RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Russian hacking” is the Left/Never-Trumpers’ explanation for Donald Trump’s election.

In their furrowed-brow-telling, they have recently discovered something called “Russian interference” and “Russian influence.” Don’t ask where so many of them have been all of our lives, because they’ve spent about the past century telling us there was no such thing.

That was then. Today, they insist that this newfound “Russian interference” and “Russian influence” secretly drove nearly 63 million American deplorables to reach for that GOP lever again and again to vote for Donald Trump, not Hillary Clinton.

Let me squeeze in a little historical context. The late, great Sen. Joseph McCarthy himself was not wont to make such sweeping, conspiratorial charges without offering well-documented evidence, as we might see in his remarkable peroration on the still strange and perplexing career of George C. Marshall (pdf here; get over the Birch imprint; this is a reissue of the original 1952 Devin-Adair book publication).

Back to postmodern times.

Russia exerted this influence and interference, anonymous “officials” say — also political appointees James Clapper (he who prevented a mandatory damage assessment regarding national security breaches related to the Hillary Clinton server!), and alleged Muslim convert John Brennan (he who voted Communist before entering the CIA!) — by its alleged hacking of the email accounts of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and the DNC, and subsequent alleged passing of these tens of thousands of emails to Wikileaks. That would be Julian Assange’s “radical transparency group,” as the Washington Post calls the phenomenal, Internet-based publisher of government documents, which, hosannas to the gods, now performs a watchdog-role by default that most media, including the Post, have rejected, making themselves noxious and obsolete.

It is hard to imagine Jeff Bezos’ sheet today publishing that massive, pre-hacking-era document “theft,” the Pentagon Papers. Fie! That would be “stealing,” according to our brave, new, uniparty-state-submissive stenographers. Better for all good media to ensure that government “secret” documents never, ever get to those of us who just elect and employ the government.

Thus, due to Russia — and not due to the globe-spanning criminality and corruption (and the open borders, forked-tongue Alinskyism and co-dependend-sex-crimes) of Hillary Clinton; and not due to one bit of Donald Trump’s revolutionary America First political program — Trump won the presidency. Ergo, Trump = Putin puppet. That makes the Clinton crime syndicate, its degenerate Podestas, the Left, Never-Trumpers such Amnesty McCain (and that bizarre pop-up candidate, Evan McMullin) the Second Coming of … Joe McCarthy? (Now, just a minute, stop, we don’t mean to suggest anything like that, witch-hunt, witch-hunt, Red Scare, glug, glug….)

Oh, Meryl.

Not you, too?

Just when I thought we’d exhausted the reservoir of Trump-hating luvvies, up pops the biggest star in Hollywood to join the bandwagon and stick one more stiletto-heeled boot into the President-elect ten days before his inauguration.

Let me make one thing clear before I continue: I love Meryl Streep.

She’s the greatest actress in history (and not, as Trump disingenuously tweeted today, ‘one of the most overrated in Hollywood’!). She’s also, and I speak from personal experience, a delightful woman – incredibly smart, warm, funny and decent.

In fact, there’s no better role model for any budding actor, or finer example of true feminist power at its very best.

So when she speaks, the world listens.

Last night, Streep received a Lifetime Achievement award at the Golden Globes, and chose the moment to launch a very personal attack on Donald Trump.

She began by saying that Hollywood, foreigners and the press are ‘the most vilified segments of American society right now’.

At which point the cameras panned out to hundreds of the richest, most privileged people in American society sitting in the audience in their $10,000 tuxedos and $20,000 dresses, loudly cheering this acknowledgement of their dreadful victimhood.

She then said that if all the ‘outsiders and foreigners’ were kicked out of Hollywood, ‘you’ll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts.’

Wow.

I haven’t heard such elitist snobbery since Hillary Clinton branded Trump supporters ‘a basket of deplorables’.

For your information, Ms Streep, tens of millions of ordinary Americans love football and the MMA and would be quite happy watching their favourite sports at the expense of the next Woody Allen film.

Her real target, though, was Trump. She’d come to take him down, and that is exactly what she proceeded to do.

‘There were many powerful performances this year that did breathtaking, compassionate work,’ she said. ‘But there was one performance that stunned me. It sank it hooks in my heart, not because it was good – there’s nothing good about it. But it was effective and it did its job. It was that moment when the person asking to sit in the most respected seat in our country imitated a disabled reporter. Someone he outranked in privilege and power and the capacity to fight back.’

Meryl’s bottom lip began to tremble.

‘It kind of broke my heart when I saw it,’ she cried, ‘and I still can’t get it out of my head. This instinct to humiliate when it’s modelled by someone in the public platform, by someone powerful, filters down into everybody’s life because it kind of gives permission for other people to do the same thing.’

Hmmm.

Really, Meryl?

For starters, the incident to which she referred didn’t happen last year, it happened in 2015. There’s even been another Golden Globes in between then and now, at which it was never mentioned.

Second, Trump has always furiously denied – and has again today on Twitter – he was mocking the reporter’s disability and a Conservative website produced video evidence of numerous other instances where he made the exact same gesture to fully able-bodied people when attacking them. (See here and decide for yourself)

Henry Miller, a physician and molecular biologist, is the Robert Wesson Fellow in Scientific Philosophy and Public Policy at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He was the founding director of the Office of Biotechnology at the FDA.

One of the ways that scientists traditionally measure the well-being of a nation is to track the rate at which its citizens die, and how long they can be expected to live. So the news out of the National Center for Health Statistics earlier last month was disturbing: The overall U.S. death rate has increased for the first time in a decade, and that led to a drop in overall life expectancy for the first time since 1993.

The finding is thought to be due to a confluence of issues, including more obesity in the population, increasing long-term unemployment, more patients with chronic diseases, and a lack of breakthrough innovations to reduce the costs of care while increasing the quality of life. But the new data certainly highlight the critical need to provide better life-saving and life-prolonging therapies for patients.

While policymakers and stakeholders continue to debate how to solve these problems, there are some things that we know Congress can do to address them: enact smart, evidence-based policies, invest in private-public partnerships that enhance innovation, and eliminate roadblocks to America’s innovators.

The 21st Century Cures Act is an example of smart policies spurring solutions to the nation’s problems. This commonsense legislation, signed into law last month, is the result of years of negotiations, compromises, and passionate advocacy among countless stakeholders, including patient groups, health-care providers, hospitals, the life-science community, regulators, and more. Although not perfect, the legislation will boost research into some of the most vexing medical challenges our health-care system faces, while making sure that there are expedited pathways coupled with new resources for medical innovators and regulators to get breakthrough therapies to patients without delay.

Many roadblocks limit our nation’s innovators and entrepreneurs, some of which could be removed rapidly by Congress, especially when there is already broad, bipartisan agreement to do so. Perhaps no better example of this would be the permanent repeal of the disastrous medical-device excise tax. This monstrosity, a provision of the Affordable Care Act, was a dark cloud over medical-technology innovation during the years it was in place and led to drastic cuts in R&D, job losses, and lost opportunities to improve patient care. Congress recognized how detrimental this policy was to innovation and suspended the tax for two years, but if nothing is done, it will resume in 2018. Fully repealing the medical-device tax once and for all — which has been spearheaded by Representative Erik Paulsen (R., Minn.) — is a commonsense approach that would remove a massive obstacle to improving patient outcomes and the creation of high-tech manufacturing jobs.

There is a word missing from the non-classified report issued Friday, in which three intelligence agencies assess “Russia’s Influence Campaign Targeting the 2016 US Presidential Election.” The FBI, CIA, and NSA elide any mention of . . . “Podesta.”

Seems like a pretty significant omission — not just because of how the 2016 campaign played out but also in light of the intelligence community’s recent history of politicizing its analyses.

The report is replete with references to Russian “cyber espionage,” “covert intelligence,” “false-flag,” “propaganda,” and “influence” operations by which Vladimir Putin is alleged to have tried to put his thumb on the electoral scale. Very sinister stuff, to be sure. But when the public hears these terms, it thinks of spies, misdirection, disinformation campaigns — i.e., schemes intended to deceive the target audience. People don’t instantly think, “Oh, you mean an effort to publicize true but embarrassing information”; they don’t read “covert operation” and say to themselves, “That must mean they subjected only one side of a political contest to a high level of scrutiny.” That’s the kind of behavior people associate with the American media, not the Kremlin.

The three intelligence agencies’ report pointedly declines to tell us what specific information gives them such “high confidence” that they know the operation of Vladimir Putin’s mind. They plead that the nature of their work does not allow for that: To tell us how they know what they purport to know would compromise intelligence methods and sources.

Fair enough. The problem, though, is that if you’re essentially going to say, “Trust us,” you have to have proven yourself trustworthy over time.

Here, we are talking about a community whose own analysts have complained that their superiors distort their reports for political purposes. In just the past few years, they have told us that they had “high confidence” that Iran suspended its nuclear weapons programs in 2003; that the NSA was not collecting metadata on millions of Americans; and that the Muslim Brotherhood is a moderate, “largely secular” organization. We have learned that the Obama administration intentionally perpetrated a disinformation campaign — complete with a compliant media “echo chamber” — to sell the public on the Iran nuclear deal (and the fiction that Iran’s regime was moderating). We have seen U.S. intelligence and law enforcement complicit in the Obama administration’s schemes to convince the public that “violent extremism,” not radical Islam, is the explanation for terrorist attacks; that a jihadist mass-murder attack targeting soldiers about to deploy to Afghanistan was “workplace violence”; that al-Qaeda had been “decimated”; that the threat of the ISIS “jayvee” team was exaggerated; and that the Benghazi massacre was not really a terrorist attack but a “protest” gone awry over an anti-Muslim video.

I can attest that the intelligence agencies overflow with patriotic Americans who do the quiet, perilous, thankless work that saves American lives. We can acknowledge this incontestable fact and still observe that, on this record, the intelligence community as an institution cannot very well expect that “Trust us” is going to get them very far.

Which brings us back to what the new report studiously avoids mentioning.

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) was founded in 1971 by two Alabama attorneys, Morris Dees and Joseph Levin Jr. The latter served as the Center’s legal director from 1971-76, but it was Dees, who views the U.S. as an irredeemably racist nation, who would emerge as the long-term “face” of the organization.

Identifying itself as a “nonprofit civil rights organization” committed to “fighting hate and bigotry” while “seeking justice for the most vulnerable members of society,” SPLC describes the United States as a country “seething with racial violence” and “intolerance against those who are different.” “Hate in America is a dreadful, daily constant,” says the Center, and violent crimes against members of minority groups like blacks, Latinos, homosexuals, and Arabs/Muslims “are not ‘isolated incidents,’” but rather, commonplace. To combat this ugly state of affairs, SPLC dedicates itself to “tracking and exposing the activities of “hate groups and other domestic extremists” throughout the United States. Specifically, the Center’s “Hate & Extremism” initiative publishes its findings in SPLC’s Hatewatch Blog and in its quarterly journal, the Intelligence Report.

SPLC first gained widespread national recognition in 1987, when it won a $7 million verdict in a high-profile civil lawsuit against the United Klans of America (UKA). By the time that lawsuit was filed, UKA was already a destitute, impotent, disintegrating entity that virtually all white Americans emphatically rejected; the SPLC lawsuit merely drove the final nail into the UKA coffin. SPLC boasts that it has likewise won “crushing jury verdicts” that effectively shut down groups like the White Aryan Resistance, the White Patriot Party militia, and the Aryan Nations.

This has been SPLC’s modus operandi since its inception: to initiate lawsuits against prominent hate groups for crimes that their individual members commit. In these suits, declares Morris Dees proudly: “We absolutely take no prisoners. When we get into a legal fight we go all the way.” The leftist writer Ken Silverstein, who in 2000 wrote a penetrating exposé of SPLC for Harper’s magazine, has noted that the targets of these lawsuits tend to be “mediagenic villains” who are “eager to show off their swastikas for the news cameras.” As Dees and SPLC well understand, such figures stand the best chance of triggering an emotional public response that translates, in turn, into financial contributions from donors eager to combat the perceived threat.

SPLC claims that there are currently 892 active “hate groups” in the U.S. Asserting that the vast majority of such organizations are “right wing,” the Center says they include “the Ku Klux Klan,” “the neo-Nazi movement,” “neo-Confederates,” “racist skinheads,” “antigovernment militias,” “Christian Identity adherents,” and a variety of “anti-immigrant,” “anti-LGBT,” “anti-Muslim,” and “alternative Right” organizations. While also identifying a tiny smattering of black separatist entities as hate groups, SPLC takes pains to point out that black organizations must be judged by a different standard than their white counterparts, because “much black racism in America is, at least in part, a response to centuries of white racism.”