RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/05/high-noon-usa-bruce-thornton/

“It looks like this year’s midterm elections will be the showdown between the “woke” tyrants and the defenders of freedom.”

Since the Sixties the Left has been expanding its influence throughout our nation and its institutions. But decades earlier communism had already established a foothold in the U.S. starting in the early 20th century. Even the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 only briefly checked this process. But history’s repudiation of a totalitarian political order––one fundamentally opposed to the Constitution’s protection of individual freedom and unalienable rights––could not uproot decades of leftist transformation of America.

Indeed, the last 20 years saw the Left reinvigorated by the rise of “woke” ideology and its anti-Constitutional agenda. The Biden administration and its hubristic policies and glaring failures increasingly look likely to ignite a backlash. The showdown between the “woke” Democrats and freedom-loving Americans, whatever their party, is coming in November, and will decide whether the Left has succeeded in “fundamentally transforming America.”

The principles, however, for “woke” leftism were laid down a century ago in the rise of progressivism. Like communism, progressivism favors centralized, concentrated power administered by government bureaucracies and agencies staffed by “experts” who know better than the sovereign people how best to run their lives.

But this ideology conflicts at every point with the Constitution, which balances, checks, and disperses power so that citizens are free to manage their lives, their families, and their businesses as they see fit, checked only by Constitutionally compliant laws created by Congress, whose members are accountable to the citizens who put them in office.

https://thefederalist.com/2022/05/04/as-roe-hangs-in-the-balance-an-ugly-class-blindspot-distorts-abortion-discours/

The political establishment’s class blindspot is on full display in conversations about abortion, and the discourse on Justice Samuel Alito’s leaked draft opinion in the Dobbs case is no exception to this rule. Support for abortion increases with income and education levels. Pollsters use many questions to gauge public opinion on abortion—from support for Roe to support by trimester to general morality—but wealthier Americans tend to be more supportive across the board.

The left is correct that wealthy women in a post-Roe world will be able to get abortions with greater ease than women in lower income brackets: they can afford travel, childcare, and time away from work more easily. But as a demographic, they’re also more supportive of abortion, so the argument that overturning Roe is an attack on the working class is not sound.

It’s true, as The New York Times wrote in 2019, that “[w]omen getting abortions today are far more likely to be poor than those who had the procedure done 20 years ago.” The Times also notes, “About half of women who had an abortion in 2014 were below the poverty line, with another quarter very close to poverty.”

But Gallup data from 2021 found that respondents asked whether abortion was “morally wrong,” “morally acceptable,” or “depend[ent] on the situation” were more supportive as yearly household income increased. This tracks with education level as well, as you can see in the screenshot below.

Above the $100,000 income threshold, 63 percent of people said abortion was morally acceptable and 32 percent said morally wrong. Below the $40,000 threshold, those numbers were almost reversed. Only 38 percent of respondents said it was morally acceptable while 55 percent said it was morally wrong. This pattern is consistent among Gallup’s recent research on the question.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/04/losing-the-people-then-change-the-rules/

Court packing—the attempt to enlarge the size of the Supreme Court for short-term political purposes—used to be a dirty word in the history of American jurisprudence. 

The tradition of a nine-person Supreme Court is now 153 years old. The last attempt to expand it for political gain was President Franklin Roosevelt’s failed effort in 1937. FDR’s gambit was so blatantly political that even his overwhelming Democratic majority in Congress rebuffed him. 

Yet now “court packing” is a law school cause célèbre. It is hailed as a supposedly quick fix to reverse the current 5-4 conservative majority. 

Recently, a rough draft of an opinion purportedly overturning the Roe v. Wade decision that had legalized abortion in all 50 states was leaked to the media by someone inside the court. 

That insider leak of a draft opinion was a first in the modern history of the Supreme Court. It violated all court protocols. Yet it was met with stunning approval from the American Left. 

The leaker either intended to create a preemptive public backlash against the purported court majority in the hope that one or two justices might cave and switch under pressure—or to gin up the progressive base to fend off a likely disaster in the November midterm elections.   

The recent leak, however, is consistent with a left-wing assault on the Court that has intensified over the last five years. Democrats have gone ballistic ever since George W. Bush and especially Donald Trump’s appointees solidified a conservative majority. 

During Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings in 2018, protestors stormed the Senate chambers in protest. The Left rallied behind the now-convicted felon Michael Avenatti, who publicized crazy, wildly untrue charges about a teenaged Kavanagh.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/05/05/the-american-mushroom-cloud/

The left’s reaction to anything that doesn’t go its way becomes louder, shriller and more hysterical by the day, if not the hour. Its response to the alleged draft of a Supreme Court ruling that would overturn Roe v. Wade landed like a cruise missile with a hot warhead. But that’s the way today’s Democrats operate. Counterattack any and every event that threatens their agenda by scorching as much earth as possible.

There are plenty of candidates for the most hinge-free response to the draft. But before we go further, we’d like to highlight Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren descent into madness. Watch the video with the audio muted. Does her body language, the spasmodic gesturing, the pointed finger remind anyone of a 20th century figure whose speeches we’re used to seeing in black-and-white newsreels?

Heaven help us.

Warren’s fevered tirade clearly shows we have reached the point that the left has decided that policy will not be made like sausage but through tantrum, intimidation, and riot. If the Supreme Court doesn’t rule its way, then the Court is illegitimate, stolen and therefore has to be destroyed to save itself from making incorrect rulings. As John Daniel Davidson so eloquently noted for The Federalist, “whenever the left feels they have lost control of an institution, they try to destroy it.”

But what should we expect given the childish outbursts and lawlessness following the 2016 election of Donald Trump? The Antifa riots and violent Black Lives Matter mobs that were tacitly approved, and in some cases supported, by the Democrats? And a hard-left press that strangled its last shred of credibility by trafficking the Russian dossier it new was fake, and then insisting in the most maniacal ways imaginable that only it can determine what is acceptable speech in the U.S.?

https://www.city-journal.org/the-five-best-prosecutors-in-america

In 1940, then–U.S. attorney general Robert Jackson gave a speech to prosecutors, telling them, “While the prosecutor at his best is one of the most beneficent forces in our society, when he acts from malice or other base motives, he is one of the worst.” Jackson’s career exhibited this good side, and he went on to serve as the chief prosecutor in the Nuremberg trials of the Nazis. Jackson’s comments about the potential good and the potential evil of prosecutors ring true today.

To honor Jackson’s view of prosecutors, I have compiled a list of the five best and five worst in the United States today. The factors under consideration: public safety, fidelity to the rule of law, personal integrity, leadership, responsible innovations and training, community relations, office morale, and teamwork with other players in the criminal-justice system.

In the interests of starting with good news, let’s begin with the five best prosecutors. (I will describe the five worst in a separate article.) Fortunately, the United States has more than just five great prosecutors, but these five stand out, in my judgment.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-abortion-disinformation-campaign-roe-v-wade-samuel-alito-griswold-supreme-court-11651703428?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

First, they ban abortion. Next will be a contraception ban. Then a ban on same-sex and even interracial marriage. Soon we will all be living in “The Handmaid’s Tale.”

That’s the parade of horribles that Democrats and the media are trying to sell Americans after the leak of a draft Supreme Court opinion that would repeal a constitutional right to abortion.

If Roe v. Wade falls, it “would mean that every other decision related to the notion of privacy is thrown into question,” President Biden warned Tuesday. “Does this mean that in Florida they can decide they’re going to pass a law saying that same-sex marriage is not permissible?” If we can borrow a word he likes, the President is peddling disinformation.

The press is full of similar pearl-clutching about which precedent the Supreme Court might strike down next. Is it Obergefell (2015), which enshrined gay marriage? Griswold (1965), which overturned a state law prohibiting married couples from buying contraceptives? What about even Loving v. Virginia (1967), which guaranteed interracial marriage?

The correct answer is none of the above, as Justice Samuel Alito’s draft takes pains to emphasize. The leaked opinion is explicit about distinguishing Roe and its 1992 legal revision, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, from cases on unrelated social topics.

“None of the other decisions cited by Roe and Casey involved the critical moral question posed by abortion,” the draft says. “They do not support the right to obtain an abortion, and by the same token, our conclusion that the Constitution does not confer such a right does not undermine them in any way.”

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/homeland-securitys-disinformation?

The power to decree what is “disinformation” now determines what can and cannot be discussed on the internet. It is now in the hands of trained disinformation agents of the U.S. Security State.

The most egregious and blatant official U.S. disinformation campaign in years took place three weeks before the 2020 presidential election. That was when dozens of former intelligence officials purported, in an open letter, to believe that authentic emails regarding Joe Biden’s activities in China and Ukraine, reported by The New York Post, were “Russian disinformation.” That quasi-official proclamation enabled liberal corporate media outlets to uncritically mock and then ignore those emails as Kremlin-created fakes, and it pressured Big Tech platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to censor the reporting at exactly the time Americans were preparing to decide who would be the next U.S. president.

The letter from these former intelligence officials was orchestrated by trained career liars — disinformation agents — such as former CIA Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Yet that letter was nonetheless crucial to discredit and ultimately suppress the New York Post’s incriminating reporting on Biden. It provided a quasi-official imprimatur — something that could be depicted as an authoritative decree — that these authentic emails were, in fact, fraudulent.

After all, if all of these noble and heroic intelligence operatives who spent their lives studying Russian disinformation were insisting that the Biden emails had all of the “hallmarks” of Kremlin treachery, who possessed the credibility to dispute their expert assessment? This clip from the media leader in spreading this CIA pre-election lie — CNN — features their national security analyst James Clapper, and it illustrates how vital this pretense of officialdom was in their deceitful disinformation campaign:

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/all-hail-americas-new-truth-czar?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lk

If you heard about the recent birth of a new government committee called the Disinformation Governance Board—which will operate out of the Department of Homeland Security and be run by a woman named Nina Jankowicz who writes songs about misinformation for fun—you could be forgiven for thinking you hit your head and woke up in 1984. Rest assured, you did not. It’s entirely real.

Nina Jankowicz 🇺🇦🇺🇸 @wiczipedia
You can just call me the Mary Poppins of disinformation 💁🏻‍♀️

Nina Jankowicz 🇺🇦🇺🇸 @wiczipedia

I had two on-camera interviews today and still have a face full of makeup; what should I make a TikTok about?

The Disinformation Governance Board, or the Ministry of Truth, as critics dubbed it, has an ambitious mission: to stop the spread of misinformation. That sounds nice. Except, what one woman calls “misinformation” another might just call “information.” As you may recall, recent stories labeled “misinformation” include some that look increasingly legit, like Hunter Biden’s forgotten laptop, the Covid lab leak theory, and Wayfair selling cabinets full of stolen children (ok, that one might actually be fake). 

While the federal government determining what’s true and what’s fiction may sound ominous, Alejandro Mayorkas, the head of Homeland Security, promises you that it’s not. Any rumors to the contrary, any concerns about this at all, are just more “misinformation,” he insists, and this new effort is designed purely to combat disinformation spread by human traffickers and the Russian government. Well, if there’s someone we should all trust, it’s definitely the guy who runs a surveillance service.