RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/13/justice-department-moves-to-conceal-police-misconduct-on-january-6/

After months of foot-dragging, Joe Biden’s Justice Department is preparing for the first set of trials related to its sprawling prosecution of January 6 defendants: Robert Gieswein, who turned himself in and was arrested on January 19 for his involvement in the Capitol protest, is scheduled to stand trial in February.

A week after his arrest, Gieswein, 24 at the time, was indicted by a federal grand jury on six counts including “assaulting, resisting, or impeding” law enforcement with a dangerous weapon that day. He has been behind bars ever since, denied bail while Judge Emmet Sullivan delayed his trial on numerous occasions. Gieswein is among 40 or so January 6 defendants held in a part of the D.C. jail system solely used to detain Capitol protesters.

Federal prosecutors accuse Gieswein of using a chemical spray against police officers and carrying a baseball bat. Clad in military-style gear, Gieswein climbed through a broken window shortly after the first breach of the building. He told a reporter on the scene that “the corrupt politicians who have been in office for 50 or 60 years . . . need to be imprisoned.” Democratic politicians, Gieswein complained, sold out the country to “the Rothchilds and the Rockefellers,” a remark the FBI investigator on his case described as an “anti-Semitic” conspiracy theory.

Ahead of Gieswein’s trial, the Justice Department asked Judge Sullivan to strictly curtail how Gieswein can defend himself. A motion filed earlier this month argued Gieswein should not use self-defense against law enforcement as a reason for his actions on January 6. (Prosecutors also stated that Gieswein should not blame President Trump for his alleged criminal behavior,  claiming it is “objectively unreasonable to conclude that President Trump could authorize citizens to interfere with the Electoral College proceedings,” a legal torpedo to the Democrats’ nonstop accusations that Trump “incited” the events of January 6.)

“[The] Defendant will not be able to put forth any evidence that he had a reasonable belief that his actions were necessary to defend himself against the immediate use of unlawful force,” Matthew Graves, the new U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, wrote in the December 1 filing. “Through his words and actions, the Defendant made plain his intent. The Court should exclude any testimony and evidence purporting to assert a claim of self-defense.”

Preventing Gieswein from telling a jury exactly what happened on January 6 is the Justice Department’s latest attempt to cover up pervasive police misconduct. Gieswein’s alleged offenses coincided with the time frame when Capitol and D.C. Metropolitan Police officers started attacking thousands of protesters assembled outside the building on January 6. 

Law enforcement deployed explosive devices known as “flashbangs,” which emit a powerful burst of light and sound to temporarily stun the intended victim, into the crowd around 1:15 p.m. on January 6, just moments after Trump finished up his speech at the Ellipse less than two miles away. Police also used rubber bullets, tear gas, batons, and in some cases, their own fists to assault protesters.

Prosecutors know this is fact—and it’s precisely why the Justice Department is desperate to keep any video footage or testimony that portrays these vicious assaults out of the public eye. As I have reported, the Justice Department and U.S. Capitol Police want roughly 14,000 hours of surveillance video captured by security cameras on January 6 to remain under protective orders. The trove is considered “highly sensitive” government material by Biden’s Justice Department; even defendants are strictly limited as to how they can view this classified footage used as evidence against them.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/covids-winnipeg-wuhan-galveston-connection-lloyd-billingsley/

“Anyone on your team conducting gain of function studies, recombination studies or any other studies that may have resulted in the creation of the nCoV?” That was James LeDuc, director of the Galveston National Laboratory (GNL) in a February 9, 2020 email to Juan Zhiming at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China. LeDuc, who earned a PhD in epidemiology from UCLA, had trained staff at the WIV, yet the GNL boss had little clue what was going on there.

“Where is coronavirus research conducted?” LeDuc wanted to know. “What level of biocontainment? How many different laboratories actually handle live virus? Where are coronavirus stocks stored?” In addition, “When was the nCoV first handled in your laboratory? What was the source of that virus?” and “what are the coronaviruses in your possession that are most closely related to nCoV based on genetic sequences and are able to replicate in culture?”

When LeDuc posed these critical questions, as the Epoch Times noted,  “Dr. Anthony Fauci and a small circle of collaborating scientists were in the process of establishing the natural origin narrative about COVID-19 that would pervade the media.” By early 2020, evidence was mounting for the Wuhan Institute of Virology as the source.

China and Viruses: The Case of Dr. Xiangguo Qiu, a January 2020 paper by Israeli microbiologist Dr. Dany Shoham, revealed that Dr. Qiu shipped a cargo of deadly pathogens to the WIV. The shipment included: Ebola Makona, Mayinga, Kikwit, Ivory Coast, Bundibugyo, Sudan Boniface, Sudan Gulo, MA-Ebov, GP-Sudan, Hendra, Nipah Malaysia and Nipah Bangaladesh. This deadly cargo came from Canada’s National Microbiology Lab (NML) in Winnipeg, where Dr. Qiu, a Chinese national, ran the special pathogens program.

Dr. Qiu also maintained a close bond with China and the graduate students that joined her at the NML came from facilities believed to be involved in China’s biological weapons development, including the Academy of Military Medical Sciences and the WIV. In 2017 and 2018, Dr. Qiu made at least five trips to the WIV.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/simone-gold-frontpagemagcom/

[Our original post of the video below on Vimeo was removed, purportedly for “violating” Vimeo’s guidelines against “false or misleading claims” about the COVID-19 vaccine. We therefore uploaded it on our new Rumble account to let our readers watch and decide for themselves.]

Dr. Simone Gold, the founder of America’s Frontline Doctors, spoke at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s 2021 Restoration Weekend on Nov. 11th-14th at the Breakers Resort in Palm Beach, Florida. Dr. Gold discussed the medical tyranny that is now taking over America — and how our Constitution is under lethal attack. A transcript follows.

Simone Gold: You know, all the speakers at the event are amazing, but it’s really an honor to follow Dinesh. That’s a man after my own heart. We are really giving birth to a new movement here; a movement where we fight back.

Now, the fight we are in, in my estimation, is really the second Revolutionary War, because the reality is, is that we’re living under a tyranny that we never thought was possible in America. We have lost almost all of our Constitutional rights. We only retain, with a big struggle, the Second Amendment. What do I mean? The First Amendment, the freedom of religion. We saw that go by the wayside this past year. Free speech, which is what I was doing. Free press, which is completely corrupted and a monopoly, doesn’t exist. The right to peacefully assemble. Fourth Amendment: bodily integrity. Fifth Amendment: due process. Sixth Amendment: speedy and public trial. Seventh Amendment: a right to a jury trial. Eighth: no excessive bail, cruel and unusual punishment. We’ve heard many speakers already about the January 6 defendants who are being held pre-trial. Gone. These things are as strong and inviolate a law as we have in America, and they’ve just been abrogated. Disappeared.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-internal-revenue-leak-service-propublica-charles-rettig-chuck-grassley-11639437071?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Democrats want to give $80 billion to the Internal Revenue Service to audit millions of Americans each year. Yet six months after the progressive website ProPublica first published the secret tax information of rich Americans, the tax agency still can’t explain what happened. Senate Republicans led by Iowa’s Chuck Grassley are demanding answers.

In a Dec. 1 letter to IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig, all 14 GOP Members of the Senate Finance Committee express frustration at how little the agency has discovered or reported on the ProPublica leak. Mr. Rettig promised when the leak occurred in June to find out what happened, but in September he told Senators, “We do not yet have any information concerning the source.” Since then it’s been crickets.

The scale alone should make investigating the breach a priority for the IRS. ProPublica claims to have thousands of individuals’ tax information, and it has continued publishing confidential details since its first report. Neither the publication nor federal authorities have said they know who leaked the records. No one seems to know, or least admit, how it was done, or how many more taxpayer files might have been stolen.

The leak is a crime, but tracing it isn’t merely a matter of criminal enforcement. The breach highlights the general failure of the IRS to protect taxpayer data. In their letter, the GOP Senators refer to several known weak points in the agency’s systems.

The problems include the agency’s master file for tax submissions, which was developed in 1962 using a coding language now broadly considered to be outdated. Yes, 1962. That’s several digital revolutions ago. The Government Accountability Office concluded a review of the agency’s systems in 2020, and its report was unsparing. More than a year before the leak, it warned of holes that enabled “unauthorized access to, modification of, or disclosure of financial reporting and taxpayer data.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/12/14/it-took-a-special-kind-of-stupid-to-believe-jussie-smolletts-hate-crime-hoax/

So, to absolutely no one’s surprise except perhaps himself, Jussie Smollett, a third-rate homosexual black actor got convicted of faking a hate crime. When I originally heard of what had supposedly occurred, my reaction was, “Say what??”

Supposedly, the actor went out at 2 a.m. — during a polar vortex.

To get a Subway sandwich from a store supposedly open at 2 a.m. In the south part of Chicago.

And then out of nowhere, white men jumped out at him. Wearing MAGA hats. At 2 a.m. In Chicago. Carrying a noose. And they recognized him.

These “white men” grabbed him and said, “This is MAGA country.” And then they poured some bleach on his clothes. And put the noose on him.

They happened to wear MAGA caps in a black neighborhood of Chicago. And were carrying bleach around. And they just happened to be carrying a noose. During a polar vortex. At 2 a.m.

Then he returns to his apartment — still wearing that noose around his neck.

Riiiiight.

https://spectatorworld.com/newsletter/why-wont-the-white-house-take-inflation-seriously/

Let’s hear it for Colorado governor Jared Polis. He is a rare beast: a Democrat governor with a libertarian streak. And on Covid, he has admirably little time for both those who seem to want the pandemic to go on forever and those who have decided to lionize a reluctance to get vaccinated as some sort of brave stand for liberty.”

Everybody had more than enough opportunity to get vaccinated,” Polis said on Friday. “At this point, if you haven’t been vaccinated, it’s really your own darn fault.”

As a result, Polis sees no case for ongoing pandemic restrictions: “The emergency is over. You know, public health [officials] don’t get to tell people what to wear; that’s just not their job. Public health [officials] would say to always wear a mask because it decreases flu and decreases [other airborne illnesses]. But that’s not something that you require; you don’t tell people what to wear. You don’t tell people to wear a jacket when they go out in winter and force them to [wear it]. If they get frostbite, it’s their own darn fault.”

https://spectatorworld.com/newsletter/why-wont-the-white-house-take-inflation-seriously/

Why won’t the White House take inflation seriously?

As has been clear for some time now, the fortunes of Joe Biden’s Build Back Better legislation and the state of the US economy are inextricably linked. With every bit of economic bad news, such as the worse-in-40-years inflation figures announced on Friday, the chances of the president securing fifty votes for his monster spending bill seem to fade.

Today, Biden will meet Joe Manchin and try to win the West Virginia holdout round. But one suspects nothing the president says to Manchin would be as persuasive as some good economic news — in particular, an easing of the price rises that Manchin has long said are a major reason why he cannot support the bill.

And for all that the Biden White House now claims to take the inflation threat seriously, one cannot help but feel the administration basically views the problem as one of messaging and spin, rather than anything more serious. Consider, for example, the insincere way in which Build Back Better has been rebranded as an urgently needed inflation-busting measure. The economic picture is radically different to when Build Back Better was first introduced. And yet we are supposed to believe that the legislation remains the perfect set of measures for the moment.

The White House has officially dropped talk of “transitory” inflation, but they clearly still think of it as a temporary problem. On Friday, Biden called price rises a “real bump in the road.”

Biden has assembled a handful of inflation-busting measures, but they feel designed so that he has an answer to the inflation question rather than as an earnest attempt to bring prices down. A government that was serious about the inflation threat would take an all-of-government approach. It would decide that now was not the time to double tariffs on lumber, for instance.

Rather than actually tackling inflation, officials are more interested in explaining why those prices aren’t the full story. Biden chief of staff Ron Klain decided that the best response was a flip chart explaining that everything was actually great. It is one thing to tout your economic achievements, it is another to deny the existence of any problems. On inflation, the White House too often finds itself telling voters not to believe their lying eyes.

To some economists, frustration among Americans at the state of the economy is a head-scratcher. GDP is surging, why aren’t people feeling better, they ask themselves.

But as the New York Times’s David Leonhardt explained on Friday, this really isn’t as much of a paradox as these economists seem to think. In his blunt assessment, “Americans think the economy is in rough shape because the economy is in rough shape.”

As Obama economic adviser Jason Furman told the Washington Post recently, “The typical family is spending an extra $4,000 this year because of excess inflation. It does not seem like much of a mystery why people are upset when they have to spend thousands of additional dollars more because of inflation.”

Not long ago, Klain called inflation a “quality problem.” He has learned not to say something like that again in public. But one can’t help but feel that, privately at least, that is still the White House view.

https://www.commentary.org/articles/christine-rosen/the-new-misogyny/

A new form of misogyny is taking hold in contemporary culture. It comes in the guise of a liberationist philosophy, a transformational movement dedicated to open-mindedness. Its advocates believe they are ushering in a world in which one can be whomever one chooses to be. And in doing so, they are treating womanhood itself—the defining feature of half of humankind—as though it is a disposable commodity.

Under the dictates of this new dispensation, anyone, regardless of physiology, must be allowed to lay claim to the biological realities of the female body. Anyone should have the right to call themselves a woman.

The misogynistic nature of this revolution has escaped proper scrutiny precisely because it is understood as progressive—as literally better than everything that has come before. And it casts everything that has come before as suspect: All forms of social organization and every idea that denies this movement’s claims have been deemed retrogressive and actively harmful to the forward march of greater rights for all.

This is an audacious form of woman-hatred, especially since it comes in the guise of opening up womanhood, of extending its benefits to all. But by doing so, it becomes nothing less than an assault on what it means to be a woman. And it is not being understood as such by its advocates and their fellow travelers because of a potent combination of two factors: First, people’s fears of being labeled bigots, and second, a genuine and commendable effort to extend compassion and care to a very small minority.

That compassion has largely been met with hostility. It is becoming increasingly clear that the new misogyny shares one feature with the old: contempt for women. The difference is that the contempt is now coming from the radical extremes of the trans movement. As the signs carried by trans activists who recently protested a women’s conference in the UK read, “Suck my dick you transphobic cunt.” This is not progress. This is misogyny.

These radicals insist on redefining women in masculine terms. Women are as tough as men; they are not biologically different from men; indeed, many of them were born men, came of age as men, and, despite having lived in the guise of women for but a scant portion of their lives, feel entitled to take positions of power away from women. Even motherhood must be acknowledged as something men should be allowed to claim as their own.

https://www.commentary.org/articles/eli-lake/trump-russia-fbi-russiagate/

In November, U.S. attorney John Durham indicted the primary source for the so-called Steele dossier—a document that supposedly offered proof of a conspiracy between Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and the Kremlin. Igor Danchenko, a Russian national living in the United States, has been charged with five counts of perjuring himself to the FBI. The indictment alleges that a major source of information for the Steele dossier was an unregistered American lobbyist for Russia named Charles Dolan, who has been a close associate of Bill and Hillary Clinton for years.

This revelation has compelled some observers to look back critically on the behavior of the media these past five years. Erik Wemple, the media columnist of the Washington Post, said that “key claims in the indictment…[raise] specific concerns about reports in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and ABC News—as well as more general concerns about how outlets such as MSNBC, CNN, McClatchy and Mother Jones handled the story.”

Even so, the Paul Reveres of the Trump-Russia scandal are digging in. Even if former British spy Christopher Steele’s dossier was fake, they tell us, Russiagate was real.

“The Steele dossier undertook to answer the question ‘What the hell is going on with Trump and Russia?’” David Frum writes in the Atlantic. “But the disintegration of the dossier’s answers has not silenced the power of its question.” Indeed, he claims, Durham was actually appointed in 2019 by Trump-administration attorney general William Barr with the specific intention of silencing that question.

Max Boot, Jonathan Chait, David Corn, and Charlie Savage have offered similar arguments, contending that the recent focus on the fraudulence of the Steele dossier only plays into Trump’s effort to discredit the broader investigations into his campaign’s ties to Russia. There’s a kernel of truth to this argument. As I wrote in the January 2021 issue of Commentary, when it comes to Russia, Trump was both framed and guilty. Former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation did uncover impressive details about Russia’s operation to hack and publicize the emails of the Democratic Party and the Clinton campaign. Furthermore, a 2020 report from the Senate Intelligence Committee confirms that one-time Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s relationship to a man named Konstantin Kilimnik, who the report says is a Russian intelligence officer, presented a major counterintelligence threat.