RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2022/08/20/the-feds-go-too-far/

I am pretty sure that I have had occasion to quote Gertrude Stein’s wise advice for the aspiring avant-garde. It is important, she said, to know how far to go when going too far. 

This sage admonition applies just as much to practitioners in the realm of government and law enforcement as it does to those in the arts. An illustration of how pertinent Stein’s advice is to the former is the still-unfolding aftermath of the FBI’s raid on President Trump’s residence in Palm Beach on August 8. 

Everyone instantly knew that the swaggering agency had gone too far. But that had happened often in the past. Just ask Michael Flynn or Roger Stone or Peter Navarro. The FBI often goes too far. It’s what they do. But in raiding Mar-a-Lago, did they go too far when going too far? 

The FBI clearly underestimated the public’s reaction to their unprecedented violation of a former president’s privacy. According to a recent Rasmussen poll, more than 50 percent of likely voters agree with the statement “there is a group of politicized thugs at the top of the FBI that are using the FBI as Joe Biden’s personal Gestapo.” I agree with it myself. 

Question for Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray: Was it worth it? You carted off Donald Trump’s passports and other documents, and maybe, as you did with the journalist Sharyl Attkisson, you also bugged Trump’s computers or planted incriminating evidence in Melania’s underwear drawer. 

Garland and Wray don’t know the answer to that question yet. They are holding their breath. It’s been worth it in the past. The Russian collusion delusion? That was made up out of whole cloth to destroy Donald Trump. The utterly fictitious nature of the gambit was eventually revealed, but so slowly and in such piecemeal fashion that the damage to the agency, and to the regime generally, was minimal. Even the people guilty of crimes—Andrew McCabe, Kevin Clinesmith, Michael Sussmann, and others—all walked. 

Clinesmith actually altered an email in order to open a FISA investigation on Carter Page, thereby providing the Feds with a backdoor into the nerve center of the entire Trump campaign. The original email said that Page was a CIA asset. Clinesmith inserted the word “not,” thus providing the specious grounds for the whole Trump-is-a-Putin-Puppet meme. He got probation (!) and was last in the news, page B-78, when his license to practice law was quietly restored. 

My point is that despite loads of negative publicity, whenever they overstep the bounds of propriety (which is often: see “The FBI’s Bad Apples” for a summary) the noise quickly abates, and the fickle public moves on to something else. 

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2022/08/19/watch-huge-mob-flashes-california-7-eleven-and-picks-it-clean-n1622408

“Street takeovers” are becoming quite common in Los Angeles and big cities. A mob of people and cars, responding to a prompt on social media, show up at an intersection and raise holy hell. Police try to break it up but are usually far too late.

Such was the case on August 15 when a flash mob showed up at Figueroa Street and El Segundo Boulevard. After a few minutes of causing mayhem on the streets, they moved into a 7-Eleven store like a swarm of locusts. They picked it clean of anything of value in a matter of minutes.

CBSNews:

“Cars were just going everywhere,” said neighbor Lisa Trafton. “And then I looked into the store because I wanted to get a pop and the store’s totally trashed.”

Security video released by the LAPD shows dozens of people streaming into the store. At first, many people appeared to be simply shopping for snacks, but suddenly others started running in, ransacking shelves and jumping the counter to grab items behind the register. Candy, chips, and drinks were left strewn all over the store, and a cash register was destroyed, but it’s not clear if any money was taken.

“Angry mob mentality inside the store,” said Det. Ryan Moreno. “They started ransacking the place, taking food, cigarettes, lottery tickets — tried to get the cashier’s box.”

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/two-americas-california-florida-desantis-newsom/

What is America? The answer to that simple question can get you into a lot of trouble. Or it can propel you to the Oval Office.

You can try to run away from the question with adverbs. “Well, historically, America was the name a European mapmaker slapped on the unexplored continents across the Atlantic.” Maybe Amerigo Vespucci, that mapmaker, had Florida in mind, though Vespucci would have struggled to imagine a future figure such as the forty-sixth governor of the state, Ron DeSantis.

Or, “Linguistically, America is an abbreviated form of the United States of America, a political union that traces itself to a local rebellion of thirteen British colonies in the eighteenth century, which grew into territorially aggressive entity.” Eventually these practitioners of settler colonialism found their way to the western extremity of the continent, revolted against Mexican rule and founded the California Republic, which was soon subsumed into the United States where it became the personal vineyard of the entrepreneur and founder of PlumpJack wine store, Gavin Newsom.

Other adverbs come to mind. What is America politically, culturally, geographically, musically, economically, militarily? It is an open book exam. But don’t forget the Articles of Confederation, Gilligan’s Island, and Afghanistan.

Putting on my anthropologist hat, I’d point out that the measure of any society is what divides it — and a culture consists of the most meaningful disagreements among people who have to pay attention to one another. To take a famous literary example, when Jonathan Swift’s intrepid explorer Gulliver washes up on the island of Lilliput, he finds the inhabitants committed to the practice of breaking their eggs on the little end. Yards away lies the island of Blefuscu, similar in every respect to Lilliput except that Blefuscian tradition decrees that eggs should be broken on the big end. War between Big Enders and Little Enders has persisted for generations. To outsiders like Gulliver — and presumably Swift — these poignant differences seem trivial. But that’s bad anthropology. The perpetual war over which end an egg should be cracked first is vital to the lives of these islanders.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/this-is-your-irs-at-work-tigta-report-treasury-inspector-general-for-tax-administration-audit-inflation-reduction-act-11660943317?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

The new Inflation Reduction Act has many damaging provisions, but for sheer government gall the $80 billion reward to the Internal Revenue Service stands out. The money will go to hire 87,000 new employees, doubling its current payroll. This is also doubling down on incompetence, as anyone can see in the official reports of the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (Tigta).

We’ve read those reports for the last several years so you don’t have to, and the experience is a government version of finding yourself in a blighted neighborhood for the first time. You can’t believe it’s that bad. The trouble goes beyond the oft-cited failures like answering only 10% of taxpayer calls, or a backlog of 17 million unprocessed tax returns. The audits reveal an agency that can’t do its basic job well but will terrorize taxpayers whether deserving or not.

***

Consider the agency’s chronic mishandling of tax credits. By the IRS’s own admission, some $19 billion—or 28%—of earned-income tax credit payments in fiscal 2021 were “improper.” The amount hasn’t improved despite years of IRS promises to do better.

• A January Tigta audit found that an estimated 67,000 claims—totaling $15.6 billion—for the low-income housing tax credit from 2015 to 2019 “lacked or did not match supporting documentation due to potential reporting errors or noncompliance.”

https://glennloury.substack.com/p/retrieving-the-human-condition

 The point of a university is to educate students and produce new knowledge about the world. The point of a cultural institution is to preserve and perpetuate some significant part of the creative endeavors of humankind. When the heads of businesses, universities, and cultural institutions allow themselves to be swayed by factions within and without their organizations who believe that “racial justice” must be prioritized above all (above profit, above knowledge, above culture), they threaten the very existence of the institutions they are supposed to safeguard.

So why haven’t we seen more push-back from these leaders, a refusal to cave to the often unreasonable demands of race activists? Surely they’re afraid of damaging their institutions’ reputations and their own by running afoul of these activists. But if they stuck to their guns and did refuse to cave—refused, for example, to implement equity-based hiring policies and instead hired whoever they judged to be the best candidate, regardless of race—they might find as much or more public support as they do approbation. If, as John McWhorter and I have discussed previously, the woke tide turns, then these leaders might find that they are suddenly going with the drift of the culture rather than against it.

This is speculation, of course. But I don’t think it’s unfounded. In the following excerpt from my latest conversation with John, we discuss the limited and limiting conceptions of art and human experience at work in institutions that allow themselves to be dominated by cookie-cutter ideas about race. If we’re going to preserve and revive classic works of art and learn to produce new ones, we’ll need a vision of humanity broader than our current racial politics can offer.

https://unherd.com/2022/08/the-infidels-will-not-be-silenced/

The infidels will not be silenced Like Salman Rushdie, I choose freedom.

Thirty-three years ago, when I was a teenager in Nairobi, I was a book burner. The year was 1989, the year of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, and I was seduced by the rising tide of Islamism. I greeted the fatwa with glee.

I rarely burnt actual books: we were too poor to afford a copy of The Satanic Verses. Instead, we wrote the title of the offending novel and the name of its author on cardboard and paper and set them alight. It was comical and pathetic. But we were deadly serious. We thought Ayatollah Khomeini was standing up for Islam against the infidels, bringing down the righteous fury of Allah upon a vile apostate. Had Rushdie been attacked then, I would have celebrated.

In the decades since, I have been a refugee, an atheist and a convert to the highest ideals and values of the West: free speech, freedom of conscience, the emancipation of women, and a free press. When I fled from a forced marriage and made a life in Europe, I was bewitched by the culture of freedom. But I still remember with a shudder my time as a pious believer on the verge of fanaticism. I know all too well how righteousness in the name of Islam motivates those who inflict violence on supposed infidels.

I have always viewed the fatwa against Salman Rushdie as a strange conflict between two very different figures. On the one hand, a novelist, raised in what was once secular Bombay and living in the England of Monty Python’s Life of Brian; a man in love with literature and language, who spent many years on a quest to become a published writer. Salman is an intellectual, a lover of stories, and a teller of tales. When he wrote The Satanic Verses, he was more interested in the theme of migration than in satirising Islam. He was certainly not apolitical, but he resided in the world of books and the imagination, engaging with the real world through fantasy. He did not set out to offend Muslims but simply assumed that supposedly holy events and texts were fair game for artists to play with, just as Western writers engaged freely, both positively and negatively, with Christianity.

And then there was the Ayatollah, a fundamentalist figure who had spent long years of exile in the West before returning to Iran to overthrow the despotic regime of the Shah in 1979. Whenever I read about Khomeini, I get the impression that he fancied himself a successor to the Prophet. He was both deeply arrogant and fanatically fundamentalist: a very dangerous combination. He was also a writer, though his subject matter was the Qur’an and Islamic law. Not for him the freely roaming imagination; his interest in literature was constrained by Islam.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/08/18/shame-the-fbi-or-abuses-will-escalate/

I have been unable to locate any condemnation by the FBI of the leaks to the New York Times of the “highly sensitive information about witnesses, including witnesses interviewed by the government,” in connection with the Mar-a-Lago raid. That’s strange because only a day earlier the Justice Department told a federal judge that releasing the names of these witnesses would, “jeopardize the integrity of this national security investigation.” The silence is deafening. 

On Monday, the Department of Justice filed an opposition to the release of the affidavit the FBI used to justify its “panty raid” on Mar-a-Lago.“Disclosure at this juncture of the affidavit supporting probable cause would, by contrast, cause significant and irreparable damage to this ongoing criminal investigation,”  the government argued. “As the Court is aware from its review of the affidavit, it contains, among other critically important and detailed investigative facts: highly sensitive information about witnesses, including witnesses interviewed by the government.”

The very next day, within 24 hours, the Times published an article exposing “Pat A. Cipollone and Patrick F. Philbin, the White House counsel and his deputy under President Donald J. Trump,” as the very witnesses whose identity the Department of Justice said it wanted to protect. If this were a real investigation, the target would now be warned to be careful talking to these two witnesses. 

The source for the Times article? “Three people familiar with the matter.” It’s conceivable that at the very moment a Justice Department lawyer wrote the warning to the court about revealing witness identities, three of the involved FBI agents were doing just that. 

Of course, there will be no condemnation of the leaks of the identity of these witnesses because it’s part of the FBI’s public relations campaign and election interference strategy. In spite of the FBI constantly seeking secrecy to protect its “sources and methods,” it’s more than happy to leak its sources as one of its very dirty methods. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/suppressio-veri-order-our-day-matthew-hanley/

In Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff’s recent, perfectly entitled book: The Truth is No Defense, she recounts how her life as an Austrian woman was turned upside down because she accurately articulated things that Islam deems permissible and virtuous. Including child marriage. As per Mohammed’s example.

For her trouble, she was subject to burdensome litigation that wound its way up to Europe’s highest court. And she lost. Although what she communicated was true – factually correct – the court ruled that expressing some truths may be hurtful, and therefore must be disallowed due to the overriding need to protect the feelings of Muslims.

That Muslim authorities themselves defend child marriage (and other unflattering practices) as something beyond reproach and therefore by definition not hurtful is a massive inconsistency worthy of further exploration another time.

For now, I wish to stress that Suppressio Veri – suppression of the truth – was literally a court order.  Not only because properly functioning courts are specifically meant to venerate the truth and rule against its disregard either by acts of commission or omission. But because it strikes me that, more broadly, Suppressio Veri is quite simply the order of the day – the defining characteristic of our era, along with its correlate Suggestio Falsi – the insinuation of an untruth.

Suppressio Veri most certainly is the lifeblood of the Left. Examples abound so that they can hardly be enumerated. The transgender falsehood is almost too obvious to mention. Yet we have a man named Richard calling himself Rachel serving as the Assistant Secretary for Health for the HHS, and no one bats an eye. Everyone pretends – as if at the point of a sword – that this is real.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/prominent-putin-critic-dies-under-mysterious-circumstances-in-d-c-friends-suspect-foul-play/

A fierce Latvian-American critic of Vladimir Putin living in exile in Washington, D.C., was found dead Sunday evening on the sidewalk outside his apartment building, police said.

Authorities told National Review they don’t suspect foul play, but those close to 52-year-old businessman Dan Rapoport are raising questions about the circumstances surrounding his death, which they doubt was the result of suicide.

“The stakes of getting to the bottom of [Rapoport’s death] are high,” prominent Russia historian and journalist David Satter, who was a friend of Rapoport, told National Review.

“So much in this doesn’t make sense, that clarifying this has got to be a very, very high priority,” Satter said, adding that his death could possibly be an “organized assignation” carried out by Russia in the streets of America’s capital, but that more information needed to be released to determine how Rapoport died.

The Metropolitan Police Department responded “in reference to a jumper,” and filed a police report about their discovery at 8:50 p.m. on Sunday.

Police officers found articles of clothing, a broken headphone, a cracked cellphone, $2,620 and a Florida driver’s license at the scene, according to the police report.

Rapoport was pronounced dead at the hospital.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/on-the-guilty-plea-of-trumps-finance-guy-weisselberg/?utm_s

With all the violent crime that goes unaddressed in New York City, how great to see that Alvin Bragg has resources to prosecute septuagenarians for failing to report their grandchildren’s comped school tuition to the taxman. But, for whatever it’s worth to him, the Manhattan DA has gotten his man — or at least a man close to his man. To settle the case against him, Allen Weisselberg, longtime financial officer for Donald Trump’s real-estate organization, was made to plead guilty to 15 counts of behavior so serious that he’ll be looking at . . . yes . . . 100 days in prison.

As the New York Times put it, with surprising bluntness, Bragg will “gain a victory” here because “Mr. Weisselberg, an accountant who served a vital role as the company’s financial gatekeeper, will be branded as a felon.” So will Trump’s organization when the case against it comes up in October, unless there is a plea before then. This is an exercise in branding political enemies, and the media will speak about the dispositions in those terms. The fact, however, is that the DA is settling for a puny case against the company because it can’t hook the big fish.