RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://fedsoc.org/commentary/publications/the-accidental-defender-of-the-constitutio

It is fair to say that Defender in Chief: Donald Trump’s Fight for Presidential Power is a book Yoo never thought he’d write. Fair because he says so himself, right up front: “If friends had told me on January 21, 2017, that I would write a book on Donald Trump as a defender of the Constitution, I would have questioned their sanity.”
A Review of Defender in Chief: Donald Trump’s Fight for Presidential Power, by John Yoo, https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250269577.

Decades from now, when historians assess Donald Trump’s presidency with sobriety and dispassion, the ironies are apt to stand out most. Donald Trump is the populist who lost the popular vote, owing his ascendancy to the Electoral College, an institution designed to temper popular excesses and which Trump himself, while pondering a presidential bid in 2012, rebuked as “a disaster for democracy.” Trump has been condemned as the Constitution’s scourge by progressives for whom the Constitution is mostly a nuisance to evolve beyond, framed by white racists in a time before Wokeness. Trump is the president who upheld the rule of law by firing the FBI director. He submitted to investigation by a special counsel whom he reviled but who nevertheless cleared him. Trump was impeached anyway by Democrats who were pushed into the exercise by partisans. But Democratic partisanship proved so devoid of appeal outside the activist Left that impeachment, though it happened just a few months earlier, rated nary a mention in the Democratic National Convention.

Is it any wonder that these four years have aged most of us tenfold?

We’re not through with the ironies, though. For present purposes, here is the most striking one: Through all of this, President Trump’s most compelling defender may be John Yoo, a brilliant conservative thinker who appeared to have both feet firmly planted in Camp Never Trump when the president took office in 2017.

John Yoo is the Emanuel Heller Professor of Law at the University of California’s Berkeley Law School, where it is not easy to be a conservative academic, but anti-Trumpers are welcome. Professor Yoo is a nonpareil scholar of the presidency—in particular, of executive power as conceived in the Constitution and practiced through more than two centuries. He is a prolific author, his grasp of his core concentration immeasurably enhanced by service as a high-ranking Justice Department official. He played a pivotal role in national security policy development in the post-9/11 era, when President George W. Bush grappled with the vexing challenges of international jihadism, often with ferocious partisan opposition in Congress.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/three-cheers-land-hope-bruce-bawer/

We are living through a year when the consequences of more than a generation of poor parenting and terrible education can be observed, in all their odiousness, in the streets of American cities. The young rioters, vandals, bullies, thugs, arsonists, and statue-topplers who pose as anti-fascists and racial-justice warriors do not just hate Confederate Civil War generals and certain specific institutions that, after sober and informed consideration, they have judged to be ethically inexcusable; they hate our country itself, and they hate its history, every bit of it, although they actually know next to nothing about either the country or its history.

As they take to, and take over, the streets – destroying where they are incapable of contributing, and harming and abusing many of those on whose behalf they claim to be protesting – these cruel, callow agitators are venting a rage that they themselves do not even understand and are targeting it at strangers who have done nothing whatsoever to harm them. Though they do not realize it, the people at whom this fury should properly be directed are, first, their overindulgent parents who refused to place the strictures upon them that most children desperately want and need, and, second, the ideologically driven teachers and professors who told them repeatedly over the years that America is irredeemably evil and that there is nothing they can do about that fact other than to tear the whole thing down.

To an extraordinary extent, the picture of America that exists inside these brats’ heads is the product of a single monumentally mendacious book – namely, The People’s History of the United States by the late Communist writer Howard Zinn, which has for years (thanks in part to some educators’ determination to indoctrinate and in part to the staggering neglect on the part of parents and politicians alike) been the default American history text in countless high-school and college classrooms.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/beyond-woke-mark-tapson/

Like many other linguistic irritants the left has introduced into our cultural lexicon, “woke” has become a household term seemingly overnight. It is generally understood to refer to some kind of Progressive state of self-righteous enlightenment, but what is its origin? How and why does one become woke, and what, if anything, lies beyond this condition? What are the philosophical underpinnings of this social justice religion? If you want to truly understand it and not simply dismiss it with an eyeroll, you can hardly do better than to look to writer, philosopher, poet, and former New York University professor Michael Rectenwald. Few contemporary scholars have researched the left’s totalitarian mindset more deeply, and elucidated it so thoroughly, as he.

In January of 2018 I interviewed Michael Rectenwald for FrontPage Mag here about being outed as “the Deplorable Prof,” the man behind an anonymous Twitter account which he used to criticize the “anti-education and anti-intellectual” social justice ideology of his (at the time) fellow leftist academics. The subsequent shunning and harassment he endured from his colleagues and the NYU administration drove Rectenwald to declare himself officially done with the left. He later published a book about it titled Springtime for Snowflakes: Social Justice and its Postmodern Parentage (which I reviewed for FrontPage Mag here) from the fine people at New English Review Press. The book is a must-read for understanding how identity politics has, as Rectenwald put it, eroded academic integrity and intellectual rigor in the American university.

Rectenwald quickly went on to publish another short but vital work, Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom (I interviewed him about that one, which you can read here). In this book he argues successfully that the “Big Digital” technologies and their principals like Google represent a new form of corporate state power and leftist authoritarianism.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/09/blackout-vs-white-fragility-daniel-greenfield/

White Fragility, a racist tract by Robin DiAngelo, a white leftist, has sold somewhere in the neighborhood of a million copies. It’s been praised by Democrats, assigned on Fortune 500 corporate reading lists, and DiAngelo commands speaking fees as high as $20,000.

Blackout by Candace Owens won’t show up at your local critical race theory seminar. The conservative activist isn’t welcome because she tells the truth about racism and its profiteers. Where DiAngelo has a  PhD in Multicultural Education from the University of Washington, Owens has a degree in experiencing real-life racism that the Seattle institution can’t offer.

Owens doesn’t have a Ph.D. in Multicultural Education; instead, as she writes of her childhood, she grew up as part of ”a family of six” in a “small, three-bedroom apartment within a run-down, roach-infested building” where “fistfights, police visits, and drama were commonplace.”

To DiAngelo, racism is about the experience of being white. Black people exist in DiAngelo’s world as objects, not subjects, casting light on the elemental evil of whiteness. To be white is to be racist, while being black means being the victim of white racism. Black people only matter as weapons in a struggle between white people over the meaning of race, nationhood, and justice.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/09/marsha_blackburn_explores_the_mind_of_a_conservative_woman.html

The Mind of a Conservative Woman by Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) is an insightful commentary for all women regardless of their political affiliation.  Blackburn delves into maintaining the traditions of family, freedom, faith, a free market, and respecting those with differing opinions. 

She exclaimed, “Nearly a decade ago, I wrote the book, Life Equity.  My literary agent told me I should write a second book.  I laid out the premise of the new book.  I thought how women in the public eye elevated to office told me that conservative women are treated differently than liberal women.  The mainstream media will elevate liberal women yet mock and diminish conservative women.”

Fairness is not always prevalent.  What the senator wants is an even playing field.  “In my book, there is a chapter where I discuss how the liberals want everybody to spout their talking points even if someone is not in complete agreement.  Some of the liberal women’s organizations sent an open letter to all of the newsrooms.  It explained how people should talk to a female vice presidential candidate — basically, what could and could not be said and how to approach them.  I fired off a letter to all of the signatories and all of the newsrooms, stating that this treatment should apply to all women.  Of course, I got zero response on my letter.”

The book encourages women to believe in themselves, think for themselves, and strive to be the best they can to succeed.  “When I would speak to groups of women, they would always tell me during a Q&A how they considered themselves independent, neither a Democrat or Republican.  They want to make up their minds about an issue by doing research.  I would ask them to consider the Constitution, rule of law, justice, equality, equal treatment, and to have government get off people’s backs.  I emphasized how I want to make decisions on education and health care for my children, not the government.  As I say in my book, no one should think that an American woman is too weak and stupid to handle their own life.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/09/revealed_the_shocking_full_extent_of_big_tech_censorship_of_conservatives.html

Allum Bokhari, the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News, has performed an extraordinarily valuable service by giving us his new book #Deleted: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal the Election. While the social media giants’ efforts to suppress all dissent from their far-left, anti-American agenda have been going on for years, few people are aware of the full depth and breadth of this sinister initiative, or of how it is much more than just a bias toward the left, but a carefully planned and coordinated endeavor that, if left unchecked, will do nothing less than relegate our First Amendment right of freedom of speech to the dustbin of history.

In #Deleted, Allum Bokhari tells the whole shocking story. For those who don’t realize the implications of what is going on, he includes a Prologue entitled “The Typewriter That Talked Back” that is as amusing as it is disturbing, and that makes abundantly clear even to the most technically challenged among us what is really happening to our foremost and most important freedom, right under our noses. Bokhari paints a vivid picture of a 1968 in which a typewriter refuses to type, typing instead its own message: “We regret to inform you that your last letter violated our terms of service (Rule 32: Abusive & Offensive Content). We have suspended access to your typewriter for 24 hours.” Newsstands remove from sale magazines that third-party “fact-checkers” have deemed to be “fake news.” The Post Office returns your mail because you told a joke in a letter that a censor found offensive.

It’s all funny until you realize that all this is exactly what email providers and big tech censors are doing to Americans today, every day on the Internet. In the pre-Internet world of 1968, it would have been preposterous. Americans would not have accepted it. But it has all happened gradually, as we gave away our freedom by clicking our agreement to dense and unreadable Terms of Service that turned over our right to say what we believe to shadowy, anonymous guardians of acceptable opinion. Most Americans today are only dimly aware, at best, that it is happening at all, and those that are approach it with grim resignation. After all, what are you going to do? Start your own Facebook?

https://www.theepochtimes.com/was-russia-collusion-a-diversion-from-the-real-scandal_3435809.html

Was ‘Russia Collusion’ a Diversion From the Real Scandal? Deep-dive with John Solomon and Seamus Bruner, co-authors of the new book “Fallout”By Jan Jekielek

According to investigative journalists John Solomon and Seamus Bruner, co-authors of “Fallout,” the seeds of this scandal go back well before President Trump came into the picture, as far back as 2009—and directly involve the highest offices of the country.

This is American Thought Leaders 🇺🇸, and I’m Jan Jekielek.

Jan Jekielek: John Solomon, Seamus Bruner, it’s such a pleasure to have you both on American Thought Leaders.

John Solomon: Thank you.

Seamus Bruner: It’s a pleasure.

Mr. Jekielek: You [co-wrote] this incredible book, “Fallout.” I’ve been reading it. Man, is this a dense book—lots of facts, lots of information in there. You make an incredible connection in there. We’ll talk about this; we’ll dig in, but basically, you make the case that the Russia collusion hoax has its origins in the Obama administration’s mishandling of the Russia relationship. That would be one way to put it. Tell me more.

Mr. Solomon: I think the seminal moment for me when I realized that these events, going back from 2009 all the way to the president’s impeachment in 2019, were connected was when I had a dinner with a senior Clinton campaign official about two springs ago. I started talking about everything I learned about Christopher Steele, and he said, “Why do you think we did the project?” I said, “Well, I assume it was to dirty up Donald Trump,” and he said, “Well, actually it started much earlier than that.” [I asked,] “What does that mean?”

He said, “Well, we came into the 2016 campaign worried that Peter Schweizer’s book, “Clinton Cash,” or the Clintons’ cashing in on the Russia policy was going to be one of our liabilities, and we want to scare Republicans away from it. So we started researching people like Paul Manafort and all the figures that later came out in the scandal. We were just looking for a way to scare Republicans off from using Russia as an election issue.”

I started to think, “Oh my gosh. This isn’t what we thought it was. It was a neutralization effort to keep an issue off the table in the 2016 election. Then Donald Trump kind of plays into it, and then when Christopher Steele takes it to the FBI, it takes off in an entirely different direction. Is that what happened?” And I remember the aide looked up and down about two or three times and finally said, “Yeah, that’s what happened.” And so that gave us the inspiration to go back and say, “Well, what failed so badly that they felt like they needed to cover it up, or have a neutralization, or a stay away sign on it?” We put that story together. In the process of my interview, which Seamus didn’t even know I had, he digs up a document, and this document is extraordinary. It’s a document of the polling data. Why don’t you tell him what you found?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-russia-farce-continues-11600466740?mod=opinion_featst_pos3

“For the truly disgraceful aspect here is the efforts of people like Mr. Strzok, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman (who calls the president Mr. Putin’s “useful idiot”) and others to label Mr. Trump a traitor because he insists on pursuing the policies he explicitly sold the American people. You don’t have to agree with Trump priorities but Mr. Strzok et al.’s method of disagreeing is slimy.”

Contrary to a media chorus, the Justice Department inspector general did not find the FBI handling of the Clinton and Trump cases free of “political bias.”

He found no “documentary or testimonial evidence” of such bias to explain actions for which “no satisfactory explanations” were offered. Obama appointee Michael Horowitz detailed at great length a series of chaotic, insubordinate and unprincipled acts by FBI bureaucrats navigating 2016’s treacherous waters.

One of these officials was Peter Strzok, as you know too well. All of us, even in modestly sensitive positions, are constantly reminded about compromising personal behavior on company networks. And yet, using an FBI messaging system, he not only conducted an extramarital affair with a colleague, not only engaged in prejudicial political banter, but did so while leading supremely sensitive FBI investigations into both major-party candidates in the middle of a presidential election.

His comeuppance was unsurprising and now he’s contributing, on behalf of Democrats, to a campaign to delegitimize the next election if their guy doesn’t win. CONTINUE AT SITE

From the phony Russia collusion narrative to the coordinated riots laying waste to US cities, it’s the same ongoing operation orchestrated by the left and targeting not just President Trump but hundreds of millions of Americans who revere their country and what it stands for. For the first time, crusading investigative journalist Lee Smith reveals who was responsible and the never before known involvement of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and senior military officials who engineered a coup against a sitting president.

Beginning in late 2015, political operatives, intelligence officials, and the press pushed a conspiracy theory about Trump-he was a Russian asset and spied on his campaign and his presidency in order to undo an election.

Because the ultimate goal of the anti-Trump operation is not simply to topple the president but rather to change the character and constitution of the country, the Deep State’s machinations didn’t stop even after Trump was cleared of charges of “colluding” with Moscow. Their efforts became even more fierce, more desperate, and more divisive, threatening to scar America permanently.

In their zeal to bring down President Trump, Deep State conspirators had unwittingly revealed the origins of the anti-Trump operation and exposed corruption at the very highest levels of the Democratic party-including former Vice President Biden and his boss, Barack Obama.

Lee Smith brings to this story the same incisive reporting and commentary that distinguished his runaway bestseller, The Plot Against the President. His investigation, identifying crimes and abuses committed by senior US officials, was later confirmed by a major Department of Justice report.

For The Impeachment Plot, Smith again enjoys unrivaled and exclusive access to the main players defending America and uncovering Deep State crimes-including Congressman Devin Nunes and the president’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.