RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://spectator.us/topic/oligarchy-america-rome-athens-jeff-bezos/

The fog of the Trump wars is lifting, the road from COVID-19 rising before us, the outlines of the 21st-century American system emerging. Like the bankruptcy in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, the change has happened ‘Gradually, then suddenly.’ The age of the democratic republic is over, the age of the American oligarchy beginning.

Oligarchy is the ‘rule of the oligos’, the few: the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a self-sustaining elite. It sounds quaint, classical even, as though it couldn’t happen here because it already happened there. But it has, in fact, already happened here. Augustus Caesar, who made himself Rome’s first emperor in 27 BC, would recognize the symptoms of our American novelties. The cult of the founding fathers and the cult of entertainment. The elites divided by violent factionalism and united by naked venality. The decay of republican virtues. The widening of the wealth gap and the rise of the populares, the members of the ruling class who rebel in the name of values already overthrown. And then, when all seems lost, Oligarchy in America the rise of the imperial oligarchy that offers to restore law and order, but installs a different law and a new order.

Oligarchy happens here because it happens everywhere. It is a recurring reality, the precursor of mob democracy in Plato’s Republic; the alternative to liberal democracy in modern China, Russia and the European Union; the endless present in Arab and African states. The Chinese oligarchy is ‘market-Leninism’ under the ‘princelings’ of the party, from whose ranks Xi Jinping emerged to become a quasi-emperor. The Russian oligarchy is a post-communist, sub-czarist parody of democracy whose winners, the looters of the energy sector and the graduates of the spy services, first returned ‘oligarch’ to modern use in the Nineties. The European states were creating their oligarchy too in that decade, in the unaccountable imperial technocracy that is the European Union. The Nineties were not the decade of the triumph of liberal democracy. They were the decade when oligarchy, illiberal, liberal or semi-liberal, conquered the globe.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/26/dismounting-the-covid-tiger/

Riding fear of COVID-19, our oligarchs persuaded millions of Americans to join in masked pantomime, to deliver themselves to something like house arrest, and to blame Donald Trump for their troubles. But as much as the oligarchs enjoyed COVID powers and dreamt of segueing them into a “new normal,” they knew that America could not be locked down forever.

They especially knew, were they to unseat Trump and become responsible for the country, their charges that he had failed to stop the pandemic would come back to haunt them. “Why can’t you stop it?” would be the natural question they would have to face as the virus did what airborne viruses do: spread. Hence, after January 20, dismounting the COVID tiger, albeit gingerly, became the order of the day.

And so it happened, on January 22, Joe Biden spoke the truth: nothing that anyone could do can alter the trajectory of the virus’ spread. 

A few grumbles notwithstanding, there was silence from very same media and “experts” who had accused Trump of responsibility for hundreds of thousands of deaths because he had not implemented a nationwide test-trace-and-quarantine system. The futility of such measures in preventing an infectious disease from running its course once it has entered a population was as obvious in 2020 as in 2021. But then, denying it served the oligarchy’s prosecution. Affirming it now serves its defense.

Already on January 16, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced that his state could not wait to reopen until herd immunity had been reached naturally or through a vaccine, because “If we wait, there will be nothing left to open.” 

https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/26/to-hell-with-unity/

The recent betrayal by Republicans like Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and former Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is a reminder that the ruling class in Washington, D.C. values nothing so highly as being the ruling class in Washington, D.C. Offer them a choice between maintaining a “good working relationship with their colleagues across the aisle” on the one hand, and democracy on the other, and they’ll stick with their colleagues: Their daily lives change little no matter who is in power. 

Their priority is that they be able to chat amicably at parties with people who just called them liars on cable TV. It’s just politics, after all. It’s just a game. They don’t feel the effects of their policies because they live in the one city in America that gets wealthier when the economy gets worse.

But ordinary people will feel the effects. Joe Biden has already rejoined the Paris Climate Agreement. He has rejoined the World Health Organization. He has suspended federal oil and gas permitting and canceled the Keystone XL pipeline. He has stopped work on the border wall, suspended deportations for 100 days, and announced his intention of a path to legalization (i.e., a path to ballooning the Democratic Party’s voter rolls) for millions of illegals in the country. He signed a mandate requiring masks on federal land. He signed a bizarre executive order forcing schools to accept biological men on women’s sports teams. He reversed Trump’s ban on Chinese involvement in the U.S. power grid. And he also reversed Trump’s order mandating lower prices for insulin and epinephrine pens. Biden will also be raising your taxes—but that takes time. Everything above is just executive action. 

Imagine how great it will be once the Democratic House and Senate start pumping out unopposed legislation. But, you know, Mitch and Lindsey will still be okay hanging out with the Democrats after work because they were able to close ranks over the issue of people being angry at them about the election. Unity is wonderful. 

https://townhall.com/columnists/timgraham/2021/01/27/susan-rice-and-the-factchecker-farce-n2583762

The new White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, came to the briefing room on Tuesday with domestic policy adviser Susan Rice. This came two days after CNN’s Brian Stelter celebrated the “refreshing” arrival of “transparency and truth” at the briefings.

Rice is best remembered in conservative circles for spewing falsehoods on five Sunday talk shows on Sept. 16, 2012, when she was White House national security adviser: She claimed the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans was a “spontaneous reaction” to an Islamophobic YouTube video, not a terrorist attack. “Protesters” showed up with rocket-propelled grenade launchers, but the attack was somehow “spontaneous.” CBS later reported Team Obama knew on Sept. 11, the day of the attack, that it was a terrorist attack.

Seeing Rice at the White House podium this week, a friend of mine suggested Rice has never been “fact-checked.” Well, that can’t be, I thought. Then I went to the PolitiFact website, which strangely had a Susan Rice page … but not a single “fact-check” of Rice, even though PolitiFact was founded in 2007 and Rice worked for then-President Barack Obama from 2009 to 2017. It never put her on its tilted “Truth-O-Meter.”

It turns out PolitiFact gave then-press secretary Jay Carney a “Mostly False” rating in 2013 for saying there was no effort by Rice to “play down” the terrorism angle in interviews. But Rice evaded a rating.

As PolitiFact did for Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s claims of having Cherokee ancestry, it addressed Rice’s unmasking controversy in April 2017 with an article “in context” (avoiding the Truth-O-Meter). The headline read, “In context: Did Susan Rice lie about unmasking Trump associates?” On “PBS NewsHour,” anchor Judy Woodruff asked Rice “whether Trump transition officials, including the president, may have been swept up in surveillance of foreigners at the end of the Obama administration.” Rice said, “I know nothing about this.”

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2021/01/24/the-assault-on-greatness-n1407826

EXCERPT

“It is not only that we cannot see the forest for the trees; our vision is so low to the ground that we cannot see the trees for the underbrush. The contemporary intent is to attach minds of ivory to feet of clay, strong wills to weak inclinations, and sterling qualities to commonplace attributes. Greatness grates. Or in Johnathan Swift’s terms from Gulliver’s Travels, we need to shrink the Brobdingnagian down to the size of the Lilliputian.

Today, we see this species of libelous truncation carried out by the media, the political echelon and a significant portion of the electorate against Donald Trump, one of the truly great presidents in the national pantheon. Obviously, Trump did not possess the gravity of Lincoln or the folksy humor of Reagan. But presidents should be judged by their deeds.

This was a president who did not accept a salary, whose love of America was undeniable, and who strove might and main to Make America Great Again. He created a prosperous economy, brought jobs and industries back to the homeland, slashed the unemployment rate to its lowest figure in the last fifty years, lifted between 6 and 7 million people off food stamps, oversaw record stock market gains, eliminated strangling business regulations and bureaucratic overreach, gave tax relief for the middle class, cut the capital gains tax, rebuilt the military, renegotiated trade deals in America’s interests, established energy independence, imposed tariffs to protect vital industries, brought high-speed broadband infrastructure to rural America, lowered the price of vehicles, passed the Navigable Waters Protection Rule providing relief to farmers, modernized the Department of Agriculture’s biotechnology sector, brought the Space force into being as the sixth branch of the U.S. Armed Services, and much much more.

The fact that Trump accomplished what he did in four short years despite the veritable barrage of political obstructions, slander, disinformation, fraudulent investigations, frivolous impeachments, media mendacity and mantic contempt—in effect, a campaign orchestrated by a rabid group of ideologues to discredit and literally belittle him—beggars belief.

Trump built towers; his enemies dug trenches.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2021/01/26/only-five-republicans-side-with-democrats-to-proceed-with-impeachment-trial-n1411862

Despite Senator Rand Paul’s point of order arguing that the impeachment trial is unconstitutional, the Senate voted 55-45 not to dismiss the impeachment trial, with five Republicans joining the Democrats. Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Ben Sasse of Nebraska, Mitt Romney of Utah, and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2021/01/26/gabbard-sounds-the-alarm-leftists-are-plotting-kgb-style-surveillance-of-conservatives-n1411860

On Tuesday, former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) issued another important warning about the Democrats like former CIA Director John Brennan who appear to have seized on the Capitol riot as an excuse to crack down on dissent from the Left’s orthodoxy. Democrats seem to be mulling a new domestic “War on Terror” complete with surveillance of American “insurgents” like… Libertarians.

In a short video posted on Twitter, Gabbard began by condemning the mob that stormed the Capitol but went on to issue an important warning about the budding new “War on Terror.”

“The mob that stormed the Capitol on January 6 to try to stop Congress from carrying out its constitutional responsibilities were behaving like domestic enemies of our country. But let’s be clear, the John Brennans, Adam Schiffs, and oligarchs in Big Tech who are trying to undermine our constitutionally-protected rights and turn our country into a police state with KGB-style surveillance, are also domestic enemies, and much more powerful, and therefore dangerous, than the mob that stormed the Capitol,” Gabbard declared.

She then played a brief clip of Brennan warning against an “unholy alliance” including “religious extremists, authoritarians, fascists, bigots, racists, nativists, and even Libertarians” that “looks very similar to insurgency movements that we’ve seen overseas.”

Gabbard, a former presidential candidate, ended her clip by calling on President Joe Biden and all members of Congress to condemn Brennan’s remarks, which suggest a threat to Americans’ civil liberties.

https://redstate.com/michael_thau/2021/01/25/report-cdc-change-in-covid-criteria-that-inflated-fatalities-10-fold-also-broke-federal-law-conclusion-n316252

Imagine if President Trump had managed to squeeze out $38 billion to fund a border wall by scaring the bejesus out of Congress with some incredibly alarming stats about illegal alien crime.

Now try to imagine that the mainstream press completely ignored the question of whether those stats might have been ginned up out of thin air precisely to get Congress to turn over all that dough.

Unless you’re on some pretty crazy hallucinogens, you can’t.

Heck, even if every single word of Trump’s story were true, not a week would pass before some New York Times reporter would be all over the news quoting her mentally defective brother-in-law as a “source familiar with the matter” who claims that Trump had not only lied about the criminal propensities of illegal aliens—whom everyone knows are better Americans than you or I and especially Donald Trump could ever hope to be—but that the dreaded Orange Man had also viciously mocked our founding fathers, flag, and Jesus Christ himself along the way.

Yet, somehow, hardly anyone in America is even aware that the CDC managed to get their initial $8 billion budget for 2020 increased by a factor of six to a whopping $46 billion by relentlessly honking the COVID-19 panic-horn. (H/t, RedState reader, Kurt Schulzke.)

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/01/27/yet-another-trump-impeachment-sorry-but-this-one-too-is-a-sham/

he Democrats are racing ahead with their third effort to impeach former President Donald Trump. Democrat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi sent the impeachment articles to the Senate on Tuesday, and the now evenly-split Senate will take it up on Feb. 8. It’s a waste of time and taxpayer money for one simple reason: It’s not even legal.

No, that’s not a mere assertion or our opinion. It’s based on the only document we know that guides how impeachments should take place. It’s called the Constitution.

We still live in a constitutional republic, which means we are bound by its laws. So is Congress.

So here’s what the Constitution says:

When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside: And no Person shall be convicted without the Concurrence of two thirds of the Members present.

Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States: but the Party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law.

So the impeachment now being moved to the Senate is not legal, based on the clear wording and intent of the Constitution.