RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://compactmag.com/article/they-can-t-let-him-back-in

The people who really run the United States of America have made it clear that they can’t, and won’t, if they can help it, allow Donald Trump to be president again. In fact, they made this clear in 2020, in a series of public statements. Simply for quoting their words in an essay for The American Mind, I was mercilessly mocked and attacked. But they were quite clear. Trump won’t be president at noon, Jan. 20, 2021, even if we have to use the military to drag him out of there.

“Anti-Trump hysteria is in the final analysis not about Trump.”

If the regime felt that strongly back then, imagine how they feel now. But you don’t have to imagine. They tell you every day. Liz Cheney, Trump’s personal Javert, has said that the 45th president is literally the greatest threat facing America today—greater than China, than our crashing economy, than our unraveling civil society.

That’s rhetoric, of course, but it isn’t merely that. It’s safer, and generally more accurate, to assume that your adversaries mean what they say. If you doubt this, ask yourself: When was the last time they acted more moderately than they talk?

Even if it is just rhetoric, the words nonetheless portend turbulence. “He who says A must say B.” The logic of statement A inevitably leads to action B, even if the speaker of A didn’t really mean it, or did mean it, but still didn’t want B. Her followers won’t get the irony and, enthused by A, will insist on B.

Take some time to listen to the mainstream media. It doesn’t have to be long; five minutes should do. Then spend another five or so reading the statements of prominent politicians other than Trump. To round it out, sacrifice another five on leading intellectuals. It should become abundantly clear: They all have said A and so must say—and do—B.

And B is that Trump absolutely must not be allowed to take office on Jan. 20, 2025.

Why? They say Jan. 6. But their determination began much earlier.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/07/29/as-new-trial-looms-justice-department-silent-on-whitmer-plot/

For the first time since the government failed to win a single conviction in the alleged criminal plot to “kidnap” Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer in 2020, a top Justice Department official was publicly confronted about the FBI’s primary role in concocting the hoax.

It was not a welcome line of inquiry, to say the least.

Matthew Olsen, head of the National Security Division, repeatedly rebuffed questions by U.S. Representative Dan Bishop (R-N.C.) about the case during a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Thursday. A Michigan jury in April acquitted two men charged with conspiring to kidnap Whitmer after defense attorneys successfully argued their clients had been entrapped by the FBI; the jury deadlocked on two other defendants. Shortly after the stunning verdicts were handed down in what the Justice Department considers one of its most prominent “domestic terror” investigations in recent history, prosecutors announced they would retry Barry Croft and Adam Fox, the alleged ringleader of the group.

The new trial involves Olsen’s division, but rather than take time to perform the usual self-indulgent back slapping and preening common among top law enforcement officials during public hearings, Olsen had little to say except to confirm the Whitmer case was a good example of how the Justice Department handles domestic terror threats. 

“I would include that case among many others that are part of our efforts to ensure that people who serve in public office are safe,” Olsen told the committee.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/07/29/the-new-age-of-orwellianism/

Community organizer and left-wing social activist Saul Alinsky wrote in his 1971 book Rules for Radicals, “he who controls the language controls the masses.” Alinsky, whose work profoundly influenced at least one notable fellow Chicagoan, Barack Obama, was in that quip channeling George Orwell’s famous dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four. “Newspeak,” the language of Orwell’s fictional single-political party superstate, was a tool devised for monitoring the people’s communications, prosecuting “thoughtcrimes,” and ultimately controlling and dictating the people’s very beliefs.

Conservatives have taken pleasure in poking fun at the modern Left’s “Orwellian” tendencies—perhaps too much, actually, as overuse of the accusation has limited its potency. But as the woke ideology metastasizes within the American Left like the cancer it is, and as censors increasingly clamp down on anything sniffing of dissent to the regime’s orthodoxy, it is now clear that we are in a new age of Orwellianism. In this new age, the regime and its enforcers pursue the suffusion of its orthodoxy at any cost, gaslighting dissenters into not believing their own lying eyes.

This week, new governmental data revealed that the American economy, measured by gross domestic product, contracted for the second straight quarter. That was, up until perhaps a week ago, the universally accepted definition of what constitutes a “recession.” This was not a partisan issue; indeed, well-known liberal Democratic Party economists have frequently defined recession in precisely these terms. Back in 2008, President Joe Biden’s current National Economic Council director, Brian Deese, stated: “Of course, economists have a technical definition of recession, which is two consecutive quarters of negative growth.” And in 2019, top Biden economic adviser Jared Bernstein said that a “recession” is “defined as two consecutive quarters of declining growth.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/down-the-gender-identity-slope/

Six Republican Senators — Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, Marsha Blackburn, Josh Hawley, Mike Lee, and Marco Rubio — just did something important and clever by way of a letter they sent to Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona. The senators’ letter poses a series of questions about Cardona’s plan to treat Title IX’s ban on discrimination by “sex” as a ban on discrimination against “gender identity.” The questions posed by the senators draw on a series of recent incidents — punishments of students and teachers who refuse to use preferred pronouns; Florida’s new law protecting K–3 students from instruction on “gender identity;” the decision by schools to treat a biological girl as a boy, against her parents’ wishes; schools that withhold information about a child’s supposed “gender transition” from parents; the rape of a girl by a boy able to use the girl’s bathroom because he claims he is “gender fluid,” etc.

The ten very pointed questions in the senators’ letter are clever — and wise — in more ways than one. (Read them here.) Every question is a policy and political land-mine. The Secretary must be pressed to answer all ten, or held to account for refusing to do so.

Beyond the immediate policy and politics of the proposed change to Title IX, however, the letter and its questions hold a broader lesson about the culture war. For a couple of decades — from about the 1990s to the aught decade of the 2000s — it was argued by many that the culture war didn’t really exist, or that if it did exist it would soon be over. Now that the culture war is everywhere — and increasingly seems to rope in just about everything — you hear dismissive talk about the culture war less and less. For a long time, for example, many people believed that national recognition of gay marriage would effectively spell the end of the culture war. It hasn’t worked out that way.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/07/barr-calls-for-special-counsel-in-probe-of-bidens/

It’s time.

Former Trump attorney general Bill Barr is publicly urging incumbent Biden attorney general Merrick Garland to appoint a special counsel in the ongoing Biden investigation, which is said to focus on the president’s son Hunter.

The investigation has been ongoing since 2018 and has scrutinized shady foreign financial transactions that stretch back to at least 2014 (when Joe Biden was vice president and steering Obama administration policy in Ukraine, where Burisma, a corrupt energy company tied to the corrupt government, suddenly decided it was a fine idea to put Biden’s drug-addled son with no relevant experience on its board of directors and pay him a king’s ransom). As we observed in a recent NR editorial, Hunter is the least important Biden in the investigation, the central question of which must be “whether Hunter is a vehicle by which his father . . . indirectly cashed in on his political influence.”

Although I despise the pernicious institution of special counsel, I argued back in early December 2020, when it was clear that Biden had won the election and would be the next president, that the Biden investigation was primed for the appointment of one. That’s because there is no getting around two problems: (1) The Justice Department has a profound conflict of interest if it is in the position of having to investigate the president and/or his close family members, and (2) federal regulations instruct the attorney general that when the department is conflicted in this way, a special counsel (i.e., a scrupulous, experienced attorney from outside the government) is to be appointed.

Barr elected not to appoint a special counsel before leaving office right before Christmas 2020. In his position at that time, it was the right call and a prudent one.

It was right because there was no conflict in the Trump Justice Department’s conducting of the Biden investigation. Clearly, if Barr had made the appointment in anticipation of Biden appointees taking over the Justice Department, the move would have been seen as political — exactly the opposite of what Barr was trying to do in depoliticizing the DOJ.

It was prudently deferential of Barr to trust his successor, who turned out to be Merrick Garland, to make the call on whether there should be a special counsel. The case appeared to be in capable hands, led by David Weiss, the highly regarded U.S. attorney in Delaware (although, as I’ve warily pointed out, there are other cooks in the kitchen, principally including Tax Division at Main Justice). Garland did not displace Weiss, and that no doubt has a lot to do with Barr’s having handled things the right way.

But as Barr now points out, things have changed.