RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-democrats-deepen-the-washington-swamp-special-counsel-hearing-corruption-washington-documents-committees-11675288301?mod=opinion_featst_pos1

Here’s one way to divide America’s politics. Republicans and conservatives think the Washington Swamp is real. Democrats and progressives don’t believe it exists. This division of belief matters more than the existence of UFOs because whether the Swamp is real looks likely to be an issue in the 2024 presidential election.

President Biden gives his State of the Union speech next week, and no doubt he’ll describe his Washington as a city of bounty and benevolence.

Ron DeSantis disagrees. It was hard not to notice how, in his inaugural speech last month, the Florida governor went out of his way to describe Washington differently—unaccountable, a mockery of the rule of law, dismal, floundering, a binge.

These Swamp thoughts are set in motion by what might seem two unrelated news stories this week. But for those of us who believe, the Swamp covers a lot of damp ground.

The first was about the Justice Department and director of national intelligence telling the Senate Intelligence Committee they wouldn’t talk in detail to the committee about the Trump or Biden classified documents. The reason? It would get in the way of the special counsels appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland. Come again? The committee’s Sen. Mark Warner (D., Va.) had it exactly right about this mega-stonewall: “That just cannot stand.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/our-freedom-is-getting-more-fragile/

In January of 1967, Governor Ronald Reagan famously said, “Freedom is a fragile thing and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction.”  Sixty-six years later, the truth of that observation is all around us. If we don’t reject the politicians and policies that compromise our freedoms, this generation may be the one who will live through that extinction.

The erosion of our freedom is not a paranoid figment of the libertarian imagination. Recently the Cato Institution released its Human Freedom Index for 2022, and found that globally, freedom has declined. The Land of the Free has dropped seven points since last year, and now ranks 23rd of 160 nations.

Politicized and unscientific Covid mitigation protocols account for some of this decline. Such policies furthered the loss of freedom by violating “the rule of law and the freedom of movement, expression, and assembly,” which are among Cato’s criteria for measuring freedom. But here in the U.S. we have seen the degradation of our freedoms long before Covid.

The gross violations of the rule of law, for example, accelerated after the 2016 election. The accusation that Donald Trump colluded with Russia to fix the election was fomented by our intelligence, investigative, and surveillance agencies. The special prosecutor took two years to debunk the charge.

In contrast, Hillary Clinton, who patently violated the laws regulating the handling of classified documents, as well as willfully destroying evidence, was given a pass by FBI Director James Comey weeks before the election, even though Clinton’s violations were much worse than those of General Petraeus and others who were disgraced, prosecuted, and some incarcerated.

Six years later, Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago compound was invaded by a heavily armed battalion of FBI agents, who searched his home and rifled his wife’s underwear drawer, and scattered documents on the floor for a staged photo. Trump ended up in a still ongoing investigation. A few months later, classified documents were found in Joe Biden’s think-tank office and at his home and garage. In his case, there were no raids by armed agents, no leaked staged photos for the media, and no participation by the FBI at all. Biden’s aides and personal lawyers handled the whole show, and there is still an embargo on sharing details with the voters.

Such examples could be multiplied, such as the kid-gloves used by the DOJ and FBI in handling BLM and Antifa rioters and anti-prolife vandals and arsonists, compared to the Stasi thug-tactics employed against the January 6 and prolife protestors.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/01/31/bidens-china-spy-scandal/

Joe Biden is taking heat for the classified documents he stashed at his home and garage. Though well worthy of attention, as Victor Davis Hanson notes, the documents scandal has overshadowed Biden’s indulgence of Chinese spies, on full display in a recent case. 

“Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn have dropped their case against a New York Police Department officer who had been accused of acting as a foreign agent on behalf of the Chinese regime,” The Epoch Times reports.

Baimadajie Angwang, 33, an ethnic Tibetan and naturalized U.S. citizen, was arrested in 2020 for acting as an agent of Beijing, for wire fraud, making false statements, and obstructing an official proceeding. Prosecutors charge that Angwang reported on Chinese citizens, cultivated intelligence sources, and connected Chinese officials with senior contacts in the New York Police Department. 

The U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Eastern District of New York recently filed a motion asking federal Judge Eric R. Komitee, a Trump nominee, to dismiss the indictment due to “additional information.” The Eastern District did not reveal the information or explain its relevance to the case. The move illuminates official Biden policy toward Chinese espionage in the United States. 

“The Justice Department is ending a controversial program, launched under the Trump administration, to hunt down Chinese spies,” CBS News reported last year. President Trump’s “China Initiative” targeted China’s theft of trade secrets and intellectual property. 

As federal prosecutors charged in 2017, MIT professor Gang Chen failed to disclose ties to China and failed to disclose a foreign bank account on a tax document. Prosecutors dropped the case against Chen, but it wasn’t clear what motivated them to act. This was hardly the only proceeding against Chinese agents the Justice Department chose to abandon. 

In 2020, federal officials changed that Chinese national Tang Juan lied about ties to the Chinese military in order to gain access to the University of California at Davis. The FBI found an April 14, 2019 article on a Xi’an, China, healthcare forum that showed Tang in a military uniform bearing the insignia of the Civilian Cadres of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA). The FBI also found two other articles listing Tang’s employer as the People’s Liberation Army’s Air Force Medical University (AFMU), also known as the Fourth Military Medical University (FMMU). 

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/the-joe-and-hunter-biden-scandal-convergence

Republicans have long said the Hunter Biden laptop scandal is really a Joe Biden story. Now, it looks like the Joe Biden classified documents scandal is also a Hunter Biden story. Two Biden scandals are merging into one.

The convergence point is President Joe Biden’s house in Wilmington, Delaware. The public learned in the last few weeks that Biden stored a number of classified documents there, both in his garage, famously next to his vintage Corvette, and in his personal library.

How many documents? Biden will not say. His personal lawyer, Bob Bauer, released a statement saying that after a search of the house, Justice Department lawyers took “six items consisting of documents with classification markings and surrounding materials.” The problem is, no one knows what an “item” is. Is it a single piece of paper with classification markings? Or is it a box of papers, perhaps hundreds of pages, some of which are marked classified? If you look at how the DOJ described the results of the Trump Mar-a-Lago search, you’ll see it used the word “item” to describe boxes of documents. So there’s no way to be certain how many documents Biden allegedly mishandled.

In any event, the documents were in the house. And then we learned that also in the house at times over the years was Hunter Biden, the president’s formerly drug-addicted son. And of course we know that Hunter Biden spent years cultivating relationships with shady foreign actors. Plus, he was at times addicted to crack and was, to say the least, unreliable when it came to information security. You might recall that he forgot about a whole laptop he once left for repair.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/02/01/classified-documents-everywhere-but-only-one-hunter-biden/

Leaving Washington with classified documents must be a tradition for outgoing presidents and vice presidents. Sensitive government papers have now been found in the private homes and offices of Joe Biden, Donald Trump and Mike Pence. Maybe every president going back for decades has taken documents he shouldn’t have. 

But only one has a crooked son who could have easily accessed those documents and used them to enrich himself and his corrupt family.

The public sure seems to believe that is the case. Six in 10 American voters are convinced it is likely that Biden’s son Hunter used information from the unsecured classified documents found in the current president’s Delaware home to sweeten “his foreign business deals.” Rasmussen Reports head pollster Mark Mitchell says the 60% figure is the “highest number we’ve ever seen implicating Joe Biden in anything.”

Republicans of course are overwhelmingly suspicious of Hunter Biden. But a large majority of independents, 62%, also believe that the president’s son used sensitive government documents to leverage his foreign business interests, according to the Rasmussen poll of 1,000 voters that was finalized over the weekend.

Voters also reckon that the Biden family has been “influence peddling for a decade.” Forty-three percent strongly agree with that statement while another 13% somewhat agree.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/01/31/the-third-golden-calf-gender/

Our previous two articles in this series dealt with the idol worship (i.e., secular religion) of Climate Change and Equity. Those symbolic Golden Calves at least have some connection to science and/or history. Although many climate initiatives are fatally flawed, and their supposed benefits grossly exaggerated, combatting atmospheric carbon dioxide accumulation is a valid objective. And although the quest for Equity for all attempts to address problems rooted in history, its methods are more appropriate to the accretion of political power than justifiable remedies.

By contrast, the Cult of Gender is an attempt to displace reality with a bizarre reimagining of humanity. 

The current popular usage of the word “gender” is now a conflation of sexual attraction, an individual’s chosen persona, and biological sex which is baked into our DNA. This is a specious construction. Sex dictates or at least influences many bodily functions, characteristics, and behavior, although there is, of course, variation. Only a miniscule portion of humanity has ambiguous DNA, so sex is as innate a trait as there is.

By contrast, whom we are attracted to sexually may be a conscious choice or a deeply felt orientation, but it is independent of our sex. A lesbian does not become a male because she is attracted to women, nor is a gay man female. Similarly, the persona or identity we opt to project is very much a choice embodied in appearance and behavior. It need not align with our biology at all. Sex and gender are, therefore, not interchangeable.

Society today is increasingly tolerant of gender identities. As far as we know, nobody is attempting to pass legislation (or to enforce outdated laws) to constrain any adult’s consensual sexual practices. Likewise, there are no restrictions on how we dress or interact in private, although there are some limits when it comes to potentially offensive behavior or appearance in public, depending upon the audience. The application of social “norms” is admittedly a gray and controversial subject.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/01/31/the-left-struggles-to-shove-memphsis-killing-into-a-racist-narrative/

On Monday, the Washington Post sent an update to its email subscribers with the subject line: “The police officers charged with the murder of Tyre Nichols are black. Does it matter?”

The short answer is: Yes, but only to race hustlers on the left.

Which is why the Post enlisted three reporters who spent nearly 1,400 words twisting themselves into pretzels to explain how black police officers beating a black man to death was further proof of “systemic racism.”

Here’s how the Post puts it:

“The race of the five officers charged in the Nichols killing has prompted a complex grappling among black activists and advocates for police reform about the pervasiveness of institutional racism in policing.

“The widely viewed videos of the Nichols … spawned nuanced conversations among black activists about how systemic racism can manifest in the actions of non-white people.”

If you’re confused, join the club.

In trying to make the country view the Memphis death through a racial prism, the left not only manages to defy common sense but undermines everything it has been claiming about racist police officers. Namely, that systemic racism manifested itself in whites disproportionately targeting blacks, and the solution was more racial balance in police forces. Or to defund them altogether.

Not only were the officers involved in Nichols’ death black, the Memphis police force is 58% black, as is the police chief. And, as the Post admits, this was “the result of a decades-long effort to field a police force that resembles the city’s 64% black population.”

No matter. The reporters quote Samuel Sinyangwe, president of a group called Mapping Police Violence, saying that “diversifying law enforcement is certainly not going to solve this problem.”

https://amgreatness.com/2023/01/29/justice-for-john-eastman/

The January 6 Committee may have shut up shop, Liz Cheney may have scuttled back to her constituency in Georgetown and at CNN, but the great Democratic vendetta machine is still fired up and pounding along, looking for people to smash and livelihoods to destroy.  

Those who dared to walk around the Capitol that fateful day are still being apprehended and jailed. Many face multi-year prison sentences for such misdemeanor torts as “parading” or “obstructing an official proceeding.” Anyone associated with Donald Trump is fair game, as the names Peter Navarro, Rudy Giuliani, Steve Bannon, and Jeffrey Clark remind us. 

At the top of that hit list is John Eastman, the distinguished constitutional scholar who made the unforgivable error of offering legal advice to President Trump in the turbulent aftermath of the 2020 election. 

I have written about Eastman before, both in this space and elsewhere. He has had his life turned upside down. He was shuffled out of his position as dean of the Chapman Law School and has been treated as a pariah by colleagues in his profession. Anti-Trump protestors regularly congregate at the foot of his driveway—fortunately, a long one—to vilify him and his association with the Bad Orange Man. 

Now the State Bar of California has announced that it has filed an official complaint of 11 charges against Eastman, alleging that he endeavored to “plan, promote, and assist then-President Trump in executing a strategy, unsupported by facts or law, to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election by obstructing the count of electoral votes of certain states.”

https://amgreatness.com/2023/01/29/anarchy-american-style/

The 1960s revolution was both anarchic and nihilist. But it was waged against—not from—the establishment. Hippies and the Left either attacked institutions or, in Timothy Leary fashion, chose to “turn on, tune in, drop out” from them.

The current revolution is much different—and far more dangerous—for at least three reasons.

The Establishment Is the Revolution

The current Left has no intention of “dropping out.” Why would it? 

It now controls the very institutions of America that it once mocked and attacked—corporate boardrooms, Wall Street, state and local prosecuting attorneys, most big-city governments, the media, the Pentagon, network and most of cable news, professional sports, Hollywood, music, television, K-12 education, and academia. 

In other words, the greatest levers of influence and power—money, education, entertainment, government, the news, and popular culture—are in the hands of the Left. They have transformed legitimate debate over gay marriage into a hate crime. Transgenderism went from a modern manifestation of ancient transvestism or gender dysphoria to a veritable litmus test of whether one was good or evil.

Students have no need to jam administrators’ offices because the latter, themselves, are as radical as the protestors and often lead them on in a top-down fashion. Had they not long ago demonstrated they were perfectly willing to subvert meritocracy, free expression, and equality under the law, they would not be occupying their present positions.

Apple, Google, Facebook, and other tech companies are not 1980s and 1990s “alternative” media geeks and hipsters creating neat gadgets for the people. They are not Steve Jobs and his pugnacious Apple battling the evil Microsoft or IBM, or the Macintosh commercial of 1984 depicting a maverick throwing a hammer into Big Brother’s screen. They are the Orwellian screen.

The current generation of techies is effectively Stalinist. Big Tech now colludes with the FBI, the Democratic Party, and the bureaucratic state to suppress free expression, warp balloting, and serve as contractors of government surveillance. Currently, the most totalitarian people in America are likely to wear flip flops, have a nose ring or pink hair, and disguise their fascism with ’60s-retread costumes.

There are no “armies of the night” marching on the Pentagon. Would-be demonstrators see no need, since radical identity politics, and gay, woke, and transgendered agendas are fast-tracked by the Department of Defense. 

There are no protests against the Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureau or the “La Migra” anymore by advocates of illegal immigration, because the Left owns the border. And it has utterly destroyed it. There is no border, no border enforcement, and no meaningful immigration law. As many as 6 million illegal entries during the first two years of the Biden Administration are proof enough of that. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/biden-lets-chinas-spies-slide/

“Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn have dropped their case against a New York Police Department officer who had been accused of acting as a foreign agent on behalf of the Chinese regime,” The Epoch Times reports.

Baimadajie Angwang, 33, an ethnic Tibetan and naturalized U.S. citizen, was arrested in 2020 for acting as an agent of Beijing, for wire fraud, making false statements, and obstructing an official proceeding. Prosecutors charge that Angwang reported on Chinese citizens, cultivated intelligence sources, and connected Chinese officials with senior contacts in the NYPD.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Eastern District of New York recently filed a motion asking federal judge Eric R. Komitee, a Trump nominee, to dismiss the indictment due to “additional information” on the case. The Eastern District did not reveal the information or explain its relevance to the case. So the move to dismiss may reflect official Biden policy of turning a blind eye toward Chinese espionage in the United States.

“The Justice Department is ending a controversial program, launched under the Trump administration, to hunt down Chinese spies,” CBS News reported in February of 2022.

President Trump’s “China Initiative,” targeted China’s theft of trade secrets and intellectual property.

As federal prosecutors charged in 2017, MIT professor Gang Chen failed to disclose ties to China and failed to disclose a foreign bank account on a tax document. Prosecutors dropped the case against Chen, but it wasn’t clear what motivated them to act. This was hardly the only proceeding against Chinese agents the DOJ chose to abandon.

In 2020, federal officials changed that Chinese national Tang Juan lied about ties to the Chinese military in order to gain access to the University of California at Davis. The FBI  found an April 14, 2019 article on a Xi’an, China, health care forum that showed Tang in a military uniform bearing the insignia of the Civilian Cadres of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA). The FBI also found two other articles listing Tang’s employer as the People’s Liberation Army’s Air Force Medical University (AFMU), also known as the Fourth Military Medical University (FMMU).