RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/04/diversity-free-speech-and-woke-assault-america-bruce-thornton/

Tech plutocrat Elon Musk announces he is buying Twitter to liberate this “virtual town square” from one-sided political censorship – and he is met with hysterical charges that he is attacking free speech. A woman who reposts TikTok videos of “woke” teachers bragging about their sexualize of children in their classrooms, is attacked by a Washington Post reporter who harasses the woman’s family in order to silence an enemy of “free speech” and purveyor of “hate” – just days after the reporter appeared in a video and bursts into tears over getting the same treatment she later inflicts on the anonymous creator of Libs on TikTok.

We are clearly living in Orwellian times, when the ambitions of tyrannical power are camouflaged by debased language, incoherent thought, and patent double-standards. Like the Newspeak of 1984, our progressive media abuses words like “diversity” and “free speech” to make them mean their opposites: a uniform orthodoxy protected and enforced by censorship. As long ago as Thucydides, this abuse of language and thought was recognized as the enemy of freedom and the precursor of a tyranny that reduces the diversity of opinion and ideas into one monolithic, oppressive dogma.

Since its creation in the ancient Athenian democracy, free speech has been the sine qua non of a political order that includes a wide diversity of citizens, not just the rich and educated elites who monopolized power in oligarchic or autocratic regimes. Since political discussion and deliberation were conducted through public speeches, citizens had to be protected from reprisals for, or limitations on their diverse opinions and their particular ways of expressing them.

True diversity – the diversity of thought and opinion – is intimately connected to free speech, itself one of the most critical foundations of political freedom, and most important bulwarks against tyranny.

This freedom of speech given to social and economic inferiors was one of the major criticisms of democracy in arguments against politically enfranchising non-elites. Antidemocratic critics like Plato, an aristocrat and philosopher who favored rule by a technocratic elite, mocked the average Athenian who presumed to address his betters in the Assembly and the Council. Plato’s like-minded mentor Socrates mocked and slandered the masses as “dunces and weaklings,” the “fullers and the cobblers or the builders or the smiths or the farmers or the merchants or the traffickers in the market-place who think of nothing but buying cheap and selling dear.”

https://pjmedia.com/columns/john-stossel/2022/04/27/wikipedia-bias-n1593132

“Look up “concentration and internment camps” and you’ll find, along with the Holocaust, “Mexico-United States border,” and under that, “Trump administration family separation policy.”

I love Wikipedia. I donated thousands of dollars to the Wikimedia Foundation. Before Wikipedia, all we had were printed encyclopedias — out of date by the time we bought them.

Then libertarian Jimmy Wales came up with a web-based, crowd-sourced encyclopedia.Crowd-sourced? A Britannica editor called Wikipedia “a public restroom.” But Wales won the battle. Britannica’s encyclopedias are no longer printed. 

Congratulations to Wales.But recently I learned that Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger now says Wikipedia’s political pages have turned into leftist “propaganda.”That’s upsetting. Leftists took over the editing?

Sadly, yes. I checked it out. 

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/04/blinken-appears-to-confirm-iran-is-targeting-current-u-s-officials/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_

Yet he downplayed the practical effect of the IRGC terror label during a Senate hearing today.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken seemingly confirmed during testimony Tuesday that Iran is plotting attacks on both current and former U.S. officials. While there have been reports about threats to former senior officials, Blinken’s comments appear to be the first disclosure of any plot concerning current officials.

The Biden administration’s top diplomat addressed the threats under questioning from Senator Ted Cruz before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “Is it true that the IRGC is actively trying to murder former senior officials of the United States?” Cruz asked.

“I’m not sure what I can say in an open setting, but let me say generically, that there is an ongoing threat against American officials both present and past,” Blinken answered.

The phrasing leaves room for interpretation. But the testimony is likely to feed into congressional concerns about nuclear negotiations with Iran being carried on in spite of these threats.

Blinken, citing the confidentiality of the talks, declined to answer Cruz’s questions about whether the U.S. had offered to lift the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’s (IRGC) designation as a foreign terrorist organization (FTO) in return for Iranian assurances to end its ongoing assassination plots, as certain news reports had indicated.

The top diplomat did, however, say that he shares Cruz’s concerns about the IRGC and, specifically, its paramilitary Quds unit, saying that “86 of the 107 designations by this administration have been against the IRGC or its component parts.” He also said that the administration told the Iranian government to stop targeting Americans.

Throughout the hearing, Blinken blamed the Trump administration’s decision to withdraw from the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement in 2018 and to opt for a “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign for a rise in Iranian attacks across the Middle East. He noted that the Bush and Obama administrations declined to put the IRGC on the FTO list in the first place on the advice of the military and the intelligence community.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/04/27/see-if-you-can-follow-yellens-bouncing-inflation-ball/

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said over the weekend that we’re going to have to “put up with inflation for a while longer,” which means that she has now held just about every possible — and almost always wrong — position on an issue about which she is supposedly an expert. Is it any wonder nobody trusts elites anymore?

Yellen was on CNBC over the weekend and, when asked whether inflation had peaked, said:

“Well, it may have peaked, but … I think the shocks emanating from this unjustified attack on Ukraine will prolong inflationary pressures. So, the outlook is uncertain. As you know, the Fed is taking steps to bring inflation down, but I think we will have to put up with high inflation for a while longer.”

Let’s leave aside Yellen’s dubious claim that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has had any meaningful impact on inflation. Why would it? Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, which was far more disruptive to the global oil market, bumped oil prices up for a short period but had no broader inflationary effect.

The Putin-is-to-blame for skyrocketing prices is one of team Biden’s big lies meant to deflect blame. But the press never calls them on it.

No, what’s really troubling is the fact that Biden’s Treasury secretary has been so utterly clueless about inflation since joining his cabinet.

Let’s look at what Yellen has claimed about inflation since early last year and the actual results. The chart shows what inflation was doing when she made these statements.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/apr/26/kamala-harris-joe-bidens-excellent-vp-pick-may-kee/

Joe Biden was darned lucky he chose Kamala Harris as his running mate. If he had teamed up with someone capable, someone who had won the trust of the country, Biden might be headed out to pasture. Good pick, Joe.

This is not, as Joe might say, hyperbole. Over the past few months, the president has shown himself not only confused but dangerously confused. At some point, Democrats dragged down by Mr. Biden’s poor performance would likely step in, demanding he resign.

But then we would have Kamala Harris in the Oval Office, an outcome too dreadful to contemplate, even for Democrats.

Mr. Biden is a liability to the U.S. and to his party. His comments appearing to call for regime change in Russia or suggesting that U.S. GIs were soon to enter Ukraine played into Vladimir Putin’s hands and provided invaluable fodder for his propaganda machine.

Of course, it is not just about the Ukraine war that Mr. Biden has appeared confused about. Just recently, the president was asked about his plans to rescind Title 42, the health emergency measure that has allowed our government to rapidly expel people entering the U.S. illegally. Instead of addressing the border situation, Biden talked about the Department of Justice appealing a judge’s ruling that nixed the federal mask mandate on airplanes, conflating the two issues.

This was not because he didn’t hear the question; there was no Marine One helicopter hovering in the background. This was Mr. Biden, confused.

The steady stream of misstatements and contradictions has taken a toll. As have videos of Mr. Biden shaking hands with thin air or being awkwardly coached by his wife Jill to wave to a crowd.