RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2022/05/15/heres-what-the-buffalo-shooters-alleged-manifesto-actually-says-n1597997

On Saturday afternoon, an 18-year-old from Upstate New York traveled to Buffalo and live-streamed himself shooting several people, ten of whom he killed, at a Tops Friendly Market in a predominantly black neighborhood. The suspect was captured by law enforcement and has been arraigned on 10 first-degree murder charges.

With their usual swiftness, leftists on Twitter quickly launched a seemingly coordinated effort to blame Fox News and Tucker Carlson for allegedly radicalizing the suspect.

As word of the shooting quickly spread on social media, so did reports that the shooter had posted a 180-page manifesto online, explaining his racist and anti-Semitic motives and detailing how he planned to carry out the attack. PJ Media obtained a copy of the manifesto, and while we cannot independently verify its authenticity, it is widely believed to be genuine, and some left-wing operatives are intent on claiming that the manifesto proves the shooter was radicalized by Fox News and right-wing politics. I’ll show you want the manifesto actually says (though I will not link to it).

First, despite the coordinated effort to blame Fox News, the manifesto attacks a number of news networks, including Fox, for hiring Jews.

A search of the entire manifesto also yields no mentions of Tucker Carlson and specifically mentions “the internet” as where he got his beliefs.

Others have tried to link the shooter in a more general way to right-wing politics. For example, the so-called conservative S.E. Cupp of CNN tried to blame “right-wing extremism” for the shooting.

But here’s what the manifesto says about the shooter’s politics:

https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/15/the-cycles-of-revolutions-in-our-midst/

We are witnessing a number of radical military, social, and political revolutions that are changing the United States—and the world—in fundamental ways that we still have not appreciated. 

The taboo about never mentioning the first-strike use of nuclear weapons in a major conventional war is now apparently over. Vladimir Putin routinely threatens their use. Communist China hints at its growing nuclear capability and is hell-bent on rushing into production a huge new nuclear missile force. The world is defining nuclear incineration down.

The more China and North Korea talk about nukes, the more necessary it is that uneasy democracies such as Australia, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan will make adjustments. And the more the United States bows out of its prior role of extending its nuclear umbrella over Western democracies, the more likely these societies will consider going nuclear themselves. Should Iran acquire nuclear weapons—and its patrons Russia and China seem to be ensuring that it will—then the long feared but heretofore never reified nuclear Middle East arms race will finally break out, as the petro-rich Arab world tries to deter Iran’s unhinged theocrats.

There is also a revolutionary vacuum occurring abroad. Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea are trying to figure out whether there is still any old-style American deterrence, or whether the woke progressives now in power in Washington dislike the customs and traditions of the United States even more than they do.

Lots of disasters have contributed to the current perilous state of affairs, including the precipitous American retreat from and humiliation in Afghanistan. Add in voluntary cutbacks in oil and gas production by the West, and the subsequent embarrassment of a superpower beseeching thuggish regimes to send us their energy. 

The politicized transformation of the U.S. military from a meritocratic force focused on wartime lethality into an  extension of the social welfare state driven by diversity, equity and inclusion has encouraged our enemies to take risks they otherwise might not have taken. 

Other contributors to the American power vacuum are the enormous federal debt, hyperinflation, and likely stagflation and recession this winter—along with the worldwide mania following COVID and the disastrous blanket lockdowns. All of the above has suggested to the world that a cognitively challenged 79-year-old Joe Biden is both an illustration and cause of American decline, rather than a temporary embarrassing aberration. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/05/ultra-buck-passer-and-liar-white-house-joseph-klein/

On May 10th, President Joe Biden delivered a speech on inflation in an effort to get ahead of the expected bad news the next day concerning the Consumer Price Index (CPI). The president said that fighting inflation was now his “top domestic priority” even though it was not that long ago when he dismissed the steep price increases Americans were experiencing as merely “transitory.”

President Biden is calling inflation “a real tough problem to solve.” Too bad that the president has no clue on how to solve the “real tough problem” that he had a big hand in creating.

President Biden’s speech was long on passing the buck to others and short on offering real solutions. The president refused to accept any responsibility for the inflation that began surging early in his term.

Instead of following the advice from the sign on President Harry Truman’s desk in his White House office, “The Buck Stops Here,” Biden took to heart President Truman’s quip: “If you can’t convince them, confuse them.”

Indeed, President Biden tried to spin his own disastrous economic policies into something positive. He shamelessly boasted, “I think our policies help, not hurt.”

At a Democratic National Committee fundraiser on May 11th, Biden said that “until we got elected and we changed presidents, I think people started to lose faith in the capacity of the American government to deliver — to deliver, to make life better for people.”

The American people are not fooled. A majority has lost faith in President Biden’s capacity to perform his job and make life better for the American people. About two-thirds of Americans disapprove of the way President Biden is handling the economy, according to a poll reported by CNN earlier this month.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-house-subpoena-wars-jan-6-committee-congress-kevin-mccarthy-jim-jordan-nancy-pelosi-11652479291?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Partisanship on Capitol Hill is as bitter as we can recall, and it’s about to get worse. The Jan. 6 special committee has unleashed the subpoena power of the House against fellow Members.

The committee on Thursday issued commands to five GOP Members of Congress to testify about events surrounding the Jan 6 Capitol riot. Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.)and Reps. Scott Perry (Pa.), Jim Jordan (Ohio), Andy Biggs (Ariz.) and Mo Brooks (Ala.) have refused to answer committee questions, so they’re getting unprecedented subpoena treatment.

House subpoenas to Members are typically reserved for investigations by the Ethics Committee focusing on allegations of corruption. The Ethics Committee has an equal number of Democrats and Republicans, and its investigations (if not always its judgments) are traditionally bipartisan.

The Jan. 6 committee has two GOP Members, though they were chosen by Speaker Nancy Pelosi after she rejected two of Mr. McCarthy’s candidates. The Minority Leader then declined to nominate anyone else. Republicans are sure to see the subpoenas as a case of turning the investigative power of the House against the opposition party.

If Democrats think this will be a one-time-only event, they are dreaming. If Republicans retake the House in November, you can guarantee that Mr. Jordan, as likely Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, will find some reason to subpoena Democrats about oh, say, what they knew about the Russian collusion narrative or Democrats who objected to the electoral vote counts in 2000, 2004, or 2016.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/my-lawsuit-will-shine-a-light-on-twitter-censorship-soical-media-big-tech-facebook-speech-11652634888?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Do social-media companies collude with the federal government to suppress speech? On April 29, Judge William Alsup issued a ruling in a case I brought against Twitter that could become a watershed in holding social-media companies accountable for censorship.

This problem became acute at the outset of the Covid-19 pandemic. On Jan. 29, 2020, Twitter declared: “We’re committed to playing our part to amplify authoritative, official content across the globe.” Facebook essentially forbade discussion that the virus might have leaked from a Chinese lab. Today debate over the lab-leak theory is allowed, but free discussion of the side effects and efficacy of Covid vaccines isn’t.

Censorship by these vastly powerful companies is antithetical to the advancement of science and basic democratic principles, both of which require open debate. But the companies and government have closely guarded the secrets of how they work together—including whether and how they target dissenters like me.

After March 2020, I became a prominent skeptic of the U.S. coronavirus response, arguing that neither “nonpharmaceutical” interventions like masks nor vaccine mandates were likely to change the course of the epidemic. Much of what I wrote, though controversial at the time, is now conventional wisdom. Twitter—open to the public, available globally, and a crucial platform for journalism—was my primary outlet.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/05/yet-another-anti-conservative-study-was-fake-news/

Virtually all social-science hypotheses that attempt to find dark psychological reasons for conservatism haven’t held up at all under peer review.

Yet another major study claiming conservatism is caused by mental problems has been conclusively proven to be junk science.

The now-debunked study suggested conservatism is associated with conspiratorial thinking and “negativity bias.” But it proved impossible to replicate when tested by other researchers.

“We find no consistent evidence that negativity bias promotes right-wing ideology; promotes ‘closed’ values or personality traits, such as need for closure or (low) openness to experience; or interacts with political engagement,” researchers doing the debunking wrote in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Nature. “To support these null results, we conduct a series of data quality and robustness checks that suggest our data is comparable in quality to that of previous work and our results do not hinge on particular operationalizations or modeling choices. Indeed, our results are consistent with several recent studies that fail to replicate associations between physiological indicators of threat sensitivity and political ideology.”

Perhaps nothing confirms that the root of the crisis in science is government control as much as watching people with doctorates make mistakes that should be obvious to a freshman. The critical error of endlessly privileging hypotheses that coincide with progressive political preferences has become sadly common.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/14/thoughts-on-our-faucian-bargain/

“It’s a pity Donald Trump and his team did not consult Henderson’s work when COVID first reared its ugly head. They could have saved the country, and indeed the world, from much misery, not to mention Trump’s electoral prospects. They could also have saved the country from that other misery of listening to Anthony Fauci emit his poisonous advice. That would have been a blessing. But it would not not have done a thing to make the investigation into corruption at the NIH less pertinent. Kudos to Open the Books. ”

How much money does the federal government have? 

None. 

All those trillions of dollars the government spends is our money. Government has just appropriated it. 

The founders knew all about this process, and they abominated it. 

But as Christopher Marlowe put it in another context, “that was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead.” 

Over the years, I have several times written about the invaluable work Open the Books has done in exposing the corrupt, self-serving, nepotistic, unaccountable leviathan that is government bureaucracy. Ever since its founding in 2011, the organization has been like Jacob wrestling with the angel, struggling to bring transparency to the fetid, self-engorging swamp that our government, colonized by bureaucracy, has become. “Every Dime. Online. In Real Time.” Their motto is as neatly expressed as it is difficult to achieve. 

Open the Books has publicized outrageous taxpayer-funded pensions, lavish government subsidies to super-rich Ivy league colleges, and eye-popping public employee salaries. Every revelation is wrenched from the clenched fists of government bureaucracies whose byword, like that of the mafia, is “omertà,” silence. 

Perhaps their most damaging report was released just last week. Open the Books teamed up with Judicial Watch, another invaluable public-spirited watchdog, to mount a lawsuit against the National Institutes of Health in order to prise loose information about the millions and millions of dollars the organization has received from third-parties (that would be Big Pharma) and distributed to its scientists and administrators.

The last time the NIH was forced to disgorge such information was back in 2005 in response to a Freedom of Information demand filed by the Associated Press. 

The NIH, of course, is the preferred playground of Anthony Fauci, publicity hound and COVID scold par excellence. Fauci, as has been noted many times at American Greatness, is the highest paid federal employee. In 2021, his taxpayer-funded salary alone was $456,028. That’s $56,028 more than the salary of the president of the United States. (“But the president is Joe Biden,” you object. I point out that we’re talking about the office, not the man.)

Anthony Fauci has been a fixture in the public health establishment for decades. There he was during the AIDS crisis, warning that you might catch the disease from sitting next to someone who had it, and grimly raising the specter of “heterosexual AIDS.”

And there he was day-in and day-out at press briefings at the White House in 2020 and 2021, fanning the flames of COVID hysteria, dispensing oracular and contradictory advice to a confused and terrified public. 

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/05/fbi-resists-garland-pressure-to-politicize-domestic-terrorism-probes-of-americas-parents/

Good news: Director Christopher Wray has refused to let the bureau be sucked into the Justice Department’s weaponizing of federal law enforcement.

There was heavy breathing this week from House Republicans regarding Attorney General Merrick Garland’s abominable October 2021 directive that the FBI harass and intimidate parents who object to the woke indoctrination of their children by progressive school administrators. Garland’s memo echoed the suggestion of left-wing activists that the parents could be investigated as if they were domestic terrorists.

Garland’s actions are as condemnable as ever. GOP efforts notwithstanding, though, the only significant development in this story in the past six months is that the FBI has performed well. Director Christopher Wray has refused to let the bureau be sucked into the Biden Justice Department’s weaponizing of federal law enforcement.

Back in November, I explained that Representative Jim Jordan (R., Ohio), the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, had prematurely leapt from the correct premise that the FBI had opened a category of investigations, known in bureau parlance as a “threat tag,” to the unfounded conclusions that (a) the bureau had employed against parents such national-security authorities as the PATRIOT Act, whose investigative measures are meant for (mainly foreign) terrorists, and (b) Garland had committed perjury during congressional testimony when he denied that the FBI had either resorted to such measures or labeled parents as “domestic terrorists.”

Our Zachary Evans has the latest news about the investigations and, despite the renewed efforts of Jordan and Representative Mike Johnson (R., La.), what we’re learning is somewhat comforting.

To repeat what I said six months ago, the abomination here, about which Republicans are right to keep reminding people, is that the Justice Department brandished its awesome investigative powers in an effort to stifle parental dissent. It was a nakedly political gambit. There is no federal jurisdiction to monitor relations between parents and schools. There is no surge in violence against school administrators. Given the vastness of our country and the importance of education, it is inevitable that there will be occasional incidents of potentially criminal threats or assaults. But such incidents — in which school officials are often more at fault than parents — are not federal crimes; they are the concern of state and local law enforcement.

Yet, in its desperation to mollify the radical Left, the Biden administration quietly collaborated with progressive activists at the National School Boards Association on a letter to Garland, which depicted parents as domestic terrorists and implored the Justice Department to act on supposed threats. This served as the pretext for Garland’s October 4 memo directing district U.S. attorney’s offices throughout the country to work with the FBI in addressing this purported crisis.

https://www.nysun.com/article/spot-the-extremist-is-it-democrats-or-the-gop-who-will-shock-the-voters-on-abortion

Just recently, Republicans and Senator Manchin blocked passage of legislation that, as the New York Times described it, would “enshrine the landmark Roe v. Wade precedent in federal law.” Reporting on that defeat, few news organizations, including the Times, provided a link to the Democrats’ proposed  bill. There’s a reason for that.

While the Times dutifully linked to the leaked draft of Justice Samuel Alito’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade, which has caused borderline hysteria on the left, the paper eschewed guiding readers to the pro-abortion legislation recently approved by 49 Senate Democrats. The Times failed even to mention the name of the bill until the 17th paragraph of its report on the vote, possibly worried that curious readers might research the 29-page legislation on their own.

Why keep the pro-abortion bill under wraps? First, because its expansive abortion rules come wrapped in racism, extolling “reproductive justice” and claiming that “restrictions on reproductive health, including abortion, perpetuate systems of oppression, lack of bodily autonomy, white supremacy, and anti-Black racism.”

Since black women, 14 percent of the population, account for roughly 40 percent of abortions performed in our country, some might think that legalizing the procedure is more persuasive of white supremacy, but never mind.

More importantly, the press might want to downplay the bill because it is a horror that goes way beyond Roe v. Wade. Most offensive, it allows abortion up through nine months of pregnancy, when, “in the good-faith medical judgment of the treating health care provider, continuation of the pregnancy would pose a risk to the pregnant patient’s life or health.”

https://quillette.com/2022/05/13/joe-bidens-faulty-gender-diktat/

On March 31st, Joe Biden’s White House issued a lengthy “fact sheet” claiming that science has spoken in favour of puberty-blocking drugs—lifelong synthetic hormones for young people who identify as transgender or non-binary and seek medicalised gender change. What used to be called “sex-reassignment” is now the more seductive “gender-affirming care.” We also have the leader of the free world boldly “confirming the positive impact of gender-affirming care on youth mental health.”

“Confirming” is the new asserting, and the Biden-Harris administration is also “confirming that providing gender-affirming care is neither child maltreatment nor malpractice.” It’s a small step from confirming to enforcing, and so the federal Justice Department has written to state attorneys-general warning them that if they deny minors the benefits of gender-affirming medical science, they will fall afoul of constitutional and statutory guarantees of equality, not to mention funding rules tied to grants from Washington. The first state under federal fire is Alabama, where a new law would impose up to 10 years’ prison time on clinicians taking anyone under 19 on a medicalised gender journey. The White House is even taking the fight offshore, pledging to uphold trans health rights with its foreign policy and overseas aid programs.

Biden’s blizzard of initiatives was unleashed on Transgender Day of Visibility. Timing matters in politics, and Biden’s may be a little off. Americans are starting to get their first glimpse of gender medicine as an intensely contested field; it’s nowhere near settled science. For several years, big left-leaning media outlets have told a simple story in which the medicalised gender-affirming approach is lifesaving, at least for those kids who say they can’t live without it. It follows, we’re told, that any restriction is a suicidally dangerous denial of health care, there being supposedly no alternative to hormonal and sometimes surgical interventions.