RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2024/04/11/dei-cronyism-and-woke-grifters/

When ideology replaces meritocracy or provides immunity from the consequences of illegal behavior, systemic mediocrity follows.

Under toxic National Socialism, Stalinism, and Maoism, millions of cronies and grifters mouthed party lines in hopes that their approved ideology would allow them to advance their careers and excuse their lawbreaking.

The same thing has happened with the woke movement and the now-huge Diversity/Equity/Inclusion conglomerate.

Grifters and opportunists mask their selfish agendas under the cloak of neo-Marxist care for the underprivileged or victimized minorities. Meanwhile, they seek to profit illegally as if they were old-fashioned crony capitalists.

During the disastrous COVID-19 lockdown, California governor Gavin Newsom pontificated about leveraging the quarantine to ensure greater equality: “There is opportunity for reimagining a [more] progressive era as it [relates] to capitalism…We see this as an opportunity to reshape the way we do business and how we govern.”

Meanwhile, Newsom did not seem very “progressive” when he was caught in one of California’s most expensive restaurants dining with sidekick lobbyists while violating the very mask and social distancing rules he had mandated for 40 million others.

Newsom also bragged about social equity when he signed a new California law mandating $20 an hour for fast-food workers—while many of his own employees at his various company-controlled eateries made only $16 an hour.

And he allegedly gave a unique exemption from his wage law to one particular bakery/restaurant chain, Panera, whose owner is an old friend and major campaign contributor.

Newsom apparently feels that the more progressively he postures, the less he’ll be called out for his own hypocrisy and self-interested agendas.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/no-more-special-counsels

Few innovations in American law enforcement have done more damage than “independent” prosecutors. Independent and special counsels have upended every presidential administration that has encountered them. They have never yielded benefits commensurate with their costs. They should be abolished.

From my perch at the White House Counsel’s Office, I was a front-row observer of, and direct participant in, Robert Mueller’s investigation of Donald Trump. What I saw then confirmed to me the fatal flaws of the special-counsel regime—flaws that, by now, should be obvious to everyone.

The current special-counsel regulation dates to 1999, the year Congress allowed to expire the Ethics in Government Act of 1978, which inaugurated the role of independent counsel. That 1978 statute, a post-Nixon ethics reform, created “independent counsels” who, once appointed, wielded the “full power and independent authority to exercise all investigative and prosecutorial functions and powers of the Department of Justice.” These independent counsels reported to nobody, and they could only be removed for “good cause” and “by the personal action of the Attorney General.”

By the turn of the century, this regime had achieved bipartisan notoriety, spurring multiple Supreme Court cases, prompting perhaps Justice Antonin Scalia’s finest opinion (his solo dissent in Morrison v. Olson), and enabling the endless prosecutorial stalking of executive-branch officials.

Congress’s letting the independent-counsel statute expire should have ended the matter. Yet rather than make a clean break, the Department of Justice made a grave, if understandable, error. It adopted a regulation maintaining independent prosecutors but housing them within the Department of Justice under the supervision of the Attorney General. The department believed it was improving the lapsed statute by continuing to exempt these “special counsels” from the attorney general’s “day-to-day supervision,” while making such prosecutors—unlike independent counsels—ultimately answerable to the attorney general for their investigative and prosecutorial actions.

Experience has proved this system to be no better. For one thing, it does not solve the biggest problem with independent prosecutorial offices—that prosecutors and agents join teams dedicated to pursuing a specific person or group of people. In these supremely political investigations, people who are politically hostile to the investigatory target invariably jump aboard.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-serious-business-of-comedy/

Late last year at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s annual Restoration Weekend event, Seth Dillon, CEO of the wildly popular, controversial satire site Babylon Bee, gave a keynote speech and knocked it out of the ballpark. He was entertaining and inspirational, a great Christian conservative culture warrior doing courageous work defending our First Amendment rights and skewering the idiotic madness of the left’s agenda.

I made sure to invite him on the Freedom Center podcast I host called The Right Take, where I have conversations with important conservative thinkers, writers, pundits, and storytellers about the intersection of politics and culture. On January 11th, the man behind the Bee, “the definitive source of fake news you can trust,” appeared on The Right Take and did not disappoint. His insights into, and tales of fighting, the culture war were such that I thought it worth posting an excerpt from our conversation in case you missed it or just don’t like listening to podcasts. Check it out below.

Mark Tapson: Seth, welcome to The Right Take.

Seth Dillon: Thanks for having me.

MT: I know you’re a busy guy and – I’m sorry, I don’t mean to assume your gender – so I’ll get right to it. In the book Rules for Radicals by the late, left-wing strategist Saul Alinsky, rule number five reads, “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. There’s no defense against it. It’s irrational. It’s infuriating.” Now, the left has wielded this weapon successfully against its political enemies for decades.

But the right has gone much of that time with no counterpart. I mean, in recent years, our side has had Greg Gutfeld, and he’s basically been it. Meanwhile, the left has had every late-night talk show host, basically the entire entertainment industry aligned against the right, with no real heavy-hitting pushback from our side until the Babylon Bee came along. And I think one of the important things the Bee has done for the culture war is that it’s proven that the left can dish it out, but they can’t take it, can they?

SD: They don’t like to be the object of mockery. There’s a number of reasons for that. I think that one of the reasons they don’t like mockery is because mockery does effectively undermine their ideas and their arguments, and they don’t like that, so they try to put a stop to it. We see them behaving like tyrants all the time.