RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/the-other-imaginary-red-wave

Well, that was a dud. Not the abortive “red wave,” but the Democratic expectation (read: ill-disguised hope) that “election deniers” would disrupt polling places on Tuesday with violence and intimidation. In October, a national security bulletin had warned that poll workers were at physical risk from homegrown election terrorists. The Justice Department let it be known that it was monitoring threats against election employees. Illinois officials installed panic buttons and security locks in election offices. People using ballot drop-off boxes were said to be at risk of violent intimidation from crazed MAGA supporters. Michigan anticipated that right-wing poll watchers would disrupt ballot tabulation in Detroit. Election-deniers who had run for office and lost would allegedly refuse to concede defeat, putting “democracy,” in establishment parlance, at further risk. “We could be six days away from losing our rule of law,” warned historian Michael Beschloss, who wondered “whether our children will be arrested and conceivably killed.”

None of these predictions panned out. There was no electoral violence or intimidation. No one mobbed ballot boxes or election offices. As of this writing, political election-deniers who lost their races have accepted defeat.

We have been through this hysteria before. Predictions of right-wing violence are now a standard feature of Democratic rhetoric. In the lead-up to January 6, 2022 (the one-year anniversary of the 2021 Capitol riot), the media, politicians, and the Biden national-security apparatus warned that “domestic violent extremists” were likely to strike again. Washington, D.C., was reportedly on edge in anticipation of the MAGA rebels. As it turned out, January 6, 2022, was notable only for the maudlin theatrics of newly patriotic Democrats, who softly sang “God Bless America” in a candlelight vigil on the Capitol steps, as calm engulfed them.

During the previous year, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Homeland Security had issued regular warnings about election-denying terrorism. The summer of 2021, August 2021, September 2021—all provoked a satisfying increase in alerts and in precautionary barricades and bollards. And still, the right-wing terrorists did not strike. However loathsome and despicable the mob violence of January 6, 2021, it has proved to be a one-off perpetrated by ill-informed hotheads who got lamentably carried away during one very particular historical moment. (The Paul Pelosi attack is one possible exception to this no-repetition rule.)

https://www.city-journal.org/stochastic-terrorism-is-about-suppressing-free-speech

I browsed the news recently only to discover that, according to a popular science magazine, I was responsible for the attempted murder of Paul Pelosi, husband to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

In an opinion piece for Scientific American, writer Bryn Nelson insinuated that my factual reporting on Drag Queen Story Hour was an example of “stochastic terrorism,” which he defines as “ideologically driven hate speech” that increases the likelihood of unpredictable acts of violence. On the night of the attack, Nelson argued, I had appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight to discuss my reporting, and, hours later, the alleged attacker, David DePape, radicalized by “QAnon” conspiracy theories about “Democratic, Satan-worshipping pedophiles,” broke into the Pelosi residence and attacked Paul Pelosi with a hammer.

This is a bizarre claim that, for a magazine supposedly dedicated to “science,” hardly meets a scientific standard of cause and effect. There is no evidence that DePape watched or was motivated by Tucker Carlson’s program; moreover, nothing in my reporting on Drag Queen Story Hour encourages violence or mentions Nancy Pelosi, QAnon, or Satan-worshipping pedophiles. My appearance on Tucker Carlson Tonight and DePape’s attack against Paul Pelosi are, in reality, two unrelated incidents in a large and complex universe. And Nelson, a microbiologist specializing in human excrement, is full of it.

But Nelson isn’t trying to prove anything in a scientific sense. Under the concept of “stochastic terrorism,” logic, evidence, and causality are irrelevant. Any incident of violence can be politicized and attributed to any ideological opponent, regardless of facts.

The scheme works like this: left-wing media, activists, and officials designate a subject of discourse, such as Drag Queen Story Hour, off-limits; they treat any reporting on that subject as an expression of “hate speech”; and finally, if an incident of violence emerges that is related, even tangentially, to that subject, they assign guilt to their political opponents and call for the suppression of speech. The statistical concept of “stochasticity,” which means “randomly determined,” functions as a catch-all: the activists don’t have to prove causality—they simply assert it with a sophisticated turn of phrase and a vague appeal to probability.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/11/13/tragically-trump/

“Yet for a variety of reasons, both personal and civic, their characters not only should not be altered, but could not be, even if the tragic hero wished to change, given his megalomania and absolutist views of the human experience. In the classical tragic sense, Trump likely will end in one of two fashions, both not particularly good: either spectacular but unacknowledged accomplishments followed by ostracism when he is out of office and no longer useful, or, less likely, a single term due to the eventual embarrassment of his beneficiaries, as if his utility is no longer worth the wages of his perceived crudity.”   —The Case for Trump (2019)

After the midterms, the Republican Party and half of the conservative movement are now furious with Donald Trump. Their writs are many—even though the party establishment shares much of the blame. More importantly still, American elections have radically shifted to mail-in/early/absentee voting rendering Election Day a minor event. The predictable result is that any close race undecided on Election Day in subsequent days usually is won by the Democrats. 

On the eve of the midterm, Trump gratuitously attacked Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who was up for reelection, while all but announcing he would run for president. 

That preview could have waited until the elections had passed. The pizzazz may have galvanized some Trump-haters to go to the polls. It might even have alienated perhaps a few thousand DeSantis Republicans who were not thus inclined to vote for Trump-stamped candidates. 

Trump’s frantic fundraising efforts had amassed a huge sum in his PAC, geared to his future primary fights. But many felt he was far too parsimonious in spreading his largess to his own cash-strapped and outspent MAGA candidates. That stinginess might have helped contribute to their defeats in close House and Senate elections. 

Those earlier rumblings were only amplified after the unexpectedly anemic Republican midterm performance. Trump sent out a disjointed, almost unhinged letter damning DeSantis as disloyal, without gratitude (to Trump), mediocre, and overrated. 

The indictment was ill-timed to DeSantis’ landslide victory over Charlie Crist. DeSantis’ long Florida coattails fueled the only red tsunami of the entire evening. If Trump thought he would employ the battering-ram tactics of his first presidential debate of 2020, then he should remember they failed (in contrast to his effective second debate against Biden). And in reaction, DeSantis’ rope-a-dope silence is effectively designed to let Trump punch his way out and down to the low 30s in approval.

Trump further blamed some of the losses of his endorsed candidates on either their own shortcomings and lack of loyalty, or the bad advice from those who had persuaded him to back losers. New Hampshire U.S. Senate candidate Don Bolduc was deemed insufficiently denialist and so, according to Trump, was crushed in the New Hampshire race. 

Former First Lady Melania Trump, of all people, was reportedly to blame for convincing the ex-president to back Mehmet Oz in the Pennsylvania U.S. Senate race. 

Yet Oz turned out to be a tireless worker and a rookie but solid candidate. Still, he was easily outspent—and was fatally injured by the balloting blowback against the mediocre Trump-supported gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano. The latter’s wipeout injured Oz and Republican congressional candidates once thought likely to win. 

Worse still, Trump highlighted his self-obsession over party concerns by weirdly celebrating the loss of fellow Republican senatorial candidate Joe O’Dea of Colorado. His RINO crime was spurning Trump’s support. Stranger still, Trump attacked popular Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin for supposedly having a “Chinese”-sounding name.

But these were sins of commission. There were also those of omission. Trump had not issued an ecumenical call to head to Georgia, to forget intramural squabbles, and to rally money and time on behalf of Herschel Walker—Trump’s own endorsed candidate. 

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19111/tiktok-ban

The Biden administration rolled back its predecessor’s efforts to ban TikTok and is currently in negotiations with the company through the government’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS). According to published reports, a draft agreement would require exclusive US storage for all TikTok data, monitoring of TikTok’s powerful content recommendation algorithms, and create an oversight board comprised of cyber-security experts. The terms of the draft agreement would not require ByteDance to sell TikTok, as the Trump administration previously demanded.

The danger of this approach is obvious – that the app and all the collected data remain under the ownership of a Chinese company which, according to Chinese law, is required to provide this data to the Communist government upon request, at any time.

The draft agreement, which has not been announced or made public, has not satisfied TikTok’s critics. FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, a longtime critic of TikTok, renewed his call earlier this month for the US government to ban the app from Apple’s and Google’s app stores over the national security risks posed by its ties to China.

[T]he app circulated false information about the COVID-19 virus during the pandemic and [technology experts] believe China could potentially do so again as part of broader propaganda efforts to influence public discourse within the US.

At a time when an invasion of Taiwan by Communist China looms ever larger, why worry about TikTok?

Targeted at American teens, TikTok is a mobile app for sharing short videos, owned by a Chinese company called ByteDance. After five short years on the market, it has more than one billion users worldwide. The app has lived under deep suspicion for much of that time, as American cyber-security and counter-intelligence experts have warned about its enormous reach and direct connections to the Chinese Communist Party.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/11/americas_great_political_unraveling.html

What’s worse—how much of a joke America’s “elections” are or the contempt with which election officials treat voters who have the nerve to demand answers on election night? Days of mail-in ballot counting have turned Republican Senate leads into Democrat Senate victories, while control of the House is still up for grabs; but the praetorian news pundits who defend the Deep State’s virtue as if they were protecting the disputed honor of a blushing bride still find it more appalling that voters could question the legitimacy of America’s elections than the reality that vote-counters have turned elections into long-term, unbelievable affairs.

It takes an awful long time to track down all those rascally elusive ballots temporarily lost in the mail. Perhaps any unused leftovers can just be scooped up and used again for the Democrats in two years—whatever might move this whole farce along more quickly in the future.

This debauched civic ritual has become so dirty that there’s not enough soap to wash off the stench. In states where voter identification rules are somewhat enforced and mail-in and absentee ballots are reserved for exceptional cases, Republicans won overwhelmingly. In states where anonymous, unsecured mail-in ballots are the new norm, Republicans got trounced.

In 2010, when Republicans absolutely “shellacked” Obama-Marxists in the midterms, conservatives won around two and a half million more votes and picked up a landslide sixty-three additional House seats. In 2022, Republicans have won six million more votes than the Democrats across the country yet will be lucky to grab an additional nine seats.

Amazingly, Republicans managed to win decisively, while still losing every toss-up election but one. You must be a card-carrying member of the Expert Class not to understand what’s going on here. In America, elections are dead. We have COVID-19-induced ballot hunts now, where paid political operatives are rewarded for finding and filling out as many as they can.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/stephen-kruiser/2022/11/13/election-hangover-my-democracy-doesnt-feel-saved-at-all-n1645150

Other than in the last few Morning Briefings of the week, I tried to abstain from any hot takes on the election, the state of democracy, or whether we are all, in fact, sims.

At the beginning of the month, I wrote that I did believe that democracy is being threatened, but the threat is coming from the left. I also issued the following disclaimer, which is necessary every time I opine on this topic:

I am well aware that we don’t live in a democracy, so don’t sprain your wrists scrolling to the comments to correct me. Democracy is, however, the word that those other guys use in this false narrative, so, for simplicity’s sake, it’s what I’ll use in this column.

As I write this on a beautiful Sunday afternoon here in my beloved desert, I’ve had three-and-a-half solid days of post-election rumination. (Wednesday was a bit hazy after my election night deep dive into the potato vodka, so it doesn’t count.) Now that I have the benefit of a little perspective, I have to honestly say that my democracy is less than impressed with the saving it got last week.

In fact, one might even say it’s on life support.

There’s time to correct this situation, but we must be ever cognizant of the fact that the Democrats are always trying to sneak someone into the room to pull the plug.

https://mailchi.mp/f856b91e056a/35b-from-us-taxpayers-funded-world-health-organization-59331?e=0c8ccf8e98

Each week, our investigations are showcased in local markets across the country by the local ABC, NBC, CBS, and FOX affiliates of the Sinclair Broadcast Group.

We are reaching the American people in their living rooms to connect on the issues most important to them — right in their own neighborhoods.

Check out a few of our recent investigations:

• AUSTIN, TEXAS: It’s lucrative to be in leadership in Austin! The city pays public officials much more than state and federal leaders.
https://www.openthebooks.com/cbs-austin-city-of-austin-pays-much-more-than-positions-of-leadership-at-state–federal-levels/

• LAS VEGAS, NEVADA: Meet the Las Vegas $100,000 Club — 1 in every 2 city workers made 6-figures or more last year!
https://www.openthebooks.com/nbc3-news-meet-the-las-vegas-100000-club–2037-city-employees-with-100000-in-compensation-costing-taxpayers-314-million/

• BALTIMORE, MARYLAND: It’s pension heaven for the city council — voting themselves lifetime pension benefits after just eight years of service. We crunched the numbers: invest just $30,000 over eight years and receive $450,000+ in lifetime payout starting at age 50!
https://www.openthebooks.com/fox-45-baltimore-city-council-wants-the-golden-parachute-public-pension/

• NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE: 550,000 unused sick and vacation days were accrued by Nashville public school employees into their paid-time-off bank accounts!
https://www.openthebooks.com/fox17-nearly-550000-unused-sick-and-vacation-days-banked-by-metro-nashville-public-school-employees/

• SPRINGFIELD, ILLINOIS: Why Illinois Is In Trouble — 133,000 Public Employees And Retirees Made $100,000+ Last Year!
https://www.openthebooks.com/abc20-over-130000-state-workers-making-over-100000-in-annual-salary-or-pension/

This year, our auditors will file 50,000 Freedom of Information Act requests to capture nearly every dime taxed and spent at every level of government across America.

That’s never been done before!

Why are we fighting so hard? Because transparency changes everything.

Remember, It’s Your Money!

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2022/11/11/desantis-2024-think-again-n1645202

It should be clear by this time that popularity has nothing to do with electability. Trump filled rally after rally in state after state with countless, full-house, full-stadium crowds, and such numbers do not lie. There really was a red wave in the midterms, but it was macro-engineered to a trickle, as should have been expected. The scam of  “malfunctioning” voting machines, the shortage of paper ballots, the tsunami of mail-in and late ballots, the temporary closing and slow-downs of polling stations, and so on would have been sufficient to determine an electoral result. 2020 was an early run for 2022, which in turn should be regarded as a template for 2024. I am absolutely sure that the Dems are now, even as we speak, preparing favorable ground for the next presidential election. As Stalin is reputed to have said, “It’s not the people who vote that count, it’s the people who count the votes.” To make Trump responsible for Democrat malfeasance is wholly misguided.

DeSantis is now the favorite among many Republican voters and almost all conservative commentators for the Party presidential nomination. Such passionate advocates seem to have missed two essential points:

In a rigged electoral system, no Republican candidate, not even DeSantis, can be expected to win a national election. DeSantis cruised to victory in Florida because, as governor of the state, he had the means and the authority to ensure a clean election. But he would be helpless against a massive crime organization, aka the Democrat Party, which effectively controls the electoral infrastructure, the physical apparatus, the paid loyalty of election workers, and the federal agencies that oversee the process. If the system is not repaired and made answerable to the people, there will never be a Republican president again.
Should DeSantis run in 2024 and lose — which is increasingly likely in the current adulterated circumstances — the sequel would be devastating. Florida would be at the mercy of the next gubernatorial race since DeSantis is a unique political figure and could not be readily replaced. Additionally, DeSantis himself would have become a kind of displaced person, neither an American president nor a state governor. An invaluable political talent would have been sacrificed to the untutored enthusiasm of his supporters. If the American republican experiment is now in dire straits, it would then be expeditiously destroyed. A slim hope will have become an utter disaster.

Trump has obviously made his mistakes. As Alicia Colon writes on American Thinker, “There is no question that Donald Trump is a flawed human being like most successful businessmen.” She goes on: “Whenever I read the complaints from Trump haters, it’s all about his personality, his tweets, his misogynism, his sexist remarks, blah, blah, blah. This is infantile, high school criticism that has no place in political punditry.” Similarly, as J.B. Shurk writes, everything that the establishment class “has fraudulently peddled against Trump—that he’s imperious, mercurial, uncouth, unworthy to hold office, a Russian spy, a warmonger, an insurrectionist, a ‘denier,’ a criminal—is nothing but an endless barrage of psychological warfare directed against MAGA voters.”

Trump’s flaws of character — and who is without them — do not alter the fact that Trump is an indomitable fighter and the most successful president in recent history. His ego is concomitant with his strength; the two cannot be separated. To turn against him now and indulge in gutter journalism, righteous schadenfreude, or in considerations of realpolitik largely because a number of his chosen endorsements succumbed to a corrupt and rigged electoral machine is a sign of conservative defeatism and, in some cases, of self-enamored mobbing. We were quite happy with his major and unprecedented policy successes: making America energy-independent, restoring the manufacturing base, revisiting trade deals to benefit American workers, creating a surge in employment and prosperity, laboring to put a stop to illegal immigration, appointing conservative judges, rebuilding a depleted military, and establishing renewed American pre-eminence on the international stage. Now we are ready to consign him to the golf course. How quickly gratitude turns to recrimination.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/11/the_fbi_report_weve_long_needed.html

The actions of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have been questionable as of late under the leadership of Christopher Wray.

We could dive back into the way the bureau acted upon raiding former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate earlier this year.  But their actions go much deeper, with reports about surveillance and even spying on emails of private American citizens in the hopes of finding criminal activity.

There’s about to be a spotlight shining down on the FBI.  House Republicans have released a 1,000-page report that details just what’s wrong with the FBI, thanks to a number of former agents-turned-whistleblowers who detail just how bad things have gotten there.

“The Federal Bureau of Investigation, under the stewardship of Director Christopher Wray and Attorney General Merrick Garland, is broken,” the report explains.  “The problem lies not with the majority of front-line agents who serve our country, but with the FBI’s politicized bureaucracy.”

Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee detail the report as “the first comprehensive accounting of the FBI’s problems to date, which undermine” its “fundamental law-enforcement mission.”

People could say this is a political move that will serve Republicans going into their elections, but that’s an easy dismissal when the report actually takes a look at something concrete: the problems within the bureau.

And there are problems.  They are hard to ignore.  A number of whistleblowers who understand the inner workings of the bureau’s office have noted that its leadership is “rotted at its core.”  They also seem to highlight what they call “a systematic culture of unaccountability,” consistently utilizing “rampant corruption, manipulation and abuse.”

The gist of the report explains how the bureau has been consistently biased against conservatives, investigating the actions of former president Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans with little to hold it back.  Not to mention the Bureau is out to “purge” employees who have even the faintest of conservative views, fearing they’ll have an effect on its direction.

Furthermore, the FBI is holding back the facts on the effectiveness of constitutional-carrying citizens.  These are people who have stopped a number of active shooter events.  However, the FBI’s “official” numbers aren’t nearly as high as what’s actually happening.

https://www.city-journal.org/ron-desantis-rules-for-political-success

On a disappointing night for Republicans, Governor Ron DeSantis crushed it in the free state of Florida, lapping his challenger, Congressman Charlie Crist, by close to 20 points. Before DeSantis’s emergence, Florida used to keep us wondering whether it would turn blue or red until the wee hours on Election Night or, in the case of the 2000 election, for weeks thereafter. But it was clear well before midnight on Tuesday that Florida had turned solid red. From Portsmouth to Puget Sound, Republicans interested in replicating DeSantis’s “win for the ages” should learn from these eight rules.

Stay on offense. Given the mainstream media’s leftward tilt, Republicans are often stuck playing defense. As president, Donald Trump called the media the “enemy of the people” but also seemed to crave their approval. DeSantis, by contrast, rewrote the Republican playbook by staying on offense virtually nonstop for four years. He refused to bend or apologize for anything he said or did, even when the media called him “DeathSantis” for keeping the state open during Covid or mischaracterized his Parental Rights in Education law (falsely smeared as “Don’t Say Gay”). As he said in his victory speech on Tuesday night, “We took the hits, we weathered the storms, but we stood our ground, we did not back down.”

Every week, or so it seemed, the governor took the fight to a new target: woke corporations like Disney, intransigent teachers’ unions, Big Tech, liberal judges and prosecutors who refused to follow the law, or “sanctuary-city” leaders who “embraced” illegal immigrants—as long as they didn’t settle in places like Martha’s Vineyard.

You can create your own majority with the right approach. When DeSantis took office, Democrats enjoyed a small voter-registration edge statewide, but now Republicans hold a commanding 300,000-voter lead. He undoubtedly won over some native Floridians, but probably the much bigger factor here was his effort to inspire like-minded conservatives to move to Florida from blue states. (And perhaps this helps explain, in part, why Gretchen Whitmer, Kathy Hochul, and other embattled liberal governors survived.) I moved to Florida from Oregon in 2019 to some degree because I admire DeSantis and his approach to governance, so I count myself a member of this movement.