RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/what-to-do-about-bidens-classified-docs

WHAT TO DO ABOUT BIDEN’S CLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS? On Monday evening came one of those stories that seem almost too convenient to be true. CBS News reported that Attorney General Merrick Garland has appointed a U.S. attorney to investigate classified documents found in an office used by President Joe Biden after he left the vice presidency.

What???!!! Does that mean the current president improperly held classified documents like his predecessor, former President Donald Trump, is accused of doing? As if on cue, reporters at a number of news outlets jumped into action, determined to explain to readers that the cases are totally different. Worried that Republicans would “seize” on the news to suggest an equivalence between Biden and Trump, many in the media sought to portray the two investigations as entirely dissimilar affairs: Trump bad, Biden not bad.

But there are some distinct similarities, both in what we know and what we don’t know, about the Biden and Trump investigations. First, the most obvious: Both men apparently kept classified information at a place they used for business after leaving office. As commentators reminded us many, many times during the Trump investigation, that can be a very serious problem. Both men had the highest access to classified information, Biden as vice president and Trump as president. And both men left those high offices to set up working spaces in other places, Biden at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington, D.C., and Trump at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and home in Palm Beach, Florida.

Here is a really important similarity. In neither case do we know what the classified documents were. All through the Trump investigation, with so much sensational and overwrought reporting — all through that time, the public never knew what the documents were that Trump allegedly mishandled. Were they truly the nation’s most important national security secrets? Or were they examples of the overclassification that plagues the federal government, when noncritical information is classified at a higher level than it deserves, if it should be classified at all? We don’t know the answer in the Trump case, and we don’t know the answer in the Biden case.

https://thefederalist.com/2023/01/10/where-is-the-fbi-raid-of-joe-biden/

Documents marked classified from Joe Biden’s time as vice president were reportedly found in a private office, but there won’t be an FBI raid.

There are plenty of reasons why 4 in 5 Americans see a two-tiered justice system. On Monday, federal officials gave the public another textbook example.

Attorney General Merrick Garland ordered the U.S. attorney in Chicago to investigate nearly a dozen documents marked classified from President Joe Biden’s time as vice president found at a private office, according to CBS News. The documents, supposedly marked top secret, were found buried at a space Biden used when he was an honorary professor at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington. The center was a project of the University of Pennsylvania.

“The material was identified by personal attorneys for Mr. Biden on Nov. 2, just before the midterm elections, Richard Sauber, special counsel to the president confirmed,” CBS reported. “The documents were discovered when Mr. Biden’s personal attorneys ‘were packing files housed in a locked closet to prepare to vacate office space at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C.’”

There were no federal agents raiding the president’s personal offices, no dramatic press conferences announcing the prosecution of an enemy of the state, and certainly no warrants granting law enforcement virtually unlimited scope to confiscate whatever they wanted.

It remains unclear what documents, exactly, Biden may have been stashing in the closet of an old workspace. They may not even be important, considering Washington has a chronic overclassification problem; just try compelling a federal agency to cough up public documents through the Freedom of Information Act. How the documents were discovered, however, shows Americans all they need to know about the political nature of the nation’s premier law enforcement agencies.

When former President Donald Trump was suspected of harboring classified papers in his Florida residence at Mar-a-Lago, Garland sent more than 30 plainclothes FBI agents to raid the 128-room complex as the administration’s personal stormtroopers. The attorney general’s foot soldiers even rifled through Melania Trump’s wardrobe operating under a warrant that allowed agents to confiscate any record her husband may have come into contact with when president. Federal officials ultimately carried away 15 boxes of material that the Justice Department claims featured the nation’s most heavily guarded secrets.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/musk-exposes-fauci/

Elon Musk is transforming Twitter from a government censorship bureau into a powerhouse of investigative journalism. The Biden Junta doesn’t like it.

Musk’s tweet of “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci” drew a furious reaction from White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, who said criticizing Dr. Fauci was “dangerous,” “disgusting” and “divorced from reality.” Musk didn’t think so, and started digging deeper.

On December 28,  Musk tweeted, “Almost no one seems to realize that the head of bioethics at NIH – the person who is supposed to make sure that Fauci behaves ethically – is his wife.” That would be National Institutes of Health bioethics boss Christine Grady.

Musk’s tweet caught the attention of Bruce Y. Lee, a Professor of Health Policy and Management at the City University of New York (CUNY) School of Public Health and a staunch defender of Dr. Fauci as a “real scientist.”

“Just because someone has the words ‘Chief,’ ‘Bioethics’ and ‘NIH’ in her title doesn’t mean that she [Grady] heads all of bioethics at NIH,” wrote Lee in Forbes.  “That would be like saying that a head barista runs all of coffee everywhere just because ‘head’ is in that person’s title and that person deals with coffee. Or that a musk rat somehow oversees everything that Musk does, just because they share the word ‘musk.’”  Readers learn nothing about Christine Grady’s fascinating career.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/is-the-west-living-in-the-end-of-days/

An apocalyptic vibe seems to have settled over the West. Signs and portents abound: The Covid plague and the Russo-Ukrainian War have unleashed two of the Four Horses of Revelations. For those not terminally “woke,” gaudy transexuals performing for prepubescent school-children, and credentialed medical doctors poisoning and mutilating healthy children and young people bespeak the moral idiocy that typically marks civilizational collapse. A self-created energy crisis threatens to turn off the heat and lights and all the other amenities of modern civilization. And cities rife with murder, daylight plundering of stores with impunity, junkies shooting up near schools, excrement polluting the sidewalks, and the mentally disturbed roaming streets and subways summon up images redolent of rough beasts whose time has come round at last.

What we’re really talking about is that staple of historiographical pessimism, what in 1918 Oswald Spengler called the Decline of the West. Since then many moments of Western decline have come and gone. But is this time different? Are we finally facing the end of the most sophisticated, wealthy, and powerful civilization in history?

Our geopolitical rivals certainly think so. Putin’s Russia, Xi’s China, and Khamenei’s Iran watch our cultural degradation, hedonistic lives, intolerance for physical and psychic discomfort, obsession with even low risk, and dwindling faith, and calculate that we no longer have the nerve or convictions to maintain our global dominance, and can be pushed aside for new, autocratic Axis Powers that will be the global hegemons.

To this geopolitical triumvirate, the Western “new world order” postwar paradigm comprising democracy, rule by law, free-market economies, political accountability, human rights, equality of the sexes and sexual preferences, confessional tolerance, and the separation of church and state is played out. Now other, more autocratic traditions marginalized by the arrogant West will be better stewards of the global community.

https://americanmind.org/salvo/what-elections-wont-fix/

Whoever wins in 2024, our problems run deeper.

“Whether Trump, DeSantis, or someone else is the best person to capitalize on this fluidity is beyond my capacity to discern. Events are moving rapidly, and much will happen in the interim. The best we can do for now is to heed Abraham Lincoln’s parting counsel in his 1852 eulogy on Henry Clay: “Let us strive to deserve, as far as mortals may, the continued care of Divine Providence, trusting that, in future national emergencies, He will not fail to provide us the instruments of safety and security.”

We typically talk about elections in terms of data and hot takes—the language of pollsters, pundits, and plodding academics like myself. But none of that seems adequate to the moment. The questions and problems of our time go far beyond ordinary electoral politics, and yet they take place within the context of those politics.

Through all the turmoil of his two years out of office, Donald Trump remains an emblem of all those deeper questions we hope to resolve in and through politics. His enemies are still out to destroy him. His supporters long for redemption (revenge?) in 2024. There’s no doubt that the Republican Party is still Trump’s party. He will be the nominee if he wants it, and by announcing his candidacy after the 2022 midterm election he certainly seems to want it. In poll after poll, with one recent exception, Trump dominates among Republican primary voters. At present the only challenger with any traction at all against Trump is Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

DeSantis, understanding the terrain, so far refuses to challenge Trump. On the other hand, it is possible that the public’s views on Trump have hardened to the point where they now constitute a ceiling that he cannot break through. The possibility that Trump’s moment has passed opens the field to other possible candidates. The conversation, however, always seems to come back to DeSantis as the obvious, perhaps the only, viable alternative.

Since the day after the 2020 election, I have been singing the praises of Ron DeSantis. He cleaned up, or at least reduced to tolerable levels, election corruption in Florida. He has shown excellent instincts on everything from resisting coronavirus hysteria to countering the indoctrination and mutilation of children. He displayed considerable courage in going toe-to-toe with Disney, one of the largest corporations in the world and one of the largest employers in his state. The aftermath of Hurricane Ian has allowed DeSantis to manifest great managerial competence. The surest indicator we have that recovery is proceeding apace is that it isn’t being reported on by our media. Were this Katrina redux, but with the darling of the Republican Party in charge, we’d have wall-to-wall coverage from every media outlet in America. The results speak for themselves: in four years, DeSantis has turned the purplest of purple states into a GOP stronghold.

https://thespectator.com/topic/how-desantis-can-de-program-the-blue-states/

Four years ago this week, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis presciently warned in his first inaugural address that big-spending, high-taxing states were inspiring “productive citizens to flee.” DeSantis came into office with a flimsy mandate of just four tenths of one percent at a time when Florida had 257,175 more registered Democrats than Republicans. Republicans now outnumber Democrats in the state by more than 356,000 and, in the wake of his resounding twenty-point win in November, DeSantis’s inaugural address last Tuesday felt like a warm-up for the 2024 presidential campaign.

In his 2019 speech, DeSantis spoke to Floridians, but he seemed to be addressing all Americans, urging us to reconsider Florida as a model rather than as the butt of Florida Man jokes. Republican hopes in 2024 may hinge on this effort to recast the Sunshine State. It won’t be easy, but Florida can be re-branded, though DeSantis will likely need a secret weapon he may not have considered.

Though the media likes to diminish DeSantis as a Trump knockoff, his concise, sixteen-minute address was as focused and substantive as Trump’s speeches are a gallimaufry of complaints and rants. Trump is the businessman, but DeSantis is the one who is all business. Trump uttered nearly 9,000 words in his campaign launch, while DeSantis’s speech weighed in at 1,649. Though it obviously wasn’t a campaign launch, it still sounded like one at times.

“When the world lost its mind — when common sense suddenly became an uncommon virtue — Florida was a refuge of sanity, a citadel of freedom for our fellow Americans and even for people around the world,” he said.

DeSantis spoke of the “historic number of families” who have moved to what he called a “promised land of sanity,” one of law and order, fiscal restraint, and no Covid mandates. Freedom, a word he didn’t use once in his 2019 address, was the key theme of the speech. He also never mentioned the word “woke” four years ago, but his pledge to keep Florida as the place where “woke goes to die” was his biggest applause line of the day.