RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-trump-biden-debate-disaster

A day before Thursday’s presidential debate, the New York Times ran a front-page story in its print edition railing against the posting of unflattering videos of Joe Biden. Among the president’s many “adversaries,” observed the Times, was the “distorted, online version of himself, a product of often misleading videos that play into and reinforce voters’ longstanding concerns about his age and abilities.”

Such voter concerns were misguided, according to the Times and its sources. Former Illinois representative Adam Kinzinger told the paper: “If you see those [videos] and that’s all you see, you’re going to walk away thinking there’s something wrong, like something’s going on.”

The public was simply too credulous, according to the Times. A pollster complained that “people that already are concerned about his age are quick to accept what they see in the video, and not question whether that’s selectively edited.”

The Times ended its story on an upbeat note. “People are going to see actual footage [during the debate] that contradicts that [cognitive decline narrative],” said the digital director for President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign. “They’re going to be pleasantly surprised and constantly be reminded that the president is in a lot hardier shape than they’ve been told.”

Oops. It turns out that nothing prepared viewers for the debacle that was Biden’s debate performance. The mainstream media cannot blame selective editing for the impression that Biden lacks the mental acuity to function another four years in the White House. That impression was generated from 90 minutes of live broadcast.

And now the Times and other media outlets have revised their history. It turns out they had their doubts all along! In an editorial calling for Biden to withdraw from the presidential race, the Times admits that the president’s catastrophic performance on Thursday night “affirmed concerns that have been mounting for months or even years.” Biden understood, according to the Times, that “he needed to address longstanding public concerns about his mental acuity and that he needed to do so as soon as possible.” Now they tell us!

https://thespectator.com/topic/scotus-robust-decision-presidential-immunity/

All is unfolding as I have foreseen. Yesterday, reviewing last week’s Supreme Court decisions and indulging in a little well-earned Schadenfreude over Thursday’s scenes from the geriatric dementia ward, I noted that what SCOTUS would probably issue its final opinion of the season, on the question of presidential immunity.

So it turned out to be. This morning, “Trump v. United States” dropped. For the first time, the Court pondered the question, “Does a president have immunity from prosecution?” or, to use the language of the opinion, “Whether and if so to what extent does a former president enjoy presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct alleged to involve official acts during his tenure in office.”

The answer was more or less what I predicted. I wrote that, while no one outside the hallowed halls of the Court really knew how the Court would come down on the issue, “most observers expect the Supremes to recognize immunity for ‘official acts’ but to remand to the lower court the vexed question of what counts as an ‘official’ and therefore protected act.” 

That is precisely how the Court decided, 6-3 (Justices Sotomayor, Kagan and Jackson dissenting), though in fact the opinion was even more robustly phrased than I could have hoped. “Under our constitutional structure of separated powers,” the Syllabus of the opinion reads, “the nature of Presidential power entitles a former President to absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority. And he is entitled to at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts.” The one caveat was this: “There is no immunity for unofficial acts.” 

https://amgreatness.com/2024/07/01/anti-israel-rioters-block-pride-parade-in-new-york-city-vandalize-floats/

In one of the final celebrations of “pride month” in New York City on Sunday, a clash broke out between the pro-gay parade participants and anti-Israel rioters who blocked the parade route and vandalized several floats.

As reported by Fox News, the rioters could be seen sitting in the street to block the progression of the parade, chanting various anti-Semitic slogans such as “Free Palestine” and “from the river to the sea.” Several of them could be seen using spray-paint to vandalize floats, while others climbed over barricades and threw fake blood at the displays. Dozens of rioters were ultimately arrested by police, who used zip-ties to handcuff them.

“It is certainly a more active presence this year in terms of protest at Pride events,” said Sandra Perez, executive director of NYC Pride. “But we were born out of a protest.”

This year’s pride demonstration was the 54th annual parade in New York City, with the very first one taking place in 1970. This year’s pride theme was “reflect, empower, unite.”

This year’s “pride month” saw a high number of protests and riots against various pride demonstrations carried out almost exclusively by anti-Israel agitators, who have been protesting and rioting across the country ever since the October 7th terrorist attacks against Israel by Hamas.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/what-was-missing-from-the-debate/

Even at their best, presidential debates are glorified dog-and-pony shows. Voters always say they want a serious policy debate, but such discussions involve technical information, statistical data, and complex explanations, all of which a majority of people find tedious. They much prefer emotion, clashing personalities, drama, humor, flubs, gaffes, and, as Donald Trump has shown since 2016, street-fighting elan.

Those limitations are good for entertainment and marketing, rather than informing voters, the default purpose of these verbal jousts, which reduces their political utility.

Last week’s debate illustrated this flaw, especially the insult battles between Trump and Biden. The moderators’ questions covered the issues that concern voters and regularly show up in polls, such as illegal border-crossings and inflation. But the dueling narratives mostly comprise attacks on each other, rather than presenting specific policies.

Trump, however, had the advantage in that bout despite his trademark hyperbole, given his first-term successes on both fronts, compared to Biden’s surreal lies, incoherence, and obviously addled condition, not to mention his sorry record of exacerbating those very problems.

But especially on the economy, we didn’t hear the more detailed information needed in order to break through the partisan rancor and spin, and get closer to the facts. For example, a few days before the debate, the Wall Street Journal published an editorial about the Democrat’s “Tax Armageddon” scheme for undoing Trump’s 2017 tax reforms: “Democrats are saying out loud that they plan to use the scheduled expiration of the 2017 tax cuts at the end of 2025 to insist on the largest tax increase in history.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/07/02/did-the-supreme-court-just-throw-biden-a-lifeline-joe-thinks-so/

In his remarks following the Supreme Court’s decision on presidential immunity, President Joe Biden pretended to be mortified by it. But there’s a reason Biden seemed so energetic and focused Monday night. The Court might just have done him and his reelection campaign a huge favor. At least, Biden thinks so.

In his very brief remarks, Biden called the ruling a “dangerous precedent.” He said it “continues to the Court’s attack on a wide range of long-established legal principles.” He quoted Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s inflammatory opinion which said “With fear for our democracy, I dissent.”  I concur, Biden said.

His performance was a striking contrast from last Thursday’s disaster.

But Biden was actually celebrating this decision because it gave his campaign a shot in the arm it desperately needed. He now has a whole new way to scare voters about Trump.

Biden argued that because the president will “no longer be constrained by the law,” the only limits on executive actions “will be self-imposed by the president alone.”   

Biden, in an obvious attempt to equate himself with George Washington, said it was a display of the first president’s character that he believed presidential power was not absolute and that power resides with the people.

“Now, over 200 years later, today’s Supreme Court decision, once again will depend on the character of the men and women who hold that presidency that are going to define the limits of the power of the  presidency because the law will no longer do it.”

Do you get where he’s going with this?

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/06/biden_s_failing_brain_exposes_deep_state_treachery.html

I know the country’s going to hell in a handbasket.  Inflation is killing working-class families.  Illegal immigrants are raping and murdering little girls.  “Woke” corporations are pushing “transgender” madness on young children.  Public schools are telling students that they will not survive the “climate apocalypse.”  Biden and the build back better buffoons in control of Western governments are doing everything they can to drag us into WWIII.  Still, if you are a Trump supporter who believes the status quo must go, Thursday’s presidential debate was awfully fun.

Perhaps you couldn’t bring yourself to watch the event “live” because you knew CNN was going to do everything it could to prop Biden up and tear Trump down.  If that is the case, then surely you were happy to awaken the next morning and find your usual newsfeed filled with two types of headlines: one recognizing Trump’s winning performance and the other recounting Biden’s total humiliation.  For all of you suffering daily out there, I hope the words provided momentary relief. 

You knew that Biden lost his marbles long ago, but the propaganda press has been telling the world that he’s just fine for years.  For those people who rely upon Deep State programmers to tell them what to believe, seeing Biden disintegrate on the debate stage must have been stunning.  Mainstream news corporations have been covering up Biden’s mental infirmities for so long that too many Americans watched Biden struggle to form sentences for the first time.  Just as reporters in the first half of the twentieth century lied to the American people about FDR’s reliance upon a wheelchair, reporters in the first quarter of the twenty-first century have lied to the American people about Biden’s debilitating dementia.  On June 27, the lid on journalists’ barrel of Biden-protecting lies shot right off.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/cultural-marxism-a-century-old-and-thriving/

In 1923, a group of professors known as the Frankfurt School came to the fore. These German Marxists—notably Theodore Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse—harbored a deep disdain for capitalism and traditional morals. Unfortunately, the professors did not stay in their homeland long. Adolph Hitler’s rise to power forced them out of Germany, and they reemerged at Columbia University in New York City in 1935.

And a century later, the malign effects of their teachings are still with us.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), Critical Race Theory (CRT), Black Lives Matter (BLM), gender indoctrination, wokeism, etc., fade in and out of the news cycle, but they have established a secure foothold in the nation’s culture, notably in our schools.

Cultural Marxism is still pervasive in a significant number of our colleges. In Illinois, legislators want to embed racial considerations into state appropriations for public universities. According to its website, Yale’s Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry faculty are told to place “DEI at the center of every decision” when making hires.

There are a few bright spots, however. Public universities in Texas, Florida, and Utah have banned DEI. However, those decisions came from state governments, not from the colleges themselves.

At MIT, a private university, President Sally Kornbluth confirmed in May that the school would “no longer require diversity statements in faculty hiring.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/biden-white-house-is-proud-to-have-tyler-on-the-team/

Tyler Cherry has been newly appointed as Associate Communications Director at the White House. He is distinguished by two things. First, there is his hatred of the police — any police, all the police, the very idea of the police. During the Baltimore riots in 2015, he tweeted that he was “Praying for #Baltimore but praying even harder for an end to a capitalistic police state motivated by explicit and implicit racial biases. In another tweet he wrote “Time to recall that the modern day police system is a direct evolution of slave patrols and lynch mobs.”

Second, there is his virulent hatred of Israel. He tweeted on July 25, 2014 that he’s been “Cheersing in bars to ending the occupation of Palestine – no shame and f– your glares #ISupportGaza #FreePalestine,” Cherry wrote on July 25, 2014. And there is much more in that vein, including his calling for an end to American support for Israel. He sees Israel not as a tiny, imperiled country surrounded by enemies but, rather, as a nasty little Sparta that deserves to disappear.

His hatred of the police, and of Israel, were expressed in 2500 tweets that he deleted between June 23 and June 24 — I can well imagine his panicky attempt to get rid of all that incriminating evidence of his hideous views — but alas for Tyler Cherry, if screen shots were taken of some of those tweets, they can be retrieved. And there are other ways as well to retrieve more than a handful. And I have no doubt they will be.

Here is Tyler Cherry’s description of Tyler Cherry, posted at LinkedIn. It is a perfect specimen of its type, where bland bureaucratese and shameless self-advertising blend seamlessly.

My experience in political and communications strategy helps me untangle the complexities of today’s hyperpartisan, fragmented, and fast-paced media ecosystem into effective, winning messages. Working at the intersection of politics, policy, and advocacy, I have crafted and executed strategic communications plans for dozens of governmental, political, non-profit, advocacy, corporate, and legal organizations, including earned, paid and digital media strategy, crisis communications, speechwriting, debate and hearing prep, litigation strategy, and thought leadership and brand-building.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/06/30/scotus-rulings-biden-trump-debate-shake-up-political-landscape/

What a week it’s been! We started off with Justice Amy Souter Barrett writing the SCOTUS ruling in Murthy v. Missouri.  At issue was whether it was okay for the federal government (the FBI and related elements of the American Stasi) to pressure social media and data-hoovering companies (Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc.) to suppress opinions they didn’t like about things like COVID, the 2020 election, and the Jan 6 jamboree at the Capitol.

Just to be clear about this: it is not okay for the government to do this, but that’s not what Justice Souter Barrett said.  She did not quite come out and say it was okay.  She left that bizarro opinion to her colleague Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who, during the oral argument phase of the case, said to plaintiff’s counsel: “My biggest concern is that your view has the First Amendment hamstringing the federal government in significant ways.”

Memo to Justice Jackson: “hamstringing the federal government,” i.e., limiting its prerogatives and ability to intrude upon the lives of its citizens, is the very point of the First Amendment.  That’s why we have a First Amendment.  Indeed, it is a large part of why we have a constitution: to protect citizens from the coercive power of the state.

Justice Barrett was not quite so forthright.  She argued that the plaintiffs “lacked standing.” If Louisiana and Missouri lacked standing to defend their citizens in this case, who or what would have standing?  That was part of the burden of Justice Alito’s robust dissent, in which he was joined by the other adults on the Court, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch. As the legal commentator Jonathan Turley put it, “The government is engaging in censorship by surrogate… They have made a mockery of the limits of the First Amendment.”

Justice Barrett was not done making those of us who supported her nomination to the Supreme Court regret our support.  In Fischer v. United States, one of the most important cases before the Court this session, the issue was whether it was okay to use an Enron-era law that was designed to prohibit destroying evidence to go after January 6 defendants (and that ex officio perpetual defendant, Donald Trump).  This was the famous, or infamous, “obstructing an official proceeding” charge that we heard so much about while the FBI was arresting grandmothers and other tourists who were in the Capitol that day, and which official but illegally appointed bag man Jack Smith has so handsomely availed himself of in his vendetta against Trump. The case was decided Friday, 6-3, but Barrett weighed in with a dissent.

It used to be that the FBI and other members of the law enforcement fraternity would discover a crime and then pursue the perpetrators. Now, as the dragnet sparked by the January 6 protest shows, “law enforcement” means identifying people the regime doesn’t like and then combing through the statute book to see what laws might apply, or be twisted to apply, to them. It’s a refreshed, Americanized version of the venerable principle articulated by Stalin’s head of the secret police, Lavrentiy Beria: “Show me the man,” said Beria, “and I will show you the crime.”

Another major case, also decided Friday, overturned the 1984 case Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, which in effect handed legislative power to the alphabet soup of federal agencies.  By striking down Chevron, the Court dealt an important blow to “the administrative state,” that parallel government populated by unelected, largely unaccountable bureaucrats who have increasingly been the ones who ran our lives: promulgated the rules by which we were required to live and imposed the fines and other sanctions should we fail to do so. Article One of the Constitution begins by vesting “All legislative Powers . . . in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.”  Chevron bypassed that stipulation by stealth, rendering Congress more and more ceremonial as distinct from a legislative body.

https://tomklingenstein.com/in-search-of-an-american-aristocracy/

Editor’s Note: The first step in winning a war is to recognize the fact that you are in one. This means, first and foremost, to come to know your enemy and his goals. In a recent essay for this site, Glenn Ellmers and Ted Richards of the Claremont Institute make a compelling case that the present enemy—the “woke” or group quota regime—is a totalitarian threat, and that its aims are nothing short of revolutionary. While our own troubles may seem far removed from the hard totalitarianism of the twentieth century, Ellmers and Richards argue that the six traditionally accepted elements of totalitarianism are already present in woke America. What’s more, they identify three factors that are unique to the tyranny of the present day.

The American regime was founded by intellectual giants: men like John Adams and Thomas Jefferson who, even in their devotion to equality, recognized the necessity of great men for the preservation of a republic. In an important way, argues Micah Meadowcroft, the regime change underway has been defined by the replacement of this natural aristocracy with a “global elite” untied to America or its constitution. This is the seventh in a series of nine contributions by leading experts on the nine defining elements of what Ellmers and Richards dub “Totalitarianism, American Style.”

When in 1813, early in the epistolary reconciliation of their twilight years, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson shared their mutual preoccupation with the idea of a natural aristocracy, they could not set aside biography entirely. As Jefferson concluded, despite their abiding differences of opinion, “We acted in perfect harmony thro’ a long and perilous contest for our liberty and independence. A constitution has been acquired which, tho neither of us think perfect, yet both consider as competent to render our fellow-citizens the happiest and the securest on whom the sun has ever shone.” 

Regardless of whether, as Jefferson proposed, autochthonous aristoi were the source and summit of republican liberty or, as Adams worried, lions and eagles whose ambitions must be bound by the chains of a mixed regime, they had both been as younger men the best of their colonies and come together with others like them to bring forth a new nation. They were our Founding Fathers and, without hereditary title, an American aristocracy.

Today, there is no American aristocracy worth the term, and despite breathless liberal fantasies about President Trump, no lions or eagles either. We do not even have an American elite, except in the most basic social science sense. Instead our civic life is managed by a global elite, functionaries of what, as Glenn Ellmers and Ted Richards described in the opening salvo of this series, an international order “in which American sovereignty becomes insignificant.”