RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-nation-divided-and-a-world-in-turmoil/

A happy, upbeat friend does not watch television news, whether national or local, does not read a newspaper and avoids discussing politics, religion or even sports. Self-employed, he found out about something called the coronavirus while driving to work the day the California lockdown mandate began. That morning he encountered no traffic on the normally busy streets of Los Angeles and said, “What’s going on?!” It seems unthinkable that someone in his mid-to-late 30s could erect news blinders, especially when he, like most everyone else, uses a smartphone for personal and business matters. He even maintains a Facebook page to keep up with friends and family.

He does not know that since Joe Biden became president, five million illegal aliens entered the U.S. from over 100 foreign countries, their whereabouts now mostly unknown. Border patrol arrested dozens of border crossers on the terror watch list, with no telling how many entered undetected.

He does not know that America faces a crisis of fentanyl, a synthetic opioid more potent than heroin by as much as a factor of 50, and morphine by as much as a factor of 100, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. China supplies the precursor chemicals and Mexican cartels process, manufacture and bring the fentanyl into the United States. At 64,000 deaths among those aged 18 to 49 in 2021, fentanyl killed more than those who died from COVID-19, cancer and car accidents combined.

He knows nothing about a Donald Trump-hating Manhattan district attorney who might arrest and indict the former president under a legal theory that even The New York Times called “untested.” He does not know about the “weaponization” and collusion of the DOJ and Big Tech social media platforms to attack conservatives, stifle dissent about vaccine and mask mandates and suppress the cost-benefit debate about COVID-19 lockdowns. Among other things, the student learning loss suffered due to virtual versus in-school learning.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/murder-manifesto-mystery/

On Monday, March 27, as the April 1 “Trans Day of Vengeance” approached, Audrey Hale, a woman who thinks she’s a man, shot open a locked door and entered the Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee.

In 14 minutes, Hale fired 152 rounds from an AR-15–style rifle and 9mm Kel-Tec SUB2000. Hale shot dead Evelyn Dieckhaus, 9, Mike Hill, 61, William Kinney, 9, Katherine Koonce, 60, Cynthia Peak, 61, and Hallie Scruggs. That nine-year-old was the daughter of Chad Scruggs, senior pastor at the Covenant Presbyterian Church, on the same site as the school.

With six people dead, including three children, Hale’s attack qualifies as a mass murder, and in any murder case, the question of motive is paramount. Hale left clues in a manifesto, but trans-friendly activists sought to suppress its release. For example, Charles Moran, of Log Cabin Republicans, advocates for equal rights for LGBTQ+ Americans, warned of “serious consequences” if the manifesto was released to the public.

Enter Nashville city councilman Robert Swope, who worked as Tennessee state director for Donald Trump in 2016 and now heads the city council’s Public Safety, Beer and Regulated Beverages Committee. Swope told the New York Post that the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit is working “in tandem” with the Metro Nashville Police Department to complete “a very in-depth analysis of certain aspects of the shooter’s life.”

According to the councilman, “the manifesto is going to be released. It’s just a matter of when. There are some incredibly brilliant psychological minds and psychological analysts combing through her entire life.” While revelations await, one fact is perfectly clear.

The FBI, supposed on guard 24/7 against domestic terrorism and violent extremism, failed to prevent Audrey Hale’s attack. Relatives of the victims have reason to wonder what the FBI knew and when they knew it.

https://www.city-journal.org/chicagos-hard-left-choice

For several reasons, the election of Brandon Johnson as mayor is the most important in Chicago for generations and the most politically salient urban election this century. First, it represents the triumph of the hard Left not on one of the coasts but in the heart of the Midwest, in a city known for its pragmatic, if machine-Democratic, politics. Second, it displays the raw power of public-sector unions in Illinois and in today’s Democratic Party. Johnson was not just supported by the unions; he is the paid agent of the most powerful and radical of them all—the Chicago Teachers Union. Third, Johnson’s victory will have national reverberations for years to come because his administration will test the Left’s attempt to transform urban policy.

Johnson’s win shows the current might of the urban Left precisely because the political climate and the candidate himself were not optimal for victory. Chicago has suffered high crime rates since the George Floyd riots. Cab drivers spontaneously tell me of carjackings and shootings they have witnessed. A campaign that focused on public safety, like the one that Paul Vallas ran, seemed tailor made for the times. Moreover, Johnson was running as a progressive after the failed tenure of another self-proclaimed, if far more moderate, progressive, Lori Lightfoot. We might have expected Chicago voters to opt for an ideological change, as New York voters did when they chose Eric Adams after the disastrous mayoralty of Bill de Blasio.

Johnson, too, was an imperfect messenger for the Left. The teachers’ union provided him with much of his campaign funds and boots on the ground, but many parents were unhappy with the union’s long strike in 2019 and prolonged school closures during the pandemic.

https://www.thefp.com/p/a-prisoner-of-china-an-american-scandal?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

For 11 years, Mark Swidan has languished in a Chinese prison on charges no one believes. ‘If this were a politically connected person, he would have been out a long time ago.

There are at least 54 Americans being wrongly held overseas today. They haven’t broken any laws. They haven’t received a fair hearing. They have been rendered political pawns, detained in dingy cells in places like Cuba, Iran, Russia, and China.

Last week, Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich became one of them when he was taken by agents in Yekaterinburg, where he was working on a story. He was accused of espionage and taken to Lefortovo prison in Moscow. Bari Weiss

“In the fall of 2012, Mark Swidan was 37 and engaged to a Filipino woman named Mylene. Mark had met her on a trip to Manila in 2011. He loved Southeast Asia, and he’d built a small interior design business selling hand-carved knickknacks from Thailand, artworks from Vietnam—that kind of thing.

He had also just bought, with his mother Katherine Swidan, a fixer-upper outside Houston that the three of them planned to move into after the wedding. The house needed work, and Swidan googled a factory near Guangzhou that sold flooring and light fixtures for almost nothing.

So in October, Katherine said, her son jumped on a plane to buy housewares halfway across the world. This was an odd thing to do, but less so for a man who had a penchant for Asia. Katherine told me that her son also planned to visit Macau, the Las Vegas of China, which is a quick train trip away, before returning home.

He had been in Guangzhou a few weeks—Katherine wasn’t sure how long—and on his last night there, November 13, 2012, he took his driver and interpreter to dinner to thank them for carting him around.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/04/07/dont-let-biden-gaslight-you-about-the-jobs-situation/

The one thing he’s good at is lying about statistics.

Whatever the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports today about job growth and the unemployment rate, you can bet that President Joe Biden will use it as an opportunity to brag about his superb handling of the economy. The one thing Biden is good at is lying with statistics.

Biden will probably claim that he’s overseen a record number of new jobs – the most in history. The press will dutifully regurgitate White House talking points.

But the numbers getting bandied about these days about job growth and unemployment are wildly misleading because they ignore important bits of context. Such as:

The pace of job growth slowed considerably once Biden started “rescuing” the economy.
It took just nine months under President Donald Trump for the economy to regain 57% of the 22 million jobs lost during the COVID lockdowns. It took 17 months under Biden to regain the other 43%.
The economy was adding jobs at an average of 1.3 million a month in Trump’s last nine months in office. In the first nine months of Biden’s term, job growth averaged 620,000.
As a result, job growth is now behind the pace set by most recoveries since 1948, according to the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank. Nearly three years after the COVID recession officially ended, we are still just 2% ahead of the previous employment peak. At the same point after the 1981 recession, there were 3.5% more jobs. Three years after the 1969 recession, the job market was 5.7% bigger.
The jobs picture would be far worse had it not been for Republican-run states that defied the Biden administration’s intrusive COVID policies. By mid-2022, red states were 350,000 ahead of their pre-COVID highs, while blue states were still 1.3 million jobs short of where they were before the COVID lockdowns.

But what about the low unemployment rate Biden brags about?

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2023/04/06/cash-app-founder-bob-lee-stabbed-to-death-in-san-francisco-after-moving-to-miami-to-evade-crime-wave-n1685088

Lee had left the region six months ago and had moved to Miami, but was back in the city on business. He extended his trip by one day, and was murdered.

The Founder of the mobile payment company Cash App was stabbed to death on a deserted street in San Francisco early Wednesday morning. Bob Lee was a well-known member of the Bay Area technology community, and his violent death outside some luxury apartments near the Bay Bridge underscores the decline in living conditions in the city.

Lee’s gruesome death was partially captured on surveillance video, as reported by the San Francisco Standard.

Surveillance footage reviewed by The Standard shows Lee, who had already been stabbed, walking up Main Street away from the Bay Bridge at around 2:30 a.m. Lee crosses the intersection at Harrison Street and walks up to a parked white Camry with its hazard lights flashing.

Lee then lifts his shirt—as if to show the driver his wound and ask for help—and falls to the ground after the car drives away, the footage shows. He gets up and walks back toward the Bay Bridge before falling to the ground again outside an apartment building called the Portside.

At some point, Lee dialed 911 and repeatedly screamed for help, saying he needed to go to the hospital, according to the records reviewed by The Standard. Lee made the call at 2:34 a.m. and police arrived on the scene less than six minutes later.

City leaders and the media are rushing to defend San Francisco as being a peaceful, safe city.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/04/department_of_defense_official_testifies_that_the_military_must_be_a_safe_space_for_the_nonbinary.html

When a rainbow-colored Navy training video on the proper use of preferred pronouns surfaced last year, many people thought it was a joke. Sadly, many people were wrong.

Recently, a top Department of Defense official offered testimony to Congress that doubled down on the video’s underlying message: the armed services must be a “safe space” in which each and every member feels validated and affirmed on his and/or her journey of self-discovery. Remarkably, the video discussed how to make the Navy a “safe space” for people who wish to explore their gender identity.

People traditionally joined the Navy to explore the world and burnish their character, not to explore their gender identity and sexual preferences. This puts a new twist on basic training. “Am I a boy or a girl?” is really basic. Or perhaps neither or both…or something else entirely would be a better fit. Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead with my own personal gender journey!

This has to be good for unit cohesion and operational readiness, particularly when hundreds or thousands of sailors are confined to a single boat, right?

The DOD’s Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer (CDIO) reportedly told the House Armed Services Committee that the “concerns young Americans have about safety are negatively impacting [military] recruiting.”  The CDIO further claimed that potential recruits do not “feel safe reporting to work for fear of discrimination.”  

Our military now needs to be “a safe space” or no one will join it? This seems oxymoronic and counter-intuitive at best, and potentially cataclysmic at worst.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/04/05/our-french-revolution/

We are in a Jacobin Revolution of the sort that in 1793-94 nearly destroyed France. And things are getting scary. 

The Democratic Party vanished sometime in 2020. 

It was absorbed by hard-left ideologues. They were bent on radically altering, or hijacking, existing institutions to force radical, equality-of-result agendas that otherwise do not earn majority support. 

The American people want affordable power and fuel and energy autonomy. They do not want a Green New Deal that results in dependence on the Middle East. 

They want fiscal sobriety, not a permanent stagflationary economy marked by bank failures, soaring interest rates, crony capitalism, and subsidies for those who choose not to work. 

They know no country can exist without a border, much less while offering blank checks to foreign cartels that kill 100,000 Americans yearly. 

They demand realist deterrence abroad, not the current woke military whose erosion is spelling the end American credibility and global stability. 

Racialists are eerily embracing discredited Neo-Confederate notions of racial chauvinism, discrimination, segregation, and the old-one-drop rule of racial obsession. They are turning America toward a Balkanized war-of-all-against-all. 

To implement such an unpopular program, the new Left must radically alter our institutions. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/chicago-chooses-crime/

Brandon Johnson’s “victory” means that Mayor Lori Lightfoot will be replaced by someone far worse. Lightfoot at least made occasional efforts to fight crime, Johnson’s message is that criminals are the victims.

That is the trend in a party and a political system that goes to extremes.

Johnson’s victory comes as little surprise despite polls that showed Paul Vallas was leading. Like Rick Caruson in Los Angeles, Vallas picked up endorsements from Democrats, including surprising ones, ran as a moderate and seemed poised to win over a city that was tired of the madness. And, like the LA mayoral race it didn’t matter. Johnson and Bass had the same two assets, racial bloc voting and a political machine capable of delivering votes, especially once it understood how many votes were needed to get its candidate over the top.

I’m not even counting the media.

Chicago loves crime, but this isn’t the Capone kind of vote, it’s the solidarity between the Left and the thugs running the streets. The old Chicago machine alternated between tolerating crime and cracking down on it. It cut dirty deals with bosses and busted hoods. The new machine loves street level criminals. And they love it.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-indictment-accelerates-americas-race-to-the-bottom-alvin-bragg-new-york-polarization-clinton-edc1d2b2?mod=opinion_lead_pos6
Mr. Penn was a pollster and adviser to Bill and Hillary Clinton, 1995-2008. He is chairman of the Harris Poll and CEO of Stagwell Inc. Mr. Stein, a Democrat, served as New York City Council president, 1986-94.

The demonization of political opponents is entering its next depressing but predictable phase—the use of the most partisan parts of the criminal-justice system to arrest and prosecute political opponents on flimsy charges. Too much of the public, increasingly divorced from bedrock national values, is cheering it on.

It’s the logical extension of Donald Trump’s claiming he won the election he lost; of Joe Biden’s branding “MAGA Republicans” a “clear and present danger” to “our democracy”; of right-wing groups planning and executing an assault on the Capitol; of the Russia-collusion hoax; of partisan impeachments; of tech companies censoring political and scientific information to promote ideological and partisan agendas; of retired intelligence officials interfering with the 2020 election by making false claims about the Hunter Biden laptop; of law students shouting down federal judges with the encouragement of university administrators.

The routine violation of political norms worsened under the Trump and Biden administrations but began under President Obama. He personally upbraided the Supreme Court in his 2010 State of the Union address, falsely characterizing its holdings in the Citizens United case. His administration weaponized the Internal Revenue Service against grass-roots conservative groups and initiated the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s interference in the 2016 election.

Most voters in last month’s Harvard CAPS/Harris poll endorsed indicting Mr. Trump—51% of all respondents and 80% of Democrats. When asked if such an indictment would be politically motivated, 59% said yes. When asked if any payments to Stormy Daniels were campaign or personal expenses, 67% said they were personal—the opposite of the theory in the New York indictment. Most expect Mr. Trump to be acquitted, which means some respondents’ answers violate the basic principle that prosecutors shouldn’t bring charges that they can’t prove beyond a reasonable doubt.