RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/washington-secrets/biden-at-11-months-one-of-the-worst-years-ever

All of the hope in President Joe Biden’s 21-minute inaugural address, which promised “unity, unity,” has not only evaporated in his first 11 months but left people feeling that 2021 was “one of the worst years ever,” according to the latest Rasmussen Reports survey.

In the poll previewed by Secrets, likely voters said that they not only believe the year was a bust, but that a majority feel 2022 will be bad also.

“If there’s any bright spot in the public’s grim assessment of 2021, at least it was better than 2020, which Americans rated the worst year in more than a decade of surveying,” said Rasmussen in a not so uplifting analysis.

The numbers:

74% said 2021 was a fair to poor year, with most, 48%, calling it poor.
Just 23% called it a good to the best year ever, with just 2% dubbing it “one of the best years.”
63% of Democrats agreed that it was fair to poor.
50% expect 2022 to be fair to poor, and 41% believe it will be good to the best.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-senator-elizabeth-warren-biden-bank-heist-fdic-jelena-mcwilliams-rohit-chopra-gruenberg-khan-cfpb-federal-reserve-nominee-11641155812?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Elizabeth Warren finally got her woman—that is, the Senator and her many acolytes in the Biden Administration have succeeded in ousting Jelena McWilliams as chair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. The coup deserves attention because of its norm-breaking precedent and what it signals for bank mergers and supposedly independent regulatory agencies.

Ms. McWilliams resigned on Dec. 31, effective Feb. 4, to avoid more turmoil at the bank regulator. But as she wrote in these pages on Dec. 16, her resignation comes amid a concerted and unprecedented political effort to strip her of authority before her term as chair expires in June 2023.

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The coup has been led by Rohit Chopra, the Warren protege who now runs the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and is one of four current members of the FDIC board (one post is vacant). The FDIC’s longstanding practice and bylaws, based on its interpretation of the law, is that the chair sets the board’s agenda.

Every administration for 88 years has honored that understanding, including the supposedly norm-breaking Trump Administration. Democrat Martin Gruenberg was allowed to continue as chair until June 2018 after President Trump took office, and no one attempted to oust him.

Enter the Warren-Biden progressives in a hurry. The Senate confirmed Mr. Chopra on Sept. 30 on a 50-48 vote, and as soon as Oct. 31 he presented Ms. McWilliams with a request for information (RFI) on bank mergers. When she said the draft RFI would have to be vetted by FDIC staff, Mr. Chopra publicly released his own RFI without authority from his post at the CFPB, which the FDIC was obliged to contradict.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/pandemic-intelligence-failure-2021-report-card-lloyd-billingsley/

“I’m very sorry, but not this time. Maybe another time when this is all over.” That was Dr. Anthony Fauci last week, telling people not to invite unvaccinated family members to their home for Christmas. The Biden medical adviser also called for those vaccinated and boosted to stay away from gatherings of 30-50 people. As Fauci explained, “those are the kind of functions — in the context of COVID, and particularly in the context of Omicron — that you do not want to go to.” As 2021 closes out, those contexts have yet to gain the attention they deserve.

In early November, health workers in South Africa discovered the Omicron variant and on December 1, 2021, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) announced the first Omicron case in the United States. In November, 2020, medical authorities in India identified the Delta variant of COVID-19, which swept through that country and the UK before arriving in the United States, “where it quickly surged.”

On December 12, 2019, according to the CDC, “a  cluster of patients in Wuhan, Hubei Providence, China begin to experience shortness of breath and fever.” On January 17, 2020, the CDC deployed a team to Washington State in response to the first reported COVID-19 case in the United States. Americans had a right to wonder what their nation’s Epidemic Intelligence Service had been doing, if they knew that such a service existed.

The CDC deploys the EIS, as Diana Robeletto Scalera of the CDC Foundation explains, “to ensure epidemics in other countries do not hit American soil.” EIS disease detectives are “are the ones responsible and they take this role very seriously.”

The EIS had boots on the ground in China, but the disease detectives failed to stop the virus that causes COVID-19 from showing up in America. When the virus did show up, nobody from the EIS told the American people how that that had happened, how the EIS might have failed, or anything the EIS knew about the true origin of the virus.

The “service” itself dates back to the Korean War but in recent decades, considerable mission creep has become evident. As UC Berkeley molecular biologist Peter Duesberg noted in Inventing the AIDS Virus, the EIS came to be known as the nation’s “medical CIA.”

EIS vets have worked in the CDC other federal agencies, international bodies such as the World Health Organization, and they are also embedded in the media. EIS vet Lawrence Altman became a medical journalist for the New York Times and Bruce Dan served as a medical editor with ABC News and the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association.

Such EIS activists rarely advertise their affiliation, and after the spring of 1993 the EIS membership directory was withdrawn from public view. As Duesberg learned, EIS members “constitute an informal surveillance network,” and can “act as unrecognized advocates for the CDC viewpoint, whether as media journalists or as prominent physicians.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/pushback-against-soft-despotism-comin

Over the last two years, many of us have been surprised and troubled at how eagerly millions of citizens have surrendered their freedoms to the shifting, contradictory, nakedly politicized diktats of various “experts” and government agencies. Coerced vaccinations, boosters, masks, and social distancing continue to be mandated and just as eagerly obeyed, even in the case of the mild Omicron covid variant. The technocratic Left currently ruling the country has wrung every ounce of unconstitutional power from the sovereign people, a large cohort of whom, especially the cognitive elites, have willingly gone along with every new crisis and command.

As the year ends, signs of a pushback are multiplying. But will such resistance reach the critical mass of voters necessary for liberating us from such “soft despotism” and its wardens?

We shouldn’t be surprised that progressives have seized the opportunity to aggrandize themselves through serial changes on the pretext of an exaggerated crisis. It has long been a truism of history that, as James Madison said in 1788, “there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachment of power, than by sudden usurpations.”

Nearly half a century later, Alexis de Tocqueville foresaw an even more insidious stealth despotism that could arise in American democracy: “An immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure [the people’s] gratifications and to watch over their fate.” And he prophesized that the bureaucratic regulatory state would be the instrument of this “soft despotism”: a power “absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild” that “covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform.” The goal is “to keep [the people] in perpetual childhood,” for this power is “well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing.”

The last hundred years have seen such a regime gradually become reality. Crises such as the Great Depression, Two World Wars, and other conflicts and recessions provided the pretexts for expanding and concentrating the powers of federal agencies and their “network of small complicated rules.” And like children, too many citizens have accepted these encroachments, willingly ceding their autonomy and freedom to overseers who bribe them with the redistribution of other people’s money, and with promises “alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate” from the cradle to the grave ––what we call “entitlements” but think are unalienable rights.