RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/04/bidens-ministry-of-truth/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=top-stories&utm_term=third

A federal speech czar? Just as the Founders imagined it, no doubt.

Earlier this week, Department of Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told Congress that his agency is creating a “Disinformation Governance Board” to combat “misinformation” coming from Russia as we near this year’s midterm elections. The Biden administration’s new Committee on Public Information will be led by Nina Jankowicz, “a disinformation fellow” who, perfectly enough, comes to the administration from a think tank named after Woodrow Wilson. Like Wilson, Mayorkas, himself a font of untruths, does not explain under what constitutional power he proposes to oversee speech.

It gets tedious to point this out, but you can vividly imagine the thermonuclear meltdown the country would be (rightly) subjected to if a Republican president assembled a government panel tasked with weeding out “disinformation.” To our technocrats’ dismay, this isn’t Europe, where the state can dictate allowable speech and sometimes arrests those who don’t abide. Here, citizens are the ones who call out the state for peddling misinformation, not the other way around.

The pro-censorship Left, which is to say the vast majority of contemporary Democrats, now have Barack Obama on board as well. The one-time neoliberal champion of free speech — a freedom he employed aggressively to mislead the American people when it served his partisan interests — alleged during a recent Stanford University speech that “people are dying” from misinformation. And, you know, if censorship can save one life . . .

Indeed, these arbiters of truth not only happen to be some of the same people who ran around repeating ludicrous conspiracies about foreign interference for five years; they’re also the same people who used the menace of “Russian disinformation” to lie and suppress news that undermined their electoral prospects, as they did with the Hunter Biden laptop story. (That crew, you’ll be surprised to learn, includes Czarina Jankowicz.)

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/fbi-conducted-3-4-million-data-record-searches-in-2021-according-to-report/

The FBI conducted as many as 3.4 million searches of data in the U.S. without a warrant over the year 2021, according to a new government report.

The Annual Statistical Transparency Report, was published by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Thursday and focuses on the intelligence community’s use of national security authorities for surveillance under U.S. law.

The information was previously gathered by the National Security Agency, the U.S. military’s signals intelligence agency, but was transferred to the civilian-led FBI per the U.S.A. FREEDOM Act, passed in 2015.

The figure represented a 260 percent increase from the previous coverage year, 2020, where the FBI had conducted around 1.3 million searches.

According to analysis by the Wall Street Journal, more than half the data searches – 1.9 million – pertained to the FBI’s investigations of attempts by Russian hackers to infiltrate and sabotage critical U.S. infrastructure. This included the investigation of the cyberattack on the Colonial Pipeline, a 5,500-mile pipeline from Texas to New York, which was shut down by Russian hacking group “DarkSide” in exchange for ransom in May of 2021.

The shutdown briefly prompted emergency fuel rationing measures by the Department of Energy across the northeastern United States.

Though a version of the same report has been published every year since 2014, this marks the first time that an accounting of the number of data acquisitions by the FBI has been undertaken. At a press briefing in Washington on Friday, an FBI official admitted that “3.4 million is certainly a large number. I’m not going to pretend that it isn’t.”

https://nypost.com/2022/04/28/team-biden-finally-admits-theres-a-war-on-cops/

The Biden Justice Department is finally acknowledging the war on cops: FBI Director Christopher Wray denounced the 59% increase in cop murders in 2021.

An officer is murdered nearly once every five days, yet violence against law enforcement “doesn’t get enough attention,” Wray said Sunday on CBS’s “60 Minutes.”

That is an understatement. Wray’s bosses — Attorney General Merrick Garland and President Joe Biden — have instead focused almost exclusively on alleged white-supremacist criminality, which they claim is the biggest domestic threat facing the country today.

That charge is preposterous. It is violent street crime — drive-by shootings, sadistic robberies, carjackings — that has been destroying lives at an increasing rate since the George Floyd race riots. White-supremacist violence played no role in the record-breaking 29% national homicide increase in 2020 or in the ongoing crime surge since then.

As startling as that 2020 homicide increase was, cop murders rose at twice that rate in 2021. A significant portion of those fatalities were ambushes, which were up 91% by mid-2021. Through April 26 of this year, gun murders of cops are up another 13% over the same period in 2021. Shootings of officers, lethal and nonlethal, were up 43% by early April.

These cop killings emerge from a national rhetoric of cop hatred and racial animosity. The Floyd riots and their long aftermath featured the graffiti tag ACAB (All Cops Are Bastards) sprayed across public buildings from New York City to Seattle.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/28/mcconnells-exhilarating-insurrection/

A dirty little secret about January 6—one of many—is that Democrats and establishment Republicans, not Trump supporters, wanted to shut down the official proceedings of that day.

Just as the first wave of protesters breached the building shortly after 2 p.m., congressional Republicans were poised to present evidence of rampant voting fraud in the 2020 presidential election. Ten incumbent and four newly-elected Republican senators planned to work with their House colleagues to demand the formation of an audit commission to investigate election “irregularities” in the 2020 election. Absent an audit, the group of senators, including Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) pledged to reject the Electoral College results from the disputed states.

The Hail Mary effort was doomed to fail; yet the American people would have heard hours of debate related to provable election fraud over the course of the day.

And no one opposed the effort more than ex-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). 

During a conference call on December 31, 2020, McConnell urged his Republican Senate colleagues to abandon plans to object to the certification, insisting his vote to certify the 2020 election results would be “the most consequential I have ever cast” in his 36-year Senate career.

From the Senate floor on the afternoon of January 6, McConnell gave a dramatic speech warning of the dire consequences to the country should Republicans succeed in delaying the vote. He downplayed examples of voting fraud and even mocked the fact that Trump-appointed judges rejected election lawsuits. 

“The voters, the courts, and the States have all spoken,” McConnell insisted. “If we overrule them, it would damage our Republic forever. If this election were overturned by mere allegations from the losing side, our democracy would enter a death spiral.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/04/the_comical_buffoonery_of_bidens_new_disinformation_czarina.html

I confess to alternating between fear and scornful laughter when it comes to the newly announced Disinformation Governance Board that DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced April 27 in a Senate hearing. The blatant violation of the First Amendment, the lack of Congressional authorization, the blatant choice of topics of focus (immigration and Russia in Spanish Language media) right before an election and the utter ridiculousness of the woman named to head, it all make it hard for me to take this Orwellian state organ seriously.

Yet, Joe Biden sits on the Oval Office and commands the federal bureaucracy, which is seeming eager to accommodate plans that would expand their powers over the citizenry.

Still, the selection of Nina Jankowicz to head the organization inclines me to laughter. Tucker Carlson began his May 28, 2022 show with a segment on Jankowicz that was alternately horrifying and hilarious. You must see her TikTok video in which she uses the tune from Mary Poppins, supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, to express her deep thoughts. 

Watch and weep… with tears of laughter:

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/05/16/woke-warriors/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=top-of-nav&utm_content=hero-module

— Mr. Gallagher  is the ranking member of the Military Personnel Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee and a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. As a U.S. Marine Corps officer, he served seven years on active duty, including two deployments to Iraq.

How DEI threatens the DOD

Wolf Warrior II, released in 2017, is the second-highest-grossing Chinese film of all time. Early in the movie, the hero, a former People’s Liberation Army special-ops soldier named Leng Feng, sums up the film’s main message: “The Americans are good for nothing.” Posters promoting the movie featured the tagline “Anyone who offends China, no matter how remote, must be exterminated.” In the climactic scene, an American mercenary named “Big Daddy” is about to kill Leng Feng. As Big Daddy attempts to jam a knife into Leng Feng’s throat, he gloats: “People like you will always be inferior to people like me. Get used to it. Get f***ing used to it.” Spoiler alert: Leng Feng improbably turns the tables, brutally stabbing Big Daddy to death with a bullet he wears as a necklace, the same bullet that Big Daddy used years before to kill Leng Feng’s fiancée.

The movie’s message may be familiar territory for those who have watched the diplomatic corps of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) operate over the past few years. Responding to the call of General Secretary Xi Jinping to display more “fighting spirit” — and inspired by Leng Feng’s on-screen heroics — CCP officials have adopted a posture known as “Wolf Warrior” diplomacy. CCP Wolf Warriors aggressively confront and criticize China’s competitors abroad and promote CCP propaganda on American social-media platforms (to which Chinese citizens don’t have access). Both the Wolf Warriors and the Wolf Warrior movies are part of a broader effort to discredit democratic and liberal values globally and to demonstrate the superiority of socialism with Chinese characteristics.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/04/29/welcome-to-stagflation/

When it comes to the economy, Democrats like to say it’s unfair to judge a president by his first year in office. Very well. President Biden is now in his second year and now we have the statistical verdict of his economic stewardship rendered by the first-quarter drop in GDP. Stagflation, anyone?

It may well be that the first quarter’s annual GDP growth of -1.4% marks not just the beginning of a period of low or no growth accompanied by inflation, but also the return to the stagflation that ruined the decade of the 1970s and helped destroy the presidency of Jimmy Carter.

And no, you can’t blame Donald Trump anymore for things that go wrong. The economic disasters piling up are now on the progressive Democrats’ tab. They broke it, they bought it.

Biden immediately spun the bad GDP news as due to “technical factors,” including a slowdown in government spending and a decline in net exports, which both contributed to the GDP drop.

“What you’re seeing is enormous growth in the country, that was affected by everything from COVID, and the COVID blockages that occurred along the way,” Biden said, after the Commerce Department delivered the bad news.

“No one is predicting a recession now, they are, some are predicting a recession in 2023. I’m concerned about it,” he said.

“But I know one thing, if our Republican friends are really interested in doing something about dealing with economic growth, they should help us continue to lower the deficit,” Biden added, saying he wants “a tax code that is actually one that works.”

https://openthebooks.substack.com/p/investigation-hospitals-ignoring?s=r

Before he left office, President Donald Trump made good on his vision that hospitals should be transparent about the prices they charge patients for services.

His administration proposed a rule that those prices must be posted online in real time for everyone to see.

If it was price disclosure at the grocery store or the gas station, it wouldn’t have been revolutionary. But, the hospitals went crazy!

In a recent study, 857 out of 1,000 hospitals audited weren’t complying — a full year after the Biden administration finalized the price transparency rule.
 
Hospitals are slow-walking price transparency. And we found that the Biden administration has yet to levy a single fine!