RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2021-3-23-update-on-bill-de-blasio-re

“It is hard to come away with any conclusion other than that de Blasio’s endless blather about income inequality was just a sick joke. He had no idea how income inequality had originated, and no idea how to diminish it. What he has done in 7+ years in office is increase the City budget from about $73 billion to $94 billion annually, in a time of little to no inflation. Another $20+ billion per year to the bureaucracy to accomplish absolutely nothing. It’s the very definition of progressivism.”

Last month, shortly after New York Mayor Bill de Blasio reached his seventh anniversary in office, I had a post giving him a “report card” on his achievements, or lack thereof. As you may know, de Blasio is term-limited at eight years, so he is now in his last year. In fact the contest to replace him is well under way, with the primary (that will likely determine the result) scheduled for June 22.

My February post on de Blasio covered subjects like taxes, spending, crime, schools, and rent regulation. On all of those, his performance has been abysmal, if not worse. But recently it occurred to me that the post had omitted to cover another subject that de Blasio himself has consistently emphasized as being his signature issue. That subject is income inequality.

How has de Blasio done on this issue? The answer is, disastrously. Despite — or maybe because of — de Blasio’s policy initiatives and greatly increased public spending, measured income inequality has actually increased. That result will of course not come as any surprise to Manhattan Contrarian readers. Things like income inequality are just not subject to cure, or even amelioration, by government tax-and-spend programs. So de Blasio’s failure was inevitable. But that has not stopped him and his supporters, let alone his most likely successors, from continuing to believe that the next round of such programs and spending is finally going to work.

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-us-intelligence-community-flouting?token=eyJ1c2

A letter from House Intelligence Committee members demands answers from the DNI about illegal breaches of the wall guarding against CIA and NSA domestic activity.

A report declassified last Wednesday by the Department of Homeland Security is raising serious concerns about the possibly illegal involvement by the intelligence community in U.S. domestic political affairs.

Entitled “Domestic Violent Extremism Poses Heightened Threat in 2021,” the March 1 Report from the Director of National Intelligence states that it was prepared “in consultation with the Attorney General and Secretary of Homeland Security—and was drafted by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and Department of Homeland Security (DHS), with contributions from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).”

Its primary point is this: “The IC [intelligence community] assesses that domestic violent extremists (DVEs) who are motivated by a range of ideologies and galvanized by recent political and societal events in the United States pose an elevated threat to the Homeland in 2021.” While asserting that “the most lethal” of these threats is posed by “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists (RMVEs) and militia violent extremists (MVEs),” it makes clear that its target encompasses a wide range of groups from the left (Antifa, animal rights and environmental activists, pro-choice extremists and anarchists: “those who oppose capitalism and all forms of globalization”) to the right (sovereign citizen movements, anti-abortion activists and those deemed motivated by racial or ethnic hatreds).

The U.S. security state apparatus regards the agenda of “domestic violent extremists” as “derived from anti-government or anti-authority sentiment,” which includes “opposition to perceived economic, racial or social hierarchies.” In sum, to the Department of Homeland Security, an “extremist” is anyone who opposes the current prevailing ruling class and system for distributing power. Anyone they believe is prepared to use violence, intimidation or coercion in pursuit of these causes then becomes a “domestic violent extremist,” subject to a vast array of surveillance, monitoring and other forms of legal restrictions:

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/the-biden-presidency-already-transformative-for-the-worse

President Biden is using his entire administration to impose “woke” precepts about race, class, and gender on a public that recognizes them as mostly pseudo-intellectual rubbish masking intolerance.

He’s made it clear that implementation will not be left to a single department or czar. It will, rather, be the core goal of his whole presidency, and every agency will be dragooned into service to achieve it.

No matter where you look, officials who once focused on housing, immigration, energy, or other discrete and dust-dry policies, have been transformed into woke legionaries, framing their responsibilities to fit a faddish crusade against fictional bigotries.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and congressional Democrats naturally support this. The House of Representatives passed the Equality Act on Feb. 25, and if the Senate follows suit, the law will add “gender identity” and “sexual orientation” as protected categories covered by the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

This would demolish the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act. So, for example, schools that teach Christian doctrine that marriage is a sacramental union of one man and one woman could be obliged to hire staff who are in gay marriages and thus live lives that repudiate and undermine their employer’s mission. Institutions will lose a shield given to them 32 years ago to protect people’s right to transmit and live by reasonable principles that have been handed down through millennia from generation to generation.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17206/new-york-times-v-sullivan

The result of this decision has been open season on public figures. The media, and their lawyers, are aware of how difficult it is to prove malice. So in order to sell their product, many are prepared to print obvious falsehoods, exaggerations and outright lies about political opponents and others.

People at the top of CNN made a deliberate decision to doctor the recording so as to eliminate my carefully chosen words “unlawful” and “illegal.” Then they had their paid commentators go on prime-time TV and falsely proclaim that I had said that a president could not be removed even if he did things that were unlawful or illegal. In other words, they doctored the recording to make me say the exact opposite of what I said.

Despite having been the target of deliberate media defamation, I am not in favor of a total overruling of New York Times v. Sullivan. In order for the First Amendment to thrive, the media must have the right to make honest mistakes: that is the right to be wrong.

“All the news that’s fit to print” has become “only the news that fits our biased narrative.”

I would propose a sliding scale, whereby the more serious and hurtful the defamation, the greater the media’s obligation to engage in due diligence to determine whether or not it is truthful or false. If they fail to exercise due diligence, they can be held liable for defamation.

In a striking dissenting opinion, the highly respected Court of Appeals judge, Laurence Silberman, urged the Supreme Court to reconsider and perhaps overrule the leading case of New York Times v. Sullivan.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/03/23/whos-actually-running-this-thing/

We’ve seen the headlines: Biden holding migrant children in cages. Biden crafts plan to raise taxes. Biden does this, Biden does that. But who is actually doing it? 

No one believes that Biden is actually president. Forget for a moment the questions about the election itself, and focus on the man: Biden can’t speak coherently, can’t remember the names of his cabinet members, can’t be trusted to give a live press conference. He says he’s willing to take questions and they turn his feed off. So he’s not in charge. He’s not running the show. He’s not president. Who is?

The American press corps would like to think that it is they; which is why they’re willing to go along with the cover-up. They think they’re the ones running the country. And what exactly would be the difference between the current situation and an official government of the mainstream media? This administration promises to enact, as if by media direction, every single woke prescription and pipe dream. They couldn’t possibly do better if the New York Times editorial board were living in the White House. 

Hollywood thinks the same of our situation. As do the universities. This is great for all of them—it’s as though they are finally, collectively president of the United States. We have achieved what Buckley greatly feared: Not government by the first 2000 names in the Boston phonebook, but government by the faculty of Harvard. This is what an oligarchy looks like.

An oligarchy is an anti-liberal concept, when you use “liberal” in its classical sense as a philosophy of civil and economic liberty. But oligarchy is also the fondest dream of the modern Left—the social justice, cancel-culture, woke-crusading, anti-liberal Left. These people have never been pleased with the idea of individuals running their own lives. They don’t believe an average person has, frankly, the intelligence to choose his own doctor or take care of his neighbors or pick a school for his children or decide how to spend his own money. They certainly don’t believe the average person is intelligent enough to run the government. And by extension they don’t believe the average person is qualified to choose a national leader.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/before-the-shooting-11616538752?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

There’s a contemporary political compulsion to immediately inject a horrific shooting into ongoing debates about types of weapons and the terms for acquiring them. But before legislating a response, lawmakers should spend some time trying to figure out why Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa allegedly murdered 10 people on Monday at a Boulder, Colo. supermarket.

CNN’s Ray Sanchez, Blake Ellis and Amir Vera report:

Alissa, whose family emigrated from Syria, may have been suffering from mental illness, according to his 34-year-old brother, Ali Aliwi Alissa.
The brother told CNN on Tuesday that in high school bullies made fun of Alissa’s name and for being Muslim and that may have contributed to him becoming “anti-social.”
Alissa had become increasingly “paranoid” around 2014, believing he was being followed and chased, according to his brother. At one point, the young man covered the camera on his computer with duct tape so he could not be seen, said the brother, who lives with Alissa…
“We kept a close eye on him when he was in high school. He would say, ‘Someone is chasing me, someone is investigating me.’ And we’re like, ‘Come on man. There’s nothing.’ … He was just closing into himself,” the brother added.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/far-more-dangerous-period-lloyd-billingsley/

“Under Joe Biden, by contrast, the FBI mounts massive raids against people not charged with any violent crime. The president’s lawyer Merrick Garland gives full support. This partisan sophist vows to protect the DOJ, not the constitutional rights of the people. If anybody thought Joe Biden, Merrick Garland and Christopher Wray are out to criminalize dissent it would be hard to blame them. As Garland says, we are facing a more dangerous period now.”

“I certainly agree that we are facing a more dangerous period than we did in Oklahoma City at that time,” said Biden Attorney General pick Merrick Garland in his Senate confirmation hearing. The reference was to the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building that killed 168 people.

Garland supervised the prosecution of the bomber, Timothy McVeigh. On the other hand, according to remarks Garland made before confirmation as U.S. Attorney General, that deadly bombing would not even qualify as an act of terrorism.

According to Garland, nationwide BLM-Antifa violence does not qualify as terrorism because it took place at night. So if Timothy McVeigh had detonated his bomb at midnight, he too would have escaped the domestic terrorist tag. So much for the great legal mind all attorneys general are supposed to display.

For Garland, job one will be prosecution of those involved in the “heinous attack” of January 6, in which no bombs were detonated and the only people with guns were the police. One cop gunned down Air Force veteran and Trump supporter Ashli Babbitt, but Garland appears unconcerned about that police shooting.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/boulder-shooter-isis-sympathizer-leftists-hardest-robert-spencer/

A man murdered ten people in a Boulder, Colorado supermarket Monday. No details were immediately released about the shooter, but Leftist “journalists,” working from a photo of the shooter, seized upon the shooting to shore up their sagging narrative of “white supremacist terrorism.” There was just one problem: the massacre was actually, after a four-year hiatus, a new incidence of Islamic jihad on American soil.

Even after the shooter’s name was revealed as Ahmad Al Issa (which is how he himself wrote it on his Facebook and Twitter accounts), establishment media reports continued to give his name as  “Alissa,” which of course is a common first name for women in the U.S., and thus gives the impression that he is an American non-Muslim. Were “journalists” trying to obscure the fact that he is a Muslim migrant ISIS sympathizer? Of course they were.

And that was after they had already decided that he was one of those “right-wing extremists” who are, according to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, the “most lethal and persistent” threat the U.S. faces today. Julie DiCaro, a senior writer and editor at Deadspin, tweeted: “Extremely tired of people’s lives depending on whether a white man with an AR-15 is having a good day or not.” As of this writing on Tuesday afternoon, DiCaro has not taken down the tweet, as some media hacks are still, like a captain going down with his sinking ship, insisting that Al Issa is white. Prominent race baiter Tariq Nasheed tweeted: “White supremacists are trying their hardest to deflect from the fact the Boulder suspect is WHITE. Syrians in America are legally, politically & socially WHITE. Their white status is well documented in court cases Terms like ‘muslim’, ‘Arab’, ‘islamic’ doesn’t change whiteness.”

Of course Al Issa really is white, as he is an Arab Muslim migrant from Syria, and Arabs have been considered “white” ever since they began arriving in this country. Nasheed’s tweet, however, still pointed up the Left’s inconsistency and hypocrisy: up until this shooting, Leftists considered Arab Muslims to be “brown,” after the fashion of Linda Sarsour, who memorably identified as white until she put on a hijab and miraculously became a “person of color.” If the Boulder shooter had been a white non-Muslim American and his victims had been white Arab Muslims, Tariq Nasheed would be railing against the persecution of “brown” people in the United States.