RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/dobbs-and-kennedy-rulings-intensify-lefts-war-bruce-thornton/

“Finally, the great paradox is that these champions of reason and science are promoting unscientific ideas such as the notion that biological sex is really a fluid “gender” created in a child’s mind by mental states. These dubious ideas, passed off as science, are weaponized by the “woke” in service to their attempt to aggrandize power for themselves and their faction. Or they are the expressions of what can only be called a cult, true believers who passionately and uncritically accept bad ideas, and persecute or “cancel” heretics who challenge them––the same tyrannical behavior that has characterized political religions like fascism and communism.”

The Supreme Court’s affirmation of the states’ power to settle controversial issues upon which the Constitution is silent has the usual “woke” suspects hyperventilating over religion’s dangerous power to undermine “our democracy.” This war on religion, now in its third century, is predicated on dubious ideologies, ignorance of the role of faith in the Constitution and America’s Founding, and an evangelical faith in the power of “science” that lies at the heart of our progressive technocracy.

As such, the hysteria over Dobbs is really about the power and authority of progressives who are threatened by religion and institutions of civil society.

Two examples of the “woke” panic about faith allegedly driving the Supreme Court’s decisions appeared last week. As National Review’s Isaac Schorr reported, a Politico scribe managed to completely misunderstand and garble the Justices’ argument in Dobbs, which she claims “marks a serious step in an emerging legal campaign by religious conservatives on the Supreme Court to undermine the bedrock concept of separation of church and state and to promote Christianity as an intrinsic component of democratic government.” 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/merrick-garland-the-washington-post-and-the-nuclear-story-11660671636?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

If papers in former President Donald Trump’s home represented such a grave threat to national security, why did the Justice Department take so long to act on it? Among the implausible details of this disturbing story has been that after a Justice official and several FBI agents visited Mar-a-Lago in early June, Justice waited several days before merely requesting that a stronger lock be placed on the door of a storage room and then waited roughly two months before seeking a warrant. Now a new report makes the theory of a significant security threat even harder to credit.

The Journal’s Sadie Gurman and Aruna Viswanatha report from Washington:

Attorney General Merrick Garland deliberated for weeks over whether to approve the application for a warrant to search former President Donald Trump’s Florida home, people familiar with the matter said, a sign of his cautious approach that will be tested over the coming months.
The decision had been the subject of weeks of meetings between senior Justice Department and FBI officials, the people said. The warrant allowed agents last Monday to seize classified information and other presidential material from Mar-a-Lago.

Weeks of meetings strongly suggest a gray area, not a clear and present danger. Mr. Garland’s long period of pondering is completely incompatible with a news report that has been widely circulated since last week. In a story published on Thursday and updated on Friday, Devlin Barrett, Josh Dawsey, Perry Stein and Shane Harris reported for the Washington Post:

Classified documents relating to nuclear weapons were among the items FBI agents sought in a search of former president Donald Trump’s Florida residence on Monday, according to people familiar with the investigation.
Experts in classified information said the unusual search underscores deep concern among government officials about the types of information they thought could be located at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club and potentially in danger of falling into the wrong hands.

Their concern was so deep that they had to kick the issue around at meetings for much of the summer before trying to do anything about it? The Post report continued:

The people who described some of the material that agents were seeking spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18810/self-interest-politics

“Government is itself an art,” wrote the late US Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, “one of the subtlest of the arts. It is neither business, nor technology, nor applied science. It is the art of making men live together in peace and with reasonable happiness.”[1]

Of course a leader should be able to do both – “making men live together in peace and with reasonable happiness” – but what if there are leaders or the people around them who are, as Frankfurter noted, “those who pursue self-interest through politics”[2]?

As previously asked on these pages, are union moguls, lobbyists and advisors, power players and profiteers trying to do end runs around US election laws (here and here) and the Constitution (here and here)?

Anonymous “dark money” groups are still trying to “shape” our elections without disclosing where the money is coming from.

According to Bloomberg News, “‘Dark money’ helped pave the way for the Biden campaign” – to the tune of $145 million.

Big Tech has just been found to have been acting as a “state agent” of the federal government in curtailing free speech with which the government did not agree. Twitter just settled a lawsuit by the journalist Alex Berenson after he showed the court that orders to Twitter to ban him had come from the White House.

https://bda1776.substack.com/p/the-politics-of-gutting-and-rebuilding?utm_source=email

Wrap Up Time

It’s time to wrap up our gut-and-rebuild discussion.  I apologize for the delay, but August happens.  Also, before we get back to it, I published a column in yesterday’s Epoch Times that’s a small taste of what I’ve got coming.  Watch this space after Labor Day for an essay series on America’s spiritual crisis and the new religion of Wokeism.

To get back on track, our basic theme here is that America is in deep trouble.  We live in a world far too complicated and interconnected to navigate without relying upon experts and institutions.  Yet all of our important institutions and most of our experts are corrupt.  In other words, we have to trust them but we can’t trust them.   That’s bad.

As things stand, our corrupt institutions seem to be pushing us towards totalitarianism.  If that push generates enough of a backlash, we could end up with two violent factions—one fighting for the totalitarianism and one fighting against it.  That thought makes me—and I hope you—unhappy.  I’m not a fan of either thought control or violence.  I think both are worth avoiding.  These days, that sort of attitude can earn you a reputation as a hard-core right winger.  That’s bad, too.

The only workable remedy is thus to develop superior institutions and experts.  Given how badly most of them have already rotted, however, the only way forward is to gut them, reuse what we can, and rebuild from the ground up.  We’ve explored some of what that would mean in the public sector and some of what it would mean in the private sector.  Now we’re down to the last piece: The role of electoral politics.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/how-democrats-inflation-reduction-act-delivers-five-winning-issues-gop

The FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago was a reckless political stunt meant to show the left that Attorney General Merrick Garland will keep the heat on former President Donald Trump. It was unprecedented, seemingly unnecessary, and infuriating to the millions who saw the heavily armed agents’ 10-hour search vividly spotlighting our uneven application of justice.

The raid was also incredibly stupid. Among other things, the furor completely overshadowed passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, which Democrats are hawking as President Joe Biden’s greatest legislative accomplishment.

Combined with photos of the Biden family – complete with compromised son Hunter Biden — jetting off  for a lavish vacation at a mansion owned by a rich Democrat donor, the White House political messaging machine appears, as usual, clueless.

If Biden couldn’t stick around to sign his big bill, how important could it be?

On the other hand, diverting attention from the Inflation Act could prove a blessing for Democrats, and for President Biden. The bill is riddled with pitfalls – at least five — for the president’s party, giving Republicans much campaign fodder for the months ahead.