics said.

The gifts came during 2017 and 2019, a time when agency spending was out of control, not properly recorded, with lavish expense accounts and payments made to insiders without competitive bidding, The Day reported.

Former board chairpersons, Old Lyme First Selectwoman Bonnie Reemsnyder and Scott Bates, deputy secretary of the state, both resigned at the request of the governor.

While the Ethics Office fined Seabury for the unethical payments, it won’t say who got the bribes and neither will the Port Authority.

https://thefederalist.com/2022/08/10/under-bidens-doj-the-rule-of-law-in-america-has-become-a-farce/

Biden’s Justice Department and FBI will do anything to keep Trump from regaining the White House, even if it means imitating Nicaragua.

The criminal indictment and imprisonment of former heads of state by ruling regimes in other countries is more common than most Americans probably realize. Today, former presidents of Argentina, Bolivia, El Salvador, Colombia, Guatemala, Panama, Peru, Paraguay, and Costa Rica are all imprisoned — and that’s just in Central and South America.

The world is replete with corrupt leaders who criminalize the opposition and politicize domestic law enforcement. That’s why, for example, Daniel Ortega has been president of Nicaragua since 2007. When you jail your political opponents and potential rivals, as Ortega did with gusto ahead of Nicaragua’s 2021 presidential election, it’s easy to stay in office. One of the salient features of these so-called “developing countries” is that they have not developed a way to transfer power peacefully. Brute force, not free and fair elections, is how rulers of the Third World seize and retain power.

Soon, the United States might join their ranks. On Monday evening, dozens of FBI agents raided the Florida home of former President Donald Trump. The absurd pretext for the raid was a dispute over documents with the National Archives — a circumstance by no means unique to the Trump administration and one that no serious person believes could ever justify such a raid.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-swamps-trump-obsession-mar-a-lago-raid-fb

An FBI raid against a former president should never happen. End of discussion.

Let us assume that for 99.99% of the U.S. population in early August 2022, the last thing on their mind was Mar-a-Lago. Instead, a short list of real things preoccupying Americans would include inflation, crime, battles in Congress over spending, Ukraine fighting World War III for us in Europe, and China conducting massive live-fire military exercises around Taiwan.

So it came as a surprise to discover Monday evening that the Justice Department and FBI decided the most important thing in the world just now was raiding former President Donald Trump’s estate in Palm Beach, Fla. Among other thoughts, a three-letter acronym starting with W comes to mind.

Forgive me for not spending more than a moment on the legal niceties of this event—the applicability of the Presidential Records Act, that it had be about “something big” involving classified documents, or that no one, including a former president, is above the law. They are all beside the point.

You can hate Donald Trump until your eyes pop out, but let us be clear: He was elected the 45th president of the U.S. He served four years in office. No former president who was disliked by many—not Clinton, Reagan nor FDR—had his home invaded by a squad of FBI agents. This should never happen in the U.S. End of discussion.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/mar-lago-raid-preview-rigged-2024-election-daniel-greenfield/

On Thursday, FBI Director Christopher Wray cut short his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee to fly the FBI’s private jet to his family’s vacation home. At the hearing, Wray had admitted that disciplinary action against FBI personnel involved in Russiagate abuses had been “slowed down” and refused to call Russiagate a “hoax”.

On Monday, President Trump revealed that Mar-a-Lago had been raided by “a large group of FBI agents”. Any warrant for such a raid would have been signed off on by Attorney General Merrick Garland and his associates in the Biden administration which expects to face the former president in the next election. Wray, who quietly listened to complaints about the politicization of the FBI from Senator Grassley and Cruz, among others, would have known what was coming.

The New York Times reported that, “according to two people familiar with the investigation, appeared to be focused on material that Mr. Trump had brought with him to Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence, after he left the White House.”

Back in May, the paper revealed that a federal grand jury investigation had been convened over boxes of “government documents, mementos, gifts and letters” taken to Mar-a-Lago. There was no federal investigation when the Clintons left the White House with $190,000 worth of “china, flatware, rugs, televisions, sofas and other gifts”. The FBI didn’t come knocking at Chappaqua.

This isn’t about the documents. Just as Russiagate was not about the Russians. It’s not about the 15 boxes of documents, letters and assorted presidential records and gifts that were hurriedly packed up and sent off to Mar-a-Lago, most of which were later returned when the National Archives requested them, this is about the 2024 presidential election.

The assorted Trump investigations were not motivated by concerns about national security, political norms and they’re certainly not driven by sudden worries about mishandling classified documents. And yet the same media which spent years explaining why mishandling classified documents was no big deal when the Clintons did it will explain why it’s a big deal now.