RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://openthebooks.substack.com/p/investigation-hospitals-ignoring?s=r

Before he left office, President Donald Trump made good on his vision that hospitals should be transparent about the prices they charge patients for services.

His administration proposed a rule that those prices must be posted online in real time for everyone to see.

If it was price disclosure at the grocery store or the gas station, it wouldn’t have been revolutionary. But, the hospitals went crazy!

In a recent study, 857 out of 1,000 hospitals audited weren’t complying — a full year after the Biden administration finalized the price transparency rule.
 
Hospitals are slow-walking price transparency. And we found that the Biden administration has yet to levy a single fine!

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/athena-thorne/2022/04/27/free-speech-alert-dhs-setting-up-new-disinformation-governance-board-n1593400

The ink isn’t even dry on Elon Musk’s deal to buy Twitter and make speech free again, and the authoritarians in the Biden administration are nakedly acting to lock down the flow of information. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is creating a new agency called the Disinformation Governance Board.

Politico is reporting:

DHS is standing up a new Disinformation Governance Board to coordinate countering misinformation related to homeland security, focused specifically on irregular migration and Russia. Nina Jankowicz will head the board as executive director. She previously was a disinformation fellow at the Wilson Center, advised the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry as part of the Fulbright Public Policy Fellowship and oversaw Russia and Belarus programs at the National Democratic Institute. (h/t Daniel Lippman)

Why would a DHS program focus solely on “irregular migration and Russia”? Are there no other threats to the homeland about which someone might mislead us? Or are these just the most politically dangerous narratives for the Left to lose control over?

DHS secretary Alejandro Mayorkas revealed the creation of the new Ministry on Wednesday when speaking with the House Appropriations DHS Subcommittee, in a clip posted by the Post Millenial. When asked what the DHS is doing about an assertion that African Americans and Spanish-speaking Americans are being “heavily targeted” for disinformation, Mayorkas mentioned:

Our Undersecretary for Policy, Rob Silvers, is co-chair with our Principle Deputy General Council, Jennifer Daskal, in leading a just recently constituÿyted misinformation, disinformation governance board.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/27/tearing-down-the-silicon-valley-wall/

Elon Musk has finally managed to buy Twitter. And the moment he did, the enraged Left flipped out. 

Abruptly leftists began trashing their favorite electronic communications platform as the domain of the nation’s elite, professional classes. Had they just discovered that they had been racists and privileged users all this time? 

And what happened to the Left’s former worship of Musk as the man who revolutionized the clean, green automobile industry with his Tesla electric car company?

Or Musk the space revolutionary and hip star trekker, who with his own money helped ensure the United States remains preeminent in space exploration?

Or Musk, the patriot who is providing free next-generation internet service to the underdog Ukrainians fighting Russians for their lives? 

No matter. The Left reviles Musk because he has announced that Twitter will be the one social-media platform whose business is not to censor or massage free speech in an otherwise monopolist, intolerant, and hard-Left Silicon Valley. 

Who knows, Musk might even allow former president Donald Trump to communicate on Twitter—in the fashion that the terrorist Taliban, Iranian theocrats, and violent Antifa protesters all take for granted in their daily access to Twitter. 

But how did the once free-speech, anti-trust, let-it-all-hang out Left become a Victorian busybody, a censorious Soviet, and an old-fashioned robber-baron monopoly? 

When it discovered that few Americans wanted left-wing, socialist politics it turned elsewhere. It found power instead through control of American institutions, from academia and Wall Street to traditional and social media. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/04/defending-constitution-jason-d-hill/

Recently, Elie Mystal, author and “Justice Correspondent” for The Nation, went on the daytime TV show The View and stated that the U.S. Constitution is “kind of trash.” In his new book, Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to The Constitution, Mystal continues to denigrate the Constitution in chapters such as “Canceling Trash People is Not a Constitutional Crisis” and “Bigotry is Illegal Even if You’ve been Ordered by Jesus.” Msytal is not alone in his dim view of the Constitution. Repeated surveys show that college students have increasingly come to believe that the U.S. Constitution is outdated and ought to be “brought up to the contemporary era,” radically modified, or abolished altogether. In this first of a series of three articles, I aim to show, in a measured and rational manner, both the indispensability of the Constitution in its universal form and content, and the revolutionary nature of its foundation.

When the Founding Fathers turned on the light of reason over 244 years ago and wrote the Constitution and Declaration of Independence, they achieved a remarkable feat. It was not just, as hundreds have remarked, the creation of an unprecedented political achievement that was the constitutional republic of the United States of America. This republic, replete with its Bill of Rights and subsequent constitutional amendments, was a major civilizational advancement over any other political phenomena that had ever existed.

But the major achievement of the Founding Fathers was not political; that was a derivative achievement. They, the first and last of America’s great intellectuals, had done what no other philosopher had done in the history of mankind: they achieved a revolution in epistemology by discovering the proper application of human nature to its appropriate political configuration. For the first time, the requirements of man’s survival as a human being – that is, man’s nature as a rational and conceptual being – were grafted onto a social and political environment that supported its rational upkeep.

The political milieu that they created was a direct corollary of that nature. In other words, they were the first to understand that the endpoint of all human striving—freedom and happiness—required a specific political milieu in which human preservation and the achievement of rational happiness were possible. They were the first to integrate man’s nature with the perfect political environment. America was and remains a political application of human nature. It is a metaphysical expression in the form of a political republic derived from an unprecedented epistemological feat: the perfect integration of a discovery of man’s nature and the artificial creation of a political system that corresponds to that nature.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/04/human-rights-watch-aclu-amnesty-international-robert-spencer/

There has been one salutary effect of the weeks-long efforts of Elon Musk to gain control of Twitter, and the debate over the freedom of speech that ensued: now the Left’s foremost individuals and institutions are out in the open about their hatred for the freedom of speech. The authoritarian heart of the Left has been exposed, as has their war against the foundational principle of any free society: the right to express oneself even if one’s opinions don’t coincide with those of the powerful and/or moneyed elites. Barack and Hillary hate the freedom of speech and want you to think it’s a dangerous toy, too dangerous for you to play with. And now three pillars of the unctuous and hypocritical Leftist “human rights” establishment, Human Rights Watch (HRW), Amnesty International, and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), have come out against it as well.

Reuters, adopting the solemn, even funereal tone it reserves for significant Leftist setbacks, noted Monday that Musk has described himself as a “free speech absolutist” and has called the freedom of expression the “bedrock of a functioning democracy.” That’s exactly what it is, and that’s why Leftists are enraged that someone who believes such things has gained control of one of the foremost means of mass communication in our age. They had become complacent in their control of such outlets, as confident of the rightness of their power as much as any medieval king was in his divine election; but now their hegemony has been severely challenged, and so it’s time to try to shape public opinion by calling out the self-appointed and reliably Leftist “defenders of human rights” to explain to us why this is so very, very wrong.

Deborah Brown, whom Reuters describes as a “digital rights researcher and advocate” at Human Rights Watch, asserted: “Regardless of who owns Twitter, the company has human rights responsibilities to respect the rights of people around the world who rely on the platform. Changes to its policies, features, and algorithms, big and small, can have disproportionate and sometimes devastating impacts, including offline violence. Freedom of expression is not an absolute right, which is why Twitter needs to invest in efforts to keep its most vulnerable users safe on the platform.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/04/28/biden-unites-the-country-nobody-wants-him-as-president-any-more/

Last December, the I&I/TIPP poll asked registered voters who they’d like to see on the Democratic ticket in 2024. A shockingly low 37% of Democrats named President Joe Biden. If Biden didn’t run for reelection, only 16% wanted Vice President Kamala Harris to be on the ballot.  

The findings, we said at the time, are “a devastating sign of Biden’s weakening support within his own party.” (Google’s content police found the results so upsetting that they labeled our article accurately reporting the poll results as “unreliable and harmful.”) 

In the months following that poll, Biden gave his State of the Union speech, Russia invaded Ukraine, and COVID receded as a threat.  

Under normal circumstances, these events, along with ginned-up positive news from corporate media, would boost a president’s approval rating. At least they’d shore up support among his base. 

Yet, when we asked the same question of voters this month, Biden’s devastating numbers got shockingly lower.

Our April I&I/TIPP poll found that only 29% of Democrats want Biden on the ticket in 2024, and only 12% want Harris.  

Overall, less than one in five adults (19%) now say they want Biden on the ticket, down from 22% in December.  

Other polls show similar dismal results.  

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/04/tyranny-moral-minorities-daniel-greenfield/

When pilots and flight attendants announced the end of the mask mandate in-flight, most passengers cheered. Everyone except the media which claimed the masked were the victims.

Biden, in an unexpected moment of sanity, said, “it’s up to them” whether people wear masks.

But since Biden has as much impact on the policy of his administration as the shoeshine guy at Union Station, the DOJ and the CDC have triggered a legal challenge to the federal court ruling.

Biden and the entire D.C. elite don’t like wearing masks. Most people don’t. Universal masking is mandated to accommodate a vocal minority, most of whom are not immunocompromised or otherwise especially vulnerable, but who still demand that everyone accommodate them.

This tyranny of minorities has long since come to define the Democrat coalition which knits together single-issue victimhood voters whose pet issue, whether it’s police shootings, green energy, racial justice, men pretending they’re women, or the right of teachers to sexually indoctrinate kindergartners against the wishes of their parents, must take precedence.

That is why the Biden administration will fight for an otherwise unpopular mask mandate.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/04/diversity-free-speech-and-woke-assault-america-bruce-thornton/

Tech plutocrat Elon Musk announces he is buying Twitter to liberate this “virtual town square” from one-sided political censorship – and he is met with hysterical charges that he is attacking free speech. A woman who reposts TikTok videos of “woke” teachers bragging about their sexualize of children in their classrooms, is attacked by a Washington Post reporter who harasses the woman’s family in order to silence an enemy of “free speech” and purveyor of “hate” – just days after the reporter appeared in a video and bursts into tears over getting the same treatment she later inflicts on the anonymous creator of Libs on TikTok.

We are clearly living in Orwellian times, when the ambitions of tyrannical power are camouflaged by debased language, incoherent thought, and patent double-standards. Like the Newspeak of 1984, our progressive media abuses words like “diversity” and “free speech” to make them mean their opposites: a uniform orthodoxy protected and enforced by censorship. As long ago as Thucydides, this abuse of language and thought was recognized as the enemy of freedom and the precursor of a tyranny that reduces the diversity of opinion and ideas into one monolithic, oppressive dogma.

Since its creation in the ancient Athenian democracy, free speech has been the sine qua non of a political order that includes a wide diversity of citizens, not just the rich and educated elites who monopolized power in oligarchic or autocratic regimes. Since political discussion and deliberation were conducted through public speeches, citizens had to be protected from reprisals for, or limitations on their diverse opinions and their particular ways of expressing them.

True diversity – the diversity of thought and opinion – is intimately connected to free speech, itself one of the most critical foundations of political freedom, and most important bulwarks against tyranny.

This freedom of speech given to social and economic inferiors was one of the major criticisms of democracy in arguments against politically enfranchising non-elites. Antidemocratic critics like Plato, an aristocrat and philosopher who favored rule by a technocratic elite, mocked the average Athenian who presumed to address his betters in the Assembly and the Council. Plato’s like-minded mentor Socrates mocked and slandered the masses as “dunces and weaklings,” the “fullers and the cobblers or the builders or the smiths or the farmers or the merchants or the traffickers in the market-place who think of nothing but buying cheap and selling dear.”