RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2022/08/13/a-token-of-the-managerial-age-bewails-trumps-surge/

I was chatting with a politically mature friend today who, in the course of some delighted words about Attorney General Merrick Garland, reminded me that in his famous “evil empire” speech of 1983, Ronald Reagan quoted a few choice lines from the preface of C. S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters. “The greatest evil,” Lewis wrote, is not now done in any Dickensian “dens of iniquity” or even in “concentration camps and labor camps.” Such brutish moral cesspools, Lewis says, are rather “the final result” of the encompassing evil evoked in his awesome (in the old sense) satire. 

On the contrary, the evil he has in mind is “conceived and ordered . . . in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice.” Men, that is to say, like Merrick Garland, a lugubrious embodiment of the “Managerial Age,” the “world of ‘Admin’” that Lewis so abhorred. Here, he suggested, is the home office of Hell, “something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business con­cern.”

The reason, by the way, my friend’s words about Merrick Garland were “delighted” was because of the huge, if inadvertent, boost the attorney general has just given to Donald Trump’s political prospects. 

Monday’s FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Palm Beach residence, was probably the single biggest boon to his stature among voters since he left office in January 2021, bigger even than the partisan witch hunt over which future CNN hostess, Liz Cheney, has been presiding with such ostentatious zeal.

This is obviously a concern among the beautiful, well-pressed people with white collars and clean fingernails who hate Trump. Employing a ju-ju they recognize but do not understand, Trump has time and again demonstrated an uncanny ability to goad his would-be attackers into contortions of self-immolation. 

https://www.city-journal.org/the-elite-panic-of-2022

On April 18, U.S. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle struck down the federal requirement for wearing surgical masks on airplanes, in airports, and while riding mass transit. Online videos showed passengers and airline staff ripping off their masks and celebrating in mid-flight. Given the accumulated frustration of two years of pandemic travel, the reaction was understandable.

Far more remarkable was the vehemence of those opposed to the ruling. Judge Mizelle was unfit for office, they said. She was too young, at 35; she was unelected; she was a single, unrepresentative voice. Worst of all, she was an “activist Trump judge” and thus branded with the mark of the beast. Rescinding government policy—the kind of thing that American judges engage in with abandon, and usually to progressive cheers—in this instance was condemned as a usurpation of the powers of the executive branch.

Judge Mizelle had crashed an exclusive party reserved for people of higher caste. “The CDC has the capability, through a large number of trained epidemiologists, scientists, to be able to make projections and make recommendations,” said Anthony Fauci, bureaucratic czar of all things Covid-19. “Far more than a judge with no experience in public health.”

That was the heart of the matter. Fauci embodied a bureaucracy and political class that, with the active support of the media, had converted the public’s fear of infection into a principle of elite authority. Under this principle, only trained scientists can make projections and recommendations. The writ of government stretched as far as the boundaries of scientific truth—and those boundaries were, of course, determined by government agencies. It wasn’t just a question of specific policies like lockdowns and vaccine mandates. At stake was the restoration of the public’s habit of obedience that had gone missing during the Trump years.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/fbi-rubicon-donald-trump-mar-a-lago-raid/?utm_source=Spectator+World+Signup&utm_campaign=15c8b91727-

Everyone knows that in January 49 BC Julius Caesar, about to lead part of his army across the Rubicon river, said “Alea iacta est,” “the die is cast.” Except that, according to Plutarch, what he really said was “Ἀνερρίφθω κύβος,” “let the die be cast,” and he did not so much say it as quote it, since the already-proverbial line came from the Greek playwright Menander. Anyway, in bringing an army across the stream that separated cis-Alpine Gaul from Italy proper, Caesar had committed treason. In crossing the Rubicon he had crossed a line, sparking the civil war that engulfed Rome and formalized the end of the Republic that had, as Caesar himself noted, been dead in all-but-name-only for decades.

Contemplating the recent actions of our secret police, known to some as the FBI, I have often wondered where to locate their Rubicon. Was it when they conducted a dawn raid against Roger Stone, having been careful to alert CNN beforehand so they could be on hand to publicize the attack? Maybe it was when they burst into the apartment of Project Veritas’s James O’Keefe, throwing him out in the hallway in his pajamas, while they ransacked his home looking for a diary kept by Joe Biden’s daughter? Or perhaps it was when they arrested former Trump aide Peter Navarro, throwing him in handcuffs and leg irons before depositing him in jail? Or when they accosted the lawyer John Eastman and confiscated his cell phone? That seems to have become a favorite pastime of the FBI, seizing people’s cell phones. Just a couple of days ago, they took Representative Scott Perry’s phone. “But,” you point out, “Perry is a Republican and Trump ally. He has no property rights.”

Well, there is that. But still, I keep wondering: where is our Rubicon? Where is the line that, once crossed, signals, definitively, the end of one thing and the beginning of something else?

I hesitate to make any predictions about that because I have been wrong about it so often in the past. “Surely,” I have thought, “this is it. The American people will not stand for this.”

But then they do. James Comey was OK. So was Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Kevin Clinesmith and Michael Sussmann. The FBI does something outrageous. There are little eructations of unhappiness. Then people go back to their lattes and put it out their minds.

https://thefederalist.com/2022/08/12/merrick-garland-doesnt-care-about-the-rule-of-law-just-ask-hunter-biden/

Biden’s Justice Department has done anything but apply the rule of law ‘evenly, without fear or favor.’ Hunter Biden is Exhibit A.

Attorney General Merrick Garland addressed the FBI’s raid of former President Donald Trump’s Florida residence on Thursday afternoon, three days after the Department of Justice embarked on an unprecedented escalation of its persecution of political opponents.

“Faithful adherence to the rule of law is the bedrock principle of the Justice Department and of our democracy,” Garland said. “Upholding the rule of law means applying the law evenly, without fear or favor. Under my watch, that is precisely what the Justice Department is doing.”

President Joe Biden’s Justice Department, however, has done anything but apply the rule of law “evenly, without fear or favor.” Hunter Biden is Exhibit A.

In September of 2020, Senate investigators published an 87-page report detailing Hunter Biden’s extensive overseas networks with a series of potential conflicts of interest. The investigation included episodes of potentially criminal business activity flagged for the Justice Department such as a six-figure shopping spree financed by Chinese business leaders. The report also unearthed evidence of “organized prostitution and/or human trafficking.”

https://amgreatness.com/2022/08/12/american-stasi/

Monday’s shocking images of police sirens blaring outside Mar-a-Lago, former President Donald Trump’s magnificent Palm Beach, Florida, estate, will not soon be forgotten.

Much has already been said and written about the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago that precipitated those sirens: “outrageous,” “unprecedented,” a “crossing of the Rubicon” moment. Regrettably, all of that is true. The siccing of the national law enforcement apparatus to execute a pre-dawn raid on a top partisan rival—especially when that rival is the head of state’s predecessor and perhaps-likely future opponent—is a contemptible act of raw political bloodlust. It is an act far more befitting a crumbling hellhole like Venezuela, or a third-world country in sub-Saharan Africa, than it is the land that was to be, per Benjamin Franklin’s alleged quip, “a republic, if you can keep it.”

America, it seems, won the Cold War only to see its own federal law enforcement/national security apparatus morph into a version of the old East German Stasi—and barely three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, to boot.

Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Thursday “press conference,” remarkably defensive and defiant in tone, did not dispel any concerns or assuage any critics. (Those critics, incidentally, include even former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang and disgraced former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.) The scuttlebutt is that Trump was hoarding deeply secretive, classified information deep in the bowels of Mar-a-Lago, in violation of the Presidential Records Act. But the back-and-forth between the National Archives and Trump’s personal legal team surrounding the boxes of material, entirely routine for an ex-president when it comes to things like establishing a presidential library, was by all accounts unfolding amicably: A subpoena was issued this spring, Trump’s lawyers were cooperative and archivists had already recalled 15 boxes earlier this year.

Furthermore, the Presidential Records Act isn’t even a criminal statute, and probable cause for the violation of a criminal statute is the necessary precondition for a magistrate to sign off on a search warrant. As the case may be, the magistrate who signed off on this particular warrant, Bruce Reinhart, is a Jeffrey Epstein-connected ex-defense attorney who just so happened to donate thousands of dollars in 2008 to then-presidential candidate Barack Obama. Go figure.