RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/ex-fbi-agent-strzok-acknowledged-steele-dossier-was-intended-to-influence-media/

In newly declassified messages, ex-FBI agent Peter Strzok, who oversaw the bureau’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s potential ties to Russia, touted the Steele dossier’s ability to “influence” media.

Senate Republicans on Thursday released a number of internal FBI messages from Strzok that provide insight into Crossfire Hurricane, the investigation into the Trump campaign. The Justice Department declassified the records on December 1 after Senators Ron Johnson (R., Wisc.) and Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) asked Attorney General William Barr and FBI Director Christopher Wray to declassify the documents in October as part of their investigation into Crossfire Hurricane.

Strzok’s messages suggest that he was aware that former British spy Christopher Steele, whose dossier was used by the FBI to obtain surveillance warrants against Carter Page, was a source for a Yahoo! News story alleging that Page had a secret meeting in Moscow with two Kremlin insiders.

“Looking at the Yahoo article, I would definitely say at a minimum Steele’s reports should be viewed as intended to influence as well as to inform,” Strzok, who was fired from the FBI in August 2018, wrote on Sept. 23, 2016.

It was later uncovered that Steele was a source for the article and he had met with a number of journalists in Washington, D.C. as part of an opposition research campaign commissioned by the DNC and Clinton campaign.

Though Strzok expressed his suspicion that Steele was the source for the article, the Bureau continued working with the ex-spy and did not disclose Steele’s contact with journalists to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC).

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/530342-joe-bidens-looming-disaster

Pity Joe Biden. He is the dog that finally caught the bus and he is soon to be political roadkill. While he celebrates his victory in the Electoral College, powerful forces already are engaged to doom him and his presidency. His two central problems are that he has set the wrong expectations and that his policies will not work in the current domestic and international political, economic and military environment.

The only message in his “I’m-not-Trump” political campaign was that President Trump made a mess of domestic and foreign policy and that Biden would fix all of that. The deadly trap is that Trump did very well on many key measures and Biden inevitably will do much worse, creating a failed Biden presidency. 

His Day One issue of COVID-19 already is a loser. Researchers developed vaccines in record time, under Trump’s direction, and are rolling them out. The complex issue of distribution now goes to Biden. Any significant number of deaths among the vulnerable communities of nursing homes, the elderly in general, minorities, and those with pre-existing conditions will fall solely on Biden’s team. Similarly, sustained economic damage resulting from lockdowns will fall on Biden and Democratic officials.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/12/16/what-is-to-be-done/

Over the course of several decades, the managerial ruling class has taken over. Republicans and Democrats each had their share of formal power, but the Left proceeded apace, regardless of who was technically in command, slowly capturing universities, large corporations, the media, and government bureaucracies. It now has power that is largely immune from elections.

My last essay explained why there has been so little resistance to a ruling class that has cruelly tightened the screws during the coronavirus pandemic and likely stolen a national election. As explained in that piece, economic insecurity and social isolation are the key structural foundations of the managerial class’ power. Insecurity and isolation are obstacles to an effective resistance by what is left of Middle America. 

In the comments section, some said, roughly, “OK, you explain why. But what should we do?” This is a reasonable question. Much of what follows is personal and economic, as the power of the system is personal and economic. 

To the extent political activity can succeed, it must be intertwined with these economic and personal reforms. Any purely political efforts should be local and issue-specific, rather than channeling our energies into a doomed bid for national power. 

Economic Independence

As so much of the system depends upon individuals’ embeddedness within it, separating oneself from that system is a large part of the answer. This requires a radical program of individual self-improvement. 

Various habits render one fragile and insecure, not least debt. Thus, avoiding debt and getting out of debt has to be one of the bedrock habits of any dissident. This is particularly true for young people, who are sold a siren song of credentials funded by student loans, when state colleges, learning a trade, or investing money in a business would earn a larger return.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-president-should-sign-the-bill-outlawing-female-genital-mutilation/

A rare worthwhile bipartisan bill has passed Congress that will outlaw female genital mutilation as a matter of federal law. From HR 6100, The STOP FGM Act of 2020”:

“(a) Except as provided in subsection (b), whoever, in any circumstance described in subsection (d), knowingly—

“(1) performs, attempts to perform, or conspires to perform female genital mutilation on another person who has not attained the age of 18 years;

“(2) being the parent, guardian, or caretaker of a person who has not attained the age of 18 years facilitates or consents to the female genital mutilation of such person; or

“(3) transports a person who has not attained the age of 18 years for the purpose of the performance of female genital mutilation on such person,

shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 10 years, or both.”

A word about religious freedom and FGM. The bill provides:

It shall not be a defense to a prosecution under this section that female genital mutilation is required as a matter of religion, custom, tradition, ritual, or standard practice.

That is right and good.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/12/omar-tlaib-and-aoc-demand-facebook-remove-100-anti-daniel-greenfield/

Two of the most notorious bigots in the House of Representatives signed a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg demanding that he “eradicate anti-Muslim bigotry from Facebook”.

The three-page letter signed by Rep. Ilhan Omar, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, as well as 28 other left-wing House members, spends a great deal of time demanding the removal of what it calls “anti-Muslim content” without ever specifically defining it. That’s convenient considering Omar and Tlaib’s own history of racism and antisemitism, and support for the sorts of Islamic bigotry and violence that groups like CAIR, which supports the letter, have become known for.

The letter spotlights one violent incident, but then goes on to call for a ban on “anti-Muslim content”, “anti-Muslim animus”, “anti-Muslim bigotry”, and finally, “anti-Muslim content and organizing” on the platform, without ever explaining what exactly they want to ban.

Considering the letter’s call for, “100 percent proactive detection and removal of anti-Muslim content”, the safe assumption would be that they want to ban everything critical of Islam.

That’s a disturbing attack on the First Amendment coming from 30 House members.

https://www.aier.org/article/the-rescue-from-madness

In his memoirs, written in the 1940s but not published until after his death, the great economist Ludwig von Mises wrote, “I set out to be a reformer, but only became the historian of decline.” Most people contemplating the political and economic climate of 2020 can probably relate. 

Many of us, frustrated at the loss of liberty and overreach by governments in the single-minded battle to eradicate a virus they don’t understand, have reached for George Orwell or Aldous Huxley. In their novels, 1984 and Brave New World, they explored incredibly dystopian worlds. Real-world events that resemble anything in those books invite the fear that we’re destined for the same tyrannical lives. 

While literature captures something deeply real about what it means to be human ‒ particularly during the first half of the despicable 20th century in which these authors lived ‒ they ultimately depict something unreal. The superstate of 1984’s Oceania hasn’t quite emerged anywhere, except perhaps North Korea; the foolish quest for unstructured and uninhibited pleasure in the World State has so far restricted itself to communes and sections of woke university campuses. 

Instead, I find Mises, or his contemporary, the novelist and poet Stefan Zweig, much more revealing. Both came of age in fin de siècle Vienna with its coffee houses, intellectual advancements, literary achievements, famed circles and aura of learning for learning’s sake that posteriority much envied. Both witnessed the prolonged and enduring collapse of their civilizations. 

In contrast to Orwell and Huxley’s unreal worlds, the demise that Mises and Zweig discuss actually happened, and just a few generations ago. In our times, in our worlds, with roughly our civic institutions and social structures and values. 

We are watching, in real time, the destruction of our own civilization.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/12/jill-bidens-doctorate-is-garbage-because-her-dissertation-is-garbage/

Her dissertation is not an addition to the sum total of human knowledge.

You can tell someone is smarting from an inferiority complex when he insists on being addressed as “Dr.” on the basis of holding an academic doctorate rather than being a physician. Ph.D. holders who have genuine accomplishments don’t make you call them “Doctor,” which is why you never hear about “Dr. Paul Krugman” and “Dr. George Will.” None of the professors I knew at Yale, even the ones who were eminent in their fields, insisted on the title, and I think most of them would have scoffed if someone had addressed them as “Dr.” The only reason you ever hear the phrase “Dr. Henry Kissinger” is that Kissy grew up in title-mad, airs-and-graces Germany, where people are awed rather than dismissive even if you insist on a triple-serving title (“Herr Professor Doktor”).

Insisting on being called “Doctor” when you don’t heal people is, among most holders of doctorates, seen as a gauche, silly, cringey ego trip. Consider “Dr.” Jill Biden, who doesn’t even hold a Ph.D. but rather a lesser Ed.D., something of a joke in the academic world. President-elect Joe Biden once explained that his wife sought the degree purely for status reasons: “She said, “I was so sick of the mail coming to Sen. and Mrs. Biden. I wanted to get mail addressed to Dr. and Sen. Biden.” That’s the real reason she got her doctorate,’” Joe Biden has said.

Mrs. Biden wanted the credential for its own sake. As for its quality, well. She got it from the University of Delaware, whose ties to her husband, its most illustrious alumnus if you don’t count Joe Flacco, run so deep that it has a school of public policy named after him. That the University of Delaware would have rejected her 2006 dissertation as sloppy, poorly written, non-academic, and barely fit for a middle-school Social Studies classroom (all of which it is) when her husband had been representing its state in the U.S. Senate for more than three decades was about as likely as Tom Hagen telling Vito Corleone that his wife is a fat sow on payday. The only risk to the University of Delaware was that it might strain its collective wrist in its rush to rubber-stamp her doctoral paper.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/andrew-cuomo-continues-his-assault-on-the-first-amendment/

If he had his way, New York governor Andrew Cuomo would do to the Constitution what he’s already done to the elderly of his state. This week, he signed a bill banning the sale of “hate symbols” such as the Confederate flag, swastikas, and “white supremacist” imagery on state property. Of course, neither Cuomo nor the state legislature is empowered to decide what constitutes “hate symbols,” much less selectively ban them — even if New Yorkers had any interested in selling these symbols on state property, which doesn’t seem to be the case. But all of this is just virtue-signaling, as the kids say: a way to get people who still believe in liberal values to sound like they’re defending ugly things like the Confederate flag rather than a neutral principle.

Then again, perhaps there’s familial confusion over the issue of speech rights among the Cuomos. You may remember Chris, who earned his law degree at Fordham, informing his followers that “hate speech is excluded from protection” in the Constitution. (It isn’t.) Now Andrew Cuomo, who earned his law degree at Albany Law School, argued that his ban would “safeguard New Yorkers from the fear-installing effects of these abhorrent symbols,” as if his bailiwick or anyone’s else’s in government is to protect you from seeing things you don’t like. If it were, nursing-home residents would be throwing copies of Cuomo’s book American Crisis into a raging bonfire.

“This country faces a pervasive, growing attitude of intolerance and hate — what I have referred to in the body politic as an American cancer,” Emmy-award winning Cuomo, quoting himself, says in his approval message. This is a wholly paranoid — or crassly cynical — view of American life, but also irrelevant. There is no “hate” exception to the Constitution just as there is no coronavirus exception.

Cuomo, whose great tolerance once led him to say that conservatives weren’t welcome in New York, was recently rebuffed by the Supreme Court for targeting the free religious expression of New York’s orthodox Catholics and Jews with his COVID diktats (the governor called the Supreme Court’s decision “irrelevant.”) Cuomo is a perfect illustration of why the state should never be empowered to adjudicate the limits of free expression. It is not difficult to imagine what an aspiring authoritarian like Cuomo, who regularly smears his political opponents as hatemongers, would do with such power.