RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/david-solway-2/2022/12/12/people-of-the-lie-n1652934

In several previous articles, I addressed what I believe to be the crucial issue of our time, namely, the institutionalization of the lie in culture and politics. The situation shows no sign of abating and indeed grows more alarming with every passing day. The integrity of the information we receive about domestic and world affairs has been degraded almost beyond recognition. Reality has been denatured. For the Lie has become a systemic and indelible part of public and institutional life. The dilemma we now confront, as D. Stephen Long points out in an important book dealing with the relation between relativism and authoritarianism, is speaking truth in a post-truth world.

But the problem goes further than relativism; rather, it involves a substitution of absolutes, of an assumed truth for a genuine truth, replacing objective fact and data with a new paradigm of subterfuge, fable, and casuistry under the rubric of “truth.” When lying acquires something like constitutional status, it becomes a phenomenon so deep it can be described, adopting the popular saying, as “turtles all the way down,” now the title of an indispensable new book on vaccine science and myth, which reveals “how ineffectively and dishonestly the COVID pandemic was handled.”

In fact, a climate of fraud and deception is now omnipresent in all walks of life and endeavor, personal and professional. As Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben writes in The Mystery of Evil, power and institutions are delegitimated today “because the powers have lost all awareness of their legitimacy,” which is why “illegality is so diffuse and generalized.” In other words, lying has assumed the authority of law.

The “People of the Lie,” in psychiatrist M. Scott Peck’s telling phrase, are now everywhere to be found, inhabiting what we might call the “moral infrastructure” of our era. They comprise not only the elite or parasite class in the corridors of both elected and non-elected officialdom, the federal agencies, the administrative bureaucracies, the corporate world, academia, the medical and pseudo-scientific professions, the suborned media, the diverse nonprofits and aspiring Technates like the World Economic Forum, the radical feminist sorority, “Global Warming” propagandists, much of the judiciary that labors to pervert and annul prosecutorial ethics and legal obligations in our courts, but also the vast body of ordinary citizens whose lives and everyday practices have been infected by the virus of the Lie.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/12/the_commercial_impacts_of_covid_will_last_for_years.html

Have you noticed that things have changed in our country over the last three years?

In 2019, my truck broke down.  I got it into the shop the next day to be fixed.  In 2022, I needed a mechanic to service the brakes on one of our cars.  It took three weeks to get the car into a garage.

We also had a fender-bender this year.  It took two months to get an appointment for an estimate — not even to get someone to actually fix the damage.  The insurance adjuster just sighed and said that was pretty normal these days.  I halfway expected him to ask who John Galt is.

In 2019, we could go to the local diner and get a good meal with good service.  In 2022, the service at the same diner is slow because of limited staff.  Three quarters of the menu items aren’t available because food deliveries are weeks overdue.

Those are minor annoyances.  Things get a bit more serious when we look at the medical industry.  In 2019, I needed a new general practitioner (G.P.).  I got in to see one almost immediately.  In 2022, my wife needed a new G.P.  Most weren’t accepting new patients, and the doctor who was had a four-month waiting list to get an appointment.

Even worse, I found myself in the E.R. with a heart condition this summer.  The E.R. doctor referred me to a cardiologist.  It took two months to get an appointment to see him and another six months to get on the surgical schedule for the procedure I needed.

Are you noticing a pattern?  Prior to COVID, everything worked.  After COVID, every industry is struggling to meet customer needs.  Businesses have people waiting in line to give them money but are unable to provide the services those customers want to buy.  Don’t they want the money?

Everybody’s familiar with the problems the airline industry experienced in 2022.  Flight cancelations and delays have been commonplace — not because of weather or mechanical issues, but due to a lack of flight crews.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/minnesota-hamas-linked-cair-comes-out-in-favor-of-racism-in-education-grants/

The deputy director of the Minnesota chapter of the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Mohamed Ibrahim, insinuates that the discussion by the Faribault School Board on whether or not to refuse a grant is based in racism.

Just because CAIR came to the meetings, it gets its brand displayed on the broadcast and is treated as if it has something of value to offer.

This is a teachable moment for all of us that we need to be vigilant about these attempts to really defund BIPOC [Black, Indigenous and other People of Color].

There are no “attempts” or need to be “vigilant” about the board meeting depriving BIPOCs of an education. They are questioning a poorly written piece of legislation.

Minnesota authorities and local newscasters need to take responsibility for their role in what became nationwide rioting: here is a video of people in Santa Monica, California, almost 2,000 miles away from Minneapolis, dragged out of their cars by George Floyd protestors and beaten in the street.

Minnesota did not kill George Floyd, but they did bring us the riots, and could do it again.

Although CAIR’s Jaylani Hussein was instigating trouble both before and after the George Floyd riots, he continues to receive favorable coverage, even when positioning himself potentially to trigger a large-scale event.

Hussein brought a mobile public address system to the five-year memorial for Jamar Clark, whose police shooting sparked massive protests at the time. Hussein lashed the crowd for not doing “something,” and bellowed into the microphone:

We FAAAILED!

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19211/elon-musk-twitter-files

It was not “Russian disinformation.” Nor was it “unsafe.” The executives running Twitter in the 20 days before the 2020 presidential election clearly knew that, and tried to find other justifications for what amounted to raw censorship.

Twitter’s bias in censoring or banning conservative accounts for “hate speech” while happily servicing accounts for Iran’s “Supreme Leader” and the Taliban is a running joke. In a series of secretly recorded interviews with Twitter employees, Project Veritas had already confirmed that “shadow-banning,” manipulating the number of followers shown by certain accounts, and selectively “de-boosting” certain tweets in its algorithms was a well-established, standard manipulation of the platform’s stated purpose: “We serve the public conversation. That’s why it matters to us that people have a free and safe space to talk.”

Kudos to Khanna for his lonely but principled stand for free speech. Taibbi also noted in his thread that Khanna was the only Democratic official to do so.

China’s enticements to the Biden family are but one example of this campaign. We learned through this research how insidious and effective the Chinese government has been at co-opting not just the families of senior elected officials, but captains of industry, financial behemoths, and the wealthiest American philanthropists and educational institutions.

The Biden story also showed the ingenuity of corrupt politicians who essentially “outsource” their corruption to family members rather than risk a possible paper trail leading back to themselves. The Bidens, even more than Bill and Hillary Clinton before them, were a family influence business.

We have all learned about other stories of political interference and foot-dragging within the FBI. The public is right to wonder whether federal prosecutors are as serious about pursuing this case as Twitter’s Democratic partisans were in squelching it.

Further, President Biden’s Attorney General, Merrick Garland, continues to task the FBI with investigating the January 6, 2021 riots as a deep conspiracy, while simultaneously ignoring what certainly appear to have been well-organized efforts by Antifa to foment violence during the 2020 George Floyd riots, and violence done by pro-abortion organizations after someone on Twitter publicized the home addresses of Supreme Court justices.

For more than two critical weeks, under secret pressure from the Biden campaign and Democrats who were desperate to bury a devastating story that implicated their presidential candidate in his son’s corruption by Chinese intelligence-connected businessmen. The Post’s story was factually accurate, legitimately reported, and was (belatedly) authenticated by other news outlets. In short, there was no reason to do what Twitter, Roth, and Gadde did, other than pleasing a political party with whom they agreed.

Elon Musk’s release of internal Twitter correspondence around the censoring of the New York Post’s blockbuster “Hunter Biden laptop” story merely confirms what most knew already — that Twitter under Jack Dorsey and Parag Agrawal was staffed with Democratic Party partisans who censored information they thought would damage their cause.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/12/13/whos-more-un-american-oil-companies-or-joe-biden/

When Biden administration officials aren’t promising to put them out of business, they’re calling oil companies “un-American” for not drilling more. They should look in a mirror.

Amos Hochstein, Joe Biden’s “senior adviser for energy security” at the State Department, complained to the Financial Times last week that oil companies were using profits to buy back stock rather than invest in oil production.

“It is not only un-American, it is so unfair to the American public,” he said. “You want to pay dividends, pay dividends. You want to pay shareholders, pay shareholders. You want to get bonuses, do that, too. You could do all of that and still invest more. We are asking you to increase production and seize the moment.”

This is the same guy, by the way, who just a few months ago said that oil output must be limited in order to “make sure that we’re in a better footing to accelerate the transition” away from fossil fuels.  

In any event, by Hochstein’s standard, Biden is the most un-American president in history, because his policies are behind both the industry’s increased profit margins and its decision to spend that money on stock buybacks rather than increase production.