RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2021/01/the-desperate-twilight-of-donald-trump/

” Why the US Supreme Court decided Texas lacked standing to challenge voter fraud in other states will never be known beyond the justices’ curt refusal to take up the matter. With hindsight’s benefit it was the moment Donald Trump should have accepted grim reality and conceded defeat — defeat not in a bent election but in his doomed efforts to overturn its tainted result.”

“Well OK, apart from deregulation, fuller employment, cheaper energy, return of industry, the First Step Act, standing up to China, rejection of the Paris agreement, control of illegal immigration and a Covid vaccine in record time, what has Trump ever done for us?”

“Given us peace.”

“Ah, shuddup!”

In the build-up last week to the US Presidential inauguration, Sky News (and probably others) reported that “tonight there are more troops in DC than there are in Iraq and Afghanistan combined.”

I wonder if anyone appreciated the irony of that comparison, only made possible by the fact that President Trump, in line with one of his many electoral commitments, had gradually withdrawn US troops from overseas deployment and, unlike all many of his immediate predecessors, declined to be involved in any new wars.  And he did this at the same time as he defeated ISIS and junked the Iran nuclear deal.

Trump’s record of achievement is considerable but his detractors ignore that and point to his crassness, his misogyny, his stubbornness and many other personal flaws to argue that he should never have been President. He is now accused of dividing the country by trashing sacred public institutions.  It is said he was unsuitable to hold the office because he did not act in a Presidential manner.

It’s often said that newly appointed leaders all make mistakes and have to be given some leeway to ‘grow into the role’. Unfortunately, Trump was never afforded that luxury. It was not his policies that were targeted but his very election.  He suffered unprecedented personal abuse from day one.  One of the sacred institutions of the US is the Presidency itself.  The man has always been treated with respect because of the office he holds.  Not so with Trump.  It was the Democrats who trashed that – the most vivid example of which was Nancy Pelosi standing behind the President and tearing up his State of the Union address. 

https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/16/a-party-of-faction-and-fantasy/

“It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once.”— David Hume

There are many lessons to be drawn from the 2020 election. The transformation of the United States of America from a republic into an oligarchy is a large and portentous lesson. 

Why are there some 21,000 troops and oodles of razor wire in Washington D.C.? 

Really, it is an amazing, not to say an ominous, spectacle. As one Twitter wit put it, Donald Trump brought peace to the Middle East, Joe Biden brought war to Washington. 

The ostensible reason for turning the capital of the United States into an armed camp is to protect the mostly virtual inauguration of China’s Big Guy, Joe Biden, against the onslaught of all those “right-wing extremists,” “white supremacists,” etc. that the magical magus Donald Trump is mobilizing through secret “dog whistles” and other shamanistic practices. 

The trouble is, all those “right-wing extremists,” like President Trump’s supposed “incitement” of the crowd at his “Save America” rally on January 6, are a figment of Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer’s addled imaginations. Yes, that meme is assiduously, not to say preposterously, circulated and amplified by the media, social and anti-social alike. But those threatening hordes do not exist.

Just so, the violent mob scene at the Capitol on January 6 was not an “insurrection” or an act of “domestic terrorism” but rather, as Tucker Carlson put it, a political protest that “got out of hand.” 

Here’s something else that has got out of hand: the American political order. 

https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/16/locked-down-and-locked-out/

As a coinage goes, “Deep Tech” is superior to “Big Tech.” It better captures the deforming power and tentacular reach into state and civil society of the high-tech monopolists. 

That reach notwithstanding, many libertarian-minded and “small-government conservatives” (a contradiction in terms, considering the national debt is $28 trillion) have been stalwart defenders of the rights of Deep Tech to deploy unprovoked financial force to kneecap those users who don’t conform to the tech oligarchy’s monolithic image of the new Ideal Citizen.

David French, writer at The Dispatch—and one of the many political dwarfs tossed periodically at Donald Trump by NeverTrumpsters (hey, dwarf tossing is a cruel sport)—emphasized the immutable right of private platforms to deplatform (limit and throttle) “millions of Americans who engage in wrongthink,” the president included.   

Let Dissidents Eat Cake 

Let the disenfranchised—those of us who’re routinely blocked from being able to grow our appeal and peddle our intellectual products, now fearful that our books will be digitally burned—create platforms of their own, exhorts French, from the comfort of his conformingly banal, pixelated perches. 

“Find other off-ramps,” exhorted podcaster David Rubin. 

Coming from the conformist mediocracy that runs Conservatism Inc., this cynical suggestion is the equivalent of, “Let them eat cake,” which in practice means “let political dissidents go dark or resort to a barter economy.” 

You might not know it, but financial deplatforming has been a staple of many a long-suffering American dissident’s working life. Financial deplatforming is when you are barred from banking or transacting via PayPal. It is an “existential threat to free speech in America,” inveighed Revolver News. 

This observation both trivializes what’s afoot and misses the point, for financial deplatforming teeters on violating another’s natural right to make a living. 

https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/satfbi-state-officials-aware-early-steele-made-major

Shortly before the FBI used his dossier to secure a surveillance warrant targeting the Trump campaign, Christopher Steele met with State Department officials and relayed information suggesting Moscow was running an operation out of the Russian consulate in Miami.

There was just one problem with his intelligence: The Russians didn’t have a consulate in Florida’s largest city.

The anecdote, captured in contemporaneous memos and newly released testimony, illustrates just how bad some of Steele’s intelligence reporting was and how widely that was known inside the FBI, even as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court was being assured by the bureau that Steele was deemed credible and there was no derogatory information about his work.

Kenneth Laycock, the FBI’s current Executive Assistant Director, was a section chief for Eurasian intelligence in fall 2016 when Steele made a visit to Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Kathleen Kavalec at the State Department.

During the October 2016 meeting, Steele admitted he was leaking to the news media while working as an FBI informant, a violation of his confidential human source agreement. (He later was terminated for it.) And he also relayed the anecdote about the Russian operation out of the Miami consulate, which officials immediately flagged as false, according to Kavalec’s own notes of the meeting.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/americas-new-corporate-tyranny

“Oh, and one more thing. If you thought this essay was worth reading, you might wish to print out a paper copy before it vanishes from the Internet.”

The American political and legal systems are working just fine, despite a few hiccups. Meanwhile, American corporations are depriving citizens of basic rights and freedoms and destroying our democracy.

Imagine that you are a resident in a low-population county in 1950. You run afoul of the small group of families who are effectively in charge. Your political and legal rights are unimpaired. You are free to vote and you are free to sue in municipal and county and state courts. The police treat you with unfailing courtesy and respect.

But strange things start to happen. The only newspaper in the county refuses to take ads for your business. The only bank in the county announces that it is closing your account and calling in your mortgage. Your car breaks down and the only garage and service shop in the county refuses to repair it. The only general store in the county refuses your patronage and the few restaurants in the county turn you away at the door. After you lose your business to the newspaper advertising boycott, you try to get a job, but discover that you have been blacklisted by all of the employers in the county. Nobody will hire you.

Are you free, in this scenario, just because there is no official interference with your voting rights and your civil rights? Private power is power, no less than government power. You can be immobilized, impoverished, humiliated, tormented, and perhaps driven to suicide by hostile businesses and banks in an otherwise functioning liberal democracy, just as surely as by the police or military in a dictatorship.