RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-tale-of-two-economies-11562199595

Judging from last week’s debate, Democrats running for President see America as a Dickensian nightmare of inequality. It’s the best of times for millionaires and billionaires, and the worst of times for everybody else. Time to wake up from the Barack Obama economy, folks, and admit how many more Americans are prospering from the faster economic growth and tighter labor market after the policy changes of 2017.

“Who is this economy really working for? It’s doing great for a thinner and thinner slice at the top,” Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren declared at the debate. “When you’ve got a government, when you’ve got an economy that does great for those with money and isn’t doing great for everyone else, that is corruption, pure and simple.”

Sen. Cory Booker, who hails from high-tax New Jersey, moaned that “I live in a low-income black and brown community. I see every single day that this economy is not working for average Americans.” California Sen. Kamala Harris added: “You ask [the President], how are you measuring the greatness of this economy of yours? And they point to the jobless numbers.”

Faster Growth, Rising IncomesCompound annual per capita income growth in selected states in the first nine quarters of the TrumpAdministration and the second term of the Obama AdministrationSource: Bureau of Economic Analysis

A Rising Tide Lifts More BoatsAverage hourly earnings growth on a monthly basis during the first 29 months of the Trump Administrationand the second term of the Obama AdministrationSource: Bureau of Labor Statistics

So job numbers and other economic evidence are fake news? Hardly. The reality is that wages are rising at the fastest rate in a decade for lower-skilled workers, and unemployment among less-educated Americans and minorities is near a record low. Democrats want Americans to believe the fictions they spin rather than what they see with their own eyes.

http://dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/3896/Are-Our-Independence-Days-Numbered.aspx

https://www.theepochtimes.com/are-our-independence-days-numbered_2988614.html

We have arrived at a point in U.S. history that even our Founders, in their nearly infinite wisdom, may not have foreseen.

Regarding Election 2020, we are faced with the grave question of whether enough Americans remain in the 50 states to go to the polls to affirm the continued existence of the United States of America by voting for Donald Trump.

If the answer is no, if Americans are outnumbered and even surrounded by those animated by an openly anti-America agenda promoted by the Democratic Party, 2020 could be a terrible turning-point of no return.

This tells me it’s here: that pedal-to-the-metal moment, over a century in the making, when our potential survival as a nation-state really does seem to hang in the balance.

This is not because the Democratic Party has suddenly changed course. True to its beating, socialist heart, Democrats have been variously pushing us toward decriminalizing illegal immigration, establishing sanctuary cities and states (why not a sanctuary nation, too?), abolishing private health insurance, confiscating guns from law-abiding citizens, and the like for a very long time. Likewise, their reverential zeal for abortion, infanticide, and sexual psychoses, which they harness like battering rams against religious liberty and traditional morality.

What is markedly different now is that the Party’s mainstream could hardly be more aggressive in its contempt, its animus, for the U.S. Constitution, the flag, the Founding Fathers, the borders, and American citizenship.

The Democratic presidential candidates who have emerged from this hostile camp make this clear every time they speak. Listening to them in their first debates, I finally put it together in the starkest terms: Democrats hate America. Worse, they don’t care who knows it, because it’s a selling point for their anti-American constituencies. With this being the case, how are we not one election away from a phase of openly calculated national destruction?

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/betsy-ross-flag-controversy-progressivism/

Ramesh notes the speed with which the Betsy Ross flag was deemed outré:

Even so, the shift of the Betsy Ross flag, from worth showcasing for the Obama inaugural planners in 2013 to unacceptable for a big company in 2019, has been very quick. That timeline actually downplays how quick it has been: It was nearly instantaneous. The vast majority of people hearing about this controversy, including me, had never previously been exposed to the idea that there was anything malevolent about the flag.

And even as specimens of woke culture go, this one also stands out for the tenuousness of the connection between the newly unacceptable thing and the evil it is supposed to represent.

This is true. In a couple of days, we’ve gone from a celebrity saying a flag is bad, to a major corporation indulging that judgment, to presidential candidates and governors blithely confirming and cementing it. In my view, though, the scariest part is not so much “how quick it has been,” but that there has been no argument or explanation to speak of. Upon the instant, professional progressivism has accepted the change as if it were taking orders from on high. “The flag is in the bad column now? Got it. Will amend attitude and proceed accordingly.”

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/07/03/insinuendo_why_the_mueller_report_doth_repeat_so_much_140692.html

The Mueller report should have been a knockout blow to anti-Trump forces who invested their hopes in the special counsel. With Robert Mueller’s finding that the Trump campaign did not conspire with Russia to steal the 2016 election and that there was no clear path to indicting the president for obstruction, the enterprise should have shuddered to a stop.

Instead, those who were at first dumbfounded by the special counsel’s report have since found reasons to be buoyed by it – by its grudging tone, its sly assertions resembling proof, and its insistence that not being found guilty should not be confused with innocence. If you had to pick a single sentence that captures the style and substance of Mueller’s tome, you’d find it on page 2: “A statement that the investigation did not establish particular facts does not mean there was no evidence of those facts.”

Democratic members of the House have secured Mueller’s agreement to testify. They will encourage him to offer a sort of informal indictment of the president, something to justify impeachment. Something that can be winkled out of the Mueller report.

All of which calls for a closer reading of the 448-page document. What becomes clear is that the special counsel used a number of rhetorical devices to couch evidence and craft a narrative so that a document that ultimately clears the president can also be read as an indictment.

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/451413-russian-oligarchs-story-could-spell-trouble-for-team-mueller

Sometimes it is the quiet, elusive ones who come back to haunt you. And for ex-special prosecutor Robert Mueller, one of those might be a Russian billionaire named Oleg Deripaska.

The oligarch who once controlled Russia’s largest aluminum empire has been an international man of intrigue in the now-completed and disproven Trump collusion investigation.

Deripaska was a disaffected former business client of Donald Trump’s fallen campaign chairman Paul Manafort. He also was a legal research client of Trump-hating, Clinton-aiding British spy Christopher Steele. In his spare time, he was an occasional friendly cooperator with the FBI and its fired deputy director, Andrew McCabe.

And, at the height of the Russia collusion hysteria, Deripaska was sanctioned by the Trump administration to financially punish Russian President Vladimir Putin for his meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

With the Russia case, in which he had so many connections, now completed, Deripaska is breaking his silence. And what he has to say could impact Mueller’s July 17 testimony before Congress.

In a wide-ranging interview with me, Deripaska confirmed a story told to me more than a year ago by law enforcement sources: He was indeed interviewed by FBI agents in September 2016 during the early Russia probe, and he told them he strongly doubted the bureau’s theory that the Trump campaign, through Manafort, was colluding with Moscow to hijack the 2016 election.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/it-wasnt-force-that-made-america-great-it-was-freedom/

Happy Fourth of July!

We have reason to celebrate.

The Fourth honors the founding of America. It’s the anniversary of the day in 1776 that the Declaration of Independence was approved.

The Declaration was important.

It didn’t say that America would be the best country because it would have the biggest military, toughest leaders, most government giveaways or tightest borders.

The great innovation that day in Philadelphia was the declaration that the United States would have a (SET ITAL)limited(END ITAL) government, rooted in the idea that every individual has inalienable rights.

In other words, we do not get our rights from government. They already exist. The government’s job is to (SET ITAL)protect(END ITAL) our rights.

It’s a good thing to say out loud while watching the fireworks with your family.

The world took notice when American colonists told their king: “Bug off. We will trade with you and respect your borders, but no longer will we allow you to rule us.” Revolutions in France and elsewhere took their cues from America.

It was America’s emphasis on limited government — wanting to make sure no one in government would ever again wield power like that of the British king — that made our revolution the greatest and most lasting success of recent centuries.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274154/bearing-false-witness-ilya-feoktistov

On the morning of February 25, 2019, two prominent leaders of the New England Jewish community walked into a Boston police station to report that I had committed an anti-Jewish hate crime against both of them by threatening them with bodily harm. Robert Trestan, the New England regional executive director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), and Jeremy Burton, the executive director of Boston’s Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC), told the police that I was motivated by anti-Jewish bias, and that they were in fear for their physical safety as a result.

But, when Boston Police Department (BPD) detectives spoke to my attorney, Jewish civil rights advocate Karen Hurvitz, they were surprised to learn that I myself am Jewish and that, like Trestan and Burton, I am the executive director of a Jewish 501(c)(3) non-profit, Americans for Peace and Tolerance (APT), which confronts anti-Jewish bias as part of its primary mission.

In these troubled times, law enforcement cannot take reports of violent threats against Jewish leaders lightly. The level of urgency was upped several notches in this case because Messrs. Trestan and Burton, as prominent civic leaders in New England, have close personal relationships with Boston’s chief of police and mayor, the Suffolk County district attorney, the local U.S. Attorney’s office, and the governor of Massachusetts, among others. Mr. Trestan is a civil rights attorney, had advised the Obama White House on countering violent extremism, was honored by the Boston Police Foundation, and currently sits on the governor’s Task Force on Hate Crimes. Galvanized by the threat of prominent Jewish leaders being targeted by a dangerous criminal, scarce police resources were immediately mobilized to investigate the alleged threats.

Once the BPD detectives learned that I was a Jewish community leader, they were, understandably, confused as to why two Jewish executive directors would call the cops on another one and falsely accuse him of an anti-Jewish hate crime. My attorney explained the likely motive: my recent article in The Federalist, in which I was highly critical of Trestan and Burton’s leadership. The article criticized Trestan and Burton for politicizing the Boston Jewish community’s vigil for the victims of the 2018 Pittsburg synagogue massacre by turning it into an anti-Trump resistance rally.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-leftist-mob-attacked-me-in-portland-11562109768

‘No hate! No fear!” chanted the left-wing crowd as they marched downtown Saturday. I walked to the front of the line to record the protesters with my new GoPro camera when I was suddenly slammed on the back of my head with something hard. Dazed and still hearing faint chants of “no hate,” I was then punched and kicked by perhaps a dozen masked people in black. At an Antifa event meant to resist “fascist violence,” I—a gay journalist of color—was beaten so badly that I was hospitalized for a brain hemorrhage.

Since last year, I have been targeted by Antifa and its allies for my critical coverage of their violent extremism. I’ve reported those incidents to the Portland Police Bureau, and in some cases I’ve identified suspects, but there were no arrests. The mainstream media describe Antifa as “antifascist,” but in fact it is a far-left paramilitary-style movement of anarchists and communists agitating for a revolution.

Antifa is known for wearing black and concealing faces with masks to commit crimes under the protection of group anonymity. The Homeland Security Department has described some of Antifa’s activities as “domestic terrorist violence,” but Portland recently voted to withdraw from the Joint Terrorism Task Force, citing concerns the Federal Bureau of Investigation targeted left-wing activists.