RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/spengler/2022/08/23/a-dying-desperate-establishment-is-a-dangerous-beast-n1623454

The best piece of U.S. political analysis published in recent weeks is Michael Anton’s essay at Compact Magazine, “They Can’t Let Him Back In.” Writes Anton, a former deputy national security adviser in the Trump administration: “Our rulers’ wealth and power rise with open borders, trade giveaways, and endless war. Trump, at least in principle, and often in practice, threatens all three.” The brazenly partisan perversion of the justice system that was the Mar-a-Lago raid validates Anton’s warning in spades.

Trump threatens what the elites call the “rules-based international order,” which simply means an international order in which the elites make the rules.

Our elites are as incompetent as they are malicious. If anyone bears the blame for tearing down the post-war international order—the NATO alliance and the dollar-centered monetary system—it is the elites themselves, whose arrogance, overreach, and outright pigheadedness threaten to ruin the West. Long before the next U.S. president takes office in January 2025, the “rules-based” order and the institutions attached to it will be in ruins. The elites will be desperate.

The Ukraine war is a dealbreaker for the “rules-based order.” Despite the drumbeat of propaganda channeled through the echo chamber of international media, Russia is NOT losing—not militarily and not economically. China has doubled its imports of Russian oil and India has quadrupled its imports. The two countries alone pay Putin $150 billion a year.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/08/22/where-is-steven-dantuono/

A few days after the Capitol protest on January 6, 2021, a tough-talking FBI chief with a Boston accent promised the American people that the bureau would spare no resource in hunting down everyone and anyone involved in the four-hour disturbance that day. 

Steven M. D’Antuono, the newly appointed head of the Washington, D.C. FBI field office, gave the public a stern warning. “The FBI will leave no stone unturned. This is a 24/7, full bore, extensive operation,” D’Antuono explained during a January 12, 2021 press conference at the Department of Justice. “As Director Wray says, the FBI does not do easy.”

His agency, D’Antuono bragged, has a “long memory and a broad reach.” Agents from 56 FBI field offices across the country “will be knocking on your door if we find out you were part of the criminal activity at the Capitol.” He urged people to turn in their co-workers, neighbors, and relatives if they had information that could help the FBI in its dragnet.

Turns out, his comments weren’t just Beantown-style braggadocio. More than 850 Americans since then have been investigated, arrested, and charged for mostly nonviolent offenses related to the January 6 protest. Armed FBI agents have conducted early morning raids at homes across the country, using military style vehicles to batter in front doors while traumatizing families, children, and neighbors in the process. It is a crusade of fear and terror meant to reinforce D’Antuono’s threats that those who dared to demonstrate against the fraudulent election of Joe Biden that day will pay a hefty price. 

Nearly 20 months later, D’Antuono’s office continues to announce new arrests.

Yesterday, in a statement posted on the website of the federal agency he runs, Dr. Anthony Fauci announced his retirement in December, one month before Republicans are expected to take control of the House of Representatives and maybe the Senate.

I am announcing today that I will be stepping down from the positions of Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and Chief of the NIAID Laboratory of Immunoregulation, as well as the position of Chief Medical Advisor to President Joe Biden. I will be leaving these positions in December of this year to pursue the next chapter of my career.

As Sister Toldjah notes at RedState:

Apparently, the “next phase” of Fauci’s career will include collecting a sweet pension and possibly avoiding having to answer before Congress under oath as to what he knew about the origins of COVID-19 and U.S. gain of research funding:

https://thefederalist.com/2022/08/22/mike-pence-is-wrong-doj-and-fbi-rot-spreads-way-deeper-than-garland/

The former veep is still trying to sound reasonable by saying the GOP shouldn’t criticize the FBI — but the bureau is saturated with political bias that must be expunged.

When it comes to the way the deep state regime is at war with Republicans, former Vice President Mike Pence’s No. 1 priority is showing that his main concern is to keep playing the “good cop” to the “bad cop” of former President Donald Trump. 

Speaking in New Hampshire last week, Pence characteristically tried to have it both ways over this unprecedented attack on norms that the incident represented. After vaguely calling for transparency, Pence said:

I also want to remind my fellow Republicans that we can hold the Attorney General accountable for the decision that he made without attacking the rank and file law enforcement personnel at the FBI. The Republican Party is the party of law and order. Our party stands with the men and women who serve on the thin blue line at the federal, state, and local levels. These attacks on the FBI must stop. Calls to defund the FBI are just as wrong as calls to defund the police. The truth of the matter is we need to get to the bottom of the matter and let the facts play out, but more than anything else, the American people need to be reassured of the integrity of our justice system.

Conservatives are justifiably venting outrage over the banana republic-style raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home by FBI agents acting on the orders of Attorney General Merrick Garland. But the soft-spoken Pence thinks the priority is to reassure the administrative state that Republicans won’t be unreasonable in their pushback against attempts to delegitimize opposition to the Biden administration. 

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/real-motivation-fbi-raid-mar-a-lago/?utm_source=Spectator+World+Signup&utm_campaign=

I write  after the FBI, without warning, raided Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s home in Palm Beach. According to Trump, agents even broke into his safe and made off with who-knows-what documents. They also rifled through Melania Trump’s wardrobe. Maybe they were looking for classified lingerie. Who knows?

As many commentators pointed out immediately, this assault on a former president of the United States by what amounts to the Democratic Party’s secret police was unprecedented. Never before in our history has a former president been subject to the mafia-busting, terrorist-crushing might of state police power directed by the opposing party.

That’s just in our history, though. Elsewhere the story is not so cheery. In many countries, using the power of the state to persecute and harass one’s political opponents is business as usual. Trump got it right when he noted that such “weaponization of the Justice System” and “prosecutorial misconduct” had hitherto been the province of “broken, Third-World countries,” not America.

https://www.city-journal.org/trump-derangement-wont-end-trump

Several days before the 2016 presidential election, the comedian-cum political commentator Bill Maher made an extraordinary admission to his audience. In the past, he said, he’d heaped derision on Republican candidates and officeholders like George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney, portraying them as extremists. “We attacked your boy Bush as if he was the end of the world,” he told former presidential speechwriter David Frum, “and he wasn’t.” Maher spoke of giving President Obama $1 million to defeat Romney because he feared him so much. But “Mitt Romney wouldn’t have changed my life that much,” he admitted in 2016. For years, Maher said, liberals like himself had been “crying wolf” about Republicans, including “honorable men” like Bush and McCain. But the 2016 election, and Donald Trump, were different. “Once fascists get power, they don’t give it up,” Maher said, as he pleaded for votes against Trump.

It’s not clear how much of Maher’s audience was persuaded by his confession, but we know that far more people voted for Trump than the political establishment imagined possible—so that many voters must have discounted the same kinds of claims made against Trump as just more “crying wolf.” Six years later, Trump is a defeated ex-president, but still very much on the minds of liberals. If Trump is a fascist, he’s been an ineffective one, given that he claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him—not what you’d expect a dangerous autocrat to let happen. His own behavior in the wake of that loss, and especially his words and actions around the events of January 6, were unpresidential, to say the least, and even the partisan congressional hearings that have often seemed more like a show trial than a serious inquiry have reminded the country how disturbing Trump’s behavior was, and how serious his character flaws remain. But the political establishment has itself in the ensuing years often acted as autocratic as they accuse Trump of being—most recently, in the FBI raid on Trump’s Florida home.