RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://victorhanson.com/what-becomes-of-the-fbi/

“…..But from the Boston bombers to the San Bernadino terrorists, the FBI habitually drops leads that are handed to it. It is far more effective going after moms and Christians than it is pursuing known Islamic terrorists who kill and maim Americans.”

Can the FBI be saved in its present form? Should it be disassembled, and its bureaus farmed out to other agencies? Should its headquarters be transferred to Kansas City, or maybe Fresno, Dayton, or Boise? Given its record of transgressions and lapses, would we miss its absence?

Or are its Washington hierarchies intrinsically too intermarried with the swamp, too embedded within it, and too compliant in general to the deep state, and the leftwing cultural Washington elite, and the Democratic party to be salvaged?

Is it not striking how the FBI under intense scrutiny and criticism, nonetheless ups its performance-art raiding, its perp-walking, its politicized hounding, its obsequiousness to Merrick Garland’s renegade DOJ?

Are the FBI kingpins delighted with the rightwing criticism—as if to be giddy that they have gotten under the skins of conservatives, terrified them, and thus created a new deterrence? Or is it just FBI bullying, as if Wray et al. are saying, “Yeah, we became weaponized, what exactly are you going to try to do about it?”

Or is it convinced the Left has its back for any and everything, given it can streamline social justice agendas and DNC objectives by fiat?

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

“Goldilocks was very tired by this time; she went upstairs to the bedroom. She lay down on the first bed, but it was too hard. Then she lay on the second bed, but it was too soft.Then she lay down on the third bed and it was just right. Goldilocks fell  asleep. Robert Southey (1774-1843)   The Three Bears, 1837

It is the Goldilocks search for the right balance between too much government and individual freedom that foments so much political division: Have Washington’s entitlements and its marriage with social media made government intrusive? Has defunding the police, and the subsequent rising street crime caused us to become anarchial?  

No matter one’s political leanings, we all recognize the importance of federal government: to provide defense against foreign enemies; to maintain civil order at home; to care for those unable to care for themselves; to permit and encourage interstate commerce and transportation; to provide an agency to collect taxes and fees; to have a legislature to enact laws, an executive to carry them out, and a court system to adjudicate differences. At the same time, we believe in the ideals of independence and self-reliance, that we are individuals, free to think, speak, write, assemble, and pray as we will. Our differences are where we place ourselves along those dual (and sometimes dueling) spectrums, of government dependency and individual freedom. As government expands, freedom shrinks.

Political differences, driven by identity politics and ad hominem attacks, have become so venomous that a Cato Institute poll in July 2020 showed that 62% of Americans feel they cannot freely express their political preferences. Would anyone argue that number has lessened in the last two years? Most affected are conservatives (77%), then moderates (64%), and liberals (52%). The only group willing to freely express itself are “staunch” liberals, at 58 percent, not a surprise given their support from mainstream media. However, a New York Times/Sienna College poll taken last March found that 84% of Americans said being afraid to exercise freedom of speech is a “serious problem.”

https://www.city-journal.org/anti-asian-violence-separating-truth-from-narrative

Viral videos of senseless violence have captured public attention since crime began rising in 2020. Some of the most extreme examples are attacks against Asian-Americans. Earlier this year, for instance, three teens and an 11-year-old, all black, beat and kicked in the head a 70-year-old woman in San Francisco. Yet many academics, advocates, and reporters argue that these cases leave a false impression. “While news reports and social media have perpetuated the idea that anti-Asian violence is committed mostly by people of color,” reported NBC News last year, “a new analysis shows the majority of attackers are white.” Unfortunately, the crime against 70-year-old Mrs. Ren is representative in many ways.

The refrain that most anti-Asian crimes are committed by white people is misleading, if not meaningless. While the Department of Justice estimates that Asians are the victims of over 180,000 violent crimes every year, an average year sees fewer than 24 violent anti-Asian hate crimes. In a discussion about violence directed toward Asians, focusing on hate crimes is a transparent attempt to obscure. The data show that whites, despite being the largest racial group in the country, are not responsible for the largest share of violent crimes against Asians.

Where do these misleading talking points come from? One common source, quoted by both NBC and the San Francisco Chronicle, is a literature review by Janelle Wong of the University of Maryland titled Beyond the Headlines. But Wong’s review does not focus on violent crime: it covers hate incidents against Asian-Americans, the majority of which consist of “verbal harassment” and “shunning”—not crimes. Advocacy group Stop AAPI Hate reported similar findings: 82 percent of recorded anti-Asian incidents were not physically violent. Wong suggests that conservatives are conflating anti-Asian attacks with affirmative action admissions policies that benefit blacks at the expense of Asians—it’s “an old tactic in white supremacy’s playbook,” she says. Wong also claims “there’s not really an empirical basis” for the observation “that it’s predominantly Black people attacking Asian Americans who are elderly.”

https://amgreatness.com/2022/10/06/steven-dantuono-the-fbis-hatchet-man/

Defense attorneys representing two men recently convicted for conspiring to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer in 2020 are seeking a new federal trial for their clients amid claims of jury and judicial misconduct. (The men, Adam Fox and Barry Croft were found guilty in August in a second trial; a jury in April failed to reach a verdict on them. Two co-defendants were acquitted after jurors concluded the men had been entrapped by the FBI.) A separate state trial for three other men accused of participating in the scheme is now underway in Jackson, Michigan.

The ongoing legal drama is a reminder of the handiwork of Steven D’Antuono, former head of the Detroit FBI field office, which was primarily responsible for hatching and executing the Whitmer fednapping hoax. Supervising and undercover agents working out of that Detroit office and its satellite branches managed the day-to-day details of the wide-ranging operation such as handling the main FBI informant, Dan Chappel, who was compensated at least $60,000 in cash and personal items paid by the FBI for luring the men into the trap.

About a week after law enforcement authorities announced arrests in the case on October 8, 2020, D’Antuono was rewarded with a plum assignment: head of the Washington FBI field office where he had worked on two other occasions, including a 2008 stint as supervisor of the public corruption and government fraud squad. FBI Director Christopher Wray presumably promoted D’Antuono for helping to bolster one of the FBI’s most absurd and fact-free political narratives—that “white supremacist” terrorists pose a danger to the country. Coverage of the alleged kidnapping plot dominated the news as Whitmer eagerly played the role of victim to Donald Trump’s villain in another example of the FBI interfering in a presidential election to damage Trump.

The FBI announced D’Antuono’s new gig in an October 13, 2020 press release. Ten days later, a handful of agents in the Washington field office conducted a five-hour voluntary interview with Tony Bobulinski, a former business partner of Hunter Biden. Bobulinski told Fox News host Tucker Carlson this week that “as much [sic] as six federal agents” participated in the meeting; Bobulinski walked through his background with the Bidens and discussed records associated with their business ventures. One FBI official gave Bobulinski’s lawyers the cell phone number for Tim Thibault, the assistant special agent in charge of the Washington FBI field office and so-called point person on the matter.