RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.thefp.com/p/the-fbi-trump-durham-report?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

For the last seven years, conventional wisdom has told us a singular story about the FBI and Hillary Clinton. That story had a clear headline: the FBI was out to get her. 

Let’s go back to 2016, when the FBI was investigating both major presidential candidates in the run-up to the election. 

At the time, the bureau was looking into Donald Trump’s campaign’s ties to Russia as well as Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server when she was secretary of state.

In July of 2016, FBI Director James Comey announced that no charges would be brought against the Democratic nominee. Then, eleven days before the election, he said that in light of new information having surfaced, the Clinton investigation had been reopened. Finally, on November 6, two days before Election Day, Comey announced that the matter was closed—again.

To this day, Democrats remain convinced that Comey’s second to last announcement—which, we can all agree, was ham-handed—cast a pall over the campaign, tipping the scales in favor of the Republican nominee.

It’s a neat story. But it’s only half of it.

That’s the big reveal in Special Counsel John Durham’s 306-page Report on Matters Related to Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016 Presidential Campaigns, which came out late last week. 

If the Durham report shows anything, it is that the FBI leadership bent over backward to protect Clinton’s campaign while launching a full investigation into Trump’s campaign on the thinnest of pretexts. In other words, the FBI was not really the Clinton campaign’s persecutor, as so many insisted over the past few years, as much as its protector.

“The speed and manner in which the FBI opened and investigated Crossfire Hurricane during the presidential election season based on raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence,” the Durham report observes, referring to the FBI investigation into the Trump campaign, “reflected a noticeable departure from how it approached prior matters involving possible attempted foreign election interference plans aimed at the Clinton campaign.” 

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/reflections-on-the-revolution-in?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Reflections on the revolution in the west

In the 1990s, I managed to secure for myself entry to an inner circle of hell by arguing that, in general, children were best served by being brought up by their own father and mother. Of course, I said, some marriages would always fail; and of course, many lone parents did a heroic job in bringing up their children. But surely it was best to avoid such disadvantage wherever possible. This was denounced as heartless, cruel, anti-feminist and, of course, right-wing.  

Somewhat to my surprise, therefore, I was approached by a TV producer to make a film about my views on the destruction of the nuclear family. Since I was already cancelled in the best circles, I asked the producer why he wanted to publicise my views. “You’re so reactionary, you’re now in the very vanguard of progress”, he replied.

Given what I went on to say in subsequent years about the destruction of education, multiculturalism, the demonisation of men, Islamisation and anthropogenic global warming theory, I obviously became so progressive I managed to advance to the very end of time itself and met myself coming back.

The onslaught on the traditional family was an early example of a world turned upside down, in which certain kinds of disadvantage became a human right; victim status weaponised bullying and bigotry against those who were denied this status; and untold numbers of children were sacrificed on the altars of mass fatherlessness, the wilful promotion of ignorance in the classroom and the infantilisation of adults.

This all-out onslaught on the nation and its core social and moral norms has created our age of unreason. Language has been hijacked and evacuated of meaning.  Anti-racism means people are now judged, and damned, not for the content of their character but for the white colour of their skin. People with male genitalia are said to be women and are indeed hailed as female role models. Dissent means vilification, character assassination and intimidation.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/05/18/look-ahead-not-backwards-to-hold-the-justice-department-accountable/

Release of Special Counsel John Durham’s report on law enforcement and intelligence misconduct related to the 2016 presidential election has been met with outrage, recriminations, and a justified amount of vindication for those, including President Donald Trump, who helped expose the brazen operation from the start. 

Trump is taking a well-deserved victory lap, to the extent one can be had, punctuated with angry denunciations of the scandal’s perpetrators. Conservative media is carefully dissecting the report to confirm once again the existence of what can only be described as a legitimate seditious conspiracy—not the phony January 6 sort—concocted by the country’s most powerful interests to take down a duly elected president. U.S. Representative James Jordan (R-Ohio), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, invited Durham to testify next week.

Unfortunately, the collective reaction is an exercise in futility. No one, as many observers readily admit, will be held criminally responsible. The corrupt scheme’s collaborators receive book royalties, speaking fees, and coveted gigs at cable news outlets and nonprofits rather than lengthy prison sentences despite Senator Rand Paul’s wishcasting. 

Some, including Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, populate the upper echelons of the BIden regime. Biden himself played a key role in perpetuating the destructive lie.

But relitigating the past in the public square, as vindicating as it may feel, is fruitless. The same corrupt elements are still at work, taking aim not just at Trump but his allies and voters in the shadow of another national election. Trump summed up the current threat in a message posted Wednesday morning on Truth Social.  

Trump’s unjustified optimism in the final sentence notwithstanding, he is correct. Attorney General Merrick Garland’s handpicked special prosecutor, a man who has not been seen in public since his appointment more than seven months ago, is hauling everyone from Mar-a-Lago maids to former Vice President Mike Pence before grand juries considering charges against Trump for his role in January 6 and the handling of classified documents. A steady drip of leaks from Special Counsel Jack Smith’s office keeps Trump’s suspected criminality on the front pages; at the same time, Smith refuses to disclose the names of taxpayer-paid staff conducting the unwieldy investigations.

Federal indictments are imminent.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-dirty-money-behind-the-lynching-of-clarence-thomas/

The country is witnessing the second high-profile lynching effort of Justice Clarence Thomas. Even while the media ignores the millions from foreign nationals passing through shell companies to the Biden family, it has pushed invented scandals for Thomas while demanding his resignation to make way for a radical leftist Biden court appointee.

While no one expects anything but lies and smears from the media, few are aware of how the smear campaign against Justice Thomas was organized and who is funding it.

Before it was splashed all over the media, the Clarence Thomas smears were mostly generated by ProPublica with articles such as “Clarence Thomas’ Secret Life of Luxury” then rebroadcast by the media in stories such as “ProPublica: GOP megadonor paid private school tuition for grandnephew of Justice Clarence Thomas” which keep the smear campaign going.

While the media is deeply interested in who paid for Thomas’ grandnephew’s education, it’s uninterested in where the money that funds ProPublica’s smear campaign is coming from.

ProPublica has amplified the coverage of Harlan Crow, a conservative donor who is friendly with Thomas, but is less interested in discussing some of the men who back its operations. Its leftist smear campaigns are funded by the man who helped bring down the economy with his abusive tactics, a former Enron executive and FTX crypto-fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried.

The money that brought down banks is now trying to bring down a Supreme Court Justice.

ProPublica is a leftist nonprofit set up as an “ethical watchdog” by Herbert Sandler, listed by Time Magazine, as one of the 25 people to blame for the financial crisis of 2008, and more bluntly by Saturday Night Live as, ““people who should be shot”. (In a sign of the power and influence of the Sandlers, the SNL skit was quickly censored and cannot be found on NBC.)

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/05/19/the-past-week-proves-it-democrats-are-the-brainless-party/

If Republicans are the stupid party – and you will get no argument from us here about that – perhaps the correct label for today’s Democratic party is “brainless.” Witness what it did in just the past few days:

President Joe Biden showed up at the pro-abortion EMILY’s List gala, where he said “I also want to thank my buddy Kamala who I work for up in the White House for leading on this issue.”

This is not the first time Biden has mistaken Harris as president. The fact that she could be president is worse, since there are few in public office as dimwitted as she. Recently, Harris offered this pearl of wisdom at an event honoring National Small Business Week: “Some of our younger small business owners actually self-identify as entrepreneurs. They’re small business owners also.”

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman, the darling of the left, had this to say to a witness during a Senate Banking Committee hearing this week:

“Is it a staggering responsive … responsibility … that the the head of a bank could literally could literally crash our economy. Astonishing. That’s like if you have, I mean like … and, and they also realize is that-that-that now they have, it’s in the guaranteed a guaranteed way to be saved, by again by no matter no matter how, you know. So, it’s, it’s, you know, isn’t it appropriate that the those kinds of this kind of control should be more stricter to prevent this kind of thing from going? Or should we just go on and start bailing and sailing whoever bank, regardless of how however there’s their conduct is?”

https://victorhanson.com/institutions-breaking-bad/

As a general rule, the Left eventually destroys everything it touches.

It sees all institutions as ideological fodder, to be warped and twisted, as a necessary means to serve higher political ends. Think of an institution that started out in theory as at least neutral, apolitical, and benign, and then ponder how utterly corrupt it has become.

Public Broadcasting. The public was delighted over a half-century ago with the novel idea that it could enjoy drama, documentaries, and in-depth news—without soap and car commercials (as if something can ever be “free” without consequences). Who did not enjoy the importation of Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation or the multi-episode version of Robert Graves’ I, Claudius?

Remember the first decade of the MacNeil/Lehrer Report? It was a mostly honest liberal version of the news, delivered by two professional journalists, both superior to a Dan Rather or Peter Jennings.

But by the new millennium, the non-political programming began to become overtly ideological. “Nature” documentaries began plugging manmade, disastrous “global warming” to “climate change” to “climate chaos” themes. The PBS NewsHour house “conservatives” were more liberal than most Democrats of the age.

The quirky Garrison Keillor’s liberal, but interesting radio show, A Prairie Home Companion was finally Trotskyized by #MeToo, along with the blotted-out name of Keillor himself.

Many originally thought that NPR might resemble a more lavishly funded form of a mostly nonpartisan C-SPAN, as envisioned, say, by the talented, fair-minded, and astute Brian Lamb of Booknotes. But listen to NPR now and one would conclude that transgenderism is the new normal, that about four people voted for Donald Trump, that BLM/Antifa are similar to the Elks or Rotary, and the dossier is still “Russian collusion,” and Hunter’s laptop remains “disinformation.”

https://amgreatness.com/2023/05/17/joe-biden-the-habitual-racialist-demagogue/

The most recent liberal ABC News/Washington Post poll showed Joe Biden’s approval rating at 36 percent—the lowest in history for a president at this point in his first term.

Biden’s low popularity is no mystery. 

He inherited energy independence, affordable gas prices, historically low interest rates, low inflation, calm overseas, a low crime rate, and a largely closed border with legal-only immigration. 

And then Biden destroyed that inheritance. 

He has begged illiberal foreign governments to pump oil he refuses to drill domestically. 

He spiked inflation at the highest rate in over 40 years. 

Home interest rates have skyrocketed from less than 3 percent to 7 percent. 

He nearly doubled the price of gasoline. 

His hare-brained retreat from Afghanistan marked the greatest humiliation of the American military in the last half-century. 

Kabul is now selling billions of dollars’ worth of abandoned American equipment to terrorists and anti-American regimes.

After that fiasco, Biden foolhardily played down a possible “minor” Russia invasion of Ukraine. He implored Russia to exempt some American institutions from its cyber-attack target list. 

No wonder an empowered Putin went into Ukraine. 

Biden’s family is corrupt from top to bottom. 

Its influence peddling schemes increasingly are targets of congressional investigations. Biden himself is explicitly mentioned by his son Hunter as the recipient of a 10 percent commission on monies the family syndicate leveraged from foreign interests. 

Biden promised “unity.” Instead, he habitually smears half the country as “semi-fascists” and “ultra-MAGA” extremists. 

Biden is cognitively challenged and often incoherent. And he is now losing support in the polls from African Americans, once his most loyal constituency.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-game-of-debt-ceiling-chicken/

A feature of divided government, especially when the House of Representatives is not controlled by the president’s party, is “debt-ceiling chicken.” The president’s party tries to bluff, with threats of a default, the House, which is responsible for initiating money bills, into giving the president whatever he wants, usually more money for redistribution, and no cuts to entitlement spending. The House does the same thing, usually pressuring the other party to accept spending cuts.

The cliff they’re both speeding towards is an unprecedented default on the government’s debt, which currently stands at $31 trillion. Each side calculates that voters will blame the other party, which will slam the brakes first as the cliff approaches. This year Joe Biden, or whatever Edgar Bergan or Edith Wilson is actually calling the shots, until a week ago took a hard stand against any negotiations on raising the debt ceiling with a “clean bill” as the early June deadline looms.

The spectators of this show usually decry the “partisanship” and lack of “bipartisan” cooperation the two parties are exhibiting. Yet disputes over the budget illustrate what the Founders had in mind when they crafted a divided and balanced government––to exploit this factional competition, which reflects a flawed human nature and its passions and interests, in order to protect freedom by setting ambition against ambition. Also, this process can force a more careful consideration of a proposed policy, and sift out the dangerous features and a bringing to light better ones.

Money is integral to this process. The desire for gain accompanies ambition and the lust for power. The ensuing disparities in property, as Madison pointed out, are the cause of rival political factions. Control of the public fisc allows factions to pursue their ideological aims at the expense of others.

During the writing of the Constitution, Gouverneur Morris similarly identified the major factions as comprising the poor and the rich, those with “great personal property” and the “aristocratical spirit.” The “Rich will strive to establish dominion & enslave the rest. They always did. They always will.” To check the ambition of the “rich,” “the popular [non elite] interest will be combined [against] it. There will be mutual check and mutual security.”

https://justthenews.com/accountability/whistleblowers/tale-two-whistleblowers-highlights-reprisal-risk-congress-probes

Two different whistleblowers from two separate law enforcement agencies in two separate high-profile criminal cases are raising a disturbing new question for Congress: Is the Biden administration seeking to squash those who report wrongdoing or challenge its official narratives?

Just 24 hours apart, the plights of a decorated FBI intelligence analyst and a decorated supervisory IRS agent burst onto the national scene with detailed accounts alleging they have endured retaliation and reprisal for blowing the whistle.

The publicly unnamed IRS agent – once a star on the Swiss bank tax evasion cases that stunned the world – was unceremoniously dumped along with his entire team from the Hunter Biden tax probe just a few weeks after alleging there was Justice Department political interference in the high-profile matter, his lawyers reported to Congress.

The removal stunned lawmakers who just a week ago won assurance from the IRS chief there would be no reprisals. It also stripped the Hunter Biden prosecution team of a bench with deep knowledge gained by years of investigation into the president’s son.

FBI intelligence analyst Marcus Allen – a combat-tested Marine who just a few years ago was named the Charlotte, N.C. field office employee of the year – has had his security clearance and paychecks revoked after reporting he had found open-source intelligence calling into question the accuracy of Director Chris Wray’s testimony about the Jan. 6 probe, according to his complaint filed with the DOJ inspector general.

The FBI declined comment on Tuesday when asked about Allen’s complaint.

Both cases have lawmakers scratching their heads, concerned that if the whistleblowers allegations are corroborated that Congress has been deprived of opportunities to fix problems impacting American taxpayers.

“It’s unacceptable,” Rep. Austin Scott, R-Ga., a key member of the House Intelligence committee, told the “John Solomon Reports” podcast on Tuesday. “We need people inside the agencies to tell us, in many cases, the secrets of those agencies, if we’re going to pass legislation that is going to correct some of the wrongs of the past.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/05/16/the-hate-industry/

“The most dangerous terrorist threat to our homeland is white supremacy.”
— President Joe Biden, speaking at Howard University, May 13, 2023

In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, when establishment politicians started to make common use of the term “homeland,” they told us the most dangerous threat to Americans was foreign terrorists. But today, we are instructed to fear the enemy within. A new iconic date, January 6, 2021, is inscribed on our collective consciousness. From coast to coast, Americans are being herded into two camps. There are the “white supremacists,” those bad people who purportedly hate good people. And then there is everyone else, good people who are encouraged to hate the bad people.

The common thread, to state the obvious, is hate.

As Joe Biden’s would-be successor, doing his part to nurture and support the hate industry, California Governor Gavin Newsom on May 4 announced “the Launch of CA vs Hate, a New Statewide Hotline to Report Hate Acts in California.” Proclaiming that “hate will not be tolerated,” the governor said that Californians will have “another tool to ensure that not only justice is served, but that individuals have access to additional resources to help deal with the lingering wounds that remain after such a horrendous crime occurs.”

This is agenda-driven hype. The agenda, perfectly expressed by author Michael Shellenberger in a Substack post last week, is to “manufacture a fake ‘hate’ crisis as [a] pretext for mass spying, blacklists, and censorship.” The hype, also exposed by Shellenberger in his recent article, is underscored by the fact that over the past 10 years, hate crime convictions, as opposed to “criminal complaints of hate crimes,” have not increased at all. In a state with 40 million people, hate crime convictions were a minuscule 109 in 2021, and a negligible increase from 107 in 2012.

The hate industry is a vast agglomeration of lucrative hustles, now institutionalized and expanded into multiple and overlapping sectors. There is the diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) sector; the equity, social, and governance (ESG) sector; the activist sector comprising countless groups, including Black Lives Matter and Antifa; the corporate, academic, and government sectors; the media sector; the politicians; and the pundits. All of these sectors have spawned scores of thousands of well-paying jobs.

If these institutions weren’t able to point to rising levels of hatred in America, then their specialty, the business of hate, would no longer be a growth industry. Where there is no hate, they must manufacture it. Where hatred has diminished, they must discover new forms of hate, often so subtle that we foolishly fail to recognize it without their assistance.