RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/article/defame-and-punish

How left-wing NGOs mobilize private and public assets to silence critics

The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project recently procured a cache of government documents that expose a disturbing pattern: left-wing NGOs seeking to mobilize the state against political opponents on specious accusations of “violent extremism.”

According to the report, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) urged Washington State’s “unified counterterrorism” center to investigate me, Daily Wire host Matt Walsh, and social-media influencer Libs of TikTok, under the false pretext that our reporting on gender theory in schools and transgender medical interventions constitutes “hate,” “extremism,” and “violence.”

The campaign to mobilize law enforcement against critics of gender ideology or critical race theory is not a limited affair. The ADL and a related organization, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), have developed it as a scalable, repeatable tactic to silence political opponents.

The playbook is simple. The SPLC and ADL paint a target on an individual critic, then mobilize a decentralized network of private and public assets to degrade, censor, and punish that target. On the private side, the groups activate left-wing journalists to smear the target in the press, demand that social media companies censor the target’s online speech, and encourage left-wing editors to denigrate the target on his Wikipedia page. On the public side, the groups send notices to state and federal law enforcement, hoping to mobilize the government to open investigations and intimidate critics with the threat of state repression, even incarceration.

Sometimes it works. The SPLC and ADL have damaged the reputations of innocent journalists, driven negative media coverage against mainstream conservative groups, and influenced social media firms’ censorship policies. Seeing the success of this model, other left-wing pressure groups have followed suit, demanding full-scale state repression. The National School Boards Association, for example, persuaded the Biden administration to mobilize the FBI’s counterterrorism division against parents who opposed critical race theory.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-two-americas-2/

This just in: the ruling class hates your freedoms.

The Committee to Unleash Prosperity (CUP), a D.C.-based nonprofit advocacy group led by Steve Forbes and economists Arthur Laffer and Stephen Moore, released a report this month announcing the findings of a Rasmussen poll which confirms what the “average” American already knew: the elites, to paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald, are different. What the average American may not already know is just how much of an existential threat to freedom the ruling class is.

CUP calls the report, titled “The Two Americas and How the Nation’s Elite is Out of Touch with Average Americans,” a “first-of-its-kind look at the views of the American Elite.” This report is based upon two separate Rasmussen surveys of 1,000 members of the elite class conducted last September. It defined the elites as people having at least one post-graduate degree, earning at least $150,000 annually, and living in high-population density areas (more than 10,000 people per square mile in their zip code). They represent a mere 1% of the U.S. population, but of course they have a disproportionate degree of power and influence, not least in terms of the topics and views that dominate public policy and the national conversation.

“These results confirm what people have long suspected,” the report states. “Today, there are two Americas.” As the authors write in their executive summary,

The people who run America, or at least think they do, live in a bubble of their own construction. They’ve isolated themselves from everyday America’s realities to such a degree their views about what is and what should be happening in this country differ widely from the average American’s.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/01/26/google-sharpens-its-censorship-knives-labels-trump-praise-as-dangerous/

We recently discovered that Google’s ad-serving network is blocking its ads from appearing on a story we published almost exactly three years ago.

Google declared that the article violated its terms of service because it contained “Dangerous or derogatory content,” which it defines as anything that:

incites hatred against, promotes discrimination of, or disparages an individual or group on the basis of their race or ethnic origin, religion, disability, age, nationality, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, or other characteristic that is associated with systemic discrimination or marginalization.
harasses, intimidates, or bullies an individual or group of individuals.
threatens or advocates for harm to oneself or others.
relates to a current, major health crisis and contradicts authoritative, scientific consensus.
exploits others through extortion.

Pretty raunchy stuff, in other words.

So what was the article that it flagged? “Trump’s Top-10 Triumphs: A Last Look At A Remarkable Presidency.”

We are not kidding.

Rep. Ritchie Torres Gives Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Sermon at Central Synagogue NYC

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4u3B_feOUUU&t=2s

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/ted-fellows-resign-after-bill-ackman-bari-weiss-invited-to-speak-at-conference/

Five participants in the TED fellows program, which supports and promotes emerging voices in a variety of fields across the globe, resigned Wednesday after the public-speaking organization invited hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman and journalist Bari Weiss to speak at its 2024 flagship conference in Vancouver. The five fellows — self-described inventor Ayah Bdeir, filmmaker Saeed Taji Farouky, cosmologist Renée Hlozek, artist Sarah Sandman, and astronomer Lucianne Walkowicz — sent a letter to TED leader Chris Anderson and fellows program director Lily James Olds. Titled “TED Fellows refuse to be associated with genocide apologists,” the letter accused TED of choosing “not only to align itself with enablers and supporters of genocide, but to amplify their racist propaganda.”

The authors of the letter wrote that Ackman “has defended Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people and has cynically weaponised antisemitism in his programme to purge American universities of Pro-Palestinian freedom of speech.”

The five former fellows also named the invitation of Free Press founder and editor Bari Weiss to the conference as a reason that they cut ties with TED. Weiss, they wrote, “has a long, sordid, and well-documented history of anti-Palestinian speech.” And, supposedly like Ackman, she has “weaponised antisemitism to defend Israel’s genocide in Gaza and has a track record of transphobic extremism.”

Ackman — not known, before the Hamas attack on Israel, as a commentator on current events — has become one of the most outspoken critics of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs in higher education. Since October 7, he has become one of the loudest voices on X discussing the rise in antisemitism in the United States, particularly on college campuses. He was also one of the bigger names calling for Claudine Gay’s removal, first after the former Harvard president’s testimony in front of the House Education and Workforce Committee and then during the plagiarism scandal that ultimately led to Gay’s resignation on January 2.

Weiss, whose outlet has extensively covered the Hamas attack, the ensuing Israeli response, and the conflict’s reverberations in the West, is the author of How to Fight Anti-Semitism, from 2019. She has become known as a defender of the Jewish state.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/01/trump_americas_coat_for_a_globalist_winter.html

Market researcher and financial cycle analyst Charles Nenner has described Donald Trump in an insightful way.  In an interview earlier this month, Nenner predicted that we are simultaneously entering both a devastating global war cycle and a damaging downward financial spiral that cannot be stopped and will likely cause more human misery than the world has endured for quite some time.  While lamenting that this economic and social catastrophe is all but certain, he returned to his emphasis on cycles by saying, “You have summer and then you have winter,” and the best that anybody can do before winter arrives is to “buy a coat.”  When asked how Donald Trump’s return to the presidency might change things, he answered directly, “Trump is going to be the winter coat.  I think he can make it less bad.”

Trump is America’s winter coat.  What an apt metaphor for a man who takes all the bad weather around him in stride as he trudges up and over each new hill.  Trump is a man for all seasons, to be sure, but he seems singularly built for withstanding the fiercest winter storms.  As the global “elite” angrily watch President Trump become the Republicans’ presumptive nominee once again, some will wonder how this real estate titan and television celebrity whom they have long scorned has managed to survive endless partisan witch hunts, two farcical impeachments, outright bureaucratic sabotage, an onslaught of civil lawsuits targeting his wealth and reputation, a news media establishment that relentlessly impugns his character with outrageous lies, and a Deep State–directed “justice” system that seeks his death in prison.  The simplest answer is that Americans have long been searching for a leader not only willing to confront the D.C. Leviathan’s malevolent corruption, but also of sufficient grit to persevere against the “ruling class’s” inevitable vengeance.  

The Deep State’s worst strategic blunder has been its insistence on ruthlessly punishing Donald Trump for choosing to be the voice of tens of millions of forgotten Americans.  By throwing one challenge at him after the next and giving him the opportunity to prove his strength and determination, the D.C. Leviathan has cemented Trump’s reputation as a man of uncommon fortitude.  People sometimes have trouble distinguishing between heroes and villains.  When a man is endlessly tormented for the ideas and people he represents, and when the government engages in a punitive campaign of lawfare and lies to cut him down, nobody struggles to spot the good guy fighting back against evil.  Americans were looking for a warrior, and Donald Trump accepted the challenge.  The entrenched bureaucracy responded by erecting a nightmarish gauntlet certain to leave anyone bloodied and bruised.  To the D.C. despots’ amazement, Trump continues to run through an inferno of injustice that would have incinerated most.  Ironically, it is the Deep State that has proved the president’s mettle.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/people-of-color-are-mascots-for-the-global-elites/

During the World Economic Forum’s annual conclave of plutocrats last week, the attendees enjoyed an exotic display of indigenous culture and their own virtue signaling of their love for “diversity.”  The Catholic News Agency reports, “as part of a plenary session on Wednesday titled ‘Climate and Nature: A Systemic Response Is Needed,’ Chieftess Putanny Yawanawá of the Amazonian Yawanawá tribe . . . performed a shamanic rite.” Resplendent in her tribal garb and face-paint, she stood close to each of the several panel members’ faces, coughed, then blew on their foreheads.

This show captured perfectly the condescending, patronizing attitude of the DEI mentality of the progressive left, who make the world’s real diversity into occasions for cultural slumming, and preening their superior cosmopolitan “tolerance,” at the expense of the POC’s full, complex humanity.

Such displays have for decades characterized the progressive left’s treatment of what they now call “people of color,” that superficial, vague category that simplifies, idealizes, homogenizes, and politicizes the world’s vast, intricate ethnic diversity by turning them into “mascots,” as Thomas Sowell put it in his 1995 book The Vision of the Anointed. These symbols of the cognitive elite’s lofty virtue and sensitivity are celebrated at the same time Western elites promote energy policies that make it harder for developing nations to improve their lives.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/01/22/california-where-freedom-goes-to-die/

California was once a byword for liberty and opportunity. The so-called Golden State was home first to the Gold Rush, then to Hollywood and then to the tech revolution in Silicon Valley. Californians have long been proud of that legacy – indeed, during a 2022 debate against Florida governor Ron DeSantis, California governor Gavin Newsom boasted that his state epitomised ‘freedom’. While this might once have been true, under Newsom’s direction, and that of the state’s essentially one-party legislature, California has been transformed into something unrecognisable.

However much one might dislike DeSantis’ sometimes heavy-handed approach to fighting wokeness in Florida, California is unlikely to meet most people’s definitions of freedom. The state government of California now forces shops to have a gender-neutral toy section. It seeks to extract billions as reparations for slavery. It aims to control speech and indoctrinate the young. It is attempting to regulate virtually every aspect of life in the name of ‘saving the planet’.

Maybe it depends on how you define ‘freedom’. California certainly offers freedoms to those on the margins. The homeless, undocumented migrants and petty criminals now have the freedom to commit crimes without much worry of prosecution. Back when Newsom was campaigning to be mayor of San Francisco 20 years ago, he pledged to eliminate homelessness in 10 years. Now California’s homeless numbers are growing not just in San Francisco, but also across the whole state. Overall, California has 30 per cent of the US’s homeless population. The state is hardly a ‘model for the nation’, as Newsom proudly proclaims.

Left out in this freedom equation are the basic rights of ordinary citizens – the people who pay taxes, raise families and rent or buy houses. For them, Newsom’s version of freedom is the ‘freedom’ to suffer the highest crime rate in a decade. For the pleasure of lackadaisical law enforcement, and a deteriorating infrastructure, California’s middle and working classes get the right to pay among the country’s highest state taxes. At the same time, businesses suffer a regulatory tsunami, with over 400,000 rules to adhere to, a number unparalleled in any other state.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/activists-once-again-shut-it-down-for-palestine/

January 21–28 is another “Shut it down for Palestine” week. Hamas-loving social activists are supposed to strike for Palestinians by doing a few simple things:

Reschedule your appointments
No eating out
Don’t do any banking
Don’t use social media for anything except Palestine
No shopping! Get essentials like groceries, gas, & medicine ASAP
Stay home as much as possible
If able, call out from school/work! Sick days, time off, delay shifts.
Email your Reps — tell them you’re striking for Palestine and how

A young woman with pink hair and five-inch-long nails who has apparently positioned herself on social media as a champion for the Palestinian cause posted a video yesterday, in response to concerns that such a strike — not working or sending kids to school for a week, not paying bills, not buying food or gas — is unrealistic, and would favor privileged pro-Palestinian individuals.

“Just to be clear, the general strike is a call to action from Bisan, a young Palestinian woman whose entire life now revolves around survival and documenting the atrocities that are happening in Gaza. In English,” the pink-haired girl said. “She lost her home, lost loved ones, and on her last Live, as you could hear bombs going off in the background, she accepted that this may be her final night on earth. She called on us for a general strike.”

https://amgreatness.com/2024/01/22/2024-americas-year-of-living-dangerously/

Lame-duck presidencies, especially in the last six months of their final term, in general can offer opportunities for America’s enemies to take advantage of a perceived vacuum as one government transitions to the next.

But these normal changeover months are especially dangerous when a perceived weak or appeasing lame-duck president is likely to be replaced by a strong deterrent successor that will likely serve as a corrective to his disastrous policies.

James Buchannan (1857-1861), a northern but pro-South president, was a particularly anemic chief executive. He had done little if anything to try to deal with the growing rift between North and South, especially the furor over the Dred Scott decision and Bloody Kansas. Even when warned, Buchannan did little to beef up the U.S. Army or increase its weapon stockpiles to deter any potential secessionist state.

After Buchannan declined to run for a second term, the South understood that the abolitionist and anti-slavery Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln might well be elected in 1860—given the North/South split within the Democratic Party. And they understood that President Lincoln might well use force to stop secession.

Therefore, in the waning days of the Buchannan administration, after Lincoln’s victory, seven southern states seceded during the presidential transition, a confused North reacted little, more would follow, and a terrible Civil War became inevitable.

During the waning days of the crippled second term of Richard Nixon in summer 1974, communist North Vietnam saw a once deterrent president fatally weakened by Watergate. It was encouraged by a renewed antiwar movement, a likely soon anti-war Congress, and the next president, Gerald Ford—a probable caretaker soon to be replaced by an anti-war Democrat. And so in late 1974 and 1975, the communists renounced ignored peace accords, judged correctly that the directionless US would not help South Vietnam stop a massive invasion from the North, and thereby won the 12-year-long war.