RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/limited-hangout-lee-smith

Since Watergate, conventional Washington wisdom holds that the cover-up is worse than the crime. Richard Nixon’s Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP) tasked former intelligence operatives to break into Democratic National Committee headquarters to wiretap the opposition. To cover up his involvement in the Watergate break-in, Nixon lied about what he knew and when he knew it, resulting in his resignation from office.

Whether Hillary Clinton was aware of the crimes committed between 2016 and 2020 to further her political ambitions is a question that may never be answered. What has been proved beyond any shadow of doubt by the U.S. Justice Department over the past few months is that top operatives in her 2016 campaign used concocted falsehoods to leverage active law enforcement officials who in turn used U.S. government programs and resources to spy on the Trump campaign—a violation of American political norms whose only real parallel is Watergate. We also know that under the pretext of “investigating collusion,” at least 40 Obama officials, including then-Vice President Joe Biden, spied on the Trump team. There is circumstantial evidence that Barack Obama knew what was going on, but since, miraculously, no one has ever publicly asked him about Russiagate, not even once, he hasn’t had the opportunity to either lie or come clean.

But with Trump now safely out of office, it appears that the cover-up is now cracking wide open. In September, John Durham, the special counsel investigating the origins of the FBI’s Russia probe, charged Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann with lying to the FBI. In September 2016, Sussmann, a former Justice Department official, passed reports to the bureau that were meant to incriminate the Trump circle by claiming evidence of links between the Trump organization and a Russian bank. Sussmann had told the FBI he was not acting on behalf of a client, but records Durham obtained from Sussmann’s law firm, Perkins Coie, showed he was billing the Clinton campaign for drawing up the reports and for the meeting itself.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/remember-san-bernardino-fourteen-lloyd-billingsley/

On December 2, 2015, Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik drove up to the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino, California, and began firing automatic rifles while still outside on the grounds. The American-born Muslim Farook and the Pakistani-born Malik, then barged inside where a holiday party was in progress.

There Farook and Malik gunned down Robert Adams, Isaac Amianos, Bennetta Betbadal, Harry Bowman, Sierra Clayborn, Juan Espinoza, Aurora Godoy, Shannon Johnson, Larry Daniel Kaufman, Damien Meins, Tin Ngyen, Nicholas Thalasinos, Yvette Velasco, and Michael Wetzel. The pair then fled in a black SUV and fired more than 100 rounds at police, wounding one officer.

Police took down the terrorists and inside their SUV found a trigger device to detonate bombs the Muslims had planted at the Regional Center. Had the bombs exploded, many others would have perished.

“We must seek justice for those who lost their lives in the recent attacks in Paris and San Bernardino,” said California attorney general Kamala Harris in a December 17 statement. Like the composite character David Garrow described in Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama, Harris failed to name any of the fourteen murder victims. On the other hand, the attorney general did make her priorities evident.

“Ultimately,” Harris said, “not only is it immoral and contrary to our values to stoke fear and cast aspersions against an entire faith and the millions of law-abiding American Muslims, but it is also strategically unwise. This very community is a critical ally in the short and long term fight combatting terrorism and radicalization here at home and across the world.”

Harris was joined by officials from the Muslim Public Affairs Council and CAIR, whose Los Angeles director Hussam Ayloush said “Islamophobic and xenophobic rhetoric by certain public figures has made Muslim communities an easy target for hate crimes.” Attorney general Harris, Ayloush added, “exemplified leadership” by addressing “the spike in hate crimes against American Muslims and other minorities.”

In a statement one year later, Harris recalled “those who lost their lives and the loved ones they left behind,” but named not a single victim or any of the “brave first responders.” Those were the San Bernardino police, but the word “police” does not appear. In similar style, Farook and Malik were not named, and Harris does not mention their possible motive for “the tragedy that took place.” Like the president, Harris hailed the Muslim community as an ally against terrorism. In this case, it wasn’t.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/genocide-stolen-land-and-other-lies-about-america-jason-d-hill/

A few years ago, I was invited by a small liberal arts college in the Northeast to give a series of lectures on ethics and the formation of moral character to a mixed group of juniors and graduating seniors. I began the class with a discussion of how moral character was undoubtedly shaped by cultural norms, mores, traditions, and protocols but that, given the capacity of humans to question the sense-making narratives they inherit from their societies, the development of agency was also an individualist undertaking.

Before I could even finish my introductory remarks, an earnest young woman blurted out that such an undertaking would be immoral. There was no such thing as an ethical milieu in America. There were no uncontested cultural mores, norms and values because these all presupposed a moral space; a location in which ethical agency could emerge. America, she announced, was and continues to be, located on stolen lands. This land was forged in genocidal conditions to eliminate Native Americans from the continent. That we lived on their stolen land without their permission, that we had yet to admit that genocidal policies neutralized any possibility for an ethical space in which moral agency could be developed was not just naïve—it was immoral. The United States of America, she declared, was irrevocably tainted as a country. The concomitant agency that sprung from any spatial alignment within its reaches was bound to be ethically compromised. Just as a criminal can never legally purchase stolen goods and claim to feel reasonably attractive in them, so too, no American could claim to ever have a legitimate ethical identity short of giving back stolen lands to the Native Indians; or, paying them for all illegally acquired lands.

She was breathless at the end of her disquisition and visibly upset. She told me that my approach to the subject was wrong and that, respectfully, I was, perhaps, unknowingly, a participant in a continued colonial settler project.

I remained somber and thanked her for her passionate viewpoint. She corrected me to say that she had uttered an unassailable truth. I asked the class if it had thoughts on the matter at hand. To a person, everyone agreed with the student. Some added that Americans ought to leave the content and relocate elsewhere and give up even their homes to Native Americans. The discussion went on for around thirty minutes during which time I basically functioned as an objective moderator, pointing out, for instance, cases in which land was purchased in a legitimate manner by the Europeans and Americans from the Native Indians.

When one student declared that the moral but impractical thing would be for every American to offer him or herself up for execution to living Native Americans—I’d just about had enough of this malarkey. Almost sensing my frustration, the student who had engaged in her soliloquy told me she wanted my personal viewpoint—not some dispassionate attempt at a scholarly answer, as any such attempt would be jaundiced by historical biases shrouded in linguistic traps meant to ensnare the seeker of truth into a web of falsities.

I remained silent, however, for some reason. I wanted to grasp the magnitude of the spectacle unfolding before my eyes. In the subsequent months I read scores of articles of children in K-12 public schools being taught about America created out of stolen lands. I heard Vice President Kamala Harris deliver remarks on the day after Columbus Day, or what has come to be known as “Indigenous Day,” in October of 2021 to the National Congress of American Indians 78th Convention. There, Harris accused the United States of ushering in a “wave of devastation for tribal nations, perpetuating violence, stealing land, and spreading disease.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17984/vaccines-and-power

Given Germany’s notorious history of brutally stigmatizing various minority populations, it is shocking and outrageous that a German “research institute” and the Hamburg-based weekly news magazine would sink to such sleazy malice.

The U.S. Constitution is not “waived” due to disease or natural disaster. We must beware of politicians and other officials who seek to exercise power through “mandates” without a single vote or the active exercise of informed consent.

COVID-19 is a serious disease, but it bears constant repeating that the recovery rate now is between 97% and 99.75%.

We must resist authoritarian impulses and exercises by various officials seeking to consolidate power and impose their will over the constitutional processes and guarantees we enjoy. Our Constitution was designed and ratified for exactly such challenges and it has endured 231 years through a myriad of challenges far more grave than a virus.

COVID-19 is a serious disease that can have deadly consequences. The good news is that now the recovery rate is between 97% and 99.75%. As the world approaches its second full year grappling with the ever-mutating virus and the public health response, some serious public policy and political questions require attention:

Are some people looking to leverage vaccination status to stigmatize and marginalize political opponents?
Is vaccine status being equated with ideology or political affiliation?
Is vaccine status going to be the new societal discriminator for those who might be “more equal” than others?
Are we seeing efforts to control and pressure citizens for daring to question government officials?
What about officials who seek to change the meaning of terms such as “fully vaccinated,” or altogether abandon terms and conditions that were used to persuade the public to shut down businesses and society at-large.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/12/anthony_fauci_is_no_josef_mengele.html

Lara Logan claimed that she’s heard from people all over the world that Fauci is another Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor who sent more than a million people to their deaths at Auschwitz. The comparison is wrong because Mengele intentionally and affirmatively caused these deaths in the gas chambers. Fauci hasn’t affirmatively killed anyone. He has, however, consigned hundreds of thousands of people to death through his negative behavior, denying people access to life-saving treatment. He can be judged for that without bringing Mengele into the discussion.

From the moment COVID hit our shores, there were reports that those who were dying were people with low vitamin D levels: the elderly and Blacks (who, because of an indoor life in a non-equatorial country, are frequently vitamin D deficient). Just this week, Daniel Horowitz wrote that there’s now strong evidence of an overwhelming correlation between vitamin D supplements and a robust immune system that can resist COVID.

We also know that hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, if given sufficiently early in COVID’s progress and with Vitamin D, zinc, and antibiotics, can return people to good health. Indeed, if the case of Sun Ng is anything to go by, there’s now anecdotal evidence that ivermectin can return to health people on the verge of death. Ng was dying from COVID in an Illinois hospital that refused to give him ivermectin. Eventually, a court forced the hospital to give Ng ivermectin, at which point he began a rapid recovery.

To sum things up quickly, there’s now excellent evidence (evidence that started to accrue very early in 2020), that taking supplements to strengthen the immune system and receiving early treatment with hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin (both drugs with decades’ long histories of safe and effective use in humans) can stop people from dying. Currently, almost 800,000 people have COVID listed as their cause of death (although I suspect over-diagnosis). It’s a good bet that most of them would have survived with immune therapy and early treatment.

That all these options were denied them was because of orders coming from the top—from Fauci. You’ve read in the news and watched videos for almost two years of Fauci dismissing early treatment and immune therapy. Instead, for Fauci, it was all about masks, which he frequently acknowledged were useless because people didn’t have an endless supply of N95 masks, and lockdowns, which didn’t slow the virus but did increase deaths from untreated diseases, drug overdoses, suicide, domestic abuse, and the stresses of economic despair as Fauci’s lockdown obsession destroyed a robust American economy.

I’m reading Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, which has meticulously sourced information about Fauci’s refusal to authorize treating COVID early, with common, inexpensive therapies.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/our-ship-state-looks-titanic-bruce-thornton/

The “ship of state” metaphor first appears in the works of the late 7th century BC poet Alcaeus. An aristocrat from the important Greek city of Mytilene on the island of Lesbos, Alcaeus’s metaphor of a ship endangered by a storm represents the political upheavals caused by a succession of tyrants vying for control of the city––the surges and waves of civic violence, political turmoil, and tyranny that have damaged the ship’s hull, sails, and tackle, and threaten to sink it.

Though tired after 2600 years, the metaphor is still useful. We also are in the midst of political storms––political violence, the “soft despotism” of federal overregulation, the illiberal “wokeism” attacking our unalienable rights, and the serial damage to the Constitutional institutions that have kept us sailing free for over 200 years. But a variation of the metaphor more telling for our predicament is the sinking of the Titanic, the “unsinkable” ocean liner that fatally struck an iceberg in 1912. However, rather than one iceberg likely concealed from the Titanic’s watchmen by a nighttime optical illusion, we are confronted in broad daylight with an archipelago of icebergs that have been visible for decades now.

Take the looming federal debt, deficits, and unfunded liabilities. Our national debt has reached $28.43 trillion, 133% of GDP; annual budget deficits hover around $3 trillion; and there are $162 trillion in unfunded liabilities, including Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security––all relentlessly growing without any serious effort to reform the “big three” entitlement programs that eat up half the annual budget. More ominously, these frightening numbers have occurred during a time of anomalously low interest rates. Just a one percent rise in rates would swell interest payments to $530 billion a year––more than we spend on Medicaid.

Yet despite decades of warnings about the approaching fiscal calamity, both parties cannot summon the political will to turn the ship away from disaster. At best, we have one party occasionally trying to slow it down. Worse, the covid panic last year added to the debt $4 trillion in mitigation spending. Biden so far this year has added just under a trillion more, and another $1.9 trillion––$4.6 trillion if its provisions are extended for 10 years––in the pork-laden “bipartisan infrastructure” bill. And instead of slowing down, he’s angling for yet another $5 trillion in spending of money we don’t have.

It’s as though the captain of the Titanic ordered “Full speed ahead!” when warned about the iceberg.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/01/third-worldizing-america/

In a recent online exchange, the YouTuber Casey Neistat posted his fury after his car was broken into and the contents stolen. Los Angeles, he railed, was turning into a “3rd-world s—hole of a city.”

The multimillionaire actor Seth Rogen chastised Neistat for his anger. 

Rogen claimed that a car’s contents were minor things to lose. He added that while living in West Hollywood he had his own car broken into 15 times—but thought little of it. 

Online bloggers ridiculed Rogen. No wonder—the actor lives in multimillion-dollar homes in the Los Angeles area, guarded by sophisticated security systems and fencing.

Vineyard roadsides used as dumps—a normal scene along rural avenues near my home

Yet both Neistat and Rogen accurately defined Third Worldization: the utter breakdown of the law and the ability of the rich within such a feudal society to find ways to avoid the violent chaos.

After traveling the last 45 years in the Middle East, southern Europe, Mexico, and Asia Minor, I observed some common characteristics of a so-called Third-World society. And all of them might feel increasingly familiar to contemporary Americans.

Whether in Cairo or Naples, theft was commonplace. Yet property crimes were almost never seriously prosecuted. 

In a medieval-type society of two rather than three classes, the rich in walled estates rarely worry that much about thievery. Crime is written off as an intramural problem of the poor, especially when the middle class is in decline or nonexistent. 

Violent crime is now soaring in America. But two things are different about America’s new criminality.

One is the virtual impunity of it. Thieves now brazenly swarm a store, ransack, steal, and flee with the content without worry of arrest. 

Second, the Left often justifies crime as a sort of righteous payback against a supposedly exploitative system. 

So, the architect of the so-called 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones, preened of the summer 2020 riotous destruction of property: “Destroying property, which can be replaced, is not violence.” 

Third Worldization reflects the asymmetry of law enforcement. Ideology and money, not the law, adjudicate who gets arrested and tried, and who does not. 

There were 120 days of continuous looting, arson, and lethal violence in summer 2020. The riots were variously characterized by the burning of courthouses, police precincts, and an iconic church. 

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/12/02/refugees-from-communist-countries-are-the-canaries-in-the-coal-mine/

“What we learn from history is that we do not learn from history.” — Hegel

In the classic movie Alien, the crew of a spaceship accidentally brings a small specimen inside their ship when they land on an uncharted planet. As they resume their voyage, the alien transmogrifies into a bigger and deadlier form and begins to kill the crew one by one. At wit’s end, the few remaining crew members ask their android how to kill it. In a tone of incredulity, the android answers back, “You still don’t know what you’re dealing with, do you?”

People such as myself who have lived in countries controlled by Communist totalitarian regimes are thoroughly acquainted with their characteristics: censorship, divide-and-conquer tactics, fraudulent elections, mutilation of the arts and science, forbidding books, sadistic repressions, absence of comedy, snitching to authorities by friends and family members, constant propaganda, rewriting history books, toppling statues, relentless fanaticism, the rule of law jettisoned, political prisoners, self-censorship, propaganda posing as news, ruining the country’s economy, distorting the meaning of words. We can smell the stench of Communism, the plague of the 20th century, a mile away.

Except we can smell it here. Now.

We are the canaries in the coal mine.

I can give hundreds of instances of the above characteristics being carried out in America, which have been increasing in frequency and intensity. However, most people are unaware of them because the major propaganda outlets (CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, etc.) ignore them and, on the other hand, conservatives are notorious for only preaching to the choir and stubbornly and stupidly not reaching out to the general public because they are so lazy.

Equally affected by the news blackout of the propaganda outlets are the frantic warnings from immigrants from Communist countries. On several other occasions in various conservative outlets, I have expressed my alarm at what is happening and I could repeat myself here. Instead of writing yet another article sounding the alarm that the barbarians are not at the gates, but inside the gates, I will cite other refugees and dissidents if for no other reason that their voices deserve to be heard by more people, contrary to the efforts of the media hivemind to suppress them. Some may object to my merely listing their voices and that it is a long list. Well, the point is that it is a long list. So, you should pay attention.

And, remember: If it happened to us, why not to you? And, like you, we did nothing to stop it when it could have been easily stopped in its earlier stages.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/biden-suffers-string-of-court-setbacks-as-administration-s-vaccine-mandates-are-put-on-hold/ar-AARjmcV

The Biden administration has suffered three major court losses since Monday morning, with orders freezing key federal government Covid-19 vaccine rules in certain parts of the country and, in one case, nationwide.

The latest blow came from a federal judge in Louisiana, whose order Tuesday afternoon halted across the country the administration’s mandate requiring that certain health care workers be vaccinated.

The order in the Louisiana case was delivered a day after the administration’s health care worker mandate had been blocked in 10 states by a federal judge overseeing a separate challenge filed in Missouri. And it came just hours after a separate Biden vaccine rule — aimed at federal contractors — had been put on hold in three states by a federal judge in Kentucky.

Meanwhile, a requirement that employees of larger companies get either vaccinated or tested for Covid-19 regularly remains frozen after a scathing appeals court order blocking the mandate earlier this month.

The administration has acted quickly to seek reversals of the orders blocking its vaccine rules.

“That threat to human life and health far exceeds the potential indirect harms to patients resulting from workers who may quit rather than receive the vaccine,” the Justice Department said in one such filing Tuesday, asking for an appeals court to reinstate the mandate that covers certain health care staff at providers that participate in Medicare and Medicaid.

Claims of an ‘erosion of our liberties’

The challenges put forward different arguments for why each vaccine requirement should be blocked, touching on the administration’s compliance with administrative law to constitutional claims about the federal government’s abilities to regulate vaccine participation.

In the Kentucky case concerning the mandate for federal contractors, US District Judge Gregory Frederick Van Tatenhove said Tuesday that the question before him was “narrow.”

https://thefederalist.com/2021/12/01/if-you-dont-know-what-time-it-is-get-out-of-politics-now/

The defining political question of our time is this: “Do you know what time it is?”

The line, popularized by the Claremont Institute’s David Reaboi, succinctly captures the most essential of points: If you don’t understand the stakes, and how fraught the situation is — that the ruling class seeks total power, is closing in on it, and will stop at nothing to achieve it — you are unfit to lead. You ought to exit the playing field.

Knowing what time it is leads one to prioritize different ends and to pursue them using different means. Among those on the right, although more so in the chattering class than among activists, there appears to be a divide over the stakes inadvertently elucidated in some of the recent debates over national conservatism.

In the Wall Street Journal, Chris DeMuth and Matthew Continetti jousted over it. Continetti took issue with DeMuth’s argument endorsing national conservatism in part by claiming essentially that the movement captured so many schools of thought as to be incoherent, and that he favored his “conservatism without modification — constitutionalist, market-oriented and unapologetically American.”

I laid out what it is that unites national conservatives in a recent piece here at The Federalist — noting that a shared understanding of the stakes is inherent to the movement.

The idea that conservatism needs no modifier becomes questionable if conservatism — which has in many quarters focused on economic liberalism while ceding most everything else — is not conserving or doing everything it can to restore what it ought to in the face of a ruling class onslaught.