RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-national-tragedy-of-hunter-bidens-laptop

The recent release of more gigabytes of images and information from Hunter Biden’s laptop adds to the evidence that the all-out elite effort to bury the scandal before the 2020 election wasn’t just to protect Joe Biden, the preferred candidate of the American oligarchy. Sure, the 50-plus senior U.S. intelligence professionals who signed a letter claiming the laptop’s contents were “Russian disinformation” wanted to stop Donald Trump from sending angry tweets at them, but the laptop suggests there was much more at stake.

The U.S. spy chiefs who signed that infamously misleading letter—including John Brennan, Leon Panetta, Michael Hayden, and James Clapper—had directed America’s foreign intelligence services while Biden was vice president and before that chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. They knew what his son Hunter was doing abroad, because it was their job to know what foreign services know about leading U.S. officials and their families, and how it might affect U.S. national security.

But none of these powerful and experienced men, presumably dedicated to defending the national interest, lifted a finger to stop Hunter Biden—and really, how could they? He was Joe Biden’s son, after all. And by doing nothing about him, the pillars of America’s intelligence community became the curators of the Biden family’s scandal.

When Trump started asking questions in 2019 about Hunter and his father, prompted by Joe Biden’s public comments about protecting Hunter’s business associates abroad, it became clear that the only way to contain the mushrooming scandal involving key U.S. interests in Ukraine and China—a scandal whose magnitude they had known about for a decade—was to provide the former vice president with all the resources the U.S. government could muster. And that helped make him president.

There is so much data on Hunter Biden’s laptop that it’s hard to keep straight the sequence of images and information that have come from it since the New York Post started sourcing stories to the personal computer in October 2020. The most recent release includes 80,000 images that a Switzerland-based cyber expert recovered from deleted iPad and iPhone accounts backed up on the laptop.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/07/03/who-are-the-real-insurrectionists-2/

For 120 days in summer 2020, violent protesters destroyed some $2 billion in property and injured 1,500 police officers in riots that led to over 35 deaths.  

Because blue-state mayors and governors saw BLM and Antifa instigators as useful street soldiers, most of those arrested were never tried in court. Street thugs paid no price for declaring themselves de facto owners of downtown areas of Seattle, which police themselves conceded were no-go zones. Why did public officials in blue states ignore the violence? They were certain that it enjoyed majority support among their leftwing constituencies. 

Indeed, some leftist icons cheered on the violence. Well after the failed attempt to storm the White House grounds, in June 2020, the Democratic candidate for vice president Kamala Harris warned us that protestors were “not going to let up, and they should not.” What did Harris mean by “should not?”—when she knew numerous protests that summer had ended in terrible violence? Was she reckless in the manner Trump was said to be by encouraging a demonstration on January 6? 

The architect of the “1619 Project” Nikole Hannah-Jones assured the nation that vast destruction of (someone else’s property) was not a real crime. CNN’s Chris Cuomo gushed that violent demonstrations and riots were American traditions. Were these national voices urging calm during weeks of violent rioting and looting? 

There were no investigations, no congressional committees, and no voices of outrage from the left-wing establishment over months of such carnage. Indeed, much of the organization of the violent protests was facilitated by social media that was apparently unbothered that the medium under their stewardship was used to torch and loot. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/06/once-again-stop-talking-progressives-bruce-thornton/

Anyone who regularly comments on current political affairs will eventually end up repeating himself. Usually that’s because politicians and pundits keep making the same errors of thinking, and displaying the same lack of critical self-awareness of those mistakes. Some, like Capote’s Holly Golightly, are true believers who sincerely believe all “this crap” they believe, and “can’t be talked out of it.”  Or they are conscious liars who don’t care that their ideas and beliefs are incoherent or pernicious, as long as they win them more power and privilege.

That truth is a commonplace. But as novelist André Gide once said,  “Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again,” in the hope that somebody will be listening, since using the dishonest, politicized words of progressives helps to spread the malign concepts and ideologies like a virus, infecting the body politic.

Recently columnist George Will called this phenomenon “semantic infiltration . . . the tactic by which political objectives are smuggled into discourse that is ostensibly, but not actually, politically neutral. People who adopt a political faction’s vocabulary also adopt — perhaps inadvertently, but inevitably — the faction’s agenda.”

Will’s example is the “woke” economic term “stakeholder,” a synonym for “stockholder.” Extending a “stakeholder” to include anybody and everybody whom a business even slightly affects is to indulge a false analogy, the logical fallacy favored by those who are up to no good or smuggling their ideology into an argument––which, as Will points out, is exactly what the “stakeholder” metaphor does: “Stakeholder capitalism violates fiduciary laws that require those entrusted with investors’ money to employ it ‘solely in the interest of’ and ‘for the exclusive purpose of providing benefits to’ the investors.”

Most of us can cite a whole catalogue of scare-words and question-begging epithets, like “racist” and “sexist,” used not to communicate precisely but to demonize a political enemy or advance a dangerous ideology under cover of invective.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/one-more-blockbuster-supreme-court-decision-could-still-be-coming-after-fridays-abortion-ruling

Believe it or not, overturning Roe v Wade may not be the Supreme Court’s most dramatic decision this year. Instead, its ruling on West Virginia vs. the Environmental Protection Agency could prove far more consequential. It could literally upend how our government works.

For the better.

West Virginia vs. the EPA asks whether important policies that impact the lives of all Americans should be made by unelected D.C. bureaucrats or by Congress. This SCOTUS could well decide that ruling by executive agency fiat is no longer acceptable.

The case involves the Clean Power Plan, which was adopted under President Barack Obama to fight climate change; the program was estimated to cost as much as $33 billion per year and would have completely reordered our nation’s power grid. The state of West Virginia, joined by two coal companies and others, sued the EPA, arguing the plan was an abuse of power.

By deciding in favor of West Virginia, the court could begin to rein in the vast powers of the alphabet agencies in D.C. that run our lives and return it to legislators whom we elect to create…legislation. Just as the Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Wade that abortion laws are more appropriately left up to the people’s elected representatives, it may decide in West Virginia vs. EPA that Congress, and not federal agencies, should write our laws.

A decision that puts Congress in charge would stall environmental rules intended to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy. Legislators, back in the driver’s seat, would have to debate and go public with the consequences – and costs — of regulations that are now adopted with little buy-in from the public.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/06/19/biden-and-oil-destroy-america-in-order-to-save-it/

Try to follow the Joe Biden energy plan of frantically trying to get his hands on more of something that his own party despises. 

During the Democratic primaries, Biden ran on the premise that he would end all fossil fuels during his tenure. In 2019-2020 that bluster seemed easy demagoguery at a time of near-record low gas and diesel prices. The American people shrugged at such utopianism since they often were filling up their cars for less than $50.

Biden’s video clips from the primary campaign now seem surreal, as he tried to out-green Bernie Sanders in boasting about what has now become his own self-created energy disaster.

Biden monotonously promised at rallies, such as they were, that he would cancel pipelines, stop new federal leasing to oil and gas companies, persuade lenders to restrict loans to them, put the Alaska National Wildlife Reserve off limits, and embrace the green new deal. Those were certainly campaign boasts that he has followed up on. 

His environmental czar John Kerry has just insulted Americans by lecturing them that there is no need to pump more gas and oil to reduce gas prices that are well over $6 a gallon in many of the Western states. The billionaire Kerry exudes Antoinette disdain for the muscular classes, a hubris that now characterizes the elite rich leadership of the Left in general. 

Kerry and his progressive ilk make no effort to disguise that they feel the credentialed such as themselves, the wealthy, and the progressive enjoy the birthright to fly private, to be limousined, and to bounce between multiple energy-hungry mansions. Those compensations are all necessary, to allow them to focus on the divine task of directing and herding the unthinking and blinkered chumps, dregs, crazies and clingers to do what is for their own good—now most recently defined as paying more than $6 a gallon for gas.

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre also reassures the country that there is no reason to pump more oil and gas. Instead, she says, we just need to refine more. At her press conferences, she reads all her answers from prepared notes. But apparently Jean-Pierre’s twenty-something press preppers were oblivious that the United States, thanks to hard-left green opposition, has not built a major refinery since 1976, back when there were 110 million fewer Americans. 

Jean-Pierre has no idea why she cannot now and will never in the future answer a question about fossil fuels honestly. She knows that Left for now got what it wanted. Since January 2021 it has all but destroyed the idea of American energy self-sufficiency. 

https://amgreatness.com/2022/06/18/domestic-terrorism-ignored/

“Today is 6/14, a day that should live in infamy,” wrote Rabbi Jonathan Gross last Tuesday. June 14 marked five years since the attempt at “the largest-scale political assassination in our nation’s history,” when “a Democrat tried to murder dozens of Republican Congressmen as they innocently gathered to play baseball at a field just outside the nation’s capital.” 

The Democrat was James Hodgkinson, 66, a follower of Bernie Sanders. Hodgkinson “succeeded in seriously injuring Rep. Steve Scalise and three others, including two police officers before brave law enforcement officials stopped him and saved the rule of law.” 

According to Gross, who is also a civil rights attorney, this was “an actual domestic terror attack carried out by a Democrat.” That is not the only reason the establishment media and the federal government kept rather quiet on the five-year anniversary. 

Hodgkinson’s social media record bristled with hatred of President Trump and Republicans. He planned the attack for months, casing the Alexandria, Virginia baseball field where the representatives practiced. 

Hodgkinson deployed a Smith and Wesson 9mm pistol and an SKS automatic rifle, a precursor to the Soviet AK-47 that uses the same 7.62 cartridge. The SKS rifle had been legally purchased, but altered to accept a detachable magazine and folding stock. Before opening fire, Hodgkinson asked if the players on the field were Democrats or Republicans. 

https://asiatimes.com/2022/06/a-dangerous-implosion-of-american-politics/

While working Americans suffer the worst decline in real income since the waning months of the Carter Administration, America’s political parties are in disarray with internal divisions almost as intense as the issues that have polarized “red state” and “blue state” America.

Neither party has a proposal – credible or otherwise – on the political agenda to alleviate the inflation that is crushing family income. And neither has the prospect of gaining a governing mandate, as opposed to a temporary majority.

It’s a national train wreck, and no one has a plan to stop it.

Unless his legal problems interfere, Donald Trump almost certainly will run for president again in 2024 and will be his party’s nominee. The Congressional commission investigating the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot may have gathered enough information to motivate federal charges against the former president, but that remains unclear.

Trump’s obsessive belief that the Democrats stole the 2020 election damages him. More ominous is that his economic policies contributed to the present disaster, and Trump has no thoughts on the subject apart from assigning the whole of the blame to Biden.