RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/3016509/free-speech-is-in-dire-shape/

The following are the prepared remarks of Jay Bhattacharya upon receiving the 2024 Bradley Prize, an award to “honor scholars and practitioners whose accomplishments reflect The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation’s mission to restore, strengthen, and protect the principles and institutions of American exceptionalism.”

Thank you! I am so grateful to be honored by the Bradley Foundation today. I am especially thankful
because, in my view, this award is not just to honor me but to acknowledge so many brilliant scientists,
politicians, public servants, teachers, lawyers, firefighters, small business owners, CEOs, and people
from every walk of life who risked their jobs, their reputations, or their family bliss to oppose COVID-19
tyranny. I dedicate this award to each of them.

It’s not hard to see that our pandemic response failed. Official counts attribute more than a million
deaths to COVID in the United States and almost seven million worldwide. By early 2022, about 95% of
Americans had contracted COVID despite the harsh countermeasures in most states, including
confinement of broad populations, business closures, cessation of religious and other gatherings,
school closures, and widespread violation of fundamental civil liberties. Very clearly, these measures
failed to protect Americans from COVID.

Many powerful scientific bureaucrats justified these policies with the idea that all scientists agreed that
the lockdowns would work to suppress or even eliminate the virus. This was known false by spring 2020. For instance, the Swedish experiment with keeping schools open in spring 2020 was a
tremendous success. Lockdowns are inherently leaky because human societies, human health, and
human well-being require physical proximity. It is unhealthy to treat our fellow human beings primarily
as biohazards.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/05/tyranny_by_any_other_name_still_stinks.html

Tyranny takes hold when good people are lulled into inaction.  Those of us who mind our own business and prefer government to leave us alone are particularly prone to falling into this trap.  Because we have no use for government, we hope government will have no use for us.  So we are silent while evil grows far from our homes.  We tend to our basic comforts and ignore evil as it nears.  And, eventually, we even collaborate with evil in order to avoid making a public scene.  In an effort to “get by” without causing too many waves, tyranny’s waves grow bigger and stronger until they crash upon our homes.  By then, it is too late to batten down the hatches.  Evil has already broken through our doors.

I had hoped that we would have more time.  That must be the common sentiment shared by every generation grappling with what comes next.  I had hoped that the sheer destruction of the twentieth century would be enough to buy us many more decades of relative peace.  Regrettably, two world wars and a nuclear-tipped Cold War did nothing to temper governments’ lust for power or their financial backers’ lust for wealth.  WWI’s clash of empires should have discouraged the growth of trigger-happy alliances and endless conquest.  The evil unleashed by WWII’s totalitarian regimes should have discouraged the growth of centralized institutions and vast, unaccountable, “just following orders” bureaucracies.  Instead, military alliances, central banks, international governing bodies, administrative Leviathans, and trade organizations have accumulated more power today than at any other time in history.  The twenty-first century is the century of empire-building and totalitarianism, and unless ordinary people rein in the excesses of their own governments, the mass destruction that follows will make the first two world wars look like measly hors d’oeuvres.

Can it be done?  Can global bloodshed be averted?  Can Western nations be saved before they devolve into hotbeds of revolution and civil war?  Or do the mounting conflicts all around us signify that we are already too late?  The answers to those questions depend, in part, on whether regular citizens sufficiently resist being used as cannon fodder in the years ahead and whether global leaders sufficiently fear losing everything they now have.  Had the great monarchies of Europe understood that WWI would facilitate their demise, perhaps they would have been more hesitant to allow a tangled web of military alliances to decide their fate.  Chasing honor and glory led European nobles straight to their graves.  Had Mussolini, Hitler, and Tojo known that they would die shamefully, perhaps their thirst for empire could have been quenched.  Lord Acton’s famous observation deserves a corollary: those who seek absolute power must be destroyed absolutely.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/05/25/joe-biden-angry-warrior/

Last weekend, President Biden spoke at the graduation ceremony at Morehouse College, an all-male, historically black college, aggressively attacking his Republican opponents and decrying what he sees as pervasive, overt, and violent ongoing racism in American society. “What,” Biden asked rhetorically, “is democracy if black men are being killed in the street? What is democracy if a trail of broken promises still leave black communities behind? What is democracy if you have to be 10 times better than anyone else to get a fair shot?” Finally, he intoned, “And most of all, what does it mean, as we’ve heard before, to be a black man who loves his country even if it doesn’t love him back in equal measure?”

The speech has been the subject of much discussion, particularly among Republicans, most of whom have bemoaned the President’s purposeful victimization of young black men for political purposes. Rather than tell them the truth, rather than encourage them to be great and to dedicate their lives to fixing the problems that exist in the nation, he encouraged them to wallow in their misery and to blame others for their problems.

Certainly, there is considerable truth in this criticism. And certainly, Biden should be chided for playing into an ideology that thrives on resentment and jealousy. Still, the substance of the President’s comments is quite probably less important in the grand scheme of things than the tenor in which they were delivered.

A week before his speech at Morehouse, President Biden and his campaign team released a video addressing the Trump campaign’s demand for head-to-head debates. “Make my day, pal,” Biden challenges Trump as he declares that he beat the former president twice in their previous campaign and will gladly do so this time too.

Here again, critics rightly noted that the substance of the video was questionable at best. “6 jump cuts in 11 seconds,” conservative commentator Stephen L. Miller noted. Biden is so bad at this that he can’t even read his cue cards in a studio. How is he going to do an entire debate, much less two? He’s not up to his actual job, much less to running a grueling campaign in addition.

This is another fair point, to be sure, but one that still misses the bigger picture—Biden’s tone.

Joe Biden—or at least the Joe Biden the public is allowed to see these days—is angry. He sounds like he wants to fight Trump. He yells at the young men at Morehouse on one of the most joyful and special days of their lives. He’s rough and gruff and thoroughly displeased with everyone and everything. And if he’s not careful, it’s going to cost him the election.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/wheres-the-jury-charge/

It is now Friday evening at the start of the long Memorial Day weekend, so it’s getting safer to assume that we will not be getting the jury charge — i.e., the legal instructions that Judge Juan Merchan will give the jury prior to deliberations — in former president Donald Trump’s Manhattan criminal trial.

Interesting thing about that. It’s obvious that Judge Merchan does not want to give the commentariat an opportunity to pore over and publicly dissect what he plans to say. But that raises the question of why Merchan sent the jurors home after both sides rested on Tuesday, giving them a full week to marinate in the intense out-of-court publicity and feel pressure from family, friends, and acquaintances. (The jurors are anonymous as far as the public record is concerned, but it would be naïve to believe their identities are unknown to many people.)

Why didn’t the judge proceed with closing statements, the jury charge, and deliberations until a verdict was reached, as is customary in criminal trials? Presumably, he did not want to risk the wrath and potential defections if the jury were forced to deliberate during a holiday weekend. (If any commitments were made to the jury at the start of the trial about not working over this weekend, I have not seen that reported.) I believe the judge has been putting his thumb on the scale in favor of the prosecution, and experience teaches that when juries are inconvenienced, they tend to blame the government and the court; they may sometimes blame the defendant if it seems his lawyers are stalling, but they generally grasp that the defendant is not a voluntary participant in the trial and has the least control over its scheduling.

I want to make another point, though. If the judge does not want to make the jury charge public because of the intense media coverage, that can only be because of fear that the jurors might be exposed to that media coverage. Otherwise, there would be no downside to making public what ought to be, and routinely is, made public. If the big concern is intense media coverage, however, then why would Merchan send the jury home for a week outside the courtroom, where they’re apt to be bludgeoned by media coverage and other outside pressures? Why not have kept them in the courtroom working and shielded them from publicity and outside pressures until a verdict is reached?

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

In The Forgotten Founding Father Joshua Kendall wrote: “Recognizing [Noah] Webster’s knack for getting Americans to think of themselves as Americans, [George] Washington relied time and time again on his trusted policy advisor.” We tend to think of colonial Americans as being solely of British heritage, and certainly they dominated. But languages spoken in the American colonies in 1775 included German, Dutch, French, Swedish, Polish and Hebrew, along with numerous dialects and myriad languages of indigenous Americans. From its beginning America was diverse, unlike the more homogenous countries from which immigrants had come. The Founding Fathers wanted the people to become a melting pot.

Noah Webster[1] understood the value of developing the unique character of an American. His spelling books were designed to help people read, write and speak a common language. In the June 29, 2019 issue of the San Diego Union-Tribune, Richard Lederer noted that Webster’s dictionaries had “an array of shiny new American words, among them bullfrog, chowder, handy, hickory, succotash, tomahawk…” Today, in this English-speaking country, those not fluent are disadvantaged, yet not all are encouraged to learn English.

Integration, in this nation of immigrants, was slow, as could be seen in many New York City neighborhoods that remained distinctive into the 20th Century: Little Italy; China Town; Yorkville (for Germans); Spanish Harlem; Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant and Manhattan’s Harlem, home for black Americans, and Lapskaus Boulevard in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn where many Norwegians settled. But assimilation became increasingly common in the first and second halves of the 20th Century, first through inter-ethnic marriages and later through interracial marriages.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/staff/don-feder/

History teaches us that the best way to avoid a war is to prepare for one.

After World War I, another global conflict was unthinkable, the leaders of the democracies declared. Hitler, Mussolini and the Japanese imperialists thought otherwise.

In the 1930s, Britain effectively disarmed, and France relied on static defense. The United States embraced isolationism, relying on two oceans for protection, while Germany rearmed and Japan invaded China. The cost of that lack of imagination was another world war and 75 million dead.

When World War II ended, shortsighted politicians rushed to downsize our military, even as communism advanced on four continents.

After Vietnam, the peaceniks who had taken control of the Democratic Party couldn’t wait to put our armed forces in mothballs. Then came Saddam Hussein, the Taliban, 9/11, ISIS, and radical Islam’s war on the West.

The Biden administration’s death march of folly began with the disastrous withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan, with 13 service members dead, thousands of Americans stranded and $7 billion in military equipment left behind. The weakness we displayed to our enemies set the stage for the next round of aggression.

President Biden is Neville Chamberlain, George McGovern and Jimmy Carter rolled into one.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/bungling-bidens-commencement-whoppers/

President Joe Biden made a well-publicized commencement address on May 19 at Morehouse College in Atlanta, a historically black college. The networks touted the speech but didn’t put any “fact-checkers” on it. It contained at least four fibs.

In an echo of his 1987 lies that crumbled in first presidential campaign, Biden claimed, “I was the first Biden to ever graduate from college.” A newspaper obituary for his maternal grandfather Ambrose Finnegan noted he graduated college.

He repeated his story that his son Beau died of a brain tumor after he spent “a year in Iraq as a major — he won the Bronze Star — living next to a burn pit.” In 2019, FactCheck.org noted the science on cancer from exposure to burn pits in Iraq was “insufficient,” but Biden tells that story often.

Then Biden uncorked his typical race-baiting: “Today in Georgia, they won’t allow water to be available to you while you wait in line to vote in an election.” Georgia’s legislature passed a bill in 2021 that said no person should “give, offer to give, or participate in the giving of any money or gifts, including, but not limited to, food and drink” within 150 feet of a polling place. It doesn’t mean you can’t have water!

https://www.frontpagemag.com/anatomy-of-a-kangaroo-court/

The Donald Trump New York City farce is on the way to being over. The prosecution (at least) rested after what would’ve been a disastrous performance by Michael Cohen in any other trial, but the standard rules don’t apply here because this is not actually a trial. This trial has nothing to do with law. It is a scummy attempt to frame a political opponent of the Democrats to keep him from winning an election against the desiccated old pervert in the White House. Normally, a jury would laugh this case out of court, except that it would never have been in court had the defendant been named Tronald Dump. Everything about it is a lie and a scam, and as soon as you understand that you will understand this disgraceful case.

The Democrats behind this charade are wearing the law like a skinsuit, presenting an exterior that makes this look like a real jury trial when, in fact, it is nothing of the sort. You see the forms and processes performed, but they mean nothing because the fix is already in. Let’s talk about what happens now in terms of procedure. In terms of legality, why bother? Again, this isn’t a legal matter. This is a joke.

The state must prove each of the elements of the charge beyond a reasonable doubt. Remember, in real trials, criminal charges have elements. For instance, fraud is typically a knowing misrepresentation intended to induce reliance that causes monetary damage to the victim. Each of those requirements is an element. Was there a misrepresentation? Was it knowingly false? Was it intended to induce reliance? Was someone who reasonably relied on it damaged in terms of losing money? Each of those elements must have substantial evidence in support of it. Remember, the state has to prove everything. The defendant can just sit there with his arms crossed like a late-80s rapper and say nothing, and if the state fails to provide evidence beyond a reasonable doubt proving each element, he must be acquitted. Others have discussed how the state has failed to prove any of the elements against Trump here — suffice it to say that, as a legal matter, the state has failed on every one of the elements. But again, this case isn’t a legal matter. This is a kangaroo court. We’re just talking about how the scam will proceed.

https://eagleforum.org/psr/1998/june98/psrjune98.html

Now we know why the Democrats were so vicious in their attacks on Senator Fred Thompson (R-TN) and Rep. Dan Burton (R-IN). Theirs were the committees that were closing in on the China connection, the scandal that can bring down the Clinton presidency, the scandal that has made Congressmen start to utter the T word (treason). A series of front-page news stories in the New York Times (May 15, 16, 17) essentially vindicated Thompson’s charge that the Chinese Communist Government tried to influence the 1996 U.S. election with campaign contributions.

Bill Clinton’s friend and ubiquitous Democratic fundraiser Johnny Chung told Federal investigators that he funneled nearly $100,000 from the Communist Chinese military to the Democratic campaign in the summer of 1996. The money was handed to Chung by the daughter of the top commander of China’s People’s Liberation Army, General Liu Huaqing, who was also one of the top five members of the Chinese Communist Party’s ruling Politburo.

Chung’s liaisons with the Clinton Administration were so cozy that he was able to arrange for the daughter, who goes by the name of Lt. Col. Liu Chaoying, to get a speedy visa and come to America to be photographed with Clinton on July 22, 1996. She is what is called a “princeling,” one of the privileged offspring of China’s ruling elite. In addition to her title as Lieutenant Colonel in the People’s Liberation Army, she is a senior manager and vice president for China Aerospace International Holdings, which is the Hong Kong arm of China Aerospace Corporation, a state-owned jewel in China’s military-industrial complex, with interests in satellite technology, rocket launches, and missiles.

Johnny Chung told Federal investigators that Col. Liu actually gave him $300,000, which she said originated with China’s military’s intelligence arm, and told him to use the money for Democratic campaign contributions. He apparently kept $200,000 for his “businesses.” Soon after the picture-taking fundraiser, Col. Liu had Chung open a California branch of Marswell Investing, another of her Hong Kong enterprises, whose chief “business” was parking Chinese money in the United States. She also invested $300,000 in Chung’s facsimile business. Chung was quite a hustler; he visited Clinton’s White House 49 times.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/05/22/biden-again-releasing-millions-of-barrels-from-oil-reserves-in-attempt-to-lower-gas-prices/

On Tuesday, the Biden Administration announced that it will be releasing another 1 million barrels of oil from a reserve in the Northeast, in yet another effort to lower gas prices ahead of the November election.

ABC News reports that the reserve in question, located in New Jersey and Maine, was established in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy in 2013. The sale by the Biden Administration will take place in increments of 100,000 barrels, with the hope that there will be a competitive bidding process that will guarantee the flow of gasoline to local retailers throughout the summer.

The Energy Department said that the move aims to help “lower costs for American families and consumers,″ after a congressional mandate called for the executive branch to sell off the nearly 11-year-old Northeast reserve before its closure. This mandate was part of the spending deal that was passed in March to avoid a government shutdown.

The sale of 1 million barrels – which amounts to about 42 million gallons – comes as the average price of gas nationwide currently sits at about $3.60, according to data from AAA. This is not the first time that the Biden Administration has resorted to tapping into emergency reserves just to lower gasoline prices for political expediency, as he previously did so ahead of the 2022 midterm elections; this move was credited as one of several reasons why the Democratic Party did not face landslide losses as most polls projected.

“The Biden-Harris administration is laser-focused on lowering prices at the pump for American families, especially as drivers hit the road for summer driving season,” said Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm in a statement. “By strategically releasing this reserve in between Memorial Day and July 4th, we are ensuring sufficient supply flows to the tri-state and Northeast at a time hardworking Americans need it the most.”