RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2022/12/12/now-what/

The release of the Twitter Files, for the most part, confirms what Donald Trump and his supporters knew in 2020. Big Tech drastically suppressed information damaging to Joe Biden—his son’s overseas financial dealings and the Democratic Party’s plans to ensure Biden’s victory with an unprecedented flood of mail-in ballots—before Election Day.

The series of posts by independent journalists Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and Bari Weiss reveal internal communications between top executives as they contorted company policy on the fly to accommodate the Democrats’ political motives. Taibbi kicked off the party on December 2 with a series of tweets detailing how Twitter banned the New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop and continued to defend the move even after some company honchos admitted it was indefensible. “By this point ‘everyone knew this was fucked,’ said one former employee, but the response was essentially to err on the side of . . . continuing to err,” Taibbi wrote while posting screenshots of chat messages between decision-makers.

Weiss followed up by outlining Twitter’s shadow banning—a practice that former CEO Jack Dorsey repeatedly denied—aimed at conservative influencers such as Dan Bongino and Charlie Kirk in 2020. This built up to a fever pitch that climaxed on January 6, 2021, when a four-hour disturbance finally gave Twitter and other social media behemoths the excuse they had been hoping for to fulfill Big Tech’s dream of permanently deplatforming the president. “The bulk of the internal debate leading to Trump’s ban took place in those three January days,” Taibbi explained, referring to January 6, 7, and 8, the day Trump was banned. “However, the intellectual framework was laid in the months preceding the Capitol riots.” The pressure campaign to boot Trump, Shellenberger further disclosed, came from both internal and external forces including “Former First Lady @michelleobama , tech journalist @karaswisher , @ADL , high-tech VC @ChrisSacca.”

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/david-solway-2/2022/12/12/people-of-the-lie-n1652934

In several previous articles, I addressed what I believe to be the crucial issue of our time, namely, the institutionalization of the lie in culture and politics. The situation shows no sign of abating and indeed grows more alarming with every passing day. The integrity of the information we receive about domestic and world affairs has been degraded almost beyond recognition. Reality has been denatured. For the Lie has become a systemic and indelible part of public and institutional life. The dilemma we now confront, as D. Stephen Long points out in an important book dealing with the relation between relativism and authoritarianism, is speaking truth in a post-truth world.

But the problem goes further than relativism; rather, it involves a substitution of absolutes, of an assumed truth for a genuine truth, replacing objective fact and data with a new paradigm of subterfuge, fable, and casuistry under the rubric of “truth.” When lying acquires something like constitutional status, it becomes a phenomenon so deep it can be described, adopting the popular saying, as “turtles all the way down,” now the title of an indispensable new book on vaccine science and myth, which reveals “how ineffectively and dishonestly the COVID pandemic was handled.”

In fact, a climate of fraud and deception is now omnipresent in all walks of life and endeavor, personal and professional. As Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben writes in The Mystery of Evil, power and institutions are delegitimated today “because the powers have lost all awareness of their legitimacy,” which is why “illegality is so diffuse and generalized.” In other words, lying has assumed the authority of law.

The “People of the Lie,” in psychiatrist M. Scott Peck’s telling phrase, are now everywhere to be found, inhabiting what we might call the “moral infrastructure” of our era. They comprise not only the elite or parasite class in the corridors of both elected and non-elected officialdom, the federal agencies, the administrative bureaucracies, the corporate world, academia, the medical and pseudo-scientific professions, the suborned media, the diverse nonprofits and aspiring Technates like the World Economic Forum, the radical feminist sorority, “Global Warming” propagandists, much of the judiciary that labors to pervert and annul prosecutorial ethics and legal obligations in our courts, but also the vast body of ordinary citizens whose lives and everyday practices have been infected by the virus of the Lie.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/12/the_commercial_impacts_of_covid_will_last_for_years.html

Have you noticed that things have changed in our country over the last three years?

In 2019, my truck broke down.  I got it into the shop the next day to be fixed.  In 2022, I needed a mechanic to service the brakes on one of our cars.  It took three weeks to get the car into a garage.

We also had a fender-bender this year.  It took two months to get an appointment for an estimate — not even to get someone to actually fix the damage.  The insurance adjuster just sighed and said that was pretty normal these days.  I halfway expected him to ask who John Galt is.

In 2019, we could go to the local diner and get a good meal with good service.  In 2022, the service at the same diner is slow because of limited staff.  Three quarters of the menu items aren’t available because food deliveries are weeks overdue.

Those are minor annoyances.  Things get a bit more serious when we look at the medical industry.  In 2019, I needed a new general practitioner (G.P.).  I got in to see one almost immediately.  In 2022, my wife needed a new G.P.  Most weren’t accepting new patients, and the doctor who was had a four-month waiting list to get an appointment.

Even worse, I found myself in the E.R. with a heart condition this summer.  The E.R. doctor referred me to a cardiologist.  It took two months to get an appointment to see him and another six months to get on the surgical schedule for the procedure I needed.

Are you noticing a pattern?  Prior to COVID, everything worked.  After COVID, every industry is struggling to meet customer needs.  Businesses have people waiting in line to give them money but are unable to provide the services those customers want to buy.  Don’t they want the money?

Everybody’s familiar with the problems the airline industry experienced in 2022.  Flight cancelations and delays have been commonplace — not because of weather or mechanical issues, but due to a lack of flight crews.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/minnesota-hamas-linked-cair-comes-out-in-favor-of-racism-in-education-grants/

The deputy director of the Minnesota chapter of the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Mohamed Ibrahim, insinuates that the discussion by the Faribault School Board on whether or not to refuse a grant is based in racism.

Just because CAIR came to the meetings, it gets its brand displayed on the broadcast and is treated as if it has something of value to offer.

This is a teachable moment for all of us that we need to be vigilant about these attempts to really defund BIPOC [Black, Indigenous and other People of Color].

There are no “attempts” or need to be “vigilant” about the board meeting depriving BIPOCs of an education. They are questioning a poorly written piece of legislation.

Minnesota authorities and local newscasters need to take responsibility for their role in what became nationwide rioting: here is a video of people in Santa Monica, California, almost 2,000 miles away from Minneapolis, dragged out of their cars by George Floyd protestors and beaten in the street.

Minnesota did not kill George Floyd, but they did bring us the riots, and could do it again.

Although CAIR’s Jaylani Hussein was instigating trouble both before and after the George Floyd riots, he continues to receive favorable coverage, even when positioning himself potentially to trigger a large-scale event.

Hussein brought a mobile public address system to the five-year memorial for Jamar Clark, whose police shooting sparked massive protests at the time. Hussein lashed the crowd for not doing “something,” and bellowed into the microphone:

We FAAAILED!

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19211/elon-musk-twitter-files

It was not “Russian disinformation.” Nor was it “unsafe.” The executives running Twitter in the 20 days before the 2020 presidential election clearly knew that, and tried to find other justifications for what amounted to raw censorship.

Twitter’s bias in censoring or banning conservative accounts for “hate speech” while happily servicing accounts for Iran’s “Supreme Leader” and the Taliban is a running joke. In a series of secretly recorded interviews with Twitter employees, Project Veritas had already confirmed that “shadow-banning,” manipulating the number of followers shown by certain accounts, and selectively “de-boosting” certain tweets in its algorithms was a well-established, standard manipulation of the platform’s stated purpose: “We serve the public conversation. That’s why it matters to us that people have a free and safe space to talk.”

Kudos to Khanna for his lonely but principled stand for free speech. Taibbi also noted in his thread that Khanna was the only Democratic official to do so.

China’s enticements to the Biden family are but one example of this campaign. We learned through this research how insidious and effective the Chinese government has been at co-opting not just the families of senior elected officials, but captains of industry, financial behemoths, and the wealthiest American philanthropists and educational institutions.

The Biden story also showed the ingenuity of corrupt politicians who essentially “outsource” their corruption to family members rather than risk a possible paper trail leading back to themselves. The Bidens, even more than Bill and Hillary Clinton before them, were a family influence business.

We have all learned about other stories of political interference and foot-dragging within the FBI. The public is right to wonder whether federal prosecutors are as serious about pursuing this case as Twitter’s Democratic partisans were in squelching it.

Further, President Biden’s Attorney General, Merrick Garland, continues to task the FBI with investigating the January 6, 2021 riots as a deep conspiracy, while simultaneously ignoring what certainly appear to have been well-organized efforts by Antifa to foment violence during the 2020 George Floyd riots, and violence done by pro-abortion organizations after someone on Twitter publicized the home addresses of Supreme Court justices.

For more than two critical weeks, under secret pressure from the Biden campaign and Democrats who were desperate to bury a devastating story that implicated their presidential candidate in his son’s corruption by Chinese intelligence-connected businessmen. The Post’s story was factually accurate, legitimately reported, and was (belatedly) authenticated by other news outlets. In short, there was no reason to do what Twitter, Roth, and Gadde did, other than pleasing a political party with whom they agreed.

Elon Musk’s release of internal Twitter correspondence around the censoring of the New York Post’s blockbuster “Hunter Biden laptop” story merely confirms what most knew already — that Twitter under Jack Dorsey and Parag Agrawal was staffed with Democratic Party partisans who censored information they thought would damage their cause.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/12/13/whos-more-un-american-oil-companies-or-joe-biden/

When Biden administration officials aren’t promising to put them out of business, they’re calling oil companies “un-American” for not drilling more. They should look in a mirror.

Amos Hochstein, Joe Biden’s “senior adviser for energy security” at the State Department, complained to the Financial Times last week that oil companies were using profits to buy back stock rather than invest in oil production.

“It is not only un-American, it is so unfair to the American public,” he said. “You want to pay dividends, pay dividends. You want to pay shareholders, pay shareholders. You want to get bonuses, do that, too. You could do all of that and still invest more. We are asking you to increase production and seize the moment.”

This is the same guy, by the way, who just a few months ago said that oil output must be limited in order to “make sure that we’re in a better footing to accelerate the transition” away from fossil fuels.  

In any event, by Hochstein’s standard, Biden is the most un-American president in history, because his policies are behind both the industry’s increased profit margins and its decision to spend that money on stock buybacks rather than increase production.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/12/so_michelle_obama_was_behind_twitters_ban_of_trump_all_along.html

Michelle Obama, wife of President Obama, was one of the Democrat outsiders who pressed Twitter to make the unprecedented move to ban President Trump, then a sitting United States president, from that company’s platform.

That’s the latest revelation from the latest installment of the Twitter files, done by independent journalist Michael Shellenberger.

According to Fox News:

Former President Donald Trump was banned from Twitter the day after former first lady Michelle Obama and others demanded the company “permanently” remove him, according to the newest “Twitter Files” installment.

On Saturday, CEO Elon Musk and journalist Michael Shellenberger released the fourth batch of Twitter documents that show internal communications by the company’s executives between Jan. 6-8, 2021, including and shortly after the riot at the Capitol Building.

Among the files, Shellenberger reported “internal and external pressure,” including from the former first lady, fell onto the company calling for Trump to be banned from using Twitter.

“Now is the time for Silicon Valley companies to stop enabling this monstrous behavior—and go even further than they have already by permanently banning this man from their platforms and putting in place policies to prevent their technologies from being used by the nation’s leaders to fuel insurrection,” Obama wrote in a lengthy statement posted to Twitter on Jan. 7.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/12/11/our-parasitic-generation/

“Be assured young friend, that there is a great deal of ruin in a nation.”
— Adam Smith

Are we sure that there is all that much ruin left in the United States?

We are $31 trillion in collective debt. The new normal is $1.5 trillion budget deficits. The military is politicized and short of recruits. We trade lethal terrorists for woke celebrity athletes as if to confirm our enemies’ cynical stereotypes. 

Our FBI is corrupt and discredited, collaborating with Silicon Valley contractors to suppress free speech and warp elections. We practice segregation and racial discrimination and claim we do not because the right and good people support it and, anyway, the victims deserve it. The country has seen defeat before but never abject, deliberate humiliation as in Kabul, when we fled and abandoned to the terrorist Taliban a $1 billion embassy, a huge, remodeled air base, thousands of friends, and tens of billions of dollars in military hardware—and hard-earned deterrence.

We are witnessing the breakdown of basic norms essential for civilized life, from affordable food and fuel to available key antibiotics and baby formula. Old Cairo seems safer than an after-hours subway ride or stroll at dusk in many major American cities. Medieval London’s roadways were likely cleaner than Market Street in San Francisco. Speech was freer in 1920s America than it is now.

The Breakdown of Basic Society

Our California always is a preamble to America’s future. Our present is likely your tomorrow. 

Each summer here we impotently expect forest conflagrations. Millions of acres of flames pour more millions of tons of smoke and carbon and soot in the skies. Tens of millions of hated combustion engines cannot begin to match the natural blankets of aerial dirt. 

The state seems to shrug it off, saying wildfires are both inevitable and natural. Old-fashioned forest management and fire-fighting strategies, honed over centuries, are deemed obsolete by our green experts. So, we let fiery nature take its better course. What is the implicit message to those in the way of fires that devour homes and trees? Nature’s way? Natural wood mulch? Or that such fools should not build their cabins or homes where they are not wanted?

https://amgreatness.com/2022/12/10/wheres-the-outrage/

Bob Dole ran a pretty poor campaign against Bill Clinton in 1996. It was no surprise, then, that he lost. But let history acknowledge the former U.S. senator from Kansas asked the very best question in the entire election cycle. “Where’s the outrage?” he thundered at a GOP event at the end of October 1996. Back then, the chief issue was the Clinton Administration’s use and abuse of 900 FBI files on their political opponents. Imagine! An American president using the FBI as his secret police! Have you ever heard of anything so outrageous? In America, amidst Our Democracy™? 

Then as now, however, the answer to Dole’s question is simple: Nowhere. There was, there is, no outrage. Then, as now, there are little flutters of enthusiast unhappiness among the rest of the faithful who greet news of outrageous behavior with applause and expressions of solidarity. “You go, champ!” they seem to say, before relapsing into a blinking, weakly smiling repose. (This is the cue for people like Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney to adjust their hairdos and stride boldly on stage.) 

But the media writ large? Then, as now, it’s crickets as far as the eye can see. 

The biggest story of the day revolves around Elon Musk’s decision to open the window and reveal Twitter’s active role in stage managing the 2020 election on behalf of Joe Biden and very much to the detriment of Donald Trump. Over the past week, extensive Twitter threads posted by Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and others have revealed that the company was essentially part of a coordinated Democratic oppo-research and suppression operation and, moreover, one that was actively collaborating—or, to use the preferred term, “colluding”—with the FBI to destroy Donald Trump and assure Joe Biden’s election.

Obviously, this is front-page news in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other major newspapers as well as top-of-the-hour reporting every night on the mirror-mirror-on-the-wall talk shows that many Americans turn to so they do not have to face reality. 

Just kidding—about the prominence of the story, I mean, not the habit of Americans turning to their digital fentanyl to avoid the truth. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/twitter-files-the-real-news-is-that-the-left-dems-media-do-not-care/

“And what a difference the laptop story suppression made. A survey by The Polling Company found that 17% of Biden voters in seven swing states would not have voted for President Joe Biden had they known about the story. This is nothing short of the biggest election interference in U.S. history.”

New Twitter owner Elon Musk gave reporter Matt Taibbi of Substack access to internal Twitter documents about the media platform’s decision to spike the Hunter Biden laptop story and about how “the Biden team” had a direct pipeline to Twitter executives.

Taibbi tweeted:

“By 2020, requests from connected actors to delete tweets were routine. One executive would write to another: ‘More to review from the Biden team.’ The reply would come back: ‘Handled.’ …

“Celebrities and unknowns alike could be removed or reviewed at the behest of a political party … Both parties had access to these tools. For instance, in 2020, requests from both the Trump White House and the Biden campaign were received and honored. However … this system wasn’t balanced. It was based on contacts. Because Twitter was and is overwhelmingly staffed by people of one political orientation, there were more channels, more ways to complain, open to the left than the right.