RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thespectator.com/politics/united-states-10-4-president-biden/

In 1927, Sigmund Freud published a book about religion called Die Zukunft einer Illusion (The Future of an Illusion). As a contribution to the understanding of religion, it is, like much of Freud’s work, both banal and outrageous. But it occurs to me that its catchy title as well as its main thesis — religion, Freud wrote, was invented to fulfill “the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind” — has a certain pertinence to the large-scale entertainment now being offered to the public by Democrats eager to salvage the reputation of President Joe Biden.

The narrative, according to which Joe Biden was “sharp and intensely probing,” had been assiduously maintained by mendacious Democrats and their sycophantic lackeys in the media since before Biden became president. Few people outside that circle of magical thinking actually believed in Biden’s cognitive competence. I and many others have been calling attention to his debility for years. But the illusion has been cynically cultivated by uniparty lieutenants much as the illusory nostrums of communist solidarity were propped up by the Soviets as their regime teetered towards is final, senescent collapse in the late 1980s. Few people believed the illusion; everyone in power said they believed it, even though they could taste the cynicism and disbelief among the masses they sought to control. That curious dialectic of disbelief and acquiescence was part of the corrosive rust that eventually precipitated the collapse of the regime.

Has the uniparty changed its song about Joe Biden? There are signs that it has. In the immediate aftermath of Biden’s disastrous debate with Donald Trump last week, the narrative broke in two, or at least seemed to break in two. On one side there was horror and — word of the moment — “panic” among the Dems. The New York Times led the way in calling for Biden — for the good of the country — to resign. At the same time, there was considerable push back, encapsulated comically in the observation that dementia Joe “had a cold,” hence his gibbering incoherence. St. Barack weighed in with what appeared to be a supportive post of X: everyone has bad debate nights, he said, but “this election is still a choice between someone who has fought for ordinary people his entire life [Obama meant Biden, in case you were wondering] and someone who only cares about himself [the bad orange man].”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/two-scotus-cases-show-how-an-unaccountable-administrative-state-hurts-ordinary-people/

After the U.S. Supreme Court curtailed the powers of federal agencies in two cases last week, progressive critics predictably complained that the decisions favored “big business,” “corporate interests” and “the wealthy and powerful.” That gloss overlooked the reality that people with little wealth or power frequently are forced to contend with overweening bureaucrats who invent their own authority and play by their own rules.

In the more consequential case, the court repudiated the Chevron doctrine, which required that judges defer to a federal agency’s “permissible” interpretation of an “ambiguous” statute. The majority said that rule, which the court established in 1984, was unworkable, creating “an eternal fog of uncertainty” about what the law allows or requires, and fundamentally misguided, allowing the executive branch to usurp a judicial function.

Although People for the American Way perceived a win for “the corporate interests that have been itching to gut the power of federal agencies to protect our health and welfare,” the dispute at the center of the case complicates that picture. Two family-owned fishing operations objected to onerous regulatory fees they said had never been authorized by Congress.

In a concurring opinion, Justice Neil Gorsuch noted other examples of vulnerable supplicants who suffer when agencies are free to rewrite the laws under which they operate. He cited cases involving a veteran seeking disability benefits and an immigrant fighting to remain in the country.

Because of an arbitrary rule the Department of Veterans Affairs invented for its own convenience, Thomas Buffington lost three years of disability benefits the government owed him. Alfonzo De Niz Robles faced deportation and separation from his American wife and children after the Board of Immigration Appeals overturned a judicial precedent on which he and many other immigrants had relied for relief.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/collaborator-intelligence-agency/

It has now emerged that Gina Haspel, director of the CIA from 2018-2021, was aware of the October, 2020 letter from 51 “intelligence community” officials charging that Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation.” The signatories included three former CIA directors –Mike Hayden, Leon Panetta, and John Brennan, plus acting CIA directors John McLaughlin and Mike Morel. A full 41 signers were from the CIA – some still on contract to the agency at the time.  In 2022, many of the signatories refused comment on the letter or ducked the question.

Asked in early June if he would retract his signature, former director of national intelligence  James Clapper said “no.” In the recent debate with Donald Trump, Joe Biden claimed that the laptop was a “Russian plant,” which he too knows is false.

As these events revealed, American intelligence officials are willing to deploy their spycraft on the domestic scene for partisan purposes. This failure goes back to events 50 years ago, as explained by Edward Jay Epstein  who, before he passed away at 88 in January, reprised many of his books and articles in Assume Nothing: Encounters with Assassins, Spies, Presidents, and Would-be Masters of the Universe.

Epstein’s Deception: The Invisible War Between the KGB and CIA broke new ground but was released in 1989 when the Soviet empire was breaking apart. The book landed in remainder bins, because readers thought the invisible war was over. It wasn’t, and Deception remains more relevant than ever.

Epstein’s primary source was James Jesus Angleton, who served in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), forerunner to the CIA. In the style of a fly fisherman, Angleton liked to play Soviet defectors Anatoli Golitsyn and Yuri Nosenko for all they were worth. Angleton needed to know if he Soviets’ deception loop included persons inside the CIA who could tell how the other side was interpreting the operations. CIA bosses were unwilling to believe they could be penetrated and in 1974, amid charges that the CIA was spying on Americans, Angleton was fired. For Epstein, this effectively turned the CIA inside out.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/07/the_spirit_of_1776.html

Ah, 1776 — a time when the ruling aristocracy taxed Americans without their say, destroyed printing presses of those publishers demanding liberty, and jailed outspoken critics for treason.  How things have changed — not!  If there were one indispensable truth to be learned from America’s glorious Independence, it is this: governments do not give freedom; they take freedom away.  

Any smooth-talking politician who pretends that government should be praised for the “gifts” it bestows upon the people is a smiling agent of the Crown fashioning new chains for citizens to wear.  Laws, taxes, and regulations do not liberate human beings; they are the bricks and mortar trapping us inside ever-smaller cells.

Government is the destroyer of liberty.  Bureaucracies do not light the flame of freedom; they snuff freedom’s light out.  People alone (separate from the organizing strictures of the State) secure their liberty by pushing back against and restraining the otherwise ever-growing oppression of power-hungry governments.  Citizens hold the keys to their own prison cells.  They must only find the courage to open up their doors and walk outside.  This was true in 1776; it is no less true today.

What is remarkable about the period leading up to the American Revolution is how quickly public sentiment shifted.  By and large, colonists saw themselves as loyal servants of the English Crown until, suddenly, they were not.  They celebrated King George III’s birthday each year.  They formed militias to aid their king in wars against his European foes.  As late as 1775, few Americans desired anything so radical as political Independence.  The idea seemed far-fetched.  

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/07/the_communist_plan_that_has_subverted_our_intel_agencies.html

On June 21, the FBI declassified a 1999 video of Saudi intelligence agent Omar al-Bayoumi casing the Capitol and other Washington D.C. sites for the 9/11 attack.  How, then, did the CIA-FBI 9/11 report conclude in 2005 that Saudi Arabia was not involved in the attack?  And why did the FBI maintain — for 20 years, before its recent retraction — that al-Bayoumi wasn’t a Saudi agent?

Such willful deception, practiced increasingly by American intelligence, is the subject of former CIA agent J. Michael Waller’s new book Big Intel: How the CIA and FBI Went from Cold War Heroes to Deep State Villains.  The dramatic writing and detailing, backed by the author’s experience in espionage — in Central America and the U.S.S.R., and against jihadist conspiracies — make it a page-turner.  In 37 chapters, plus additional sections and a reading list, it presents an alarming history of how a century-old Marxist campaign has succeeded in ideologically subverting America and its intel agencies.

The results of that success are seen in today’s leftist street protests, the DEI obsession, and prevalent anti-Israel sentiment; also, in the saturation of academia and bureaucracy by Marxists.  Not so evident, because intel agencies operate covertly, is their transmogrification from valiant fighters for American freedom to an emerging state police harrying those who oppose the acceptable narratives du jour.