RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2023/06/25/a-catastrophic-implosion-of-the-rule-of-law/

Like some other commentators, I have in recent years several times quoted a famous exchange from Ernest Hemingway’s first novel, The Sun Also Rises. Recent developments in the Biden family money laundering scheme, the implosion of a boutique underwater expedition to the Titanic, and a possible coup in Russia prompt me to wheel it out once again. “‘How did you go bankrupt?’ Bill asked. ‘Two ways,’ Mike said. ‘Gradually, then suddenly.’”

It fits the long-running drama over Hunter Biden’s laptop from hell, I think. Miranda Devine broke news of that scandal in the New York Post in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election. It languished in the doldrums of official nonrecognition for years as the regime went into overdrive to keep people, especially voters, from paying any attention to it. 

Gradually, however, the truth leaked out. First, the authenticity of the laptop was acknowledged. Turns out it was not “Russian disinformation,” as those 51 intelligence experts insisted. Nope, it belonged to Hunter all right. At first, the public was titillated by all the sex-drugs-and-rock-n-roll that pervaded that digital trove. Gradually, very gradually, however, the publicly important stuff—the money angle with news of foreign payments apparently to dear-old-dad from various foreigners—began leaking out. 

Then suddenly, just this last week, the House Ways and Means Committee began dropping bombs. 

Material from an IRS whistleblower—no, two IRS whistleblowers—got fed into the mix and we got such Hunter Biden classics as this WhatsApp message from July 2017 addressed to Henry Zhao, a member of the Chinese Communist Party and, wouldn’t you know it, a business partner of Hunter’s: 

I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment [the commitment being millions of the crispest] made has not been fulfilled. Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight, And, Z, fi [sic] get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction. I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/06/25/what-the-left-has-left-for-america/

The present-day Left bears little resemblance to the old civil-libertarian, integrationist Democratic Party that existed from the 1960s through 2000. 

The antecedents to its current madness were once previewed in the old party’s extremist wing of campus radicals of the 1960s and 1970s. They were accentuated by Black Lives Matter and Antifa during the Obama years, forged during the COVID lockdown and George Floyd riots, and polished during the era of Trump derangement syndrome. 

On almost every issue, Democrats have repudiated their prior reverence for the Supreme Court. 

They distrust individual liberty and free expression. 

They now worship the money and clout of corporate America. 

Racial ecumenicalism and integration are seen as passé. 

There is little need for borders to protect vulnerable American workers, given the advantages of inviting in millions of poor illegal immigrants without audits. 

Democrats have transmogrified into a Soviet-style socialist binary of rich and poor, run by an elite nomenklatura that dictates its orders to its foot soldiers of the underclass. An entire new left-wing vocabulary—clingers, deplorables, irredeemables, dregs, chumps, ultra-MAGA, semi-fascists—has come to express their hatred of the middle class. 

On the Supreme Court 

The Left has adopted Franklin Roosevelt’s once infamous (but now sanctified) 1937 approach to destroying the autonomy of the Supreme Court by threatening to pack it. 

Note how any means necessary are justified in their attacks. Swarm the conservative justices’ private homes to leverage future opinions, with the assurance that an ethically bankrupt Justice Department will never enforce existing laws prohibiting such intimidation of the justices. 

Have the Democrat Senate minority leader scream threats to justices by name at the very doors of the court and at the head of a mob—promising to individual justices a whirlwind to reap and unrecognizable forces that will soon hit them. 

Wage ad hominem attacks on traditional justices in the media. Allege they are corrupt, on the theory that they are limited in their means of defense and any rebuttal will lack the wherewithal of the original unfounded smears. 

Talk nonstop about changing the number of the court justices in order to intimidate conservative justices to move leftward. Move left or be packed! 

Argue for nullifying Supreme Court decisions if they lack legal sanction, given the conservative majority of the Court. 

Drive down the Court’s approval ratings in polls by nonstop screams that the justices cruelly hurt left-wing constituencies. 

Claim that the presidency and the Senate, both in leftist hands, are the true voices of the people, rather than ossified edicts of heartless conservative justices. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/storming-our-castles/

Around 90 A.D., the Roman historian Tacitus traveled through Germania observing the lives of its inhabitants. It was quite an eye-opening journey for him. Among his many observations, he noted how the Germanic people chose to live in small separate dwellings, separate from even extended family. Often these dwellings would house just a mother, father, and their children.  That seems normal to us today, but it certainly wasn’t to Tacitus and the Romans, or much of the civilized world at that time.

Authors Michael Lotus and James Bennett wrote of this in their groundbreaking book “America 3.0: Rebooting American Prosperity in the 21st Century Why America’s Greatest Days Are Yet to Come.” The Germanic tribes would take this radical cultural trait with them, when in the 5th Century A.D. they would conquer Britannia. In fact, the German tribe of Angles would give England its future name. While this cultural trait would not remain as powerful in Germania or in much of Europe, it would further migrate, most notably to America, Canada, and Australia.  The idea of owning a single-family home is not unknown to the world, of course, but it planted its deepest cultural seeds here in the United States. The epitome of the American Dream is to own one’s home – a home is a man’s castle.

Why the history lesson? Because the yearning to own one’s own home is under threat and the ability to buy and own a piece of land in America is under intense attack from the Left. But then what isn’t under attack from the Left. Our communities, families, churches, every aspect of middle-class lifestyle is seen as an obstacle to the Left’s utopian dream of a new society, a roadblock in the efforts to radically transform society.

The Left is now pushing policies that promote a “densification” of living. These new “smart cities” include dense living in small, cramped dwellings in cities where the need and use of a car are eliminated. The question of what people may want becomes irrelevant. That some younger people choose to live in dense living arrangements in cities is often true. But most younger people, when they marry and have families, choose to live outside of dense cities; they vote with their feet and choose to live in suburbs.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2023/06/25/merrick-garland-may-be-impeached-over-latest-whistleblower-claims-n1706168

I’ve been advocating for Attorney General Merrick Garland to be impeached for some time now, but it finally looks like House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) is getting on board with the idea in light of recent whistleblower accusations.

On Sunday, McCarthy indicated in a tweet that the House GOP could initiate an impeachment inquiry against the scandal-plagued Garland if IRS Criminal Supervisory Special Agent Gary A. Shapley Jr.’s claims that U.S. Attorney David Weiss wanted to appoint a special counsel for the Department of Justice’s investigation into Hunter Biden prove to be accurate.

“We need to get to the facts, and that includes reconciling these clear disparities. U.S. Attorney David Weiss must provide answers to the House Judiciary Committee,” McCarthy tweeted. “If the whistleblowers’ allegations are true, this will be a significant part of a larger impeachment inquiry into Merrick Garland’s weaponization of DOJ.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/06/26/just-36-agree-with-biden-that-the-economy-is-strong-ii-tipp-poll/

Once upon a time, Democratic presidents understood how important a healthy economy was. President Bill Clinton and his advisers won two elections living by the mantra, “It’s the economy, stupid.” Get that right, they thought, and everything else follows. But today, Americans think President Joe Biden doesn’t get it, June’s I&I/TIPP Poll shows.

The online I&I/TIPP Poll, taken from May 31-June 2 and including responses from 1,358 adults nationwide, asked the following: “To what extent do you agree or disagree with the following statement: The American economy remains strong, as it transitions to steady and stable growth.”

That statement, by the way, was not made up. It’s a direct quotation of what Biden told Americans after the Commerce Department reported in April that real GDP growth in the first quarter was a disappointing 1.1%. It has since been revised up slightly to 1.3%. We did not, when surveying Americans, identify who made that statement.

Do Americans agree with Biden that the economy’s strong, steady and stable? Overall, I&I/TIPP found, 55% of Americans disagreed that the economy “remains strong,” while just 36% agreed. The poll has a margin of error of +/-2.7 percentage points.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-espionage-acts-ugly-un-american-history-trump-spies-leakers-law-america-dissent-c9ab63f7?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

Donald Trump is charged with violating the Espionage Act, one of the most un-American laws Congress ever enacted. President Woodrow Wilson set the tone in his 1915 State of the Union address: “There are citizens of the United States . . . who have poured the poison of disloyalty into the arteries of our national life; who have sought to bring the authority and good name of our Government into contempt,” he asserted. “Such creatures of passion, disloyalty, and anarchy must be crushed out.”

Congress obliged two years later by enacting the Espionage Act with the express purpose of quashing dissent. The law criminalized not only spying for enemies, but also any attempt to encourage “disloyalty” among military ranks. Prosecutors enforced the act aggressively, using it to imprison hundreds of antiwar activists and political dissenters. The Socialist former presidential candidate Eugene Debs was sentenced to 10 years in prison in part for denouncing the Espionage Act itself. The law was also used to charge religious leaders who preached pacifism, newspaper editors who republished German accounts of the war, and even the producer of “Spirit of ’76,” a film about the Revolutionary War that portrayed Britain, a World War I ally, in an unfavorable light.

Those who support prosecuting Mr. Trump claim the Espionage Act of 1917 bears little resemblance to the law today. The act was “once used to stamp out dissent,” the New York Times claims, but today punishes only “spies and unauthorized leakers.”

The 1917 law criminalized, among other things, willfully attempting to cause “insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, refusal of duty in the military.” The statute has been amended over time. Today it criminalizes sharing, gathering or refusing to return “information relating to the national defense” that “could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation.”

The present law is arguably more expansive than the 1917 act. The original act’s most expansive provisions applied only in times of war. Prosecutors were required to prove that a defendant willfully sought to harm the U.S. military. Neither constraint applies to the current version of the law. Nor is there any requirement that the defendant has acted in bad faith, that the relevant government “information” be classified, that the information ever be shared with anyone, or even that the person charged be a government official.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/hunter-biden-fair-tax-share-fraud-irs-special-agent-whistleblower-charges-misdemeanor-scheme-d8813133?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

President Biden has campaigned far and wide that America’s rich should pay their “fair” share of taxes, and he’s giving the Internal Revenue Service billions more to enforce it. Does he include his son Hunter among the rich who should pay what they owe?

The question is highly relevant after last week’s under-reported testimony from two IRS whistleblowers about their investigation of Hunter’s taxes. Hunter agreed to plead guilty last week to two misdemeanor charges of “willful failure” to pay some $200,000 in tax for years 2017 and 2018. But the two whistleblowers, testifying under oath before the House Ways and Means Committee, revealed details of Hunter’s tax maneuvering that make a mockery of his father’s tax moralizing.**

The agents reported that an IRS team in January 2022 finalized a document of some 80 pages recommending that Hunter be charged with tax violations for each of his six tax returns from 2014 through 2019.

IRS supervisory special agent Gary Shapley said Hunter’s 2014 and 2015 returns involved a “scheme to evade his income taxes through a partnership with a convicted felon.” At issue was the $83,000 a month Hunter received to sit on the board of Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company. The second (anonymous) whistleblower explained that in 2014 Hunter arranged a series of “sham” transactions so he “didn’t report any of the money he earned from Burisma”—about $400,000 in 2014.

The whistleblowers say Hunter directed Burisma to pay his money to Rosemont Seneca Bohai, or RSB, an entity owned by his business partner Devon Archer, who was convicted of fraud in 2018. They say RSB would send the money to Hunter, who then “booked it as a loan.” One obvious tax problem, explains the second whistleblower, is that “you can’t loan yourself your own money.”