RUTHFULLY YOURS

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

“What the Durham trial has exposed is not getting the press it and the people deserve. The decision by the Clinton campaign to deliberately instigate a false story of Russian collusion by Donald Trump – no matter what one thought of him – was the dirtiest trick ever played in Presidential politics. It tells us what sort of a President Mrs. Clinton would have been. Why is this not getting more coverage? Can you imagine the headlines if roles were reversed?”

Self-doubt is usually considered a negative. And when it dominates one’s activities it is. In Measure for Measure, William Shakespeare has Lucio speak to Isabella: “Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we might win, by fearing to attempt.” A recent article in National Review, signed by 59 conservatives, was titled “America’s Crisis of Self-Doubt:” “Our traditional values of fair play, free speech and religious liberty are trampled by inflamed ideologies determined to impose their will by force and fear.” That is all true, but the real problem is the over-confidence of the woke who, with religious zeal, see society “as archaic, unfair, and racially biased.” As a governor of impetuous behavior, self-doubt is a positive.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2022-5-23-a-new-chink-in-the-armor-of-the-progressive-administrative-state

The great mission of the early twentieth century Progressives was to transform our constitutional order without ever amending the Constitution itself. The intellectual leader of the movement was Woodrow Wilson. The fundamental idea was to replace the messy and contentious system of separated powers and slow bi-cameral lawmaking with a cadre of supposedly apolitical administrative “experts” who could run the country smoothly and efficiently.

The idea sounded rather benign to most people at the time, and probably still sounds benign to most people today. Who could be against having “experts” to run significant government agencies? But a hundred-plus years into this project, we have seen cancerous growth of vast administrative bureaucracies, outside the constitutional structure, and exercising great powers, but accountable to no one but themselves — the very antithesis of the constitutional structure that our founders attempted to bequeath to us.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/dennis-prager/2022/05/24/joe-bidens-buffalo-speech-was-the-speech-of-an-indecent-man-n1600295

Biden used the terrible mass shooting of black people in a Buffalo grocery store to smear America, divide Americans and foment race-based hatred. A decent man would have given an entirely different speech.

A decent man would have gone to Buffalo and said something like this:

“My fellow Americans, what happened here in Buffalo was pure evil. Let there be no equivocating about this moral fact. If evil exists, what happened here was evil. But, my fellow Americans, this young man and his race-based homicidal hatred represents an infinitesimally small number of Americans, white or otherwise. The overwhelming majority of Americans of every race, ethnicity, and religion get along with each other beautifully. We work alongside each other, date each other, socialize with one another and marry one another. We are the most successful experiment in creating a multiracial, multi-ethnic, multi-religious country in world history. The actions of a deranged teenager do not change this fact.”

Instead, the hater-in-chief went to Buffalo and said:

“What happened here is simple and straightforward: terrorism. Terrorism. Domestic terrorism. Violence inflicted in the service of hate and the vicious thirst for power that defines one group of people being inherently inferior to any other group. A hate that, through the media and politics, the internet, has radicalized angry, alienated and lost individuals into falsely believing that they will be replaced. That’s the word. Replaced by ‘the other.’ By people who don’t look like them.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/23/another-january-6-lie-no-recon-tours-on-january-5/

In the aftermath of the four-hour disturbance at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, Democrats scrambled to prepare articles of impeachment against departing President Donald Trump for the second time. Trump—according to Democrats, the news media, and most of the GOP political establishment—had incited the violence with claims of a stolen election, and by encouraging his supporters to march to Capitol Hill following his speech near the White House that afternoon.

But it wasn’t enough to just denounce Trump. After all, he would be leaving Washington on January 20 to build his post-presidency political machine. So House Democrats upped the blame and shame game by accusing their Republican colleagues of organizing tours of the Capitol complex on January 5 so the alleged coup-plotters could map out the next day’s “insurrection.”

Representative Mikie Sherrill (D-N.J.) started the rumor a week after the protest. In a letter to members of the Capitol Police board, the agency responsible for securing the Capitol, Sherrill demanded an “immediate investigation into the suspicious behavior and access given to visitors to the Capitol Complex on Tuesday, January 5, 2021.” Sherrill claimed her training in the military gave her the keen ability to “recognize suspicious activity” and questioned why so many large outside groups were in and around the building that day.

Nearly three-dozen House Democrats co-signed her letter.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/05/house_passes_domestic_terrorism_prevention_act_targeting_americans_thought_speech.html

The U.S. House of Representatives recently passed a new bill that would greatly enhance the federal government’s ability to spy on Americans in an alleged effort to combat “domestic” terrorism.

H.R. 350, or the “Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act,” passed by a margin of 222-203. The vote was almost entirely along party lines, with every single House Democrat and a lone House Republican– the reprehensible RINO Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois– voting to approve the measure.

The proposal would reportedly create “domestic terrorism offices” within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Department of Justice (DOJ), and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), according to The Hill. The offices would be tasked with “monitoring and scrutinizing potential terror activity,” with a heavy emphasis on terror activity deemed motivated by “white supremacist” or “neo-Nazi” sentiments.

Democrats have predictably framed the bill as a necessary response to the mass shooting perpetrated by an avowed white supremacist at a Buffalo, New York, grocery store last week. The perpetrator, however, characterized himself online as being in the “mild-moderate-authoritarian Left category.”

Many Republicans have slammed the bill as a frightening example of government overreach. Texas Republican Rep. Chip Roy, for example, said the bill constitutes the “empowerment of the federal bureaucracy to target Americans.” He added, “This is nothing more than empowering the federal government to police thought and speech in the United States of America, and we should oppose it roundly.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/05/24/republicans-for-biden-owe-the-nation-heck-the-world-an-apology/

In the run-up to the 2020 election, the Biden campaign was gleeful about the flood of prominent Republicans who’d crossed the aisle to support Joe’s candidacy. These Never-Trumpers weren’t just expressing their disdain for President Donald Trump, they were heartily, lovingly, making the case for Joe Biden.

Back then, they were lauded as heroes by the establishment. Today, everyone knows the truth.

These Biden-supporting Republicans were utterly, embarrassingly, dangerously wrong about the man they were touting for president. And we are all now paying an enormous and rapidly increasing price for their arrogant stupidity.

Nothing better encapsulates the “Republicans for Biden” mindset than the statement issued by nearly 500 former national security officials in the fall of 2020 backing Biden.

Forget about the fact that they trafficked in anti-Trump lies such as the “Russian bounty” story and sided against Trump on China, climate change, and other issues of importance to conservatives.

What stands out today is when they claimed that Biden “is the leader our nation needs.”

“It is unthinkable,” these “experts” said in their statement, “that [Biden] would ever utter the phrase ‘I don’t take responsibility at all.’”

Would anyone make such a claim today?

Do a Google search of “Biden blames” and you’ll be flooded with examples of his refusing to take responsibility for anything.

https://glennloury.substack.com/p/unravelling-the-spiral-of-silence?s=r

Recently, I appeared on the podcast of Lex Fridman, a computer scientist who has worked on AI at places like MIT and Google. He’s a virtuosic interviewer who seems to be interested in pretty much everything. Go check out his YouTube channel, and you’ll likely be impressed by his range of guests and his ability to engage them in deep conversations about their lives and areas of expertise.

I made the trip out to Lex’s studio in Austin, Texas, and it was well worth the journey. Our conversation ranged from my own personal experiences to economics to race and politics to the really big questions, like death and the meaning of life. We talked for four hours, and he posted almost the entire thing. I must say, I think it’s one of the best recorded conversations I’ve ever engaged in.

The excerpt below is taken from that conversation, and in it Lex asks me about the effectiveness of accusations of racism. We see this everywhere. A professor or politician or some other public figure is accused of racism, and before the charges can even be investigated, poof. Their career goes up in smoke, whether or not they’ve actually done anything worthy of censure. Often it turns out they’re guilty of little more than choosing their words carelessly, and just as often they’re guilty, at least in my view, of nothing at all. This state of affairs is untenable, and I have no problem saying so. Others feel the way I do, and you’re now seeing more of them speak out against specious accusations of racism.

But there are still many, many people who recognize the terrible injustice of these accusations but fear the repercussions of defending the accused. It’s understandable. They don’t want the mob to direct its ire at them, and they may be in a position where they have much to lose and little to gain by speaking out. I worry that this widespread suppression could create conditions ripe for exploitation by some canny demagogue who could harness the resentments of a stifled electorate and, in the process, unleash something very ugly on this country. The political scientist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann theorized the mechanisms that could bring this state of affairs about. She called it “the spiral of silence,” which I explain below.

We know the costs of remaining silent in the face of injustice. When that silence is broken, as it inevitably will be broken, are we prepared for what else may break along with it?

https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/22/the-chinese-communist-partys-terrorist-attack-on-america/

When Dr. John Cheng opted to attend church services at the Irvine Taiwanese Presbyterian Church in Laguna Woods, just 45 minutes outside of Los Angeles, California, he had no idea that he would sacrifice his prosperous and successful life to save scores of his fellow churchgoers. But that was precisely what the 53-year-old sports medicine physician and father of two did.

Cheng was attending a church service with his elderly mother. Many of the other parishioners were also elderly, prompting the heroic doctor to take decisive action against 68-year-old David Chou. Cheng sustained multiple gunshot wounds tackling Chou once it became clear Chou was planning a mass casualty attack. According to law enforcement officials, thanks to Cheng’s quick actions, the shooter was delayed from killing more people—and it gave the other parishioners time to jump into action and attack the crazed gunman. 

John Cheng is, unequivocally, a hero. Like so many other acts of terrorism conducted against Americans, the attack brought to light the very worst and, in Cheng, the very best of humanity. But now the calls for justice must be heard. We must understand how and why this attack happened, not only to avenge Cheng’s murder . . . but to determine if the terrorist attack directed against Taiwanese Americans was an isolated event or the start of a new pattern of terrorism. 

David Chou, the suspected shooter, wasn’t just some lone wolf kook. He was part of a political movement known as the “Las Vegas Chinese for Peaceful Unification” movement. This organization is not an independent entity unique to Las Vegas, Nevada. According to reports from the Taipei Times, this organization is a “semi-official [arm] of the Chinese Communist Party with branches in several countries.”

https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/22/joe-biden-and-racial-demagoguery/

Joe Biden has had a long history of racist outbursts. Can we even remember them all? The “put y’all back in chains” insults to an audience of black professionals, his dismissal of black interviewers variously as “you ain’t black” or ”junkie,” his he-man racialist Corn Pop mythologies, his recent condescending reference to a black professional as “boy,” and on and on. 

The Left has always contextualized his racial outbursts in the same fashion his decades-long creepy touching, sexual harassment, grabbing, and blowing into the hair and ears of young women and teens were always “just Joe being Joe.”  

So it was ironic but predictable that Biden went to Buffalo on Tuesday to leverage the recent carnage from the deranged, eco-fascist, racist, and insane lethal mass shooter of 11 African-Americans. Read the gunman’s manifesto: it is an unhinged collage of green fascist, racist, and politically incoherent mishmash.  

Purported right-wing monsters usually don’t hate Fox News and Ben Shapiro or go on endless green screeds. No matter. For Biden, as his midterm rendezvous looms ominously, the Buffalo shooter was useful in smearing his own political opponents. So Biden saw a trip to Buffalo as an opportunity, in a way other mass shootings were not, and made a rare excursion out of his secluded compound.  

The Great Asymmetries 

Biden’s despicable effort at blaming his political adversaries for the deaths failed for lots of reasons. He mangled his recitations of prior white-on-black shootings by including the recent Dallas shootings of three Asians by an African-American in his catalog of white-supremacist murders.