RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/womens-tennis-has-balls-does-wall

China is ruled by an increasingly totalitarian regime that uses technology to spy on its citizens. It is, at this moment, carrying out a genocide against its Uyghur Muslim population. It regularly vanishes people who dare to dissent. And it wants to control the terms of debate, politics and business worldwide.

Having disappeared doctors and scientists who tried to blow the whistle on Covid-19, the Chinese Communist Party has now targeted Peng Shuai, a tennis star who accused a former top Chinese government official of sexual assault. “Even if it is like an egg hitting a rock, or if I am like a moth drawn to the flame, inviting self-destruction, I will tell the truth about you,” she wrote on the social media platform Weibo. Then her message disappeared. And so did she.

These are facts discoverable to any American with an internet connection, which the hedge fund investor Ray Dalio surely has in his Greenwich, Connecticut, mansion.

Smart guy, one imagines, to be trusted with managing $150 billion of other people’s money, as his company Bridgewater does. But when Dalio was asked yesterday on CNBC about China’s human rights record, and how he thinks about it with regard to his investments, he feigned ignorance.

“I can’t be an expert in those types of things,” he told interviewer Andrew Ross Sorkin. “I really have no idea.” He went on to compare China’s government to that of a strict parent, and offered some mush of moral relativism about how the United States does bad things, too. This from a man who wrote a book called “Principles.”

You really should watch the whole thing:

https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/02/biden-suggests-he-played-a-part-in-negotiations-between-israel-and-egypt-during-the-six-day-war/

Either Joe Biden’s faulty memory or his lifelong habit of padding his resume was on display Wednesday during a menorah lighting at the White House in celebration of Hanukkah.

During his remarks before the lighting, Biden bragged about “the many times” he’d been to Israel, and then decided to alter history and insert himself as an important player in the Six-Day War.

“I have known every — every prime minister well since Golda Meir, including Golda Meir,” Biden said to applause. “And during the Six-Day War, I had an opportunity to — she invited me to come over because I was going to be the liaison between she and the Egyptians about the Suez, and so on and so forth.”

This would be an impressive story, except Meir wasn’t Israel’s prime minister during the Six Day War of 1967 (she was PM from March 17, 1969 to June 3, 1974), and Biden was still in law school at the time, (where he ranked a dismal 76th in his class of 85).

National Review’s Jim Geraghty reports that Biden “did indeed meet Golda Meir in 1973—six years after the Six Day War,” but according to a contemporaneous classified Israeli memo, he spent his time trying to convince the prime minister to unilaterally withdrawal from areas in the region, rather than acting as an important liaison between Israel and the Egyptians.

Biden warned that Israel’s actions in the territories it had captured during the Six Day War, including the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, were leading to “creeping annexation.”

Since he believed Israel was militarily dominant in the region, he suggested the Jewish state might initiate a first step for peace through unilateral withdrawals from areas with no strategic importance.

The official said Biden criticized the Nixon administration for being “dragged by Israel,” complaining that it was impossible to have a real debate in the Senate about the Middle East as senators were fearful of saying things unpopular with Jewish voters.

Meir rejected Biden’s call for unilateral steps, launching into a speech about the region and its problems (possibly the spiel Biden alluded to in his own comments years later).

The official added his own personal impressions regarding the young senator at the bottom of the document, saying Biden was full of respect toward the Israeli leader and repeatedly said he had come to learn, “and yet while speaking displayed a fervor and made comments that signaled his lack of diplomatic experience.”

There was no indication in the Israeli memo that Meir saw Biden as her liaison.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/12/03/bidens-pandemic-death-toll-its-our-own-fault/

With the Omicron variant of the novel coronavirus now the latest fashion accessory among the mask-lockdown-vaccine mandate crowd, President Joe Biden unveiled on Thursday his latest plan to keep us healthy. But we’ve seen this before. While running against President Donald Trump, he promised to “shut down the virus.” He failed.

But that’s not his fault, says the Whites House press secretary. We have only ourselves to blame. We haven’t been the pliant subjects Biden was relying on us to be. We’ve disappointed our Dear Leader.

Multiple times during the 2020 campaign Biden swore that if the country would elect him, he would end the pandemic. Yet it remains. Through Jan. 20 of this year, there were 425,000 deaths attributed to COVID-19, according to Centers for Disease Control data. The total now stands at 783,000 deaths, meaning that 358,000 have lost their lives to the disease under Biden.

Yes, more died while Trump was in office, each passing a sad occasion. But vaccinations didn’t begin until there was a little more than a month left of his presidency. Biden was the beneficiary of coming into office with a vaccination campaign already underway. And still death comes.

We won’t blame Biden for the fatalities. We understand that no one man or institution can shut down the coronavirus. But he should be dinged for his outright lie when he promised the country he’d end the pandemic. Either he knew he couldn’t do it, and intentionally misled voters, or he is dense enough to have believed his own words.

Neither possibilities reflect well on him.

On Monday, responding to the Omicron variant of the COVID virus, Biden said: “A year ago America was floundering against the first variant of Covid,” implying once again that he was responsible for America’s rapid response to the pandemic, including the rollout of the vaccines.

This, of course, is utterly false.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/02/will-the-public-finally-see-what-happened-in-the-capitol-tunnel/

For months, Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice has tried every trick in the law books to conceal from Americans a massive trove of video evidence that captured all the activity at the Capitol complex on January 6. Federal judges have played along, approving hundreds of protective orders to keep video clips—particularly footage recorded by the Capitol Police’s extensive closed-circuit television system—out of the public eye.

Time, however, is running out for the government.

Despite numerous discovery delays, Garland’s prosecutors are gradually turning over video evidence to defense attorneys as they prepare for trial. All surveillance video from the Capitol’s security system is designated “highly sensitive” government material; strict rules apply to the handling of every slice of footage.

There’s a reason why. As we have reported at American Greatness for months, one of the most scandalous untold stories about January 6 is egregious police misconduct that, in some instances, amounted to brutality by D.C. Metro and U.S. Capitol police. Had these attacks by law enforcement occured in any other public or private setting against leftist protesters, the national outrage would have resulted in mass firings and immediate calls for criminal investigations.

For example, the House of Representatives held two hearings last year related to its investigation into allegations of excessive force by members of the U.S. Park Police in LaFayette Square, located across the street from the White House, on June 1, 2020. Rioters protesting the death of George Floyd occupied the federal park for days, attacked law enforcement, set fires, and looted nearby property, which prompted the Secret Service to move President Trump to a safe location. An inspector general report later confirmed rioters assaulted federal officers with “bricks, rocks, caustic liquids, frozen water bottles, glass bottles, lit flares, rental scooters, and fireworks.” 

But LaFayette Square rioters were portrayed as victims rather than perpetrators of the violence. One activist, Kishon McDonald, a 39-year-old Navy veteran, testified to the House Natural Resources Committee in June 2020 that “police started throwing tear gas and flash-bang grenades at us for no reason . . . We were retreating. Using weapons on us was ridiculous. It just made the situation dangerous.” Officers also were accused of hitting protesters with riot shields and batons.

A similar yet more violent situation played out on Capitol Hill on January 6. Open-source video and testimonial evidence show Capitol and D.C. Metro police officers using flashbangs, “sting balls” filled with rubber projectiles, and excessive amounts of tear gas against peaceful protesters assembled outside the building an hour before the building even was breached. Other first-hand accounts describe physical assaults by police; one clip circulated on Twitter in late November shows several D.C. Metro police officers taking down and beating a protester who apparently breached a security line.

At least one protester, Ashli Babbitt, was shot and killed by Capitol Police Officer Michael Byrd, although she was unarmed and posed no lethal threat.

Hearing from the Defense 

Democrats, most Republicans, and the entire corporate news media not only have ignored provable instances of police brutality on January 6 but suggest “insurrectionists,” including Babbitt, deserved their fate. The same news organizations that for years have covered every angle of alleged police misconduct are selectively quiet when it comes to the egregious behavior by law enforcement during the Capitol protest.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/limited-hangout-lee-smith

Since Watergate, conventional Washington wisdom holds that the cover-up is worse than the crime. Richard Nixon’s Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP) tasked former intelligence operatives to break into Democratic National Committee headquarters to wiretap the opposition. To cover up his involvement in the Watergate break-in, Nixon lied about what he knew and when he knew it, resulting in his resignation from office.

Whether Hillary Clinton was aware of the crimes committed between 2016 and 2020 to further her political ambitions is a question that may never be answered. What has been proved beyond any shadow of doubt by the U.S. Justice Department over the past few months is that top operatives in her 2016 campaign used concocted falsehoods to leverage active law enforcement officials who in turn used U.S. government programs and resources to spy on the Trump campaign—a violation of American political norms whose only real parallel is Watergate. We also know that under the pretext of “investigating collusion,” at least 40 Obama officials, including then-Vice President Joe Biden, spied on the Trump team. There is circumstantial evidence that Barack Obama knew what was going on, but since, miraculously, no one has ever publicly asked him about Russiagate, not even once, he hasn’t had the opportunity to either lie or come clean.

But with Trump now safely out of office, it appears that the cover-up is now cracking wide open. In September, John Durham, the special counsel investigating the origins of the FBI’s Russia probe, charged Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann with lying to the FBI. In September 2016, Sussmann, a former Justice Department official, passed reports to the bureau that were meant to incriminate the Trump circle by claiming evidence of links between the Trump organization and a Russian bank. Sussmann had told the FBI he was not acting on behalf of a client, but records Durham obtained from Sussmann’s law firm, Perkins Coie, showed he was billing the Clinton campaign for drawing up the reports and for the meeting itself.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/remember-san-bernardino-fourteen-lloyd-billingsley/

On December 2, 2015, Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik drove up to the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino, California, and began firing automatic rifles while still outside on the grounds. The American-born Muslim Farook and the Pakistani-born Malik, then barged inside where a holiday party was in progress.

There Farook and Malik gunned down Robert Adams, Isaac Amianos, Bennetta Betbadal, Harry Bowman, Sierra Clayborn, Juan Espinoza, Aurora Godoy, Shannon Johnson, Larry Daniel Kaufman, Damien Meins, Tin Ngyen, Nicholas Thalasinos, Yvette Velasco, and Michael Wetzel. The pair then fled in a black SUV and fired more than 100 rounds at police, wounding one officer.

Police took down the terrorists and inside their SUV found a trigger device to detonate bombs the Muslims had planted at the Regional Center. Had the bombs exploded, many others would have perished.

“We must seek justice for those who lost their lives in the recent attacks in Paris and San Bernardino,” said California attorney general Kamala Harris in a December 17 statement. Like the composite character David Garrow described in Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama, Harris failed to name any of the fourteen murder victims. On the other hand, the attorney general did make her priorities evident.

“Ultimately,” Harris said, “not only is it immoral and contrary to our values to stoke fear and cast aspersions against an entire faith and the millions of law-abiding American Muslims, but it is also strategically unwise. This very community is a critical ally in the short and long term fight combatting terrorism and radicalization here at home and across the world.”

Harris was joined by officials from the Muslim Public Affairs Council and CAIR, whose Los Angeles director Hussam Ayloush said “Islamophobic and xenophobic rhetoric by certain public figures has made Muslim communities an easy target for hate crimes.” Attorney general Harris, Ayloush added, “exemplified leadership” by addressing “the spike in hate crimes against American Muslims and other minorities.”

In a statement one year later, Harris recalled “those who lost their lives and the loved ones they left behind,” but named not a single victim or any of the “brave first responders.” Those were the San Bernardino police, but the word “police” does not appear. In similar style, Farook and Malik were not named, and Harris does not mention their possible motive for “the tragedy that took place.” Like the president, Harris hailed the Muslim community as an ally against terrorism. In this case, it wasn’t.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/genocide-stolen-land-and-other-lies-about-america-jason-d-hill/

A few years ago, I was invited by a small liberal arts college in the Northeast to give a series of lectures on ethics and the formation of moral character to a mixed group of juniors and graduating seniors. I began the class with a discussion of how moral character was undoubtedly shaped by cultural norms, mores, traditions, and protocols but that, given the capacity of humans to question the sense-making narratives they inherit from their societies, the development of agency was also an individualist undertaking.

Before I could even finish my introductory remarks, an earnest young woman blurted out that such an undertaking would be immoral. There was no such thing as an ethical milieu in America. There were no uncontested cultural mores, norms and values because these all presupposed a moral space; a location in which ethical agency could emerge. America, she announced, was and continues to be, located on stolen lands. This land was forged in genocidal conditions to eliminate Native Americans from the continent. That we lived on their stolen land without their permission, that we had yet to admit that genocidal policies neutralized any possibility for an ethical space in which moral agency could be developed was not just naïve—it was immoral. The United States of America, she declared, was irrevocably tainted as a country. The concomitant agency that sprung from any spatial alignment within its reaches was bound to be ethically compromised. Just as a criminal can never legally purchase stolen goods and claim to feel reasonably attractive in them, so too, no American could claim to ever have a legitimate ethical identity short of giving back stolen lands to the Native Indians; or, paying them for all illegally acquired lands.

She was breathless at the end of her disquisition and visibly upset. She told me that my approach to the subject was wrong and that, respectfully, I was, perhaps, unknowingly, a participant in a continued colonial settler project.

I remained somber and thanked her for her passionate viewpoint. She corrected me to say that she had uttered an unassailable truth. I asked the class if it had thoughts on the matter at hand. To a person, everyone agreed with the student. Some added that Americans ought to leave the content and relocate elsewhere and give up even their homes to Native Americans. The discussion went on for around thirty minutes during which time I basically functioned as an objective moderator, pointing out, for instance, cases in which land was purchased in a legitimate manner by the Europeans and Americans from the Native Indians.

When one student declared that the moral but impractical thing would be for every American to offer him or herself up for execution to living Native Americans—I’d just about had enough of this malarkey. Almost sensing my frustration, the student who had engaged in her soliloquy told me she wanted my personal viewpoint—not some dispassionate attempt at a scholarly answer, as any such attempt would be jaundiced by historical biases shrouded in linguistic traps meant to ensnare the seeker of truth into a web of falsities.

I remained silent, however, for some reason. I wanted to grasp the magnitude of the spectacle unfolding before my eyes. In the subsequent months I read scores of articles of children in K-12 public schools being taught about America created out of stolen lands. I heard Vice President Kamala Harris deliver remarks on the day after Columbus Day, or what has come to be known as “Indigenous Day,” in October of 2021 to the National Congress of American Indians 78th Convention. There, Harris accused the United States of ushering in a “wave of devastation for tribal nations, perpetuating violence, stealing land, and spreading disease.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17984/vaccines-and-power

Given Germany’s notorious history of brutally stigmatizing various minority populations, it is shocking and outrageous that a German “research institute” and the Hamburg-based weekly news magazine would sink to such sleazy malice.

The U.S. Constitution is not “waived” due to disease or natural disaster. We must beware of politicians and other officials who seek to exercise power through “mandates” without a single vote or the active exercise of informed consent.

COVID-19 is a serious disease, but it bears constant repeating that the recovery rate now is between 97% and 99.75%.

We must resist authoritarian impulses and exercises by various officials seeking to consolidate power and impose their will over the constitutional processes and guarantees we enjoy. Our Constitution was designed and ratified for exactly such challenges and it has endured 231 years through a myriad of challenges far more grave than a virus.

COVID-19 is a serious disease that can have deadly consequences. The good news is that now the recovery rate is between 97% and 99.75%. As the world approaches its second full year grappling with the ever-mutating virus and the public health response, some serious public policy and political questions require attention:

Are some people looking to leverage vaccination status to stigmatize and marginalize political opponents?
Is vaccine status being equated with ideology or political affiliation?
Is vaccine status going to be the new societal discriminator for those who might be “more equal” than others?
Are we seeing efforts to control and pressure citizens for daring to question government officials?
What about officials who seek to change the meaning of terms such as “fully vaccinated,” or altogether abandon terms and conditions that were used to persuade the public to shut down businesses and society at-large.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/12/anthony_fauci_is_no_josef_mengele.html

Lara Logan claimed that she’s heard from people all over the world that Fauci is another Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor who sent more than a million people to their deaths at Auschwitz. The comparison is wrong because Mengele intentionally and affirmatively caused these deaths in the gas chambers. Fauci hasn’t affirmatively killed anyone. He has, however, consigned hundreds of thousands of people to death through his negative behavior, denying people access to life-saving treatment. He can be judged for that without bringing Mengele into the discussion.

From the moment COVID hit our shores, there were reports that those who were dying were people with low vitamin D levels: the elderly and Blacks (who, because of an indoor life in a non-equatorial country, are frequently vitamin D deficient). Just this week, Daniel Horowitz wrote that there’s now strong evidence of an overwhelming correlation between vitamin D supplements and a robust immune system that can resist COVID.

We also know that hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, if given sufficiently early in COVID’s progress and with Vitamin D, zinc, and antibiotics, can return people to good health. Indeed, if the case of Sun Ng is anything to go by, there’s now anecdotal evidence that ivermectin can return to health people on the verge of death. Ng was dying from COVID in an Illinois hospital that refused to give him ivermectin. Eventually, a court forced the hospital to give Ng ivermectin, at which point he began a rapid recovery.

To sum things up quickly, there’s now excellent evidence (evidence that started to accrue very early in 2020), that taking supplements to strengthen the immune system and receiving early treatment with hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin (both drugs with decades’ long histories of safe and effective use in humans) can stop people from dying. Currently, almost 800,000 people have COVID listed as their cause of death (although I suspect over-diagnosis). It’s a good bet that most of them would have survived with immune therapy and early treatment.

That all these options were denied them was because of orders coming from the top—from Fauci. You’ve read in the news and watched videos for almost two years of Fauci dismissing early treatment and immune therapy. Instead, for Fauci, it was all about masks, which he frequently acknowledged were useless because people didn’t have an endless supply of N95 masks, and lockdowns, which didn’t slow the virus but did increase deaths from untreated diseases, drug overdoses, suicide, domestic abuse, and the stresses of economic despair as Fauci’s lockdown obsession destroyed a robust American economy.

I’m reading Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, which has meticulously sourced information about Fauci’s refusal to authorize treating COVID early, with common, inexpensive therapies.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/our-ship-state-looks-titanic-bruce-thornton/

The “ship of state” metaphor first appears in the works of the late 7th century BC poet Alcaeus. An aristocrat from the important Greek city of Mytilene on the island of Lesbos, Alcaeus’s metaphor of a ship endangered by a storm represents the political upheavals caused by a succession of tyrants vying for control of the city––the surges and waves of civic violence, political turmoil, and tyranny that have damaged the ship’s hull, sails, and tackle, and threaten to sink it.

Though tired after 2600 years, the metaphor is still useful. We also are in the midst of political storms––political violence, the “soft despotism” of federal overregulation, the illiberal “wokeism” attacking our unalienable rights, and the serial damage to the Constitutional institutions that have kept us sailing free for over 200 years. But a variation of the metaphor more telling for our predicament is the sinking of the Titanic, the “unsinkable” ocean liner that fatally struck an iceberg in 1912. However, rather than one iceberg likely concealed from the Titanic’s watchmen by a nighttime optical illusion, we are confronted in broad daylight with an archipelago of icebergs that have been visible for decades now.

Take the looming federal debt, deficits, and unfunded liabilities. Our national debt has reached $28.43 trillion, 133% of GDP; annual budget deficits hover around $3 trillion; and there are $162 trillion in unfunded liabilities, including Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security––all relentlessly growing without any serious effort to reform the “big three” entitlement programs that eat up half the annual budget. More ominously, these frightening numbers have occurred during a time of anomalously low interest rates. Just a one percent rise in rates would swell interest payments to $530 billion a year––more than we spend on Medicaid.

Yet despite decades of warnings about the approaching fiscal calamity, both parties cannot summon the political will to turn the ship away from disaster. At best, we have one party occasionally trying to slow it down. Worse, the covid panic last year added to the debt $4 trillion in mitigation spending. Biden so far this year has added just under a trillion more, and another $1.9 trillion––$4.6 trillion if its provisions are extended for 10 years––in the pork-laden “bipartisan infrastructure” bill. And instead of slowing down, he’s angling for yet another $5 trillion in spending of money we don’t have.

It’s as though the captain of the Titanic ordered “Full speed ahead!” when warned about the iceberg.