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Who thinks Nancy Pelosi’s “9/11-style commission” to investigate what happened on Capitol Hill last January 6 is actually there to fact-find? Me, neither. But I’ll tell you who's doing some first-rate investigation and reporting on the security breach at the Capitol building, and it’s not congressional Democrats or this administration’s Department of “Justice.”

It’s REVOLVER NEWS. But what they seem to be uncovering does not fit with the narrative Democrats want to maintain. In fact, it’s what they want to hide.

An Arizona man named Ray Epps, a Marine sergeant allegedly involved in the group the Oath Keepers, clearly was acting as a provocateur the evening before the rally. According to the REVOLVER report, “...Epps was insistent that everyone stay focused on a common mission: storming the Capitol. On multiple livestreams, Epps moves from group to group throughout the plaza barging in and insisting everyone ‘stay focused’ on ‘what we’re here for’ --- which he would then explain meant going inside the U.S. Capitol building. When asked to give a reason for his crazy plot, Epps would continually fall back on his catch-all rationale: ‘It’s about the Constitution.’” People in a couple of the groups he gave his little pep talk to even suggested that he might be “a Fed.”

You’d think that if the FBI were rounding up suspects to hold them for many months without bail, essentially as political prisoners, one person very close to the top of their list, if not THE top, would be this guy. But no. They had him on their “most wanted” list for a while, but when REVOLVER NEWS came out with their first big story, he was dropped off the list.

Not only did the FBI do that, but the day after REVOLVER ran another story on Stuart Rhodes, also of the Oath Keepers, they scrubbed Epps’ face from their database. Rhodes, like Epps, remains unindicted to this day, while others who might have just walked into the Capitol Building to take a selfie are languishing in solitary, some reportedly unable even to talk with their attorneys.

The videos of Epps, seen pretty widely on Twitter, show him talking with Trump supporters the evening of January 5, repeatedly encouraging them to enter the Capitol Building the day of the rally. He’s saying in a voice that cuts through the background noise, “I don’t even like to say it because I’ll be arrested. I’ll say it. We need to go into the Capitol.”

And now, the irony is that Epps seems to be one of relatively few people identified as having been involved in the security breach who WEREN’T arrested. But also unindicted are people who worked with him the day of the rally to, in the words of the REVOLVER team, “carry out a breach of the police barricades that induced a subsequent flood of unsuspecting MAGA protesters to unwittingly trespass on Capitol restricted grounds and place themselves in legal jeopardy.”

To give a little perspective, Epps was not even arrested, while another Oath Keeper, a Green Beret veteran named Jeremy Brown, is even now behind bars, bail denied until trial, simply for standing 100 feet too close to the Capitol steps. It hardly seems possible that the government isn’t protecting Epps.

Republican Rep. Thomas Massie asked Attorney General Merrick Garland about Epps’ activities during Garland’s recent hearing before the House Judiciary Committee, playing some of the video for him of Epps talking up the idea of going inside the Capitol. Unfortunately, it was played on a very small screen that Rep, Massie was holding, but the audio of Epps telling people they need to go inside the Capitol the next day is unmistakable.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2021/10/21/rep_thomas_massie_to_ag_garland_are_you_concerned_about_the_presence_of_federal_agents_or_assets_at_january_6_riot.html

Massie informed Garland that the same person who was doing this the night before the rally was actually directing people to the Capitol during the rally. Then he asked Garland if he –- after “one of the most sweeping investigations in history,” as Garland had called it –- had seen this video. Garland avoided the question with the old “we don’t comment on pending investigations” dodge. His deflection did have an extra dash of creativity, though, with Garland also saying it’s one of the “norms” of the Justice Department not to comment on “particular scenes or particular individuals.”

“I was hoping today to give you an opportunity to put to rest the concerns that people have that there were federal agents or assets of the federal government present on January 5 and January 6,” Massie said to Garland. “Can you tell us without talking about particular videos how many agents or assets of the government were present on January 6? Whether they agitated to go into the Capitol? And if any of them did?”

Garland would not address this at all. “I’m not going to violate this norm of the rule of law,” he said. “I’m not going to comment on investigation that’s ongoing.”

If Garland had wanted to allay Republicans’ concerns that the feds might have actively encouraged Trump supporters to breach the Capitol building, this would have been the perfect time to do it, with a denial. On the other hand, if Epps and others actually were working undercover as agents to make sure the “insurrection” happened, the excuse Garland cited would be a very convenient “norm” indeed.

For when you have time, REVOLVER NEWS has put together an amazing piece of investigative journalism. It’s quite long and detailed, but highly recommended. (If it’s too exhaustive, at least skip down to the conclusion.) I’ll just tell you that Ray Epps is not the only one who played an extremely active role in the breach but was mysteriously never arrested. To cite another striking example, another Marine veteran, still unidentified but called “MaroonPB,” was going around using the same “It’s about the Constitution” line as Epps did. He also removed barricades and entered Senate offices during the breach itself, armed with bear mace. No arrest for him. Not even an identification, though he is maskless and beautifully photographed, in such a way that shows off his distinctive knuckle tattoos.

The team at REVOLVER NEWS say they're just getting started. Look at everything they’ve uncovered so far, and it suggests the FBI has a way of actually becoming the thing it purportedly hates. In this case, it might even have caused, or helped cause, the Trump “insurrection” narrative needed so desperately by leftists to prime Trump for impeachment #2 and tar his supporters as "domestic terrorists." (Note: that does NOT excuse the Trump supporters who got swept into it and caused incalculable damage to the conservative cause.) We know the FBI helped fake the Russia Hoax; who knows what else they might have faked?

https://www.revolver.news/2021/10/meet-ray-epps-the-fed-protected-provocateur-who-appears-to-have-led-the-very-first-1-6-attack-on-the-u-s-capitol/

Reading Mollie Hemingway’s new book RIGGED, about the 2020 election and the factors that tweaked the outcome, one might start to wonder what the Hillary/DNC attorney and activist Marc Elias is doing these days –- besides dodging subpoenas, of course. But if a process server from the special counsel’s office is having difficulty finding him, I know where he is, and his army of attorneys.

They’re in Virginia, for the razor-close gubernatorial race! The Elias Law Group, the new firm he started to elect “progressive” Democrats after leaving Perkins Coie, filed suit on Friday on behalf of the state Democrat Party against the U.S. Postal Service, citing delays in processing and delivering election-related materials. Over the pasts few months, the Virginia General Assembly has also repealed voter ID, allowed 45 days of “no-excuse” absentee voting, and set up automatic voter registration as part of getting a driver’s license.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/oct/25/virginia-democrats-file-lawsuit-against-us-postal-/

The election will be over in a week –- not necessarily the counting, though. An Emerson College poll taken a few days ago shows candidates Terry McAuliffe, the Democrat and huge Clinton crony, and Glenn Youngkin, the Republican and businessman, tied at 48 percent among very likely voters. (Accuracy plus-or-minus 3.2 percent.)

Youngkin held a big rally in Suffolk on Monday evening that was attended by Republicans, independents and even apparently some Democrats who, according to FOX NEWS’ Sara Carter, are "here as a referendum of what they say is a dangerous leftist agenda that is not only growing here in Virginia, but across America.”

McAuliffe let a little too much of that agenda slip recently when he said parents shouldn’t be telling teachers what they should teach their kids. Oops. He could still win, though, even now; the clueless Democrat faithful do support their jackasses.

But the election is seen by many conservatives as the start of a “red wave” of parents fighting for kids, a national referendum on Critical Race Theory, the teaching of which has, sadly, put Loudoun and Fairfax Counties on the map in recent weeks. One dad interviewed by Carter on the HANNITY TV show said, “It’s everywhere right now. But Virginia is somewhere where we can do something about it, right now. People are charged up; all eyes are on us...We don’t want it in Suffolk, we don’t want it in Virginia, nobody else wants it in the rest of the country. We want our country back, our state, and our city.”

Carter heard one refrain over and over: We want the government out of our kids’ education! We want to be in charge. We don’t want to be called “domestic terrorists.” We’re tired of mandates. Let us talk to our school boards. We want a voice!

Former President Obama is campaigning with McAuliffe, and he might be making it worse for the candidate. He brought up that old saw, voter suppression, saying Republicans are trying to keep some people from having their voices heard. The only ones whose voices we don’t want heard are the fraudsters. We conservatives are tired of having our own voices silenced.

And who else would be on the podium with McAuliffe but Stacey Abrams, who never conceded her failed run for governor of Georgia and still maintains that voter suppression kept her from winning that race. As if voter ID and signature verification kept anyone from voting who wanted to. It’s fraud that suppresses the vote of honest people, and that’s the message that needs to be communicated far and wide.

When McAuliffe brought Abrams to the stage, he said, “She would be the governor of Georgia today had the governor of Georgia not disenfranchised 1.4 million Georgia voters before the election. That’s what happened to Stacey Abrams. They took the votes away.”

Which brings us back to Marc Elias and the discussion of just whose votes get taken away. The great Margot Cleveland has a new piece in THE FEDERALIST in which she accuses Democrats in Virginia of “working to make elections sloppy again” as we go into 2022.

In this election that’s essentially neck-and-neck, Cleveland says “the more important trend for Americans to consider...lies not in the tight election, nor even in the party affiliation of the eventual victor, but on efforts by local election officials to violate state law to profit their preferred candidate.”

https://thefederalist.com/2021/10/25/how-virginia-democrats-are-working-to-make-elections-sloppy-again/

There’s a lawsuit in Fairfax County right now, filed by a REAL voter integrity group called the Virginia Institute for Public Policy (VIPP) against the country registrar and three members of the local elections board, over allowing unauthenticated mail-in ballots in violation of state law. A provision is supposed to be in place requiring the last four digits of a voter’s Social Security number, but apparently it’s not being followed.

According to the state constitution, officials aren’t supposed to just suspend a law they don’t like. The Anti-Suspension Clause provides that “all power of suspending laws, or the execution of laws, by any authority, without consent of the representatives of the people, is injurious to their rights, and ought not be exercised.” If the state legislature requires the last four digits of one’s Social Security number to verify a ballot, then so be it.

As of October 14, this suspension of law had affected at least 339 ballots, according to the filing. Now, 339 ballots might not sound like a lot, but when you’ve got two candidates in a dead heat, it can mean everything. And unauthenticated mail-in ballots should not be deciding this or any other race.

The VIPP has already prevailed in one similar lawsuit, stopping the Virginia State Board of Elections from counting ballots that arrived without a legible postmark as many as three days after the polls closed on Election Day. But even though they won, Cleveland says, the fact that they have to file suits like this at all tells us something very important:

DEMOCRATS ARE WILLING TO BREAK THE LAW TO WIN.

Virginia, she says, is a perfect case study. But I would add that in 2020, Maricopa County was another one, as we saw how Elias and his vast army of lawyers, marching into Arizona in a way that would make Kim Jong-Un swell with pride, got rules changed to make it easier to cheat. No matter what lip service they give to election integrity, counting “every vote,” stopping voter suppression and protecting “our democracy,” they could not actually care less about any of that, as long as they win. Their actions tell it: They’d suppress your vote in a heartbeat if it meant more leftists in office. The top Democrat attorneys like Marc Elias are showing them how it’s done.

In the movie THE RIGHT STUFF, as the U.S. is competing with Russia to be first in space, our lead scientist (who is German) quips, “Our Germans are better than their Germans.” We have to think similarly in fighting the left. Our lawyers have to be better than their lawyers.

Tragedy and comedy

October 26, 2021

I’m confused. I need someone from the Democratic Party to explain to me whether questioning the results of an election is treasonous or heroic. Because they can’t seem to make up their minds.

We’ve all heard the caterwauling over anyone who even wants to take a look at the ballots from 2020. They’re crazy conspiracy theorists peddling a “Big Lie!” There’s no such thing as election fraud! Questioning election results is an assault on democracy and an attempt to overthrow the government by insurrection!

Yet in just the past couple of weeks, we’ve seen Hillary Clinton claim that Stacey Abrams really won the 2018 Governor’s race in Georgia (spoiler alert: she did not.) Hillary, of course, also declared Trump an illegitimate President, and was so convinced that Russia helped him steal the 2016 election that her campaign spent a lot of money manufacturing fake evidence to prove it. Seen any Democrats denouncing Hillary for her multiple endorsements of insurrection? Or calling out Abrams for assaulting Democracy? Far from it: she’s considered a big star in leftist circles.

Meanwhile, in Virginia, Democrat gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe campaigned with Abrams and repeated her “Big Lie” that she “would be the Governor of Georgia today had the governor of Georgia not disenfranchised 1.4 million Georgia voters before the election…They took the votes away.”

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/ari-j-kaufman/2021/10/24/mcauliffe-abrams-peddle-conspiracies-to-virginians-at-rally-n1526589

This is horse apples. The voter rolls were purged of inactive voters, but all anyone had to do was show up at the polls and produce an ID and they could get a ballot. Abrams lost by about 55,000 votes. Even the liberal Atlanta Journal-Constitution investigated and found "no evidence…of systematic malfeasance – or of enough tainted votes to force a runoff election."

Listen to enough of this highly selective outrage and it becomes clear that to Democrats, “democracy” means “We win,” and questioning the honesty of an election is “insurrection” only if it’s an election Democrats won. It reminds me of Mel Brooks’ definitions of tragedy and comedy: “’Tragedy’ is if I get a paper cut on my finger. ‘Comedy’ is if you fall into a manhole and die.”

Former President Barack Obama has an irritating tendency to appear aloof and disdainful of anyone who holds different views from his, as if they are, of course, wrong, and it’s painful for him to have to tolerate their wrongness. But seldom has his timing in expressing that disdain been worse than during his recent campaign appearance for Democrat Terry McAuliffe’s flailing campaign for Governor in Virginia.

Saturday, Obama backed McAuliffe’s criticism of parents upset at leftist school boards by suggesting their anger is unjustified and not “serious problems that affect serious people.” He sniffed, “We don’t have time to be wasted on these phony trumped-up culture wars, this fake outrage, the right-wing media peddles to juice their ratings.”

https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2021/10/25/obama-gets-fact-checked-hard-over-fake-outrage-claim-about-parents-in-virginia-n463456

That “fake outrage” to which he referred wasn’t just parents' outrage over Critical Race Theory, porn, trans propaganda and socialism being forced onto their kids. It was also about news that the Loudoun County School Board knew about and covered up two brutal rapes of young teenage girls in girls’ bathrooms by a “biological male” in a skirt (or as that used to be known, “a male.”) School officials reportedly moved him to another school after the first rape, where he raped another girl. Other sexual assaults in school also went unreported. Yet the school officials allowed the father of the first victim to be smeared as a “domestic terrorist” for getting justifiably furious at a school board meeting.

Barely had Obama’s haughty and dismissive comments hit the news than word came on Monday that the “biological male” had been found guilty on two rape counts against the first victim. The judge delayed sentencing until after the second case is adjudicated.

https://www.westernjournal.com/bombshell-judge-makes-swift-ruling-controversial-loudoun-county-school-bathroom-sexual-assault-case/

As you might imagine, the blowback against Obama’s highhanded comments was swift and fierce. One Loudoun County father called it “the most tone-deaf statement I have ever heard.” The director of education reform at BEST (Building Education for Students Together) said Obama was either being clueless or misleading the crowd, and that forcing politics down kids’ throats isn’t a Republican or Democrat issue, it’s a parents’ issue.

I’ll toss in my two cents by doing what leftists hate the most: applying their own standards and tactics to themselves. How DARE Obama deny those parents’ truth by seeking to invalidate the genuineness of their outrage? He needs to check his privilege as a rich and famous person whose daughters never set foot in a public school and who have armed Secret Service protection (but if other women carry guns for personal protection from “biological males” invading their private spaces, he wants to take their guns away.) He must apologize immediately and then be canceled anyway!

What’s especially galling about this is that as the de facto leader of the Democratic Party (technically, it’s Joe Biden, but come on, man), Obama heads up an organization built entirely on a mountain of fake outrage. Think about it: what successful policies do the Democrats have to run on? Their brilliant handling of the border, Afghanistan, the economy, COVID, crime, China, energy, etc. etc. etc.? No, putting them in charge for only nine months has already proven that everything they touch becomes a dumpster fire. The only thing they have left to run on is, “You can’t vote for those other guys! Sure, they actually know how to run things, but they’re racist/sexist/trans-homo-whateverphobic!”

It’s a big load of organic manure, but it works with some people. There’s a certain segment of the populace that will overlook all the existential threats brought about by Democratic rule if you scare them enough with stories about how the bad orange man and his followers want to call them by their unpreferred pronouns or make them use the bathroom that actually matches their own plumbing. But as the ugly reality of Democratic “governance” becomes more and more intolerable, more people are seeing through that phony scare tactic and the audience for it is shrinking.

For instance, Biden just hit a new low of 43% approval in Five Thirty Eight’s average of all polls.

https://nypost.com/2021/10/25/bidens-approval-rating-falls-to-new-low-of-43-percent/

And a poll of likely Democratic primary voters in New Hampshire, the first primary voting state, found that only 37% say they’d vote for Biden if the 2024 primary were held today.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/2024-watch-biden-support-among-democrats-in-first-presidential-primary-state-drops

For once, the outrage is real, it’s justified, and it’s aimed at the Democrats, where it belongs.

Reeder: Too many obituaries

October 26, 2021

I’m sad to have to report the deaths of four popular show business figures over the past week. We extend our condolences to all their families.

Actor James Michael Tyler, best known as Central Perk coffee shop owner Gunther on “Friends,” died Sunday in Los Angeles at 59 of prostate cancer that spread to his bones.

https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/friends-actor-james-michael-tyler-dies-at-59

He was working as an actual barista when he was hired as an extra on “Friends” because he knew how to work an espresso machine. It took two years and 33 episodes before he got a name and his first line. The show’s creators liked him so much, they gave him his own story line about his unrequited love for Rachel and remembered him as “a genuinely kind, sweet man.”

He appeared on the “Friends” reunion in May, but only by Zoom because he didn’t want to “bring a downer” on the show. He devoted his last days to promoting prostate cancer exams. He said his goals were to reach his 59th birthday, which he did, and to at least save one life.

Comic actor Peter Scolari has died at 66 after a two-year battle with leukemia.

https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/peter-scolari-bosom-buddies-newhart-actor-dead

Scolari first came to fame on the short-lived ABC sitcom “Bosom Buddies,” where he and Tom Hanks played two guys who had to dress as women to keep their apartment, back when we were still allowed to laugh at that. It was originally conceived as a male “Laverne & Shirley,” but not literally. The creators made the mistake of comparing it to a Billy Wilder comedy during the pitch to ABC. Asked to name one of those, they said “Some Like It Hot.” So ABC bought it only on condition that it be retooled to include men in drag. In the second season, they moved away from that and got back to the original premise.

The sitcom allowed for lots of ad-libbing by Scolari and Hanks, who had great comic chemistry. But while Hanks went on to become a superstar, Scolari remained a working actor, constantly appearing in various TV and stage shows. He was nominated for an Emmy three times for “Newhart” and won for a guest role on “Girls.” He and Hanks remained lifelong friends. They reunited on Broadway in 2013 in the play “Lucky Guy,” and Scolari appeared in the Hanks-directed movie, “That Thing You Do.”

Composer/lyricist/playwright Leslie Bricusse died last week at 90. He wrote or co-wrote a number of hit songs that have become standards, many with his partner, singer/actor Anthony Newley, back in the days when Broadway scores birthed pop hits.

Some of his songs include “Gonna Build a Mountain,” “Once in a Lifetime” and “What Kind of Fool Am I?” (the 1963 Grammy-winning Song of the Year) from the Broadway show, “Stop the World, I Want To Get Off;” “Who Can I Turn To,” “On a Wonderful Day Like Today” and “Feeling Good” (recently made ubiquitous by the “American Idol” crowd) from “Roar of the Greasepaint, Smell of the Crowd;” “My Kind of Girl;” “Can You Read My Mind” from “Superman;” “Pure Imagination” and “The Candy Man” from “Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory;” “When I Look In Your Eyes” and Best Song Oscar winner “Talk to the Animals” from “Dr. Doolittle;” “If I Ruled the World” from the musical “Pickwick;” and “Le Jazz Hot” from “Victor/Victoria.” And in the era when people actually looked forward to the next James Bond movie, he co-wrote with John Barry the themes from “You Only Live Twice” and “Goldfinger.”

If you’d like to learn more, Mark Steyn’s latest “Song of the Week” podcast is about “Goldfinger.”

https://www.steynonline.com/11807/goldfinger

And finally (I hope, for a long time), Jay Black, lead singer of Jay & The Americans, has died at 82 of complications from pneumonia. The group opened for the Beatles on their first US tour and scored 21 chart hits in the '60s, including “Come A Little Bit Closer,” “Only In America,” “Cara Mia” and hit covers of the Drifters’ “This Magic Moment” and the Ronettes’ “Walkin’ In The Rain.” Trivia: Black’s real name was David Blatt, but he changed it to Jay Black when he took over from the band’s original lead singer, Jay Traynor.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/music-news/jay-black-lead-singer-jay-the-americans-dies-at-82-1235035946/

Thoughts on the unvaccinated

October 26, 2021

Many people are risking their careers by refusing to obey COVID vaccine mandates. For this, they’re being mocked, shunned and vilified (the Prime Minister of New Zealand is even bragging about how she’s used vaccine documents to create a two-tiered society that relegates the unvaccinated to second-class citizen status.)

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/leahbarkoukis/2021/10/25/new-zealand-pm-n2597952

So why are so many people saying no? Are they really all just ignorant, anti-science rubes, as some in the media or the Administration depict them? If so, how does that square with the fact that people with Ph.D.’s are among the most vaccine hesitant, or with all the health care workers who are refusing the jab (PR tip: if you want people to take something, don’t call it “the JAB.”)

The Epoch Times did something that few if any media outlets have done: they actually asked health care professionals why they are risking their careers to defy vaccine mandates.The full article is for paid subscribers only, but here’s the gist of what they said:

https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_morningbrief/health-care-workers-speak-out-on-why-they-would-rather-lose-their-jobs-than-take-a-covid-19-vaccine_4065164.html

Some are pro-life and have religious objections to the use of fetal cells in developing the vaccines. Others said they’ve personally seen many serious negative reactions and don’t believe they’re being honestly reported. One registered nurse in Oncology/Hematology says they’re seeing an increase in hospitalizations and referrals for clotting and bleeding disorders. Some say they don’t want to risk vaccine side effects to avoid a disease with a 99% survival rate for those not in high risk categories, and for which we now have safe alternative treatments.

Some said the vaccines are “leaky” and that the majority of COVID patients they’re seeing are vaccinated. They don’t believe the vaccines are working and think they’re fueling the creation of new variants. One said this vaccine technology has never been deployed successfully and there’s no data on the longterm effects. They say the vaccines are still undergoing their first year of study, and their safety and effectiveness aren’t yet proven. They’re in touch with other health care workers and say they aren’t seeing the “surges” that the public is being told are happening. Some health care workers say they already have natural immunity from COVID exposure.

And finally, as the aforementioned registered nurse put it, “This is America! I have every right to make an educated decision regarding my health care. No matter what you are told, what I do has no direct effect on you.”

There’s more at the link for subscribers, but that’s the reasoning, from the mouths of health care workers. Please note that I’m vaccinated myself, and I’m not endorsing their views. You can disagree with them, say their concerns are unfounded or overblown, or argue that the risks of the disease outweigh those of the vaccines. But please stop saying that everyone who resists vaccine mandates is ignorant of science and medicine, because this shows that a lot of highly-trained health care professionals obviously beg to differ.

You are involved

October 25, 2021

We don’t elect kings to lead us. We are not a monarchy, and in fact we are not a democracy, but a Constitutional Republic. A true democracy is rule by simple majority and every one votes on every issue. A Constitutional Republic is where we democratically elect representatives who serve on our behalf to make laws that are in line with our framing document, the Constitution. Each citizen has one vote and each individual is considered equal to every other citizen. We are considered individuals with personal liberty and personal responsibility. But our form of government has been under attack by those who want to replace it with an entirely different kind of government. A Marxist, socialist government would trade our being individuals to our being a part of a collective in which the government is to be served by its people rather than its people being served by the government. Instead of us having equal opportunity that is up to us to create prosperity, a Marxist approach diminishes the individual in deference to the state. We only matter as we bring value to the government. If we actually keep moving in that direction, it will be the end of our storied nation that empowered people from all nations, languages, religions, and economic circumstances to live freely and self-determine our future. Those who have worked hard and prospered will be penalized by the state and will have their property and their wealth confiscated. It will be redistributed to those who chose not to work, learn a valuable trade, get an education, or act as responsible stewards of their resources. And when you unfairly tear down the top and artificially raise up the bottom, the result is across the board mediocrity. It’s the equivalent of A students having points shaved off their grades and given to F students so that everyone in the class gets a C, whether one studied hard or partied hard. The incentive to work hard is destroyed, and the motivation to rise up and do better is marginalized. At that point, we become like so many nations before us who tried socialism only to see it destroy an economy, jobs, the value of capital, and creativity. Even art and architecture become bland and lifeless. Surely Americans don’t want that and will rise up against it! When I hear the left tell us that we have 10 years before climate change will turn us into greasy spots on the pavement, I want to scream to forget about climate change—we won’t last 10 years under socialism with inflationary high prices, empty shelves, lack of labor, and meaningless elections, and the only people left with a high standard of living will be those in the ruling class of government. Look around—we are rapidly becoming that. And the tone-deaf princes of power running our government have the audacity to insult us by saying that the problems of high prices for gas and groceries are only problems of the high class. It seems that the academics and people in the high perches of politics and power think you struggling to heat your home, fuel your car, put food on your table or clothes on your kids’ backs are nothing but symbols of wealth. Just when you think politicians can’t get dumber, one of them says “Hold my beer, and watch this!”

You may think you don’t want to be involved in politics, but friend, you ARE involved. You can sit back and let it happen or you stand up and take the power away from the people who hate America, but not caring really is no longer an option. If you like the direction our country is going, you don’t have to do anything but nothing. But some of us won’t give up on America without a fight. And I hope you are one of us!

On the subject of woke tyranny, we make a lot of references around here to George Orwell’s novel “1984” because…well, we’re all living in it now. Orwell nailed the details, he was just off with the date by nearly 40 years.

This latest example of life imitating Orwell’s totalitarian dystopia comes courtesy of Twitter, which suspended the account of PJ Media commentator Matt Margolis. His thought crime: he responded to the Biden White House appointing Rachel Levine as the “first-ever female four-star admiral” of the U.S. Public Health Services (USPHS) Commissioned Corps” by writing, “Rachel Levine is a man.”

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2021/10/22/ive-been-suspended-from-twitter-for-stating-a-biological-fact-n1526200

Twitter refused to reinstate his account until he deletes the three tweets that violated their terms of service by stating that 100% scientifically accurate fact. Just like the Ministry of Truth in “1984” that rewrites the past to constantly redefine what’s true, whereas the Ministry of Love tortures you until you accept the new truth. The linked article is for paid subscribers only, but I want to quote Margolis’ response:

“Did I attack Rachel Levine? Nope. I didn’t promote violence against him either. I simply stated a fact: He is a male. He is no less a biological male than I am, I don’t care if his preferred pronouns are she/her or xe/xir or beep/bop/boop. I will not deny this biological fact out of fear of being labeled a bigot. I don’t care if you are a man who feels like a woman. You’re still a man, down to your DNA. Biology doesn’t care about your feelings or your preferred pronouns, and neither do I.

I’ve appealed my suspension. Of course. The appeal will most certainly be denied, and then I’ll have to make my decision about what to do.

P.S. Rachel Levine is a man.”

As “1984’s” oppressed protagonist Winston Smith put it, “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.” Not only do you no longer have that freedom on Twitter, but if you say that two plus two make four in a math class, you’ll be accused of white supremacy.

Following George Stephanopoulos’ laughable attempt last weekend to resuscitate Christopher Steele, multiple investigative reporters came out last week to further discredit Steele’s work and to analyze what Special Counsel John Durham revealed in his “speaking indictment” of Clinton attorney Michael Sussmann.

The Sephanopoulos/Steele interview aired by ABC "News" was actually part of an hour-long “documentary” produced for HULU called “OUT OF THE SHADOWS: The Man Behind the Steele Dossier.” I’ll just tell you right now, we have not been able to bring ourselves to watch. I know my slogan is, “We read the news so you don’t have to,” but neither I nor my staff can stand the idea of sitting through it. Life is too short, and there is too much real, serious investigation to keep up with.

So we should thank California Rep. Devin Nunes, who headed the House Intelligence Committee during their investigation of “Crossfire Hurricane,” for making himself watch the whole blasted thing, which he calls “entirely fiction.” For “ABC News to put out something like that is just bizarre,” he said, quipping that ABC should move their headquarters to Fantasyland at its parent company’s Walt Disney World.

https://justthenews.com/accountability/media/rep-devin-nunes-abc-news-hq-should-move-disneys-fantasyland-after-steele

Nunes suspects the media don’t really still believe what Steele said about Trump is true, but that “there’s something more nefarious going on.” He said he has “no idea, you know, what’s behind this –- the timing, the release of this. That anybody would be defending Steele or those dossiers...at this point is an absolute joke.”

He has confidence that Durham is doing “a real investigation,” but he’s concerned that it might not continue, “because we know DOJ is completely politicized.”

So, will Durham be able to continue looking into the FBI’s investigation (“investigation”) of the Clinton Foundation? During AG Merrick Garland’s cringeworthy testimony before the House Judiciary Committee last Thursday, he avoided saying. As part of his larger investigation of the FBI’s “Crossfire Hurricane,” Durham has been looking into whether donors to the Clinton Foundation got special treatment from then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/oct/21/garland-wont-say-whether-special-counsel-durham-st/

Garland was asked specifically if Durham would continue free of political influence, but he skirted that question. He did say that because budgetary provisions are public, we “would know if he weren’t continuing his work.” Hey, thanks, Mr. Attorney General!

John Solomon at JUST THE NEWS followed up in detail after the ABC interview, saying that Steele’s main source and even his friends undercut his claims of “professionalism.” Steele’s work was anything but.

https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/steeles-defense-dossier-collides-avalanche-evidence

Of course, we already knew that the FBI had had to terminate him as a “confidential human source” because he had leaked to the media. Some professionalism.

What’s especially interesting about this latest news from Solomon is that it sheds light on how much information came to Durham from the lawsuit filed against Steele by Alfa Bank, the financial institution wrongly implicated in that story of computer servers "pinging" between their offices and Trump Tower. (Alfa Bank prevailed in that lawsuit.) Steele’s own legal team gave statements in a London courtroom stressing that the dossier was not verified, that much of its information was not corroborated and that he suffered from “strong anti-Trump biases.”

“It is raw intelligence,” they said last year. “It is the basis for further investigation by the recipients. So to put the bar too high in terms of establishing accuracy at that stage would be quite wrong in principle.”

“We can say,” they also stated, “the critical consideration is that his confidential human intelligence was not factual evidence to be used in a personal or public report or in court or anything like that...It was raw intelligence to be passed on as part of a much bigger intelligence picture.”

Someone should have told that to then-CIA Director John Brennan, back when he was insisting the dossier be included in the intelligence agencies’ assessment of Trump’s so-called “Russia” connections. One wonders why he treated such an easily discredited piece of fiction as if it were the Dead Sea Scrolls.

And as for the “much bigger intelligence picture,” we know that, despite what Brennan has tried to claim, the dossier was the cornerstone for “Crossfire Hurricane.” The FBI would not have gotten the warrant to spy on Carter Page without it; in fact, they had been turned down for a similar warrant before.

Solomon’s commentary includes links to the pdf’s of relevant testimony from the Alfa Bank case. He’s got footnotes from our own intelligence community discrediting the dossier (Brennan obviously wasn’t listening). He’s even got pdf’s of the FBI’s notes from their interview with Steele’s primary sub-source, who called it “bar talk and gossip.”

Judicial Watch unearthed still more documents that undercut Steele. JW President Tom Fitton told JUST THE NEWS he was dismayed that ABC News would be lending credibility to the dossier now. “I was disappointed that ABC...gave him, you know, more time to spread this disinformation,” Fitton said. “...He’s been, in my view, thoroughly debunked by official and unofficial investigations, documents you’ve uncovered, we’ve uncovered, the IG has uncovered.”

Bruce Ohr at the Justice Department –- wife of Nellie Ohr who did research for Fusion GPS –- warned that it was unverified raw intelligence and that Steele seemed “desperate” to defeat Trump.

Even former National Security Council expert Fiona Hill –- remember her from Trump’s impeachment? –- who is the person who introduced Steele to his sub-source (thanks, Fiona!), dismissed the dossier as a “rabbit hole,” likely Russian disinformation mixed in with other information that might or night not have been true.

Solomon links to a pdf of a recently declassified FBI re-interview with Steele himself, along with business partner Christopher Burrows, acknowledging his anti-Trump bias in the fall of 2017. The FBI had to know good and well what they were dealing with.

Solomon links to much more –- he characterizes this as an “avalanche” –- that shows Steele and his work for exactly what they were. And yet when Steele sat down with Stephanopoulos, he admitted only that the dossier was not “100 percent” and defended it. It’s shameful that ABC “News” did this horrid piece of “journalism.”

As for Michael Sussmann, he’s not looking too impressive, either. Durham has filed an opposition to his motion for a bill of particulars, arguing that his 27-page “speaking indictment” more than adequately informs him of the charges he faces.

https://technofog.substack.com/p/john-durham-gears-up-against-the

TechnoFog has deciphered Durham’s reply and thinks subpoenas will be going to the DNC, the Hillary Campaign/Hillary for America, Georgia Tech University and the team of cyber experts working on the Alfa Bank hoax, Fusion GPS, and “numerous companies” involved with “Tech Executive – 1,” identified as Rodney Jaffe.

This and much more leads him to think the perpetrators in the Alfa Bank hoax will be charged and that the investigation is much more expansive. He brings up CrowdStrike as well –- referencing, in fact, the article at REAL CLEAR INVESTIGATIONS by Aaron Mate that we brought you a few days ago. A close look at CrowdStrike would “strike” at the heart of what the DNC was up to with the Russia Hoax.

For more on this, here’s a colorful piece from John Solomon.

James Bond or Austin Powers? Inside the cloak and dagger caper to spread Russia collusion tale

Remember Andrew McCabe

October 23, 2021

Longtime readers of this newsletter will no doubt remember the name “Andrew McCabe” and have the same reaction to it that Dracula has to garlic. McCabe was the former #2 man to James Comey at the FBI (Comey's Renfield, to keep up our Dracula metaphor), who was up to his eyeballs in the schemes to exonerate Hillary and frame Trump and his people.

McCabe was fired by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions after FBI inspector general Michael Horowitz found he had lied repeatedly to investigators about his leaks to the media (or to use the official whitewash term, he “lacked candor.” If you or I had lacked candor in speaking to FBI investigators, we’d go to prison.) As a result, he also lost some benefits and got a smaller pension than he otherwise would have. Boo-hoo.

Some might think he should have been grateful not to be dragged directly to jail, but those folks don’t understand the massive sense of entitlement hard-wired into the swamp critters of DC. McCabe not only continued posing as a legitimate commentator on liberal news channels, he also sued to get all those things he was so justly denied when he was fired.

As Byron York at the Washington Examiner reports, the Biden Administration has just settled the suit by agreeing to all his demands. McCabe will not only get $200,000 of our money in back pay for the marvelous job he did at the FBI, but we also get to pay his lawyers’ $539,000 bill. And his official record will be expunged of anything about his firing (for CAUSE.) (Note that this is the same Administration that wants to dishonorably discharge military members and strip them of all benefits just for refusing a COVID vaccine shot.)

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/byron-yorks-daily-memo-doj-memory-holes-andrew-mccabe-wrongdoing

We may not be able to prevent this Administration from showering money on someone who should have been given nothing at federal expense but an orange jumpsuit and expunging his record, but as York notes, we can make sure that what he did is not expunged from the public memory. So click the link to read all the details before the Deep State stuffs it down the memory hole.

Worried about the economy

October 23, 2021

A new Fox News poll finds an overwhelming percentage of Americans are worried about the economy, and the negative ratings for President Biden’s handling of it are rising even among Democrats (an 11% drop in approval in just one month.) Almost nine in 10 voters are worried about inflation, and a staggering 84% say rising gas prices are a problem for their families.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/voter-worry-inflation-biden-economy-ratings

And no wonder: as of today, the average cost of a gallon of regular gas according to Triple A is just under $3.38. In California, land of liberal “governance,” it’s $4.53. And in the remote small town of Gorda, California, a gallon of regular unleaded is $7.59 and premium is nearly $8.50.

https://www.westernjournal.com/bidens-america-gas-skyrockets-7-59-per-gallon-us-town/

If you’re hoping for relief soon, dream on. The Biden Administration has backtracked and decided not to challenge a court ruling blocking the Willow Project, an oil and gas drilling project in Alaska that would have generated 100,000 barrels of oil a day and created 2,000 construction jobs and 300 permanent jobs and which had already passed an extensive review for environmental impact.

https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2021/10/21/gas-hits-unbelievable-high-while-biden-shuts-down-more-american-oil-options-n460634

President Biden admitted that gas prices are up and said they likely won’t go down until 2022. I’d say 2024 is more like it, when we can get a President back into office who hasn’t declared war on our domestic fossil fuel industry that was thriving as recently as last year.

https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/biden-predicts-gas-prices-wont-go-down-until-2022

Just as a reminder of how your vote has consequences: In February of 2020, when Trump was still in office, one of my writers snapped a photo of the sign at his local gas station in suburban Dallas as he filled up his tank. A gallon of regular was $1.89.

And Biden told you he wasn’t going to tax the poor and middle class!

Thursday, Attorney General Merrick Garland was grilled by the House Judiciary Committee. Here’s a pretty dispassionate recounting of who said what.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/merrick-garland-house-judiciary-committee-hearing-doj-testimony

And here are a few more conservative-oriented assessments:

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2021/10/22/garland-fails-to-explain-why-leftists-get-away-with-attacking-federal-buildings-n2597836

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/lincolnbrown/2021/10/22/garland-gets-grilled-on-the-hill-n1525951

https://redstate.com/mike_miller/2021/10/21/garland-once-again-proves-he-is-the-sleaziest-of-the-sleazy-on-team-biden-n460540

The major points we learned from this are that Garland denies ever referring to angry parents at school board meetings as “domestic terrorists” (to be a stickler for accuracy, that’s just how someone else described it, based on the way he proposes treating them.) He claimed only to have learned from the media about that letter from the National School Board Association that was the alleged catalyst for him calling for federal action against parents.

If so, then he’s not very well-connected at the White House, since they apparently knew about it before it was even sent.

https://freebeacon.com/campus/white-house-knew-about-letter-that-compared-parents-to-domestic-terrorists/

I noticed something interesting about the questions: Republicans focused on current issues and things Garland might do in the future, like the school board memo and parental rights, Garland’s potential conflict of interest with his son-in-law making millions selling Critical Race Theory materials to schools (he insists there is no conflict of interest, so that’s that), and whether there will be an investigation of Hunter Biden’s art sales.

Democrats’ questions were mostly attempts to keep past issues on life support, like whether Trump will be indicted for paying hush money to Stormy Daniels (Google it.) One actually complained that the DOJ was going too easy on Trump supporters arrested back on January 6th. You know, those people who were held for months, some in solitary, or under abusive conditions such as delayed medical care, before they were even charged. If that’s “going easy,” what do you call letting people go free after they loot cities, attack police and try to burn down a federal courthouse with people inside it?

And if the January 6th arrestees are ever charged with anything, what will it be? One thing we learned yesterday is that it probably won’t be “insurrection.”

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2021/10/21/merrick-garland-debunks-democrat-insurrection-claims-about-capitol-riot-n1525820

Latest poll news

October 23, 2021

Politico obtained the results of a private poll conducted by the Democrats’ Senate Majority PAC, which is warning Democrats of serious problems ahead in 2022. That poll showed that 53% of Americans think the economy has gotten worse (only 30% think it’s improved), 56% rank inflation as the most pressing economic issue, and Biden’s approval rating is only 41%, which is dragging all Democrats down.

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/10/20/senate-dem-operatives-rough-road-516355

A new Politico/Morning Consult poll found that 62% of Americans lay a lot or some blame for rising inflation on President Biden’s policies.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10112865/62-U-S-voters-blame-Biden-policies-increasing-inflation.html

Biden has now sunk so low in so many polls that for the first time, Real Clear Politics’ average of all polls shows a majority disapproving of the job he’s doing, by 52,3% to 43.2% approval.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/joe-biden-s-job-approval-hovers-at-all-time-low-in-realclearpolitics-average/ar-AAPLl1P

Most stunning of all, the latest Rasmussen Reports survey of likely voters finds that 58% believe Biden is not mentally or physically up to the job of President, and 53% believe someone else is making his decisions for him.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/10/20/nolte-58-say-joe-biden-not-mentally-physically-capable-being-president/

Caveat: I always warn readers not to pay attention to polls, especially those taken well in advance of elections. It’s good to see polls going your way, but if we’re going to save America, we have to volunteer, work, donate and vote as if they’re not.

One thing that’s been clear since Hillary’s Perkins Coie attorney Michael Sussmann was indicted by Special Counsel John Durham for lying to the FBI is that he is a pivotal character in the Russia Hoax. From Durham’s “speaking indictment” it’s easy to see that this man surely must be the Mother Lode of information about the whole scheme and virtually everyone involved, whether in the “Justice” Department and FBI, the media, the DNC, the Hillary campaign (same thing), or, with partner-in-slime Marc Elias, the fabricators of the “dossier.”

Yes, “fabricators.” George Stephanopoulos’s transparent and laughable attempts to redeem Christopher Steele via TV interview fell flat, as there’s still no verification of that stupid, mistake-riddled dossier.

Anyway, Aaron Mate at REAL CLEAR INVESTIGATIONS has a great piece on Sussmann and then-legal partner Marc Elias (who again made a name for himself in 2020 by dismantling election security measures in battleground states nationwide). Mate outlines how these two Democrat operatives were central to the Russia Hoax. “The emerging picture,” he says, “shows Sussmann and his Perkins Coie colleague Marc Elias, the chief counsel for Clinton’s 2016 campaign, proceeding on parallel, coordinated tracks to solicit and spread disinformation tying Donald Trump to the Kremlin.”

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2021/10/19/coming_into_focus_hillarys_secretive_russiagate-flogging_pair_of_super-lawyers_799168.html

Sussmann was indicted for concealing the fact that he was working on behalf of Hillary’s campaign when he went to the FBI in September 2016 with a fake story about computer servers at Trump Tower “pinging” with those at Alfa Bank, a financial institution allegedly linked to Vladimir Putin, suggesting “collusion.” Fortunately, Alfa Bank sued Christopher Steele and others involved in this fabrication, and court documents apparently provided Durham’s investigators with a lot of pertinent details.

What we like about Mate’s piece is its look at the activities of Hillary’s “dynamic duo,” Sussman and Elias, as they fulfilled their mission to get the “Russia” narrative going. It’s also got some interesting details on Sussmann and CrowdStrike, the tech company that ended up with the DNC servers after the DNC claimed in April 2016 that their emails had been hacked. It was Sussmann who immediately hired CrowdStrike. And it was CrowdStrike who quickly made the claim –- still unproven –- that Russia had hacked the DNC servers to obtain the emails that were made public by WikiLeaks.

In moves that “smell” coordinated, just days before Sussmann hired CrowdStrike and pressed them to implicate the Kremlin, Elias retained opposition research company Fusion GPS to, as Mate puts it, “dig up dirt on Trump and the Kremlin.” CrowdStrike alleged the Russia “hack” and Christopher Steele produced his first “dossier” report within six days of each other. Mate’s report is the first we’ve seen of this part of the timeline.

In later congressional testimony, Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson called the overlap of the two lawyers’ activities “an extraordinary coincidence.”

But together, these two Democrat Party lawyers played a central role in defining the fake Trump-Russia narrative. In Mate’s words, their “odd relationship” with the FBI gave them “unprecedented influence over a high-stakes national security scandal that upended U.S. politics and ensnared their political opponents.” We’ve all heard plenty about Marc Elias, Fusion GPS and the “dossier,” so for now let’s focus on the emerging story of Sussmann’s involvement with CrowdStrike.

When another Perkins Coie colleague, Graham Wilson, told Sussmann in April 2016 that a DNC server had been breached, Sussmann immediately called CrowdStrike. (He later testified to the House Intel Committee that CrowdStrike had been hired on his “recommendation.”) And here’s something dodgy: CrowdStrike’s contract to examine the DNC servers was NOT with the DNC but with Sussmann and Perkins Coie. The contract states: “CrowdStrike shall cooperate with Firm in protecting the Parties’ communications and work product from disclosure under the attorney-client privilege, work product doctrine or other applicable privileges or protections.”

Pretty slick, huh? But Elias/Perkins Coie and Fusion GPS had the same arrangement, to protect THEIR communications, too. And apparently, both attorneys hid the fact that it was the DNC and Hillary’s campaign who were footing the bill for the Russia Hoax. Everybody in this whole scheme was set up to have privileged communications!

Still, though I’m not a lawyer, I seem to recall that such privilege is not applicable if it’s a cover for breaking the law.

Apparently, it was Sussmann who controlled what the FBI was allowed to see. It was reported by THE NEW YORK TIMES that within a day, CrowdStrike “confirmed that the intrusion had originated in Russia.” In June 2016, Sussmann and DNC executives met with the FBI and encouraged the Bureau to go public with the “Russia” story and even say specifically that it was espionage. Sussmann pushed hard for this but offered the FBI no evidence in the form of forensic images or an unredacted report from CrowdStrike.

So the FBI wasn’t ready to proclaim this, but that didn’t stop the DNC from going public on its own. Sussmann and CrowdStrike CEO Shawn Henry were named as sources for a story that ran in the WASHINGTON POST.

Much later, after his testimony before the House Intel Committee was finally declassified in May 2020, we learned that Shawn Henry had no actual indication that the DNC servers had even been hacked, let alone by Russia. “There’s circumstantial evidence,” he said, “but no evidence that they were actually infiltrated.” U.S. intel officials were using weasel-words such as “likely” and “appears to” in their own documents –- including Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report –- to cover up the lack of proof.

On big question is why the FBI would rely on CrowdStrike’s word on the “hacking” of the DNC servers. The FBI has said the DNC denied them access to the servers, while the DNC said the equivalent of, “Well, they never asked.” When Sussmann and Shawn Henry testified before the House Intel Committee in December 2017, they said the FBI “did not try” to conduct an independent investigation. Sussmann testified that he said he offered access to “everything CrowdStrike was developing,” but to his knowledge they never sought access. It’s hard to know what is true, especially since Sussmann has been INDICTED FOR LYING. Another tip-off: he’s a lawyer for the DNC.

But former FBI Director James Comey testified that the FBI had made “multiple requests at different levels” to access the servers and had been denied. Gosh, it’s hard to know what to believe when known liars are contradicting each other.

James Trainor, who was then assistant director for the FBI Cyber Division, told the Senate Intel Committee that Sussmann had “scrubbed” the CrowdStrike report before it was given to the FBI, resulting in a “stripped-down version” that was “not optimal.” So the FBI was left with no investigation of its own, only CrowdStrike’s report that Sussmann had finessed and redacted. CrowdStrike’s original, unredacted report remains unreleased to this day.

So, no one has seen evidence of a Russia “hack.” But someone got the DNC emails to WikiLeaks. Julian Assange still won’t say, but he has said it wasn’t Russia or any state. There’s no indication –- so far –- that Durham is looking into that. CrowdStrike told REAL CLEAR INVESTIGATIONS that the special counsel hasn’t been in touch.

But maybe he'll find out from Michael Sussmann.

Fighting back works

October 22, 2021

The good news is that Congressional Democrats have caved before the tsunami of outrage over their plans to have the IRS track every financial transaction or bank balance over $600 and have raised the limit to $10,000. The bad news is that they’re still trying to have the IRS track every transaction or bank balance over $10,000.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2021/10/20/democrats-now-say-they-will-only-snoop-on-bank-transactions-over-10000-n1525471

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said, “Today’s new proposal reflects the Administration’s strong belief that we should zero in on those at the top of the income scale who don’t pay the taxes they owe, while protecting American workers by setting the bank account threshold at $10,000 and providing an exemption for wage earners like teachers and firefighters.”

Republicans pointed out that this would still intrude on the privacy of every small business owner and many individuals who might have balances or transactions over $10,000, for everything from depositing daily restaurant earnings to saving for a car to making a down payment on a house.

We’ve heard this “It'll only trap rich crooks” claim before, when law enforcement was given civil asset forfeiture powers. It wasn’t long before they were happily abusing that power to seize cash, houses and other assets from innocent Americans who were lucky if they could ever get their rightful property back. Here are just 10 particularly egregious examples out of many:

https://listverse.com/2015/06/29/10-egregious-abuses-of-civil-asset-forfeiture/

Do you really think that if the IRS gets this snooping power, that agency or the politicians overseeing it won’t abuse it?

Besides, if the real target is very rich tax evaders, why is the threshold set at $10,000? People in that tax bracket spend that much on a watch or a designer gown to wear to a gala with AOC. Would they really risk audits and jail time over what they would consider sofa cushion change? $10,000 may sound like big bucks to you, but it’s nothing to the people the Democrats claim are the target. Setting it that low means you are the target.

Thursday, President Biden took questions in a CNN “townhall.”

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10118843/Biden-says-cops-emergency-responders-fired-not-getting-vaccine.html

I use the quotation marks because CNN always seems to find a “town” that’s at least 90% Democrats. In this case, of the 12 people allowed to ask questions, only two were Republicans, and the first one didn’t get to speak until 20 minutes before it ended. Even one of the questioners identified as an “Independent” attacked Republicans and “rogue moderates” and asked why Biden didn’t just force through the Democrat agenda. Sounds like that person is an “Independent” like “Democratic socialists” are “Democrats.”

https://www.foxnews.com/media/cnn-biden-town-hall

The biggest news points to come out of the evening were:

* Biden admitted he didn’t have the votes to pass his $3.5 trillion spending bill if it retained his hike in the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28%.

* He said he was considering doing away with the Senate filibuster to pass the Democrats “voting rights” (i.e., “legalize vote fraud”) bill, but not for all bills, because that would lose him three votes for his $3.5 trillion spending bill. (Note: I don’t think “doing away with the filibuster” works that way. You’d think that someone who spent 370 years in the Senate would know that.)

* He said he was considering sending in the National Guard to ease the supply chain crisis. I guess that’s easier than reversing the liberal policies that are causing it, like the AB-5 law in California that banned independent contractor truckers. A national version of that is in his $3.5 trillion bill, if you want to know how serious he really is about fixing the supply chain crisis.

By the way, over 100 House Republicans signed a letter explaining why Biden’s $3.5 trillion porkulus bill would be a death blow to the supply chain.

https://www.westernjournal.com/100-gop-reps-bidens-3-5-trillion-bill-death-blow-americas-supply-chain/

* He said the US would defend Taiwan if China attacked it. China seemed really intimidated by that threat.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/biden-taiwan-china-defend

And why should they be, since they now seem to be outstripping us in military weapons development?

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10116479/China-tested-SECOND-hypersonic-orbital-nuke.html

* And the quote that made the biggest news: Biden doubled down on threatening police officers and other emergency workers and first responders, saying that if they refuse to comply with his COVID vaccine mandate, they should stay home or be fired (the fact that this received “thunderous applause” from the audience should tell you the kind of audiences CNN assembles for these dog-and-pony shows.) He then ridiculed the very idea of Americans having the freedom of autonomy over their own bodies, mocking them by saying, “I have the freedom to kill you with my COVID. Come on.” (Still unanswered: the question of how unvaccinated people endanger vaccinated people if the vaccines work.) This also overlooks the fact that many of those people worked through the pandemic at great personal risk, and were likely already exposed to and recovered from COVID so they have natural immunity.

I have a feeling that Biden dismissing cops and first responders and mocking freedom will be a recurring theme in many 2022 campaign ads.

I couldn’t help wondering what people might be thinking who actually voted for Biden because he was sold to them as a moderate centrist who would return compromise and respect for other people’s views to the White House. Also, he hailed first responders as the heroes of the pandemic, vowed not to impose a government vaccine mandate, and even expressed reluctance himself to take any vaccine that was rushed to market under Donald Trump. Now, those first responder bums' lives can just be ruined if they’re skeptical of vaccines he sowed distrust in, and they resist the mandate he promised never to impose.

I’m leaving out the biggest news of the night: he got through it without dissolving into gibberish or wandering off stage. But it might have been better if he’d done either one of those things rather than say what he did about first responders. He might want to consider that if he plans to brutally enforce a vaccine mandate, it might be good not to alienate the police. The Democrats have done enough of that already by defunding police departments and legalizing crime.

For more on that, check out this story about how an iconic Target store is the latest to close in San Francisco because the same people come back every day and rob them blind, and the liberal leaders who refuse to make them pay any consequences for theft are denying that’s the real reason. This account comes directly from some fed-up cops speaking anonymously, so you can imagine how much loyalty they still have to liberal Democrats.

https://californiaglobe.com/local/san-francisco/exclusive-iconic-target-store-in-mission-district-to-close-amid-a-shoplifting-tidal-wave/

Prof. Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit has a good op-ed on police pushback against vaccine mandates, and how forcing officers to quit will result in them becoming private security so the wealthy will be safe while poor and minority neighborhoods will suffer (thanks again, Democrats!) One silver lining: the Democrats seem to want to impose a police state, but that’s going to be hard if the police are so furious they’d rather quit than obey Democrat policies.

Finally, it wasn’t as if the Biden Townhall didn’t have a healthy scoop of false claims and incoherence, which Nick Arama at Redstate.com chronicled:

https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2021/10/21/bid

Reeder: RIP Betty Lynn

October 21, 2021

I’m sad to report that on Saturday, actress Betty Lynn died at 95. She passed away peacefully in her sleep. Beloved as Barney Fife’s girlfriend Thelma Lou on “The Andy Griffith Show,” her death leaves Ron Howard as the last surviving major cast member of that classic show.

While she was most famous as Thelma Lou, she had a long acting career, stretching from movie roles as a teenager alongside such stars as Bette Davis and Maureen O’Hara to many TV roles (do you remember her as Andy Griffith’s secretary in the first season of “Matlock”?)

TV writer/blogger Mark Evanier was very close to Betty, having grown up next door to her. He wrote, “You never met a sweeter, kinder human being than Betty Lynn.” She was like an aunt to him, so his blog has many posts about her life and his memories of her. This is a great example from his childhood of just how nice and caring she was:

https://www.newsfromme.com/2021/10/12/a-story-youll-like-2-2/

Here’s his link to what he thinks is the best obituary, put out by the Andy Griffith Museum in his hometown of Mt. Airy, North Carolina:

https://www.newsfromme.com/2021/10/17/all-about-betty/

She loved Mayberry fans and was known for attending fan fests and conventions. Fans would line up around the block for a photo and autograph, and she often remembered their names and asked about their family members by name, even if she’d only met them once, years before. Her love of Mayberry and what it stood for led her to retire to the closest thing to the TV town, Mt. Airy, where she became a beloved local celebrity and appeared regularly at the Andy Griffith Museum to greet fans and pose for photos.

I know you depend on me to tell you things that most obituaries won’t mention. So here's one from Mark Evanier: “She was deeply religious and apart from acting, the only profession she had ever contemplated was to become a nun.”

Also, Don Knotts left the show after five seasons, and so did she, since she believed Thelma Lou and Barney belonged together. But Knotts returned for a later episode about a reunion dance where Barney is distraught when Thelma Lou arrives with her new husband. Betty was so upset at the writers when she saw the script that she said the only way she could get through it was by telling herself that Thelma Lou was only pretending that a platonic male friend was her husband to save face. Personally, I tell myself that, too, when I watch it.

Fortunately, that misstep was rectified in the 1986 made-for-TV movie “Return to Mayberry,” where Barney and Thelma Lou finally got married. As God intended!

Rest in peace to a fine actress and a wonderful lady who will continue winning new generations of fans far into the future, especially with so many of us looking at the sorry state of the modern world and wishing we could “return to Mayberry.”

I know that most Americans don’t care to read about the problems of nations on the other side of the world. But I urge you to read this story from the Epoch Times about the ongoing genocide of Christians in Nigeria (70,000 so far) at the hands of Muslim extremists.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/epoch-times-journalists-praised-for-coverage-of-nigerias-genocide_4051465.html

It’s shocking that so many American media outlets trumpet their belief that “black lives matter,” yet give no coverage to the genocide of black Christians in Nigeria. But Lara Logan of Fox Nation has produced a documentary on it called “21st Century Terrorism Revealed.”

One thing it reveals is that if you think, “It’s a terrible tragedy, but it has nothing to do with us,” you couldn’t be more wrong. Bad American policy under Obama had a direct impact on causing this genocide. Obama and John Kerry worked to undermine the Christian President of Nigeria because he passed a ban on gay marriage, and helped elect a Muslim President who’s turning a blind eye to the slaughter of Christians – and who also kept the ban on gay marriage.

Nor is the danger likely to stay isolated to Nigeria. As Nina Shea of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom told the Epoch Times, this is “not simply a human rights and humanitarian crisis of genocidal proportions, it is also an American security concern. Today, Mahanga is a terrorist base camp; tomorrow, half of Nigeria, Africa’s most populous and economically prosperous country, could be one. The U.S. government must recognize the gains being made by Islamist extremists in this region under the approving eye of its President - an apologist President who continues to generously aid their efforts. Nigeria is rapidly becoming a global catastrophe.”

It may be too much to hope that the same President who just handed over Afghanistan to the Taliban and left our people behind will do anything about saving Christians in Nigeria or preventing that nation from becoming a new haven for global terrorism. But if enough Americans learn what’s going on and how it could come back to bite us, maybe our next President will.

Here’s something the White House was so eager for you to see, they released it with great media fanfare on...late Friday afternoon.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Climate-Finance-Report.pdf

Ah, we’re just having a little fun with sarcasm. As everyone who’s not an idiot knows, late in the day on Friday is when the government dumps documents it hopes will receive minimal media attention and stay under the radar. This time, it darned near worked, too; we’d like to thank Glenn Beck for calling attention to this report, dated October 14: A ROADMAP TO BUILD A CLIMATE-RESILIENT ECONOMY --- U.S. Climate-Related Financial Risk, Executive Order #14030.

Never mind all the climate-related predictions that have not come to pass. This report assumes the absolute worst, blaming climate change for all extreme weather such as wildfires and hurricanes, in a way that allows it to say that one out of every three Americans has been affected by the “climate crisis.” Our ability to deal with the financial fallout from this “climate crisis” is lacking, the report warns: “In short, the current suite of data, tools, disclosures and mitigation strategies fail to help investors, policymakers and the public understand and make decisions grounded in the economic realities of the climate crisis.” So, hooray, the government is here to fix that. This is our lucky day.

Biden’s Executive Order #14030, signed May 20, 2021, calls for the federal government to lead financial institutions by example by “appropriately prioritizing Federal investments.” And it’s far- reaching; “This report lays out a roadmap for measuring, disclosing, managing, and mitigating climate-related financial risk across the economy, including to the Federal Government, while also catalyzing public and private investment to seize the opportunity of a net-zero, clean energy future.”

This will require radical change and control---I mean nurturing guidance, but without this, we would really miss out. As the report says, “By sustaining the status quo, we not only face the mounting repercussions of climate change, but also...of missing out on on an historic chance for job creation, shared prosperity, and a more resilient future. THE UNITED STATES MUST INTEGRATE CLIMATE RISKS THROUGHOUT ALL RELEVANT ASPECTS OF THE ECONOMY AND FINANCIAL SYSTEM. [Emphasis mine.] And, in doing so, it must meet the moral and economic imperative to rectify decades of disproportionate environmental damage imposed on historically disadvantaged neighborhoods.”

This “broader economic strategy...leverages the full talent and creativity of all Americans by elevating equity [NOTE: “equity” means an engineered equality of outcome; see Critical Theory] as a top priority in all decision-making, and restores the United States’ relationship with key allies internationally, finding common ground to meet the global goals of the Paris Accord.”

Recall that newly-inaugurated President Biden rejoined the Paris Accord his first day in office. It’s described in this government press release at the time as “an unprecedented framework for global action.” And that’s exactly what it is.

https://www.state.gov/the-united-states-officially-rejoins-the-paris-agreement/

Criticism of this new "roadmap" is bound to be interpreted as “climate skepticism,” which is now verboten on YouTube, a subsidiary of Google. So, wasn’t that timed well?

Glenn Beck warned in March that this was coming, as banks were starting to implement “environmental, social and governance (ESG) scores” on their own. These were an outgrowth of the Paris Accords –- which Trump had wisely pulled out of before Biden brought us back in –- and simultaneous meetings of the world’s largest financial institutions. The World Bank and the U.N. brought together 230 banks and insurance companies to outline what became known as “The United Nations Environment Programme Finance Initiative (UNEP FI),” which drafts a methodology for, as Beck put it, “to bend the private sector to the will of the government by using banks as a pressure or a choke point.” We went hunting and found their “Principles of Responsible Banking.”

https://www.unepfi.org/banking/bankingprinciples/

Consistent with these, Article 2.1(c) of the Paris Accords states: “This Agreement...aims to strengthen the global response to the threat of climate change, in the context of sustainable development AND EFFORTS TO ERADICATE POVERTY [emphasis mine], including by making finance flows consistent with a pathway towards low greenhouse emissions and climate-resilient development.”

This is the way government gets to follow all the money---I mean, “finance flows.” (I would add that this is very much in the spirit of the recent call for U.S. banks to report every transaction over $600.) It might also determine whether a bank will loan money to you and what you have to do in order to get it. This is, well, serfdom.

The one thing that was lacking till now was full U.S. government support, which is what the "roadmap" released on Friday apparently gave. It essentially means that financial incentives will be used to make the public conform to whatever the government deems of value in controlling and dealing with climate change. They argue that this will make us more competitive with nations such as China –- which makes no sense, as China won’t be bound by any of this. (And why should they, when they already HAVE total government control?)

The "roadmap" mentions French legislation called “France’s Energy Transition Law” that uses the principle of “comply or explain.” In France, every bank and every company needs to provide a full accounting to the government “disclosing all of their ESG measures.” Beck cites the most recent report from Coca-Cola in Europe that runs to 98 pages of “explanation” to justify their license to do business. But you don’t have to read 98 pages; note the two paragraphs titled “Global Relevance” on the PRI (Principles of Responsible Investment) website at the link and see that “comply or explain” is indeed a real thing.

https://www.unpri.org/climate-change/french-energy-transition-law-global-investor-briefing-on-article-173/295.article

The White House is directing Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen to begin a similar initiative under the Financial Stability Oversight Council, using the justification that climate change is a national security threat. Knowing Janet Yellen, we’re sure she can’t wait to implement this.

We haven’t read the entire report yet, only the introductory parts, but according to Beck it will require Americans’ compliance in order to, say, continue having insurance or maintain a savings account. It does this under the auspices of protecting Americans’ savings and pensions.

Obviously, all businesses having contracts with the federal government will be particularly vulnerable to this control.

They're even “addressing climate risk in the VA lending programs.” That’s the amazing thing about “climate risk” –- it affects everything! VA lending is mentioned in the glowing press briefing from Friday, at the link.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/10/15/fact-sheet-biden-administration-roadmap-to-build-an-economy-resilient-to-climate-change-impacts/

Essentially, the government is using the perceived "climate crisis" as a pretext to run everything, to take control of what was left of the free market and everything we do or own. It’s not a crazy conspiracy theory –- it’s there in the report, and we really don’t even have to read between the lines very much to see how this works. By bringing the report out very quietly late on a Friday, they obviously were trying to keep any discussion of it as low-key as possible. Let’s see what we can do to foil that plan.

https://www.theblaze.com/shows/the-glenn-beck-program/glenn-beck-did-you-hear-biden-s-great-reset-warning-shot-to-banks

The death of Colin Powell

October 20, 2021

One of the most depressing aspects of modern politics is the way that people see the death of a fellow human being not as a time to set politics aside and show respect but as an opportunity to score cheap political points. This ranges from the sewer scum level of Twitter trolls gleefully celebrating a political opponents’ death to sanctimonious attempts to utilize the deceased as a weapon to attack others.

There’s been a lot of the latter around the death of former Secretary of State Colin Powell. Probably the slimiest, not surprisingly, came from CNN’s Chris Cilizza, who used Powell’s death to smear the entire Republican Party. He wrote an article called “The Colin Powell Republican No Longer Exists.” But if the point is that Powell was a moderate who rejected “extremism,” then I could just as easily write an article called “The Colin Powell Democrat No Longer Exists.”

https://www.foxnews.com/media/cnn-chris-cillizza-colin-powell-death-lecture-republicans

Powell obviously had his personal reasons for starting to vote for Democrats (which he did with Obama, long before Trump entered politics.) I can disagree with that decision without attacking him or millions of others, but that’s beyond some people.

Naturally, there was also sniping back and forth over the big topic of the day, since Powell was fully vaccinated but it was initially reported that he’d died of complications from COVID-19. Everyone was trying to score points over that, pro- or anti-vaccination. In fact, his vaccination status was irrelevant. Powell was 84 and suffered from several conditions that make people more vulnerable to COVID even if they are vaccinated, including a form of blood cancer called multiple myeloma. A study found that 55% of sufferers fail to fully respond to vaccination because of their limited ability to produce antibodies.

There are many tributes to Gen. Powell online and there are many criticisms. You don’t need me to point them out to you. But I will link to this column by Kurt Schichter, who is also a military veteran. While not a Powell fan, he recognizes his accomplishments, balances his praise and criticism, and does a good job of explaining why Powell might have moved from Republican to Democrat, and why it had to do with his own personal viewpoint and larger changes in government and the culture rather than tens of millions of Republicans being horrible people.

https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2021/10/19/colin-powell-and-the-crisis-of-the-boomer-elite-n2597632

UPDATE:

I’m disappointed that former President Trump used the occasion of General Powell’s death to air grievances he had with General Powell. There are times, when it’s best not to say anything than to say something that is harsh, especially when the target of the comments is deceased. Even if you’re a former President.

More video from the January 6th Capitol protest has been released, and as with the first video that the government tried to suppress, it doesn’t exactly support the claim that this was a violent insurrection. The new video appears to show someone opening a door, people walking inside, and police standing aside and letting them come in. If they were “forcing their way in,” they don’t appear to be aware of it.

https://redstate.com/bonchie/2021/10/18/new-january-6th-surveillance-footage-further-calls-into-question-the-entire-january-6th-narrative-n458811

If the House Democrats are having trouble finding actual footage of violent rioters attacking police, I know where they can get some. Unfortunately, it wasn’t taken in the Capitol on January 6th.

In a related story, former President Trump is suing the Congressional committee “investigating” the January 6th Capitol riot to block them from obtaining White House records that he says are protected by executive privilege.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2021/10/19/trump-sues-january-6-committee-to-block-release-of-records-related-to-capitol-riot-n1524990

The Democrats claim that those records might prove that Trump was talking to aids about planning a violent insurrection, which is ridiculous on the face of it. It’s more likely just a fishing expedition to try to find anything to accuse Trump of. Trump asked Biden to respect his executive privilege and refuse to comply, but of course, Biden said no because “TRUUUUUUMP!!!!”

This led some legal scholars to warn the Biden White House that they’re making a serious mistake. There isn’t likely to be anything in those records that will show Trump plotting an insurrection, but the fact that Biden failed to stand up for executive privilege could set a precedent that makes it harder to assert for future Presidents, as well as for himself if Republicans win Congress in 2022 and start launching investigations into the Biden White House.

But then, planning ahead and thinking about longterm consequences aren’t proving to be this Administration’s strong suits.

Democrats keep pointing to polls showing that a majority of Americans support their $3.5 trillion spending orgy bill. But the same polls show that most Americans don’t actually know what’s in it. We’ve tried to correct that here by pointing to several stories that detail some of the horrors within, like this:

https://banks.house.gov/uploadedfiles/final_reconciliation_.pdf

But today, let’s take a look at two very specific things that would directly affect most of you if that monstrosity passes. For instance, it would greatly expand the size, powers and reach of the IRS. Democrats claim that’s just to make the rich and corporations pay their “fair share,” so why does it allow them to snoop into every bank account with at least $600 in it?

And here’s something they haven’t told you: The IRS is most likely to audit people who have income that isn’t reported or that doesn’t match what’s in their bank accounts. The people that most closely describes are the working poor, such as handymen, bartenders and wait staff. According to journalist Saager Enjeti of the “Breaking Points” podcast, under this bill, the IRS would be THREE TIMES more likely to audit someone making less than $25,000 than someone in the top 1% of earners.

https://www.westernjournal.com/bidens-irs-plan-working-class-americans-3-times-likely-audited-rich-elites/

As the linked article points out, it’s not just the threat of audits that should worry you but also the intrusive nature of IRS snooping, allowing the government to see every purchase and donation, and potentially use that information to try to categorize and intimidate you into behaving the way they want you to (Think that’s hyperbole? Do you not want to get vaccinated? How’s that working out?)

Also hidden in the dense verbiage of that giant bill are various measures to vastly enrich and empower the labor unions that make up one of the Democrats’ biggest support groups. This is inspired by California’s disastrous AB-5 law that just about killed the gig/freelance/contract worker economy.

That doesn’t just harm people who prefer working freelance, from Uber drivers to people who work at home via the Internet. Derek Hunter at Townhall.com has a column about how tragically unqualified Pete Buttigieg is to be Transportation Secretary, and at one of the few times that job is vital, during the supply chain crisis.

https://townhall.com/columnists/derekhunter/2021/10/19/secretary-mayor-pete-is-a-disaster-n2597631

In it, he makes the point that Biden’s order to unload cargo 24/7 at the L.A. port is pointless because there aren’t enough truckers to take it anywhere, because AB-5 outlawed independent contractors, which were most of the state’s truckers.

https://www.westernjournal.com/dumb-idea-trucking-industry-reportedly-no-confidence-bidens-plan-solve-shipping-crisis/

In short, one of the big reasons why we’re facing potential empty store shelves is the idiotic leftwing law passed by California that the Democrats want to take nationwide via their $3.5 trillion socialist utopia wish list bill.

Will “free government-paid day care” really seem all that attractive when you don’t need day care anymore because your job was eliminated?

Inconceivable

October 20, 2021

The literary world in Spain is in chaos and feminists are up in arms after acclaimed female thriller novelist Carmen Mota won a prestigious book award – and the three men who secretly write under that pseudonym came up and accepted it!

https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/17/europe/spanish-female-writer-revealed-intl-scli/index.html

They had created an entire backstory for her, done interviews as her, and “her” works had even been included in selections of feminist writings.

It’s interesting that they’re being greeted with such anger and accused of being frauds and scammers. I thought that if a man identified as a woman, that made him (sorry, her) a woman. Obviously, these three guys are extremely good at identifying as a woman. And if their books are good enough to win awards, what difference does it make who wrote them? In fact, if we can be anything we "identify" as, then doesn't that negate the entire concept of identity politics?

Recently, we’ve seen controversies in the US in which authors had contracts cancelled because they weren’t the same ethnicity as their main character, as if the job of novelist (which requires using your imagination to see life through other people’s eyes) can only be performed by someone exactly like the book's protagonist. Returning a book because you find out the author isn’t exactly who you thought is like when people loved Milli Vanilli’s album until they found out the guys on the cover didn’t really sing on it, then they demanded refunds. Did the music in the grooves somehow change for the worse? And are these award-winning books now bad just because they were written by three men instead of one woman?

Next thing you know, someone will be telling me that Mark Twain wasn’t Samuel Clemons’ real name!

The New York Post reports that the Biden Administration has been secretly flying illegal immigrants, mostly children and teens but not all, from the Texas border to suburban New York under cover of darkness to settle them across the region. A Post analysis of online flight-tracking data indicates that about 2,000 illegal border crossers have been flown to an airport outside White Plains on 21 flights since August 8th.

https://www.foxnews.com/us/midnight-biden-secretly-flying-underage-migrants-ny-night

When they land, usually between midnight and 4 a.m., they’re reportedly put on charter buses and taken to various locations from the Bronx to Connecticut.

The news was met with outrage from Republicans and some local residents, but the White House claims it’s nothing new: "It is our legal responsibility to safely care for unaccompanied children until they can be swiftly unified with a parent or a vetted sponsor." That sidesteps the issue that it’s also their legal responsibility to enforce border security to prevent us having to deal with a tsunami of unaccompanied children, but here we are.

Witnesses say they’ve seen adult males get off those flights, and a spokeswoman for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said, "If the Biden Administration is so confident that their open-border policy is good for our country, why the secrecy? Why is the Biden Administration refusing to share even the most basic information about illegal alien resettlement in communities throughout our state and the entire country? Washington, DC, sets immigration policies that do not affect them, and states — that lack information about migrant resettlement and do not have the authority to change federal immigration policy — are expected to bear the brunt of Biden’s reckless open-borders agenda."

I can’t help wondering how gullible they think we are to say there’s nothing sneaky going on when they just got caught doing it in secret after midnight. It reminds me of comic Flip Wilson’s advice: “Midnight is a good time to be sneakin’. If anyone sees you, they’re sneakin’, too.”

The Post editors also have some choice things to say about why these flights are being conducted in secret: because having open borders and waving in illegal immigrants might be popular with “progressives,” but not with most Americans. So Biden’s people have to make sure most Americans never hear about it. Consider this article to be the sound of a blowing whistle.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/biden-deadly-game-secret-flights-migrants-ny-post-editorial-board

AOC challenger emerges

October 19, 2021

It may seem like an impossible dream, but AOC has a challenger in New York’s 14th House District who might actually have a chance to boot the media’s favorite socialist fashionista out of Congress.

https://www.westernjournal.com/person-win-aoc-just-entered-race-left-panic/

Like AOC, this person is Hispanic and even a former bartender – but that’s where the similarities end. Desi Cuellar’s parents fled Cuba to escape the socialism that AOC is so enamored with. He knows what it’s like to be poor, work hard and even be homeless, but he refuses to blame America for his early struggles or play victim. He even joined the National Guard because, he says, he “wanted to do more for my country.”

Cuellar said, “I am proof that opportunity exists for anyone in this country, that America is worth fighting for, that our values and our constitutional rights set us apart from the rest of the world. But my opponent AOC is doing everything she can to undo what countless Americans have died to preserve.”

He says, “As a New Yorker, I’m sick and tired of seeing AOC use our city as a launching pad for her socialist agenda.” He’s made a hard-hitting ad that can be seen at the link above. I wish him all the luck in the world.

It might seem like an insurmountable task, since AOC got 71% of the vote in 2020. But note that the 14th District has a population of nearly 700,000, and AOC’s total vote was less than 153,000. There are a lot of people there who didn’t bother to vote. Let’s hope Cuellar can inspire them to go to the polls and remind them that they elect someone to Congress to represent their beliefs and interests, not those of Bernie Sanders, Karl Marx or Fidel Castro.

Worst mayor ever

October 18, 2021

With just three “counting-the-seconds” months left in his term, New York Mayor Bill DeBlasio is making every second count in his effort to make history as the worst mayor of all time. Having presided over the complete destruction of the clean, safe, booming city that he inherited, he’s finishing out his term doing demolition detail work, like scrapping the schools’ talented and gifted program (I guess he figures no Democrat voters will ever come out of that) and now, likely removing a statue of Founding Father Thomas Jefferson from the City Council chamber where it’s stood for 187 years.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/nyc-mayor-de-blasio-e2-80-98assumes-e2-80-99-jefferson-statue-will-be-removed-from-city-hall-punts-responsibility/ar-AAPwVKv

This is backed by the Council’s Black, Latino and Asian Caucus because Jefferson was a slave owner (another thing Trump correctly predicted would happen if we let Civil War monuments be torn down.) DeBlasio tried to pass the buck for the decision to a design commission he appointed, and hedged to reporters about how Jefferson’s legacy was “complicated.”

Yes, everyone’s is, except people who never do anything right (looking at you, Bill.) Only one perfect person ever walked the Earth, and leftists won’t let His statute appear on public grounds, either.

It's true that Jefferson owned slaves; but it was his words from the Declaration of Indepence ("We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness") that were the foundation of the abolitionist movement. Unfortunately, New York's current political leaders don’t have the time, brains or inclination to consider history in any broader context than a Twitter tweet.

Personally, I’m amazed that the statue of Jefferson didn’t come to life and demand to be removed from the New York City Council chamber.

While driving on I-30 towards Dallas over the weekend, one of my staffers saw a rather startling billboard that said, “TRUMP LOST --- NO MORE ‘AUDITS.’” It featured a glum-looking picture of the former President in massive side profile, unattractively hunched over, looking down in disappointment and disgust.

It was one of those brightly-lit, changing billboards, and there wasn’t enough time to read the tiny lettering that showed who had sponsored it. Of course, the first thought when seeing something like this would be that some leftist group had paid for it, maybe some organization with deep pockets filled to overflowing with Soros or Zuckerberg money. Well, it's not a leftist group per se, though I can see how leftists might certainly support it strategically and donate money, and perhaps they have.

It was sponsored by Republicans. Or, more accurately, “Republicans.”

The small print said “PAID FOR BY REPUBLICANS FOR VOTING RIGHTS, A PROJECT OF DEFENDING DEMOCRACY TOGETHER,” and then gave the photo credit. The billboard first appeared in Times Square, and it’s gigantic.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/a-republican-group-is-putting-up-gigantic-billboards-to-remind-trump-that-he-lost/ar-AAPxv1C

It’s part of a campaign that will run in all states where Trump is encouraging vote audits. (We haven’t heard anything about anyone calling for an audit in New York, so the huge billboard in Times Square was apparently just to kick off the campaign with a big promotional splash.)

As reported by BUSINESS INSIDER, as of this weekend there were 36 “Trump Lost” billboards across 9 states. There’s a map at the Republicans For Voting Rights website.

https://accountability.gop/trump-lost-billboard-campaign/

“Republicans For Voting Rights is launching a quarter-million dollar billboard campaign across the country to call on state lawmakers to reject frivolous audits of the 2020 election.,” they say on their website. They list Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Florida, Texas and Virginia in addition to the one in Times Square. In Texas, the one near Dallas is shown, along with other billboards in Austin, Houston and San Antonio. Florida has five of them.

It’s interesting to see that they’re so opposed to audits in states that Trump easily won. The purpose of targeted audits in red states is obviously not to change the electoral outcome in those states, but to identify and address problems in major metropolitan areas such as Houston. Why would real Republicans be against that?

There’s a place on that same page to join the organization, with the headline, “Don’t sit quietly and surrender one of America’s great political parties.” I assume they mean surrender to Republicans who...want transparent elections and more confidence in the system?

On their home page, the group says, “The evidence is clear: Republicans need to reject these fraudits.” Then there are rows of testimonials from members. Here are a few samples:

“They [pro-Trump Republicans] are morally bankrupt on just about any democracy issue. Anything that made this country what it is, they’re doing everything they can to destroy it.” --- Alfred, in Ohio

“Do I stay in the party and fight against Trumpism, or do I just completely go independent? I don’t know, it’s been tough.” --- Lisa, in Ohio

“The Republican Party was founded by a guy named Abe Lincoln --- a guy who wouldn’t want the Proud Boys.” --- Migdalia, in Florida

“The election was secure. The election was safe. The election was honest. Donald Trump is a sore loser.” --- Nitin, in New York

“Anything that the government can do to encourage people to get out and vote is the best possible way.” --- Judy, in Texas

“Another reason why I left the Republican Party is the restriction on voting rights.” --- Julie, in Texas.

“Liz Cheney didn’t really change her beliefs. Everybody else changed theirs.” --- Anna, in Georgia

“If there is any chance of the Republican Party surviving this, it’s going to be because of Cheney and [Illinois Rep. Adam] Kinzinger and people like them.” --- Kim, in Florida

“The Republican Party of Donald Trump is destroying our democratic institutions by telling the Big Lie that the election was rigged.” --- Gary, in Rhode Island.

I could go on with these, but you get the idea. Speaking of Rep. Kinzinger, he’s in the news right now, and he might be sorry that he thought he could trust and work with Democrats.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/10/15/illinois-democrats-reward-never-trump-adam-kinzinger-by-redrawing-district-to-end-his-career/

To Gary in Rhode Island (and, really, all the people on this website expressing similar views), I would suggest picking up a copy of the new book RIGGED, written not by a Proud Boy but by the extremely reasoned Mollie Hemingway of THE FEDERALIST. Her book, which is just out, details all the ways in which the election was hijacked, not just at the ballot box but in the media, by Big Tech, and in the manipulation of a public health crisis to change the rules for voting. We’ll have more on this soon; her book has just arrived.

The people who've joined this group have bought the line that checking the honesty and accuracy of our voting systems is somehow suppressing the vote. Have you heard of even one actual case in which the vote of a qualified voter was suppressed in any way? Me, neither. And would you want that to be happening in our system? No. On the other hand, have you heard of many thousands of ballots being mailed en masse to outdated addresses and collected willy-nilly by partisan vote harvesters and unsupervised drop-boxes with no demonstrable chain of custody? Of course, many cases of this. Are you concerned by the post-election lack of transparency? Yes. Do these problems need to be assessed and reformed so we don’t have to deal with them next time? Absolutely. Every fraudulent vote suppresses someone’s REAL vote.

The director of this ostensibly Republican group is Amanda Carpenter, a political commentator for CNN and the author of “GASLIGHTING AMERICA: Why We Love It When Trump Lies To Us.”

The chairman and founding director of Defending Democracy Together is Bill Kristol; he’s also chairman of the board for the Republican Accountability Project. He is about as much of a conservative Republican as I am a leftist Democrat. He describes President Biden as a "moderate." To give an idea of where his head is, here’s an article he wrote for his publication THE BULWARK this summer.

https://www.thebulwark.com/seven-entrepreneurial-paths-toward-a-democratic-majority/

The great Kurt Schlichter has Kristol's number, along with that of every other pseudo-Republican who actually thinks the way to "save" the GOP from conservatives is to vote Democrat.

https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2021/08/26/the-shame-of-the-never-trumpers-n2594643

“We believe that Republicans in federal, state, and local government should protect the right to vote, protect our election systems from partisan or foreign interference, and help build trust in our democracy,” they say on their site. Funny, I thought that was the very purpose of conducting these audits. Do these people just not get that, or is something else really going on?

As a conservative, I never thought I’d be able to say “Thank Heaven for judges,” but we’ve actually seen a few recently who’ve stepped up to save the Constitution and take a stand for the justice, freedom and rationality that went out the window when Democrats took over the other two branches of government.

For instance, US District Judge Royce Lamberth ordered the director of the D.C. Department of Corrections and the warden of the D.C. Jail held in contempt for violating the civil rights of a January 6th Capitol riot defendant.

https://www.fox19.com/2021/10/13/judge-holds-dc-jail-officials-contempt-16-riot-case/

The defendant, Proud Boys member Christopher Worrell, broke his wrist in May, was recommended for surgery in June, but still hasn’t received it, nor has the jail complied with the judge’s order to turn over his medical notes. The judge said, “It’s clear to me the civil rights of the defendant were violated by the D.C. Department of Corrections. I don’t know if it’s because he’s a January 6 defendant or not.” I assume he’s just being judicious. I think we know the answer to that one.

If he were a leftist protester who’d attacked cops and set fire to a federal building, he probably would have long ago been released without charges. Just like if he were part of the two protests that took place this week in Washington in which leftists invaded and occupied federal buildings where officials were trying to conduct government business and were treated as if they were merely unexpected house guests and not “INSURRECTIONISTS!” Instapundit has that story, along with a meme that sums up the Democrats’ two-tiered “justice” system perfectly.

https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/479497/

And in a semi-victory, Marine Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller Jr., who was slapped with six charges and jailed for nine days for calling on top brass to take accountability for the disastrous Afghanistan pullout, was sentenced Friday. The prosecutors were pressing the judge to throw the book at him, but Scheller pleaded guilty to six misdemeanor counts and, in a surprise ruling, the judge sentenced him to receive a letter of reprimand and forfeit $5000 for one month’s pay.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/scheller-marine-who-criticized-afghanistan-withdrawal-sentenced-reprimand-pay-forfeiture

I think he was treated abominably, but there are military rules against publicly badmouthing your superior officers, no matter how much they deserve it, so you could argue that this was a reasonable level of punishment.

Now, since I’m not in the military, I’ll say it on his behalf: When are the top brass going to take accountability for the disastrous pullout of Afghanistan? And let’s make it clear up front: a letter of reprimand and a month’s salary will NOT do. When will they resign or face charges?

Whenever anyone questioned the endless lockdowns to try to stop the spread of a virus that was going to spread anyway (because that’s what airborne viruses do), they were always hammered by the Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) as reckless lunatics who didn’t care if people DIED!!

They had a good, power-expanding crisis going, and they didn’t want to consider any inconvenient questions, like, “Is this providing benefits that outweigh the many negatives, from economic devastation to kids losing precious school time to the physical and mental health strain from being stuck in isolation with no job?”

At long last, people are starting to wake up to the tragic costs of COVID prevention hysteria. We’ve seen it in the high rates of depression, lower school test scores and alarming increases in suicides during the pandemic lockdown. Johns Hopkins researchers found that during the first six months of 2020, suicides among black Maryland residents increased by 94%. Suicides among military members jumped by 15% (and what will President Biden’s threat of a dishonorable discharge for the unvaccinated do to that number?)

https://nypost.com/2021/10/01/military-suicides-rise-15-as-senior-leaders-call-for-action/

And now, the CDC reports that there were nearly 97,000 deaths by drug overdose last year, a 37% increase from the previous, non-pandemic year.

https://www.westernjournal.com/dem-devastation-america-suffers-record-drug-overdoses-since-covid-lockdowns-began/

These are tragic reminders that public health decisions aren’t a simple black-and-white choice between “good” and “bad.” Those who were so certain that theirs was the only right way to handle the pandemic assailed anyone who questioned them as dumb and uncaring. The truth is, we just weren’t suffering from tunnel vision, and we know that radical actions result in radical consequences, not all of them positive or even predictable. This is what happens when a sledge hammer is the only tool in your pickup truck.

Related: Law Professor Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit wrote an op-ed arguing that the American public becoming fed up and refusing to comply with more draconian edicts from (mostly) Democrat politicians is healthy.

https://nypost.com/2021/10/14/covid-regime-is-driving-americans-to-a-healthy-noncompliance/

This may be a case where the combined wisdom of the masses is not only greater than their elitist leaders, it may also finally force them to back down, because when enough people simply refuse to go along with their orders, they can’t arrest everybody. He makes an excellent analogy of marijuana, which is now legal in many states – except it actually isn’t. It’s still illegal under federal law. But when enough people decided to ignore that and treat it as legal, there was no way for the feds to stop them.

For instance, what if the Chicago Police union refused to comply with the mayor's vaccine mandate and threatened to leave the city with 50% fewer cops on the street? Considering what happens in Chicago even with a full contingent of cops, that would seem more dangerous than dropping the vaccine mandate. And what do you know? The union is threatening to do just that.

https://www.westernjournal.com/head-chicago-police-union-calls-officers-openly-defy-mayor-lightfoot/

And what if every business in New York or Los Angeles simply refused to demand that customers show their medical records or be denied service – or if we all committed civil disobedience by taking our kids trick-or-treating or celebrating Christmas together? There wouldn’t be a whole lot that the politicians, or even the omnipotent Dr. Fauci, could do about it.

I have a feeling that day may be coming soon, but the people who love having so much power won’t give it up easily. They’ll try to intimidate everyone by making examples of some. They won’t arrest criminals, drug addicts or illegal border crossers, but I suspect they’d gladly arrest people who refuse to wear a mask or get vaccinated. After all, those people are dangerous!

Great news for those of you who want to take your kids trick or treating or attend a Halloween carnival at your kids school! Dr. Fauci said it will be okay to have Halloween this year. I really hate to bust his bubble, but I honestly don’t need Dr. Fauci’s permission to have Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, or for that matter, going to church or a football game. When this whole pandemic started and President Trump was doing daily press conferences and answering hours of questions, I thought Dr. Fauci was an expert and we ought to listen to him. But as time moved on, I noticed that he changed his mind about as often as a baby changes a diaper and pretty much for being filled with the same stuff. Remember he adamantly told us NOT to wear a mask. It would be useless to protect us against the virus, and in fact would be dangerous for anyone but medical people to use a mask because we’d be touching the mask and our faces and it would be bad to wear a mask. A few months later, the same Dr. Fauci told us we had to wear a mask—and later even said we ought to wear 2 or even 3 masks. He told us if we shut everything down for 2 weeks, we’d flatten the curve. We’re going on 2 years and we’ve flattened the economy and destroyed a lot of small businesses. He told us it wouldn’t be safe to go to church if there were more than 10 people. A church with less than 10 people is probably a dead church anyway. But while church or a small mom and pop store was too dangerous to keep open because if we went there we would DIE, it was fine to go to Walmart or a big supermarket and be wall-to-wall with thousands of strangers. We’d be okay there. Fauci said sporting events in open air stadiums were too dangerous, but he never said that Antifa and Black Lives Matter riots where people crowded together to burn government buildings and police cars was a problem. He told us not to even think about having Thanksgiving with our families last year. Early on, he told us to wash all the vegetables, fruits, and canned goods coming into our homes. By summer, he said, “never mind—you can’t catch Covid by touching stuff.

The more this thing has gone on, the more I think Fauci enjoys being on TV and telling people what to do and if he changes what the “science says” then he gets to go on TV again and tell us that the science has changed. I wonder if he wants to really control the very real threat of Covid, or if he wants to control US? And if we are supposed to FOLLOW THE SCIENCE, but the science seems to keep changing and zig-zagging all over the landscape, how do you follow it? And if science is so unsure that it changes every few weeks, what does that say about the so-called science of climate change? When I was in college, we were told of a coming ice age in 10 years; 10 years later, we were told the ozone layer was disappearing and we were going to get toasted in 10 years; 10 years after that, global warming was going to melt all the glaciers and we’d be drowned by flooding in 10 years; 10 years later, it’s just climate change brought on by flatulence of cows, having cars, and flying in planes. If science is that uncertain, following it seems like following a 5 year old around in a toy store.

You would think that after one of his rabid followers nearly murdered Rep. Steve Scalise at a charity baseball game, that Sen. Bernie Sanders would have learned not to try to gin up harassment of his political opponents. These are, after all, the same leftists who are trying to blame the January 6th Capitol violence on former President Trump because he made a speech in which he called for peaceful protest.

Yet Sanders refused to sign a letter from fellow Senators condemning the nasty harassment of Sen. Kyrsten Sinema for not supporting the left’s $3.5 trillion spending orgy bill unless the letter also contained language criticizing her for not voting the way he wants (mighty big of you there, Bernie.) And now, he’s written an op-ed aimed at West Virginia voters, urging them to put pressure on their Senator, Joe Manchin, to force him to support it.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/manchin-dismissively-calls-sanders-a-self-declared-independent-socialist

It was the typical Sanders class envy/socialist blather, claiming this spending (which he wanted to be $6 trillion) would help the working families of West Virginia. (It would somehow do that by putting the energy industries they depend on to feed their families out of business while vastly expanding government, raising taxes, boosting inflation and enriching Democrat cronies such as unions and the “green energy” industry – but I digress.) Sanders also said polls show “overwhelming support” for this bill, which means nothing unless they were taken in West Virginia, which Manchin represents (that’s how a republic works, Bernie.) And he didn’t mention that those polls also show most people don’t know what’s in it. Here’s what’s really in it, if you’re interested:

https://hotair.com/jazz-shaw/2021/10/14/whats-really-inside-bidens-massive-spending-bill-a-whole-lotta-pain-n422330

Leftists are apparently so used to people caving in immediately every time they scream, “I’m triggered!” that Sanders and others of his ilk really believe these harassment tactics will work. So far, they only seem to be making Sinema and Manchin furious and less likely to compromise with people who are trying to bully them into submission, as you can see from Manchin’s blistering response to Sanders at the link above.

In one short, magnificent paragraph, Manchin skinned Sanders alive as an out-of-stater trying to tell West Virginians what’s good for them without knowing anything about them (to be fair, that’s what “Democratic” socialists do to everybody), gave him lessons in both economics and Senate math, doubled down on his opposition to “reckless expansion of government programs,” and finished with this haymaker: “No op-ed from a self-declared Independent socialist is going to change that.”

Nice touch, reminding West Virginians, who voted for Trump over Biden by 2-1, that Sanders isn’t even a Democrat, he’s an out-and-out socialist.

I doubt that the overaged spoiled brats of the left will learn from this that their public tantrums are not going to force Sens. Manchin and Sinema to buy them a big bag of candy. They’ll probably keep doing it. And while that’s childish and reprehensible, if it makes the two Senators even more resolute about saying no, for once, the left’s utter inability to learn from their mistakes could work out to America’s benefit.

Sunday Standard - October 17

October 17, 2021

October 17, 2021   

Blessings on you and your family, and from all the Huckabee staff! These are the top stories that ran this week on our website.

Today's newsletter includes:

  • MUST-READ: Woman who survived Maoist China comments on America in 2021
  • Trump to America: "DO YOU MISS ME YET?"
  • Hunter's laptop emails show funds intermingled with dad's
  • Biden makes an end-run around Americans' rights
  • "Huckabee" preview

Sincerely,

Mike Huckabee


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MUST-READ: Woman who survived Maoist China comments on America in 2021

By Mike Huckabee

The story of the day, or perhaps the year, comes from a mom in Loudoun County, which is one of two affluent Virginia counties currently embroiled in protests over race-based training being pushed on school kids. (The other is Fairfax County.) I don’t know if it’s too late for a confirmed left-leaning political hack like Attorney General Merrick Garland to have some sense knocked into him, but on the off-chance this woman’s story might make an impression, I sure hope he’s reading this.

The AG might not have known he was kicking a hornets’ nest when he issued a memo to various government agencies likening these justifiably angry parents to domestic terrorists and calling on law enforcement to deal with them accordingly, but he sure did, and thank God the parents and civil libertarians are stirring. We’ve heard more than enough criticism in recent days of parents daring to challenge the curriculum in their kids’ schools. This all comes down to the essential question of who will decide how children should be educated –- their own parents, or the government? Who has the final say?

Xi Van Fleet, who as a child endured the Maoist Revolution in China before immigrating to the United States, has spoken with FOX NEWS and other news outlets to explain how AG Garland’s Department of “Justice” and the National School Boards Association are using tactics similar to those she witnessed in Communist China to take control of children and prevent parents from having any say. If you think that sounds far-fetched, well...did YOU grow up in China during the Maoist Revolution?

https://www.foxnews.com/us/virginia-mom-survived-maoist-china-school-board-association-doj-communist-tactics

What she saw then was disturbingly similar to what we’re seeing in American “cancel culture.” The goal in those days was to cancel traditional Chinese culture and destroy their heritage. The spate of statue-toppling by leftist rioters that destroyed symbols of our national history would have been smiled upon by Chairman Mao.

“When I was in China,” she said, “I spent my entire school years in the Chinese Cultural Revolution, so I’m very, very familiar with the communist tactics of how to divide people, how they canceled the Chinese traditional culture and destroyed our heritage. All this is happening in America.”

There could be nothing more divisive than teaching children that, based on the color of their skin, they belong in one of two groups: the privileged oppressors and the victimized oppressed. But that’s exactly what “anti-racist” training does. To those who might still think “anti-racism” just means being against racism, I’m sorry, but that isn’t what it means at all. If only that were true.

And never mind the violent riots, arson and statue-toppling of last year that went virtually unpunished; Garland now wants to prosecute parents for threats and violence (of which he gave no specific examples) towards school personnel. He said that “threats against public servants are not only illegal, they run counter to our nation’s core values.”

I’ll tell you what runs counter to our nation’s core values: the government overriding parents to determine what their will children learn, even if the parents consider the force-fed curriculum to be child abuse.

Van Fleet, whose son graduated from Loudoun High School in 2015, gained attention in June when she spoke powerfully at a Loudoun County School Board meeting about what is wrong with race-based indoctrination such as Critical Race Theory. After Garland’s announcement of the tough stand he’d take against parents, she had more to say. “I do have a question,” she told FOX NEWS. “What’s [the] next step? Is the Tiananmen Square crackdown the next, or the parents who one day risked their lives just to speak out for the children. That’s why I’m here.”

Other parents are speaking up as well, though they are scared. Harry Jackson, president of the Thomas Jefferson High School PTA in Fairfax County, said parents are intimidated about speaking before the school board. “They have instilled fear within the parents,” he said. “They created fear amongst the community which you’re supposed to service and support.” Another parent, Suparna Dutta, who pulled her son out of that school, called Garland’s announcement “shocking.”

“I am scared,” Dutta said to FOX NEWS. “Yet, I believe I’m living in a time when if I don’t speak up for my child and if I don’t stand up for what’s right in America, I don’t know what the next generation will be left with.”

G. Q. Pan and Jan Jekielek of EPOCH TIMES also have an eye-opening story about Van Fleet and her experience during the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/virginia-mother-who-survived-maos-cultural-revolution-sees-parallels-in-america_4044797.html?utm_source=partner&utm_campaign=TheLibertyDaily

This is a premium story, but I’ll offer some highlights and commentary below. If you do subscribe to their premium service, you can see her interviewed on EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/i-want-to-wake-people-up-xi-van-fleet-survivor-of-maos-cultural-revolution_4045860.html

Van Fleet was a first grader when the Cultural Revolution started in China, she said. Traditional classes ceased for the older kids and they were inducted into Mao Zedong’s Red Guards, who set about destroying vestiges of traditional China. The Red Guards brought violence and destruction to anyone and everything they considered “counter-revolutionary.” The criminal justice system was paralyzed, she said, so they faced no consequences for what they did.

Consider the real violence going on in our country last summer, and how the perpetrators faced essentially no consequences for their criminal acts.

Van Fleet said the Red Guards attacked the “Four Olds”: old ideas, old culture, old customs and old habits. I can think of a few for the America of 2021:

Old ideas: Parents are in charge of their kids’ upbringing.

Old culture: We value monuments to our nation’s history.

Old customs: Biological men stay out of the ladies’ room.

Old habits: We reflexively rise for the national anthem.

She said the Chinese version of “cancel culture” grew to the point where they’d go to houses and destroy items reminiscent of pre-revolutionary China. “I remember this whole street was just a mess of things destroyed,” she said, “and the people, those homeowners, howling and crying.

If all this sounds extreme, Van Fleet says she can see the similarities here, with people afraid to speak out, lest they be called “racist.” The term “racist” no longer means anything but is used as a political weapon. “...In the last few years, it has changed its meaning,” she said. “Anyone who kind of disagrees with the ideology from the left becomes a racist.”

She also sees a big similarity between Critical Race Theory and policies implemented by Mao. Citizens were put into categories, the good “Five Red Categories” and the undesirable “Five Black Categories,” who were the descendants of rich farmers and other “class enemies.” Those people were humiliated and forced to go to “struggle sessions” where they were made to confess their privileged status. Does this sound a lot like CRT to you? It does to Van Fleet.

She describes CRT as Marxist class struggle rhetoric repackaged to focus on race so it works better in American society. And she would know. Once you see the similarities she’s pointing out, you can’t un-see them. So, parents --- everyone --- keep speaking out.

LEAVE ME A COMMENT ON MY WEBSITE, I READ THEM>>>


Trump to America: "DO YOU MISS ME YET?"

By Mike Huckabee

If you subscribe to the mailings from SAVE AMERICA PAC, you receive all the messages that former President Trump would likely be sending out on Twitter if Twitter hadn’t taken him off. They’re a mixed bag --- just as his tweets were, of course --- and a few of them would’ve perhaps been better left unsaid, but many are pithy and spot-on brilliant, and they include links to newsworthy articles.

Some are funny, too, such as the one he sent out on Thursday with the subject line, “DO YOU MISS ME YET?”

The full headline was: “ICYMI: ‘How’s Biden doing? Do you miss me yet?’ Trump attacks Biden’s mounting crises...” There’s a link to an article by Bob Crilley at the U.K.’s DAILY MAIL, and his headline goes on to include the words, “...with new poll giving him 30-point lead over 2024 Republican rivals DeSantis and Pence.”

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10088249/Hows-Biden-doing-miss-Trump-revels-Joes-mounting-crises.html

The Crilley story features a previous email from Trump that noted the many catastrophes erupting on Biden’s watch. “COVID is raging out of control, our supply chains are crashing with little product in our stores, we were humiliated in Afghanistan, our border is a complete disaster, gas prices and inflation are zooming upward --- how’s Biden doing? Do you miss me yet?”

That’s a rhetorical question; he knows the answer. Polling shows that President Trump is the runaway favorite to run in 2024. A Morning Consult poll for POLITICO published Wednesday showed that of almost 2,000 people polled, some 70 percent of Republicans said Trump should run again. As for the nomination, 47 percent of Republicans already thought he should get it, compared to 13 percent for former VP Mike Pence and 12 percent for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. (Mitt Romney got 3 percent; who ARE those people?)

But Trump has said publicly that he won’t make a decision until after next year’s midterm elections. Last week, it was reported that he wanted to go ahead and announce his intention to run but that aides talked him out of it. We don’t know if that’s true but wouldn’t be surprised.

At his rally in Des Moines on Saturday, he enumerated the many disasters that have resulted from the Biden Touch: massive illegal immigration, drug cartels flourishing, inflation, China taking over jobs, the Taliban ruling Afghanistan and more. It’s true: waking up every day to reports of the latest Biden-caused debacle is like watching a very slow-motion train wreck. It goes on and on, with gears grinding and seemingly endless destruction, and you don’t want to look but you do. It’s like a bad dream.

“There’s never been anything like what has happened,” Trump said in Des Moines. And he’s right. I say this having lived through the Carter administration. As bad as some things were then, this country faces more serious challenges now, every way we turn, from without and within.

So, if/when Trump does hit the comeback trail, some things are going to have to be different. Certainly Republicans have to do whatever it takes to have a transparent voting process in states that mismanaged that. We absolutely cannot stand for a repeat of 2020. And if the FBI tries again to tie the former President with the likes of Vladimir Putin, this will be met with howls of derision. I think those in the political middle who might have bought it the first time around are smart enough not to fall for it again.

The image of Trump throwing his MAGA hat into the ring again got us thinking about a commentary written almost a year ago by our staff writer/researcher Laura Ainsworth, about what she thought President and then-candidate Trump should say to America before the 2020 election. It turned out to be quite prescient in its description of a future Biden administration.

https://www.mikehuckabee.com/latest-news?id=40370D5E-09A1-452C-95C1-6AFB834DBD44

“Most Biden supporters really don’t know much about their own candidate --- his fading mind, his serious scandals, his lying and plagiarizing, his creepiness with women and girls, his singular lack of accomplishment, his malleability by the far-left and much more –- or even their own radicalized party,” she wrote at the time. “They just know they don’t like Trump. And for that reason, they’re ready to put into power the worst group of people imaginable.”

This all turned out to be true. The media hushed up the Hunter Biden laptop scandal and downplayed old Joe’s cognitive issues and all his other weaknesses. Most supporters assumed he was a moderate and had little idea what the country was in for with the far-left in charge. What’s also true is that we couldn’t have asked for worse people to run our country than those he brought in. Exhibit A: Attorney General Merrick Garland, a political hack who cares nothing even for the rights of parents angry at the indoctrination of their children.

Since the “Trump” that some voters hated was a fictional creation --- one that Trump admittedly played into with some of his tweets --- Ainsworth had wanted him to give a speech specifically addressing the way voters felt about him, and “most of all,” she wrote, “to show how dreadful for our country the alternative would be.”

“Because they don’t like ME,” she’d wanted him to say, “some Americans might unwittingly put into power a radical political machine that will decimate their most basic freedoms, with ruthless, violent tactics and a long list of demands that will change America into something unrecognizable, probably forever.”

The piece goes on about other forms of ruination a Biden presidency would bring: abuse of the justice system, money pouring in to radical leftist groups, the politicization of science (wow, that one went into overdrive), the continued decline of “journalism,” lax law enforcement, “anti-racism” dividing Americans, the rewriting of history, and more.

This was written in 2020 as a caution, but, sadly, it describes the chaos of 2021 America under the Biden administration. Trump lost, and it all happened. Actually, there was more; for example, the swift destruction of the southern border and trillions in crazy spending.

But this was the speech Trump should have given to the nation in 2020, to tell America who he really was, how much he loves our country, and to warn everyone of what was really hiding within the ultra-radical, rights-crushing Democrat party. Unfortunately, he didn’t. And so, simply because a lot of people didn’t like Trump’s rough style and his tweets, or believed stupid made-up stories about white supremacy and/or Russia collaboration, they gave the “unknown moderate” a try.

As a result, the margin of victory was so close in strategic counties that it’s not even possible without full, transparent audits in a number of states to prove who really won.

Disaster ensued on Day 1 of the Biden administration, and it is still ensuing. If Trump runs again, as he seems itching to do, he has to make sure the left doesn’t hijack the process as they did last time. One ray of hope: I do think voters have learned the hard way and will no longer let a few “mean tweets” stand in the way of what’s good for our country.

LEAVE ME A COMMENT ON MY WEBSITE, I READ THEM!


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Hunter's laptop emails show funds intermingled with dad's

By Mike Huckabee

When Joe Biden said he had never even spoken with son Hunter about his son’s foreign business affairs, the opposite was true, and today we all know it. Recall that he said on CBS News in October of 2019, “I have never discussed my business or their business, my son’s or daughter’s...because I know where I have to do my job, and that’s it, and they have to make their own judgments.” In Spartanburg, South Carolina, in August of 2019, he said, “I’ve never discussed with my son or my brother or anyone else anything having to do with their businesses. Period.” And he stated flatly to FOX NEWS’ Peter Doocy, “I’ve never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.”

Millions of people believed those words when they voted for him, but according to a McLaughlin & Associates poll, 4.6 percent of Biden voters –- easily enough to swing the election –- said they wouldn’t have voted for him for President if they had known about his family’s business dealings with China.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/media-s-hiding-of-hunter-biden-scandal-robbed-trump-of-clear-win-poll/ar-BB1aZGcF

Social media has continued to hush that up, even when it meant censoring the venerable NEW YORK POST, which broke the laptop story. It was labeled “Russian disinformation.” (By the way, that’s how you “rig” an election before you’ve cast even one fraudulent ballot.) Today, Biden is President of the United States, and life has gone on for the son of the President, with the news of him selling five of his “artworks” the other day for $75,000 a pop to mysterious unnamed buyers. All I can tell you about their identity is that they were not me.

https://www.businessinsider.com/hunter-bidens-art-gallery-arrangement-is-whacko-ethics-law-expert-2021-10

The POST has remained on the laptop story, however, with investigative reporter Miranda Devine scheduled to release her book on the grimy subject, LAPTOP FROM HELL, in about a month. And Britain’s DAILY MAIL is on it, too. They’ve just reported on more emails from Hunter’s abandoned laptop –- one of, at last count, three laptops that were either lost, stolen or left behind --- that show much more financial “intersectionality” between Hunter’s life and Joe’s. These include exchanges with Eric Schwerin, Hunter’s business partner at consultancy firm Rosemont Seneca, who also did his taxes. Schwerin was quite plugged into then-Vice President Joe Biden’s affairs –- more so, it seems, than was the White House –- even fielding offers for a book deal and managing the donation of his Senate papers to the University of Delaware. Typically, White House officials handle such donations, not outside business managers.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10070093/Joe-Biden-Hunters-shared-bank-accounts-make-president-target-FBI-probe.html

According to the DAILY MAIL, Joe Biden and his son even shared bank accounts and paid each other’s bills. The way they shifted funds around raises questions about whether money from Hunter’s dealings with both China- and Russia-based businesses was sent to their joint accounts.

That’s why President Biden could be drawn into the FBI investigation of his son. As a former prosecutor and expert on money laundering and criminal tax law said to the DAILY MAIL, “Whatever transaction you’re looking at, if there’s a connection to a family member or a friend, sure, the answer is yes [they would be investigated].”

One thing that might be discovered is whether or not funds from their joint father-and-son accounts were used to pay for Hunter’s week-long bender with a prostitute in May of 2018. But the sleazefest is really just one aspect of this. The DAILY MAIL report has much more detail on the nature of what the FBI might be looking at, and it’s bad, including corruption, money laundering and selling influence.

John Cassara, a former U.S. intelligence officer and Treasury special agent who specialized in money laundering investigations, said that “if Joe were not President, he would probably be in prosecutors’ crosshairs right now along with his son.” (I might say it another way: if he were not a Democrat President.) Ironically, what makes all of this especially egregious is that Biden IS President. “This sort of thing should not be happening,” Cassara said. “It undermines the full faith in the U.S. government. It undermines trust and our international reputation. It’s an embarrassment.”

FOX NEWS senior analyst Brit Hume appeared with Tucker Carlson Tuesday night to comment on this. A master of understatement, he first noted that “clearly, Hunter Biden crossed ethical lines in the activities he engaged in.” The idea that President Biden himself or his campaign might have profited from, say, Hunter’s dealings in Ukraine would “move the matter up quite another notch and add one more thing to the reasons why Joe Biden’s popularity rating has been plummeting...”

When asked by Carlson if we could be certain that Attorney General Merrick Garland will conduct a “free and fair’ investigation into both men, Hume had one word: “NO.”

Why such negativity? Simply put (and we agree), “The one thing that this Merrick Garland has turned out to be, for all of his reputation as being a fine jurist and a man who deserved a seat on the Supreme Court, he appears to be weak as water when it comes to upholding the independence of the Department of Justice and keeping the Justice Department out of politically motivated investigations.”

Looking into parents’ behavior as if they were terrorists, he said, is “something that no sensible attorney general would EVER allow himself to be involved in or give the green light to, and yet he did it. So, no, I don’t think we can depend on that at all. It might depend on investigative journalism to uncover this, or congressional investigations if the Republicans ever get control of one of both houses of Congress.”

He hopes that if the NEW YORK POST comes out with another Hunter laptop expose, the mainstream will not respond as “disgracefully” as they did last time with their move to shut it down. He doesn’t expect mainstream media to put their own investigative teams on it, though. They’d probably just minimally follow the story on a day-to-day basis. “That would be about the most we could hope for, but that’s a lot better than nothing, which is what we got last year from these, I think, politically corrupt news organizations.”

He used the border story as an example of something that wasn’t widely reported at first but that has finally broken through, as it’s so big the mainstream can’t get away with ignoring it. The same thing could happen with this.

He also pointed out that a President’s approval ratings are always a major factor in the midterm elections, and Biden’s are in the dumper, in part because of this. (I would add that it’s hard to tell how much of the drop is because of Hunter, as there are so many Joe Biden-caused catastrophes.) Hume sees the Democrats’ outlook for 2022, especially in the House, as “very poor” and thinks it’s likely they'll be swept out of both Houses. I’ve never been much on the concept of early voting, but in this case I wish we could vote today.

LEAVE ME A COMMENT HERE, I READ THEM>>>


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Biden makes an end-run around Americans' rights

By Mike Huckabee

Because of President Biden’s strict vaccine mandate, Americans are giving up their jobs, military heroes are facing dishonorable discharges, cities are losing desperately-needed first responders, already-strained hospitals and businesses are facing even worse staff shortages, unions are filing lawsuits, the supply chain is breaking down, and it’s rumored that resistance by airline pilots is largely responsible for hundreds of flights being canceled. All of that chaos is caused by the President’s wrongheaded and authoritarian actions that even he once swore he’d never take.

But for all the suffering and turmoil Biden is causing with his dictatorial vaccine mandate policy, one question remains: Where exactly is that policy?

https://www.westernjournal.com/bidens-vaccine-mandate-press-release-doesnt-actually-exist/

It doesn’t actually exist. At least not in any official form. He said he was going to order OSHA to make such a policy, but he’s yet to sign an executive order, so OSHA has yet to make the rule, and all these businesses are just enforcing what they anticipate OSHA might tell them to do. As Joy Pullman at the Federalist observes, there is no policy or order or OSHA rule: there’s nothing but press statements.

The legality of this all gets very tricky. The White House is treating this as an “emergency temporary standard,” but those can be challenged in court, and only one of the 10 ETS’s that have been issued in the past 50 years has been upheld. Once it’s actually issued, the lawsuits will hit, so we’re currently seeing all this upheaval due to nothing but a press announcement of Biden’s intention to issue an order to OSHA to make a rule that would likely be overturned in court.

In short, we have a complicated system in place to defend Americans’ rights, and this White House is doing an end-run around it and employers are just going along with it. We’ll see how long they continue to go along if the resistance to it among a large number of their employees continues to hold…

https://www.foxnews.com/media/pilot-biden-vaccine-mandate-southwest-we-have-all-control

And if entire states refuse to play ball.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/landonmion/2021/10/11/gov-abbott-signs-executive-order-banning-vaccine-mandates-n2597293

Whether you favor vaccine mandates or not, you should hope that this effort to exert such extreme control over American citizens and private businesses without constitutional authority fails because if it succeeds, imagine what other freedoms we’ll soon lose based on nothing more than a threatening press release.

LEAVE ME A COMMENT, I READ THEM>>>


"Huckabee" preview

By Mike Huckabee

There’s a chill in the air, but we have a hot new episode of “Huckabee” to warm you up tonight on TBN! I’ll talk with Arkansas Lt. Gov. Tim Griffin, and Tennessee Rep. David Kustoff will tell us about the Democrats’ plan to hire an army of IRS agents to snoop into all our bank accounts. On the lighter side, Internet chef Abby Turner will cook up a special fall chili recipe. We’ll have lots of laughs with “In Case You Missed It” and comedian Lee Hardin. And we’ll top it off with a classic soul/pop hit from the band Raydio.

Catch it all starting at 9 EST/8 CST, on TBN. To find out how you can watch TBN, from local cable and broadcast channels to streaming, visit https://www.huckabee.tv and click on “Channel Finder” on the top menu. You can stream previous episodes, highlights and online-only “Digital Exclusives,” including extended interviews, “In Case You Missed It” and “Facts of the Matter” segments, and extra performances by our great musical and comedy guests, all at https://www.huckabee.tv. You can also find past shows, highlights and digital exclusives on YouTube and my Facebook page.

Katie Couric goes there

October 15, 2021

Katie Couric is getting all kinds of backlash over her tell-all memoir “Going There,” but the latest could be the worst yet. It’s her admission that she edited an interview with the late Supreme Court Justice and liberal icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg to remove Ginsburg’s criticism of NFL National Anthem kneelers. Couric cut out Ginsburg’s comment that they were showing "contempt for a government that has made it possible for their parents and grandparents to live a decent life."

https://www.foxnews.com/media/katie-couric-ruth-bader-ginsburg-kaepernick-nfl-anthem-backlash

Couric claims she was “conflicted” because she was a “big RBG fan” and wanted to protect her because she was elderly and probably didn’t understand the question (yet liberals were fine with her staying on the Supreme Court until the day she died – think about that.) So she cut out the comment – although she did leave Ginsburg’s comment that the kneelers were “dumb and disrespectful” in her Yahoo News version of the story. I guess she assumed nobody would see that.

That linked story above contains just a fraction of the outraged responses to Couric’s “galaxy-level arrogance” in editing RBG to alter her comments to make them more PC. It also includes a reminder that this is not the only time she selectively edited stories to give them a preferred political slant, like the time she edited interview footage to make gun rights activists look too dumb to answer a question they had actually answered quite well.

But aside from Ms. Couric’s bias and lack of journalistic ethics, I want to point out another aspect of this story, and that’s the unjustified kneejerk assumption that RBG’s opinion was “incorrect” and required protection or censoring. Even a spokesperson for her estate tried to speak for her from beyond the grave by claiming she “misspoke.” How does he know? It sounds to me as if she was very clear in both her reasoning and her speech. It’s also one of the few things I ever agreed with her on, and so do tens of millions of other Americans.

If you think athletes who show open contempt for the nation that allowed them to be free, famous and wealthy are acting dumb and disrespectful, that’s a perfectly valid assessment. Please note that after I’m gone, if anyone tries to claim I “misspoke” and didn’t really mean that, then don’t listen to them. They’re as full of it as Colin Kaepernick.

Propaganda

October 15, 2021

One of the hallmarks of leftists is an unshakable belief in the power of propaganda to override obvious reality. I discussed this yesterday, in the story about Nancy Pelosi scolding reporters for not doing a good enough job of selling Biden’s massive spending and government expansion. They believe that the problem is never that their product stinks, it’s just that the “messaging” is off.

They also seem to believe that since they have so much of the media and social media acting as their unpaid propaganda arm, if they can keep anything negative off of those channels, then people will never know about it. If the media can suppress it, then it doesn’t exist. But it’s not just Hunter Biden’s laptop that disproves that.

Back in the old Soviet days, humorist P.J. O’Rourke wrote that whenever he traveled to nations behind the Iron Curtain, as soon as locals found out he was from America, they’d take him aside and privately tell him all the latest jokes about what incompetent nitwits their leaders were. The commies believed that just because they’d intimidated people into not criticizing them out loud and into voicing rabid support in public that they actually didn’t know they were living terrible lives of oppression and deprivation. Imagine Facebook bans backed up by gulags.

Fortunately, here in America, we still have some outlets for free speech (this newsletter for instance), but the leftist-supporting organs are trying to smother it, sometimes in hilarious ways. The biggest recent example was how an obscene chant against Joe Biden at a NASCAR race was turned into “Let’s go, Brandon” by an NBC reporter desperate not to admit what viewers were clearly hearing. But that didn’t make people stop cursing Biden, it just gave rise to a widely-merchandised “Let’s Go, Brandon” craze, which I like because it enables people to express their true feelings about Biden without cursing in front of the children.

The recent Disney-Plus “documentary” on Dr. Anthony Fauci also has a couple of websites scrambling for creative ways to cover up the public’s true reaction. The movie gives the fawning hero treatment to the government health bureaucrat that many people are well and truly sick of (in the latest Rasmussen survey, 54% of likely voters say he’s “lost all credibility”), and viewers made their feelings known.

At RottenTomatoes.com, the professional critics gave it a laughably high 91% positive rating while audiences gave it 2% (for comparison, they give the often-cited worst movie ever made, “Plan Nine from Outer Space,” 45%.) The disparity between the critics’ raves and the public’s disgust was so glaring that the website briefly disabled the public rankings, but now, they’re back. Silencing the public didn’t make the truth go away any better than it did for the USSR. The site did, however, put a disclaimer on the audience reviews, saying that “some viewers expressed their dissatisfaction with the subject matter by giving the documentary a Rotten rating.”

Funny, I read some of the reviews and they specifically cited how disappointed they were in the film itself for being a fawning fan letter rather than an honest, informative appraisal. Although they obviously don’t like Fauci, either, especially after seeing him in the movie, working at home under a giant painting of himself.

https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/478899/

The Internet Movie Database also showed its sympathies for Democrats by trying some blatant vote-rigging to hide the public’s hostility to the film. The average viewer rating was 1.6 out of 10, so they simply changed it to 5.8. I’ll assume they found a box of late ballots in a car trunk.

https://www.westernjournal.com/terrible-reviews-imdb-rigs-fauci-movie-scores-got-caught-forgetting-major-detail/

All these sites are accomplishing by falsifying their ratings systems is to destroy their own credibility, not restore Fauci’s. If they’ll do this, why should we ever trust their ratings of any film? Will they downgrade “Gone With The Wind” to one star for being politically incorrect, or tell us Al Gore’s global warming movie is better than “Citizen Kane?” I’d probably believe both of those claims before I’d believe that audiences gave “Fauci” a 5.8. Like P.J. O’Rourke, I’ve had too many people tell me privately what they really think of it.

White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain (sometimes referred to by the inadvertently insulting nickname of “Biden’s Brain”) had a shocking “Let them eat fruitcake” moment. Klain enthusiastically retweeted a post from a Harvard professor, dismissing worries about inflation and the supply chain crisis that might ruin Americans’ Christmas shopping as “high class problems.”

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/top-white-house-official-retweets-post-calling-inflation-supply-chain-issues-high-class-problems

An RNC spokesman fired back, "Struggling to pay for food, fuel, and housing because of rising prices is not a ‘high class problem.’ Biden is making everyone worse off, but instead of stopping the damage, their strategy is to try to gaslight Americans."

For the record, inflation is actually something that harms the lower and middle classes far more than the wealthy. If you have billions, like the Democrats’ Silicon Valley socialist donors, you don’t feel it when prices double. But if you’re on an hourly wage or a fixed income, the recent steep rises in the prices of food, gasoline, home heating and other necessities mean you have to make painful choices about what to give up to keep from going into debt.

The supply chain problems don’t just mean wealthy people will have fewer expensive gadgets to give at Christmas. Those are affecting the prices and availability of all goods. And if stores can’t get stock for Christmas, their most important selling season of the year, then whatever small businesses the Democrats actually allowed to survive the pandemic could go under.

President Biden did actually address the supply chain crisis (as usual, he showed up an hour late, spoke for 10 minutes and left without taking questions.)

https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2021/10/13/biden-remarks-on-supply-chain-disruptions-are-classic-biden-in-a-nutshell-n456380

Biden praised the “heck of a job” his “Supply Chain Disruption Team” was doing (just to be clear: are they in charge of solving or creating supply chain disruptions? Because if it’s the latter, they are doing a heck of a job.) He also seems to think he’s solved the problem by getting the Port of Los Angeles and unions to agree to work around the clock unloading ships. Good luck finding fully vaccinated people who will actually take those jobs and enough truckers to transport all those goods. Meanwhile, press secretary Jen Psaki was already warning that the Administration can’t guarantee Christmas presents will arrive on time.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/biden-praises-supply-chain-team-christmas

Finally, if the crisis is averted and Christmas shopping saved, you might want to thank Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. Although I’m sure the White House would take credit for it, just like they invented the COVID vaccines.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/stacey-lennox/2021/10/13/will-ron-desantis-save-christmas-n1523711

If you subscribe to the mailings from SAVE AMERICA PAC, you receive all the messages that former President Trump would likely be sending out on Twitter if Twitter hadn’t taken him off. They’re a mixed bag --- just as his tweets were, of course --- and a few of them would’ve perhaps been better left unsaid, but many are pithy and spot-on brilliant, and they include links to newsworthy articles.

Some are funny, too, such as the one he sent out on Thursday with the subject line, “DO YOU MISS ME YET?”

The full headline was: “ICYMI: ‘How’s Biden doing? Do you miss me yet?’ Trump attacks Biden’s mounting crises...” There’s a link to an article by Bob Crilley at the U.K.’s DAILY MAIL, and his headline goes on to include the words, “...with new poll giving him 30-point lead over 2024 Republican rivals DeSantis and Pence.”

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10088249/Hows-Biden-doing-miss-Trump-revels-Joes-mounting-crises.html

The Crilley story features a previous email from Trump that noted the many catastrophes erupting on Biden’s watch. “COVID is raging out of control, our supply chains are crashing with little product in our stores, we were humiliated in Afghanistan, our border is a complete disaster, gas prices and inflation are zooming upward --- how’s Biden doing? Do you miss me yet?”

That’s a rhetorical question; he knows the answer. Polling shows that President Trump is the runaway favorite to run in 2024. A Morning Consult poll for POLITICO published Wednesday showed that of almost 2,000 people polled, some 70 percent of Republicans said Trump should run again. As for the nomination, 47 percent of Republicans already thought he should get it, compared to 13 percent for former VP Mike Pence and 12 percent for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. (Mitt Romney got 3 percent; who ARE those people?)

But Trump has said publicly that he won’t make a decision until after next year’s midterm elections. Last week, it was reported that he wanted to go ahead and announce his intention to run but that aides talked him out of it. We don’t know if that’s true but wouldn’t be surprised.

At his rally in Des Moines on Saturday, he enumerated the many disasters that have resulted from the Biden Touch: massive illegal immigration, drug cartels flourishing, inflation, China taking over jobs, the Taliban ruling Afghanistan and more. It’s true: waking up every day to reports of the latest Biden-caused debacle is like watching a very slow-motion train wreck. It goes on and on, with gears grinding and seemingly endless destruction, and you don’t want to look but you do. It’s like a bad dream.

“There’s never been anything like what has happened,” Trump said in Des Moines. And he’s right. I say this having lived through the Carter administration. As bad as some things were then, this country faces more serious challenges now, every way we turn, from without and within.

So, if/when Trump does hit the comeback trail, some things are going to have to be different. Certainly Republicans have to do whatever it takes to have a transparent voting process in states that mismanaged that. We absolutely cannot stand for a repeat of 2020. And if the FBI tries again to tie the former President with the likes of Vladimir Putin, this will be met with howls of derision. I think those in the political middle who might have bought it the first time around are smart enough not to fall for it again.

The image of Trump throwing his MAGA hat into the ring again got us thinking about a commentary written almost a year ago by our staff writer/researcher Laura Ainsworth, about what she thought President and then-candidate Trump should say to America before the 2020 election. It turned out to be quite prescient in its description of a future Biden administration.

https://www.mikehuckabee.com/latest-news?id=40370D5E-09A1-452C-95C1-6AFB834DBD44

“Most Biden supporters really don’t know much about their own candidate --- his fading mind, his serious scandals, his lying and plagiarizing, his creepiness with women and girls, his singular lack of accomplishment, his malleability by the far-left and much more –- or even their own radicalized party,” she wrote at the time. “They just know they don’t like Trump. And for that reason, they’re ready to put into power the worst group of people imaginable.”

This all turned out to be true. The media hushed up the Hunter Biden laptop scandal and downplayed old Joe’s cognitive issues and all his other weaknesses. Most supporters assumed he was a moderate and had little idea what the country was in for with the far-left in charge. What’s also true is that we couldn’t have asked for worse people to run our country than those he brought in. Exhibit A: Attorney General Merrick Garland, a political hack who cares nothing even for the rights of parents angry at the indoctrination of their children.

Since the “Trump” that some voters hated was a fictional creation --- one that Trump admittedly played into with some of his tweets --- Ainsworth had wanted him to give a speech specifically addressing the way voters felt about him, and “most of all,” she wrote, “to show how dreadful for our country the alternative would be.”

“Because they don’t like ME,” she’d wanted him to say, “some Americans might unwittingly put into power a radical political machine that will decimate their most basic freedoms, with ruthless, violent tactics and a long list of demands that will change America into something unrecognizable, probably forever.”

The piece goes on about other forms of ruination a Biden presidency would bring: abuse of the justice system, money pouring in to radical leftist groups, the politicization of science (wow, that one went into overdrive), the continued decline of “journalism,” lax law enforcement, “anti-racism” dividing Americans, the rewriting of history, and more.

This was written in 2020 as a caution, but, sadly, it describes the chaos of 2021 America under the Biden administration. Trump lost, and it all happened. Actually, there was more; for example, the swift destruction of the southern border and trillions in crazy spending.

But this was the speech Trump should have given to the nation in 2020, to tell America who he really was, how much he loves our country, and to warn everyone of what was really hiding within the ultra-radical, rights-crushing Democrat party. Unfortunately, he didn’t. And so, simply because a lot of people didn’t like Trump’s rough style and his tweets, or believed stupid made-up stories about white supremacy and/or Russia collaboration, they gave the “unknown moderate” a try.

As a result, the margin of victory was so close in strategic counties that it’s not even possible without full, transparent audits in a number of states to prove who really won.

Disaster ensued on Day 1 of the Biden administration, and it is still ensuing. If Trump runs again, as he seems itching to do, he has to make sure the left doesn’t hijack the process as they did last time. One ray of hope: I do think voters have learned the hard way and will no longer let a few “mean tweets” stand in the way of what’s good for our country.

Leaked border documents

October 15, 2021

Fox News has obtained leaked Border Patrol documents showing that the Biden Administration has released at least 160,000 illegal immigrants into the US, most with little or no supervision, and broadly (and possibly illegally) expanded the limited parole system to make over 30,000 of them eligible for work permits (question to low-skilled minority Americans who were enjoying their first raises in years under Trump: how is that vote for Biden working out for you?)

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/leaked-border-patrol-docs-release-immigrants-us-biden-administration

This is hardly news to anyone who doesn’t get their news from the Biden-whitewashing media. Frankly, I’m surprised it isn’t more (and it soon will be, with massive caravans already on the way to our former Southern “border.”) The real news is Biden's abuse of limited paroles, which by law are to be granted “on a case by case basis and only for significant humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit” with recipients being closely monitored. Former Border Patrol Chief Rodney Scott said he never approved more than five or ten in a year. Biden is treating them like house brand Halloween candy and handing them out by the tens of thousands to anyone who shows up at our doorstep.

As you can see at the link, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has a whole bag full of “root causes” for the surge, none of which have anything to do with Biden reversing all of Trump’s successful border security measures and incentivizing illegal immigration. If you want to find the “root cause” of this disaster, stop looking in Central America and search 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

The story of the day, or perhaps the year, comes from a mom in Loudoun County, which is one of two affluent Virginia counties currently embroiled in protests over race-based training being pushed on school kids. (The other is Fairfax County.) I don’t know if it’s too late for a confirmed left-leaning political hack like Attorney General Merrick Garland to have some sense knocked into him, but on the off-chance this woman’s story might make an impression, I sure hope he’s reading this.

The AG might not have known he was kicking a hornets’ nest when he issued a memo to various government agencies likening these justifiably angry parents to domestic terrorists and calling on law enforcement to deal with them accordingly, but he sure did, and thank God the parents and civil libertarians are stirring. We’ve heard more than enough criticism in recent days of parents daring to challenge the curriculum in their kids’ schools. This all comes down to the essential question of who will decide how children should be educated –- their own parents, or the government? Who has the final say?

Xi Van Fleet, who as a child endured the Maoist Revolution in China before immigrating to the United States, has spoken with FOX NEWS and other news outlets to explain how AG Garland’s Department of “Justice” and the National School Boards Association are using tactics similar to those she witnessed in Communist China to take control of children and prevent parents from having any say. If you think that sounds far-fetched, well...did YOU grow up in China during the Maoist Revolution?

https://www.foxnews.com/us/virginia-mom-survived-maoist-china-school-board-association-doj-communist-tactics

What she saw then was disturbingly similar to what we’re seeing in American “cancel culture.” The goal in those days was to cancel traditional Chinese culture and destroy their heritage. The spate of statue-toppling by leftist rioters that destroyed symbols of our national history would have been smiled upon by Chairman Mao.

“When I was in China,” she said, “I spent my entire school years in the Chinese Cultural Revolution, so I’m very, very familiar with the communist tactics of how to divide people, how they canceled the Chinese traditional culture and destroyed our heritage. All this is happening in America.”

There could be nothing more divisive than teaching children that, based on the color of their skin, they belong in one of two groups: the privileged oppressors and the victimized oppressed. But that’s exactly what “anti-racist” training does. To those who might still think “anti-racism” just means being against racism, I’m sorry, but that isn’t what it means at all. If only that were true.

And never mind the violent riots, arson and statue-toppling of last year that went virtually unpunished; Garland now wants to prosecute parents for threats and violence (of which he gave no specific examples) towards school personnel. He said that “threats against public servants are not only illegal, they run counter to our nation’s core values.”

I’ll tell you what runs counter to our nation’s core values: the government overriding parents to determine what their will children learn, even if the parents consider the force-fed curriculum to be child abuse.

Van Fleet, whose son graduated from Loudoun High School in 2015, gained attention in June when she spoke powerfully at a Loudoun County School Board meeting about what is wrong with race-based indoctrination such as Critical Race Theory. After Garland’s announcement of the tough stand he’d take against parents, she had more to say. “I do have a question,” she told FOX NEWS. “What’s [the] next step? Is the Tiananmen Square crackdown the next, or the parents who one day risked their lives just to speak out for the children. That’s why I’m here.”

Other parents are speaking up as well, though they are scared. Harry Jackson, president of the Thomas Jefferson High School PTA in Fairfax County, said parents are intimidated about speaking before the school board. “They have instilled fear within the parents,” he said. “They created fear amongst the community which you’re supposed to service and support.” Another parent, Suparna Dutta, who pulled her son out of that school, called Garland’s announcement “shocking.”

“I am scared,” Dutta said to FOX NEWS. “Yet, I believe I’m living in a time when if I don’t speak up for my child and if I don’t stand up for what’s right in America, I don’t know what the next generation will be left with.”

G. Q. Pan and Jan Jekielek of EPOCH TIMES also have an eye-opening story about Van Fleet and her experience during the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/virginia-mother-who-survived-maos-cultural-revolution-sees-parallels-in-america_4044797.html?utm_source=partner&utm_campaign=TheLibertyDaily

This is a premium story, but I’ll offer some highlights and commentary below. If you do subscribe to their premium service, you can see her interviewed on EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/i-want-to-wake-people-up-xi-van-fleet-survivor-of-maos-cultural-revolution_4045860.html

Van Fleet was a first grader when the Cultural Revolution started in China, she said. Traditional classes ceased for the older kids and they were inducted into Mao Zedong’s Red Guards, who set about destroying vestiges of traditional China. The Red Guards brought violence and destruction to anyone and everything they considered “counter-revolutionary.” The criminal justice system was paralyzed, she said, so they faced no consequences for what they did.

Consider the real violence going on in our country last summer, and how the perpetrators faced essentially no consequences for their criminal acts.

Van Fleet said the Red Guards attacked the “Four Olds”: old ideas, old culture, old customs and old habits. I can think of a few for the America of 2021:

Old ideas: Parents are in charge of their kids’ upbringing.

Old culture: We value monuments to our nation’s history.

Old customs: Biological men stay out of the ladies’ room.

Old habits: We reflexively rise for the national anthem.

She said the Chinese version of “cancel culture” grew to the point where they’d go to houses and destroy items reminiscent of pre-revolutionary China. “I remember this whole street was just a mess of things destroyed,” she said, “and the people, those homeowners, howling and crying.

If all this sounds extreme, Van Fleet says she can see the similarities here, with people afraid to speak out, lest they be called “racist.” The term “racist” no longer means anything but is used as a political weapon. “...In the last few years, it has changed its meaning,” she said. “Anyone who kind of disagrees with the ideology from the left becomes a racist.”

She also sees a big similarity between Critical Race Theory and policies implemented by Mao. Citizens were put into categories, the good “Five Red Categories” and the undesirable “Five Black Categories,” who were the descendants of rich farmers and other “class enemies.” Those people were humiliated and forced to go to “struggle sessions” where they were made to confess their privileged status. Does this sound a lot like CRT to you? It does to Van Fleet.

She describes CRT as Marxist class struggle rhetoric repackaged to focus on race so it works better in American society. And she would know. Once you see the similarities she’s pointing out, you can’t un-see them. So, parents --- everyone --- keep speaking out.

Because of President Biden’s strict vaccine mandate, Americans are giving up their jobs, military heroes are facing dishonorable discharges, cities are losing desperately-needed first responders, already-strained hospitals and businesses are facing even worse staff shortages, unions are filing lawsuits, the supply chain is breaking down, and it’s rumored that resistance by airline pilots is largely responsible for hundreds of flights being canceled. All of that chaos is caused by the President’s wrongheaded and authoritarian actions that even he once swore he’d never take.

But for all the suffering and turmoil Biden is causing with his dictatorial vaccine mandate policy, one question remains: Where exactly is that policy?

https://www.westernjournal.com/bidens-vaccine-mandate-press-release-doesnt-actually-exist/

It doesn’t actually exist. At least not in any official form. He said he was going to order OSHA to make such a policy, but he’s yet to sign an executive order, so OSHA has yet to make the rule, and all these businesses are just enforcing what they anticipate OSHA might tell them to do. As Joy Pullman at the Federalist observes, there is no policy or order or OSHA rule: there’s nothing but press statements.

The legality of this all gets very tricky. The White House is treating this as an “emergency temporary standard,” but those can be challenged in court, and only one of the 10 ETS’s that have been issued in the past 50 years has been upheld. Once it’s actually issued, the lawsuits will hit, so we’re currently seeing all this upheaval due to nothing but a press announcement of Biden’s intention to issue an order to OSHA to make a rule that would likely be overturned in court.

In short, we have a complicated system in place to defend Americans’ rights, and this White House is doing an end-run around it and employers are just going along with it. We’ll see how long they continue to go along if the resistance to it among a large number of their employees continues to hold…

https://www.foxnews.com/media/pilot-biden-vaccine-mandate-southwest-we-have-all-control

And if entire states refuse to play ball.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/landonmion/2021/10/11/gov-abbott-signs-executive-order-banning-vaccine-mandates-n2597293

Whether you favor vaccine mandates or not, you should hope that this effort to exert such extreme control over American citizens and private businesses without constitutional authority fails because if it succeeds, imagine what other freedoms we’ll soon lose based on nothing more than a threatening press release.

Airline cancellations

October 13, 2021

Earlier this week, when Southwest Airlines was reeling from the cancellations of nearly 1,000 flights, they denied that it was due to employees protesting the COVID vaccine mandates. Instead, they blamed the weather and air traffic control issues, which mysteriously didn’t seem to be grounding any other airlines’ flights.

Biden press secretary Jen Psaki mocked Sen. Ted Cruz for suggesting it was vaccine resistance-related, snarking that he was a “business travel and health care expert.” Cruz shot back on Twitter that he heard directly from an informed source that it was a planned vaccine sickout, and it appears he was correct.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/megan-fox/2021/10/12/exclusive-southwest-whistleblower-canceled-flights-the-result-of-a-coordinated-protest-against-vaccine-mandate-n1523499

There’s a lot of information at that link, including a pilot telling Tucker Carlson that 30% of pilots are unvaccinated and if they’re fired, it will cause “massive disruptions in the supply chain.” But it’s a risk that many are willing to take on the general principle that a President should not have the power to dictate that Americans inject something into their bodies that they don’t want.

The anonymous Southwest Airlines whistleblower who spoke to PJ Media claims there are 22 airlines, along with truckers and other transportation employees, many of them connected via FreedomFlyers.org, who are banding together to fight vaccine mandates, so people should expect more disruptions in the coming days and weeks.

This movement is likely to grow as more workers realize that they have the power to push back. For instance, New York health care workers are in desperately short supply, and a federal judge just issued a temporary injunction against enforcing the state’s vaccinate-or-be-fired mandate on those with religious objections.

https://www.westernjournal.com/federal-judge-rules-religious-exemptions-vaccine-mandates-must-allowed/

Meanwhile, Biden’s OSHA has now finalized its rule requiring the mandate, making it more than just a threatening PR release. It’s setting the stage for a huge economic disruption over a disease whose case numbers have been dropping steadily since September 1st (from a peak of 191,863 new cases in the US to 52,327.) Biden might also try “following the science” and recognize natural immunity among the millions already exposed or the growing number of effective treatments. But he’s willing to risk imploding the economy over a forced vaccine mandate even with supply chain issues already reaching dangerous levels.

https://www.foxnews.com/media/supply-chain-crisis-national-emergency-home-depot-nardelli

All I can say is: “Heckuva job, Joe!”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi knows why she’s having so much trouble getting a Democrat Congress to pass $5 trillion in new spending. No, for once, she didn’t blame Trump. She scolded reporters, “Well, I think you all could do a better job of selling it, to be very frank with you.”

https://redstate.com/jeffc/2021/10/12/nancy-pelosi-scolds-reporters-for-not-selling-build-back-better-effectively-n455780

I guess she felt it necessary to remind them that as members of the news media, it’s not their job to report objectively on politics. It’s their job to go out and sell the Democrats’ crazy agenda to regular Americans who reject it because they actually have sense enough to know better.

Interestingly, Fox News reported that on Monday, Pelosi had talked about Democrats being willing to separate and back the vital parts of the massive spending package. But she backtracked after “progressives” threw a fit because they’re adamantly opposed to prioritizing certain spending. They insist on having it all.

I couldn’t think of a better description of “progressives” in general than people who refuse to prioritize the most important things and instead demand to spend an unlimited amount of other people’s money on absolutely everything on their wish list.

Aesop also described them perfectly in his fable, “The Dog and His Reflection.”

http://read.gov/aesop/026.html

Amazingly, that was 2700 years ago. Even Bernie Sanders wasn’t alive then.

Google's misdirection

October 13, 2021

You might have heard that Google is going to crack down on digital ads from “climate change deniers” to stop the spread of “misinformation” about the settled science of manmade global warming.

Now, you might think that free inquiry to challenge accepted premises and see if they can be disproven is the very essence of science. I always thought one great thing about science was that if every powerful institution on Earth believed something, but one guy with a telescope could disprove it, then the institutions had to admit they were wrong. But no more. We now have Big Tech overlords who have infinite wisdom to determine what is true, just as they determined that COVID-19 came from bats in a wet market that didn’t sell bats and that Hunter Biden’s laptop was just a fictitious creation of Russian propagandists.

Joe Cunningham at Redstate.com believes he knows why Google is taking this censorious stand now, and it has little to do with “misinformation.” It’s more about misdirection, or distracting people from what’s really going on at Google with Internet security and how they monetize mining your personal data. Also, they know Democrats hate anyone questioning apocalyptic climate predictions because that’s their excuse for printing money, and Google wants to stay on the good side of Congress.

https://redstate.com/joesquire/2021/10/11/heres-the-reason-google-is-going-after-climate-denial-right-now-n453532

Read that and you won’t have to worry about Google censoring content because you’ll be using DuckDuckGo or some other privacy-protecting search engine and browsing with Brave, Firefox or anything other than Google Chrome.

Speaking of the settled science of manmade catastrophic climate change that MUST NOT BE QUESTIONED, two scientists have written a report finding that virtually all predictions of changing climate through the end of this century are based on outdated scenarios and years-old data such as CO2 emissions that are ever-changing and no longer accurate.

https://issues.org/climate-change-scenarios-lost-touch-reality-pielke-ritchie/

It’s a long and challenging read, but well worth it. And I thought I’d better point it out to you because I assume Google won’t.

Defending Columbus

October 13, 2021

With Columbus Day behind us, I normally wouldn’t still be talking about ol’ Chris. But the assaults on Columbus (which are really an assault on the very existence of America) never stop. The liberal news outlets used the holiday to interview radical leftists and historical revisionists, and the Washington Post grabbed a plunger and tried to force its reputation even further down the toilet by printing a list of all remaining monuments to Columbus, which might as well have been titled, “The Vandals’ Roadmap.”

https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/478763/

So since the America haters refuse to stop attacking Columbus, I thought I’d go ahead and spend a little more space giving you some resources to bookmark so you can refute some of their historical misinformation (the diplomatic way of saying, “slanderous lies.”)

Here’s a link to the John Hinderaker article I referenced yesterday that includes a brief reality check on the real history of America and the Native American tribes.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/10/happy-indigenous-peoples-day.php

John Hirschauer at National Review has an even more in-depth look at the real Columbus and the complicated history and political pressures of his time, and it paints a picture quite at odds with the wild Hitler comparisons spewed by leftists today that have infected school textbooks and poisoned the minds of our children. He also notes that many of the stories of atrocities repeated about Columbus today came from uncorroborated attacks by his main political rival of the time. Treating them as solid history would be like trying to write an accurate account of the Trump White House by watching reruns of CNN.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/10/columbus-day-a-defense-of-christopher-columbus/

And if you’d like to take a real deep dive into this subject, retired college professor Armando Simon at the American Spectator did something few people do in this “I saw it on Twitter so I believe it” era: putting aside the recent historical revisionists with an ax to grind, he studied the firsthand accounts and official records of Columbus’ actions and words and his interactions with the Natives in the original Spanish. Here’s what he says these primary sources reveal about Columbus’ alleged crimes against humanity:

They are “a total fabrication. Not true. Not true at all. They are fictional…There is not one single historical source in existence that substantiates any of the ‘crimes.’ Not one. None!”

Simon says the idea that Columbus was a monster on the level of Attila the Hun was created centuries later and has become conventional wisdom, just like the false idea created in the 1800s that he set sail to prove the world wasn’t flat (nobody believed the world was flat in 1492.) To cite just one example, Columbus is accused of selling Native women into sexual slavery, including a nine-year-old girl. But records show that he actually protested mistreatment such as sexual slavery to the Spanish Crown, “including that particular 9-year-old girl.”

You might be astonished to read the original accounts and see how they've been grotesquely distorted by people with a political agenda to turn American children against their own nation. On the other hand, if you’ve ever watched MSNBC, you might find it eerily familiar.

For once, let’s let Columbus speak for himself. Hirschauer quotes him as writing something that could be aimed directly at today’s Twitter mobs who have accomplished nothing of note with their own lives other than to attack, slander and tear down others:

“Let those who are fond of blaming and finding fault, while they sit safely at home, ask, ‘Why did you not do thus and so?’ I wish they were on this voyage; I well believe that another voyage of a different kind awaits them, or our faith is naught.”

Historian Samuel Eliot Morison interpreted (I believe accurately, for once) Columbus to mean, “In other words, to hell with them!”

When Joe Biden said he had never even spoken with son Hunter about his son’s foreign business affairs, the opposite was true, and today we all know it. Recall that he said on CBS News in October of 2019, “I have never discussed my business or their business, my son’s or daughter’s...because I know where I have to do my job, and that’s it, and they have to make their own judgments.” In Spartanburg, South Carolina, in August of 2019, he said, “I’ve never discussed with my son or my brother or anyone else anything having to do with their businesses. Period.” And he stated flatly to FOX NEWS’ Peter Doocy, “I’ve never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.”

Millions of people believed those words when they voted for him, but according to a McLaughlin & Associates poll, 4.6 percent of Biden voters –- easily enough to swing the election –- said they wouldn’t have voted for him for President if they had known about his family’s business dealings with China.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/media-s-hiding-of-hunter-biden-scandal-robbed-trump-of-clear-win-poll/ar-BB1aZGcF

Social media has continued to hush that up, even when it meant censoring the venerable NEW YORK POST, which broke the laptop story. It was labeled “Russian disinformation.” (By the way, that’s how you “rig” an election before you’ve cast even one fraudulent ballot.) Today, Biden is President of the United States, and life has gone on for the son of the President, with the news of him selling five of his “artworks” the other day for $75,000 a pop to mysterious unnamed buyers. All I can tell you about their identity is that they were not me.

https://www.businessinsider.com/hunter-bidens-art-gallery-arrangement-is-whacko-ethics-law-expert-2021-10

The POST has remained on the laptop story, however, with investigative reporter Miranda Devine scheduled to release her book on the grimy subject, LAPTOP FROM HELL, in about a month. And Britain’s DAILY MAIL is on it, too. They’ve just reported on more emails from Hunter’s abandoned laptop –- one of, at last count, three laptops that were either lost, stolen or left behind --- that show much more financial “intersectionality” between Hunter’s life and Joe’s. These include exchanges with Eric Schwerin, Hunter’s business partner at consultancy firm Rosemont Seneca, who also did his taxes. Schwerin was quite plugged into then-Vice President Joe Biden’s affairs –- more so, it seems, than was the White House –- even fielding offers for a book deal and managing the donation of his Senate papers to the University of Delaware. Typically, White House officials handle such donations, not outside business managers.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10070093/Joe-Biden-Hunters-shared-bank-accounts-make-president-target-FBI-probe.html

According to the DAILY MAIL, Joe Biden and his son even shared bank accounts and paid each other’s bills. The way they shifted funds around raises questions about whether money from Hunter’s dealings with both China- and Russia-based businesses was sent to their joint accounts.

That’s why President Biden could be drawn into the FBI investigation of his son. As a former prosecutor and expert on money laundering and criminal tax law said to the DAILY MAIL, “Whatever transaction you’re looking at, if there’s a connection to a family member or a friend, sure, the answer is yes [they would be investigated].”

One thing that might be discovered is whether or not funds from their joint father-and-son accounts were used to pay for Hunter’s week-long bender with a prostitute in May of 2018. But the sleazefest is really just one aspect of this. The DAILY MAIL report has much more detail on the nature of what the FBI might be looking at, and it’s bad, including corruption, money laundering and selling influence.

John Cassara, a former U.S. intelligence officer and Treasury special agent who specialized in money laundering investigations, said that “if Joe were not President, he would probably be in prosecutors’ crosshairs right now along with his son.” (I might say it another way: if he were not a Democrat President.) Ironically, what makes all of this especially egregious is that Biden IS President. “This sort of thing should not be happening,” Cassara said. “It undermines the full faith in the U.S. government. It undermines trust and our international reputation. It’s an embarrassment.”

FOX NEWS senior analyst Brit Hume appeared with Tucker Carlson Tuesday night to comment on this. A master of understatement, he first noted that “clearly, Hunter Biden crossed ethical lines in the activities he engaged in.” The idea that President Biden himself or his campaign might have profited from, say, Hunter’s dealings in Ukraine would “move the matter up quite another notch and add one more thing to the reasons why Joe Biden’s popularity rating has been plummeting...”

When asked by Carlson if we could be certain that Attorney General Merrick Garland will conduct a “free and fair’ investigation into both men, Hume had one word: “NO.”

Why such negativity? Simply put (and we agree), “The one thing that this Merrick Garland has turned out to be, for all of his reputation as being a fine jurist and a man who deserved a seat on the Supreme Court, he appears to be weak as water when it comes to upholding the independence of the Department of Justice and keeping the Justice Department out of politically motivated investigations.”

Looking into parents’ behavior as if they were terrorists, he said, is “something that no sensible attorney general would EVER allow himself to be involved in or give the green light to, and yet he did it. So, no, I don’t think we can depend on that at all. It might depend on investigative journalism to uncover this, or congressional investigations if the Republicans ever get control of one of both houses of Congress.”

He hopes that if the NEW YORK POST comes out with another Hunter laptop expose, the mainstream will not respond as “disgracefully” as they did last time with their move to shut it down. He doesn’t expect mainstream media to put their own investigative teams on it, though. They’d probably just minimally follow the story on a day-to-day basis. “That would be about the most we could hope for, but that’s a lot better than nothing, which is what we got last year from these, I think, politically corrupt news organizations.”

He used the border story as an example of something that wasn’t widely reported at first but that has finally broken through, as it’s so big the mainstream can’t get away with ignoring it. The same thing could happen with this.

He also pointed out that a President’s approval ratings are always a major factor in the midterm elections, and Biden’s are in the dumper, in part because of this. (I would add that it’s hard to tell how much of the drop is because of Hunter, as there are so many Joe Biden-caused catastrophes.) Hume sees the Democrats’ outlook for 2022, especially in the House, as “very poor” and thinks it’s likely they'll be swept out of both Houses. I’ve never been much on the concept of early voting, but in this case I wish we could vote today.

It’s already clear that Attorney General Merrick Garland has far too much conflict of interest to be involved in the dispute between parents and “educators” (I use the term loosely) over race-based indoctrination---I mean, training. But there’s a new report of yet another conflict, this time relating to his threatened “scrutiny” of election audits. So, is there anything to it?

First, regarding the conflict that is confirmed, yes, Garland’s son-in-law is the founder of a company that produces 25 percent of such materials for American schools, in an expanding industry that is making money hand-over-fist. It is impermissible that someone with such a tie should be targeting parents upset that their children are being spoon-fed such trash and ordering federal departments to essentially treat them as domestic terrorists. (Actually, it is impermissible for him to do this whether he has such a tie or not.) What’s even worse is that his memo calling for this looks for all the world like part of a coordinated political effort to keep protesting parents from weakening the current administration politically as we enter a new election season.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/garland-son-in-law-education-company-recommends-book-bill-ayers

But on top of that, CREATIVE DESTRUCTION MEDIA now reports that Merrick Garland’s wife, Lynn Garland, is “highly involved on an executive level” advising on election audits. Recall that Garland’s “Justice” Department threatened auditors –- this was in the context of the Maricopa County audit –-with new “scrutiny” and even possible criminal prosecution for participating in their planned election canvass, which later turned up a great many irregularities, some of which have been explained (or sort-of explained) by election officials but others not.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/garland-charts-doj-collision-course-with-maricopa-county-election-audit/ar-AAKXFjX

Yes, the DOJ would prosecute cases of voter fraud, Merrick claimed. But he went on to say that “many of the justifications proffered in support of these post-election audits and restrictions on voting have relied on assertions of material vote fraud in the 2020 election that have been refuted by law enforcement and intelligence agencies of both this administration and the previous one, and by every court, federal and state, that has considered them.”

Of course, he said this back in June, before the audit had reported a great many anomalies. Also, the fact that courts failed even to look at evidence because they considered the issue “moot” says nothing about the existence of fraud or the strength of that evidence. And, really, he's citing intelligence agencies here, after what we know about the FBI trying to sabotage Trump? Good grief.

Anyway, CD MEDIA turned up a report from December of 2018 called “Principles and Best Practices for Post-Election Tabulation Audits,” which lists Lynn Garland as executive editor. There must be a lot of Lynn Garlands, and we can’t independently verify that this is Merrick Garland’s wife. Perhaps CD MEDIA can, but they did not include that in the story we saw.

A pdf of the report features a long list of endorsers, including the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law, a leftist organization which has on its web page an analysis titled “Partisan Arizona Election ‘Audit’ Was Flawed from the Start.”

https://www.brennancenter.org

On its “Defend Our Elections” page, it does its best to keep the Russia Hoax alive: “In 2016, our election was attacked. Russians penetrated lists, hacked emails and targeted election officials with email scams,” etc. I will give them some credit, however, for recommending that paperless voting systems have a paper back-up.

But as we looked farther down the list of endorsers and checked into what they say about themselves on their websites, we were struck by how some were actually calling for some of the same common-sense election reforms we want to see, such as manual counting of actual paper ballots. So our first impression was surprisingly positive.

And look at this extremely pro-audit paragraph from page 4 of the report...

“Voices from across the political spectrum agree that we should be auditing our election outcomes. According to a 2018 Senate Intelligence Committee report, ‘States should consider implementing more widespread, statistically sound audits of election results. Risk-limiting audits, in particular, can be a cost-effective way to ensure that votes cast are votes counted.’ The bipartisan Presidential Commission on Election Administration recommended that audits ‘must be conducted after each election, as part of a comprehensive audit program,’ and specifically endorsed risk-limiting audits. The National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine’s 2018 consensus study report on election security similarly recommended audits that ‘include manual examination of statistically appropriate samples of paper ballots cast,’ and advocated implementing risk-limiting audits.”

And then there’s this on page 5. Note the second sentence...

“Nearly all US votes today are counted by computerized voting systems. Such voting systems have produced outcome-changing errors through problems with hardware, software, and procedures. Errors can also occur in hand counting of ballots or in the canvassing of results. Even serious errors can go undetected if results are not audited effectively.”

It also says, “Audits require human examination of voter-marked paper ballots --- the ground truth of the election.” Too bad so many elections officials didn’t take this advice to heart and instead chose to withhold the physical ballots.

And there’s this: “Elections belong to the public. The public must be able to observe the audit and verify that it has been conducted correctly, without interfering with the process.”

And this: “Audit processes must include a way to respond to circumstances that come to light affecting particular devices, ballots or contests.” Again, Maricopa County officials were not cooperative in this regard at all. Neither was Dominion Voting Systems.

Overall, this is a good report. If it was edited by the same Lynn Garland who is married to the attorney general who was threatening election auditors with criminal prosecution, then the two of them have likely had some interesting dinner table conversations on the issue of election audits. Still, even if his wife is involved in election audits in a positive way, this is one more issue from which Garland should recuse himself. (Of course, the report she is said to have edited came out in 2018, well before the accusations of cheating in 2020.)

CD MEDIA says this report with Lynn Garland's name on it turned up not in a Google search but with another search engine. They’re say they’re still trying to find out if she was paid for any of this work, and if so, who wrote the check. They also want to know if her husband disclosed her activities during his confirmation process. If this Lynn Garland is indeed Mrs. Merrick Garland, he should have.

……………………...

Thanks to those who responded to our commentaries about AG Garland’s outrageous and unconstitutional response to parents’ protests at school board meetings. We thought this reply made a good point...

From Mike:

The description "domestic terrorist" was first applied to Trump voters but has been followed by Americans opposed to vaccine and mask mandates [and] parents who voice their opposition to CRT at Board of Education meetings. The list of Americans who are not domestic terrorists is growing short.

From the Gov:

Shorter by the day, it seems. And watch out if you fall into all three categories! That’s a degree of “intersectionality” that might make the left seat you at a separate lunch counter.

The worldwide shortage of energy is forcing many nations to go back to using coal-fired power plants that were shut down in an overly-ambitious attempt to do away with carbon emissions. This has caused the price of coal to hit its highest level in a decade.

https://www.westernjournal.com/world-demand-coal-soars-democrat-gutted-mines-unable-rake-cash-america/

That would normally be great news for America’s coal-mining industry except for one thing: we barely have one anymore because Obama openly declared war on it to stop global warming. Remember John Kerry telling all the unemployed coal miners that they could get jobs building solar panels? Now the world is facing energy shortages and blackouts, and the solution is a fuel that we have in abundance but can’t supply anymore.

One of the hardest-hit nations is Germany, which (coincidentally?) also gave the most power over its energy supply to the greens. They shut down their coal and nuclear plants in favor of unreliable and inadequate green energy sources. For instance, they built a lot of solar panels, which last winter stopped functioning because they were covered with snow and ice during Europe’s coldest winter in a decade (wait, I thought snow and ice were a thing of the past…)

Here in America, the Biden White House is following the same disastrous plan on steroids, with massive amounts of spending planned on green energy initiatives while shutting down our domestic oil and gas industries and blocking new nuclear plants. Within months, we've already gone from energy independence back to begging OPEC to produce more oil. It’s a recipe for disaster that anyone with a brain could see coming just by looking at Germany’s experience. Sadly, we are currently under an Administration that not only can’t learn from others’ mistakes, it can’t even learn from its own.

This is one of the least-talked about but most important stories of the day. It’s about how President Biden isn’t merely demanding that all military service members get vaccinated for COVID or resign, he’s insisting that those who decline be dishonorably discharged. He also refuses to recognize an exemption for those previously infected, despite a growing number of studies showing natural immunity to be superior to vaccination.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/marktapscott/2021/10/08/biden-using-dishonorable-discharges-for-military-to-weaponize-covid-vaccine-n1522594

Republicans and some Democrats in Congress are fighting Biden on this, but with Democrats in charge, it’s doubtful they’ll be able to stop him. And just to be clear, the difference between an honorable and a dishonorable discharge is massive.

As Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall put it, a dishonorable discharge means “you’re never going to be able to get a job again. You’re going to lose your Second Amendment rights. They’re going to take away your VA health care benefits and your education.” Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford added that it means you’ll be “treated worse than a convicted felon.”

We’re talking about United States military troops who have made incredible sacrifices for their country and put their lives at risk to defend us all, many of them for a number of years, being condemned to that kind of treatment and losing all the benefits they've earned simply because they refuse a vaccine they don’t trust or don’t believe they need. Even if you think that’s a legitimate reason to discharge someone from the military, why would anyone be so petty as to condemn people whom we should be treating as heroes to so much hardship by making their discharge dishonorable?

This comes from a man who not only ran as a moderate, unifying return to “decency,” but who also never served a day in the military himself (he got a deferment from Vietnam for having asthma as a teenager.) It’s a nasty, groundless, vindictive and unpatriotic policy, and President Biden should be ashamed of himself for even thinking of imposing it.

Gibberish from the Left

October 11, 2021

For years, with the help of a complicit media, leftists have been drilling home the message that Republicans are dumb racists and that they are the truly smart people whose ideas work and will make America a Utopia. Problem is, that’s all a lie bordering on a psychotic delusion. There’s not a single idea that so-called “progressives” espouse that hasn’t been tried for well over a century and brought nothing but misery. Just ask Venezuelans, who used to enjoy a prosperous life until they elected a socialist leader, and now 76.6% of the population lives in “extreme poverty” (but not their socialist leaders, of course: they have billions tucked away in foreign bank accounts.)

Unfortunately, over time, leftists managed to hoodwink the voters into putting more and more of them into power until, like the proverbial dog that chased cars until he caught one and didn’t know what to do with it, they got into power and are imploding before our eyes. Yes, they’re still very dangerous because they have power until the next election and like all radicals are using their tiny majority to try to ramrod through massively destructive policies.

But they are learning just how many Americans oppose and resist their crazy ideas and how badly they crash and burn when taken out of the faculty lounge fantasyland and put into effect for real. We’re already seeing them resort to the authoritarian bullying, censorship and threats of jail that all statists fall back on when their failures become so glaring that the people start calling them out on it. And the pressure is starting to make some of them crack.

In fact, that’s the theme of several news stories that all came in at once: Leftists jabbering incoherent nonsense.

I could give you all sorts of examples of President Biden spouting gibberish, but let’s skip the obvious and focus on something he said that was semi-coherent but crazy. He actually bragged about how his draconian vaccine mandate is forcing huge numbers of Americans to lose their jobs.

https://redstate.com/bonchie/2021/10/07/joe-biden-brags-about-getting-americans-fired-in-rambling-mess-of-a-speech-n453314

Biden declared, “When you see headlines and reports of mass firings, and hundreds of people losing their jobs, look at the bigger story…United went from 59% of their employees vaccinated to 99%.” Yes, that’s what happens to percentages when you subtract a large subset from the whole. Countless people lose their jobs, already understaffed companies are even more understaffed, but the few who still have jobs are vaccinated, so in Joe’s world, that’s a win!

Well, I guess it’s as close to one as he’s had so far.

Nicole Hannah-Jones, the creator of the anti-American and historically illiterate “1619 Project” was roundly mocked for her attempt to brand school choice advocates as racist. In her never-ending quest to brand everything as white supremacy, Hannah-Jones tweeted, "Why do 'school choice' advocates never advocate eliminating school district boundaries/funding schools by local property tax and allowing poor, Black students to attend white, wealthy schools in neighboring municipalities? They don't really want choice, just privatization."

https://thepostmillennial.com/1619-project-founder-mocked-for-arguing-against-school-choice-by-proposing-school-choice/

She was quickly answered by people telling her that she’d just described precisely what school choice advocates like me have promoted for years: giving all students (especially poor black students stuck in a cycle of poverty because of bad inner city public schools run for the benefit of teachers’ unions instead of students) vouchers to attend safe, superior schools anywhere they want. She was actually arguing against school choice by arguing for school choice.

But when you talk about leftists spouting crazy gibberish, nobody can touch the queen, Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. Nobody but AOC could have squeezed this much ignorance into only a one-line tweet:

“Health care is not an ‘entitlement’ to be earned. It is a human right.”

https://tomknighton.substack.com/p/aocs-most-impressive-tweet

At the link, Tom Knighton takes on the task of unraveling all the “misinformation” packed like sardines into those two short sentences, from explaining the difference between a “right” and a “privilege” and why health care can’t possibly be a “right,” to explaining that “entitlements” aren’t earned. They’re things the government just gives people, like Medicaid or food stamps. You’d think AOC would know that, being a Congress member and all.

Even with all that, he failed to mention that AOC’s side of the aisle are currently the ones demanding that hospitals turn away unvaccinated people. Wait, I thought health care was a “right”?...

If you listen to this brain drool for very long, you start to understand why leftists are desperately trying to declare logic to be a white supremacist concept and ban it.

It’s been a big, bad week for social media, with Facebook in the news for an apparently fake “whistleblower” interview on 60 MINUTES meant to justify more online censorship of conservatives. Then Facebook –- the whole blasted thing –- crashed for hours on Monday, sending its value crashing, too, albeit only temporarily, on paper.

Also this week, our staff writer Laura Ainsworth reacted to the attempt by another social media platform, Nextdoor, to control what jokes “neighbors” get to laugh at after someone posting non-PC “blonde jokes” was completely denied access to the site. They call it “being in jail.” Her pointt: that this platform isn’t a REAL conversation among neighbors, because real conversations aren’t monitored, censored and shaped. Deciding what people can laugh at is just one of numerous ways they do it.

https://www.mikehuckabee.com/latest-news?id=1E82ADEA-40B6-47AB-8425-3D4890AC08B2

On Thursday, she posted the link to her article on Nextdoor as well, as a few people there had asked just how “local” Nextdoor is. Answer: It might look local, but it’s not. It’s HUGE –- based in San Francisco, headed by people from around the world, many with backgrounds in academia in fields such as social psychology, and quite global in its scope, as it’s now in 11 countries and is valued in the billions of dollars. It will be interesting to see if they send Laura to “jail” for starting a conversation about this (or maybe daring to tell a few “blonde” jokes herself). But we’re happy to “out” another social media behemoth that refuses to just let us talk to each other, that insists on shaping and tweaking our conversation.

But as we come to the end of our week, there’s still more social media news, starting with Google, which used to admonish its employees not to “be evil” but from what we understand no longer does. Google is shaping the conversation as well, and is in the news today for its decision to de-monetize advertisers, publishers and YouTube creators (YouTube is part of Google) whose content denies the existence of human-caused climate change.

Here is the new policy in Google’s own words…

https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/11221321

This policy will “prohibit ads for, and monetization of, content that contradicts well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change. This includes content referring to climate change as a hoax or a scam, claims denying that long-term trends show the global climate is warming, and claims denying that greenhouse emissions or human activity contribute to climate change.”

Google arrived at this policy after consulting “authoritative sources,” notably “experts who have contributed to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change.” Well, we certainly wouldn’t want to contradict THEM.

The Google Ads team says they’ll use a combination of “automated tools and human reviews” to enforce this new policy. They say that “other climate-related topics” are still okay, including “public debates on climate policy, the varying impacts of climate change, new research and more.” But these all have to start from the assumption that human-caused global warming is a scientific fact.

Question: what if the “new research” cast doubt on “well-established scientific consensus” concerning temperature predictions or the role played by greenhouse gasses, for example? Would they even allow that discussion?

By the way, Google’s new climate change policy ties in nicely with the Department of Homeland Security’s new focus. We all know our homeland could use a lot more security right now, but pish-posh. DHS has been busy putting together a “Climate Action Plan” for its employees, monitoring employees’ progress in “climate literacy” (that means using the right vocabulary) as they complete their training on the climate, and assessing “employee understanding of climate change impacts and environmental justice.”

https://cnsnews.com/article/national/susan-jones/border-hemorrhages-dhs-releases-climate-action-plan-which-must-be

It looks very involved. But for those who desire extra credit, there’s even an employee honors program to reward the wokest of the woke. Meanwhile, we have NO security on our southern border, and unvetted Afghans from Taliban-istan are being flown to America and then disappearing from our military bases.

Anyway, these new attempts to shape our national conversation on climate change come on the heels of YouTube also banning “misinformation” on vaccines. Their definition of “misinformation” in this context is any claim that “vaccines approved by health authorities are dangerous or don’t work.” This isn’t just for COVID-19 vaccines, but for all approved vaccines. At the moment, however, the decision mostly impacts YouTube content that discusses possible risks of COVID vaccines.

YouTube will allow video of people sharing their “personal experiences with vaccination” but will remove that as well if the channel it's on “demonstrates a pattern of promoting vaccine misinformation.” They might also require "context," such as statements from experts, to counter negative information. We call this "micromanaging the message."

They’re also terminating the channels of prominent anti-vaxxers. Some of these already had been taken down, but now the rest will go. These were part of what was dubbed “the Disinformation Dozen” by a group called --- get ready --- the Center for Countering Digital Hate.

https://www.npr.org/2021/05/13/996570855/disinformation-dozen-test-facebooks-twitters-ability-to-curb-vaccine-hoaxes

We were curious about what something called the “Center for Countering Digital Hate” might be. They describe themselves as “a not-for-profit NGO [non-governmental organization] that seeks to disrupt the architecture of online hate and misinformation.”

https://252f2edd-1c8b-49f5-9bb2-cb57bb47e4ba.filesusr.com/ugd/f4d9b9_b7cedc0553604720b7137f8663366ee5.pdf

As I have made clear repeatedly, I am vaccinated myself and would never tell someone not to get vaccinated. But the government shouldn’t be forcing vaccination on anyone, or nudging businesses to do it, either. Vaccination for COVID is a decision that should be made by each one of us with the help of good, trusted medical professionals. At the same time, there is a lot of valid information out there about the risks of these vaccines, and when YouTube starts censoring channels and terminating accounts, some of the valuable stuff it is bound to get caught in the net.

We’ve linked to studies and commentaries that, if they were presented in video form, would no longer be permitted on YouTube, as they discuss the risks and questionable effectiveness of the vaccines. We’ve also talked about natural immunity and how well a growing number of experts say it compares to vaccine-induced immunity. Will talk about natural immunity be verboten, too? And will stories like this one about rare, fatal reactions be squelched?

https://thelibertydaily.com/death-by-medical-tyranny-mother-forced-to-get-jab-to-be-a-room-mom-dies-from-blood-clots/

So, class, here’s what we’ve learned this week: Google says that on YouTube, you can’t present research on climate change that goes against the “consensus,” or else you’ll be de-monetized. Also on YouTube, you can’t critically examine the possible risks and drawbacks of vaccines, or else your videos will be removed and your account likely terminated. And on Nextdoor, you can’t even tell a “blonde” joke, or else you’ll go to jail. What’s the world coming to?

At least some Republican legislators were looking at the problem this week.

https://cnsnews.com/article/washington/megan-williams/sen-barrasso-facebook-starting-look-more-and-more-big-tobacco


New poll

By Mike Huckabee

Do you think Joe Biden has done a better job than Donald Trump handling the fight against COVID-19?

Anser this question, plus questions about Afghanistan, Biden's competency, the economy and the border here:

https://www.mikehuckabee.com/biden-leadership-poll?=morningemail 

Cancel Culture conitnues

October 8, 2021

Whenever someone prominent, such as Bill Maher, denounces cancel culture, two things inevitably happen: (1.) online mobs declare that cancel culture doesn’t exist; and (2.) they demand that the person saying that it does be canceled.

This laughable lack of self-awareness is to be expected of self-righteous young radicals who’ve had their empty minds poisoned by their leftist teachers. But when the “Burn him at the stake for heresy!!” mentality is exhibited by people who are supposed to be mature adults of advanced education and superior intellect, that’s when you know we have a real problem.

Here are just a couple recent examples of respected scholars and scientists who have seen speeches canceled or been suspended or fired because they riled up the mindless mob by expressing some completely rational viewpoint.

https://redstate.com/alexparker/2021/10/07/mit-boots-science-professor-following-his-triggering-take-on-diversity-equity-and-inclusion-n453007

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/robert-spencer/2021/10/05/madness-ucla-suspends-professor-for-refusing-to-assign-grades-based-on-skin-color-n1521910

In that second story out of UCLA, a highly-regarded professor of 40 years’ standing was suspended and has endured vilification and even profane, anti-Semitic death threats. All for refusing a "woke" student’s demand that he give black students extra points on the final just because all the racism makes them too traumatized to be able to study and score as high as students of other races.

In a sane world, anyone would instantly recognize who’s the real racist in that story, and it’s not the professor, who insists on grading everyone by the same standard. George W. Bush had a term for that kind of condescending attitude: “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” It’s no longer soft, but is now enforced with an iron fist. And it’s called “progressivism” or “anti-racism,” but it’s still just old fashioned racism under new names.

Sen. Bernie Sanders refused to sign a letter signed by fellow Senators, condemning the activists who harassed Sen. Kyrsten Sinema and filmed her inside a women’s restroom as they harangued her to vote for Biden’s $3.5 trillion spending orgy bill.

https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/sanders-refused-to-sign-letter-condemning-sinema-confrontation-report-says

It’s no surprise to hear that Bernie is a-okay with any sort of tactics as long as they advance his socialist agenda. Generations of previous socialists were infamous for not letting people’s individual rights stand in the way of imposing their agenda by any means necessary.

I’d also like to add that in addition to knowing nothing about civility, manners or basic human decency, Bernie is (like all socialists) also ignorant of math.

https://redstate.com/bonchie/2021/10/01/bernie-sanders-may-be-a-delusional-communist-but-hes-also-really-bad-at-math-n450628

Bernie railed on Twitter that two Senators “cannot be allowed to defeat what 48 Senators and 210 House members want.” Uh, Bernie? Those two Democrats plus the 50 Republicans who all oppose this bill add up to 52 against, 48 for. And there are 435 House members, so 210 is also a minority.

As the Redstate article points out, Bernie seems to think it’s the obligation of Democrat Senators to vote for what their party leaders want, even if the voters who elected them oppose it. And if it’s something he really wants, then it should pass even if a majority opposes it.

And what do “Democratic” socialists call this? “Protecting democracy!”

This is one of those “Are you really that stupid or do you just think I am?” arguments. President Biden tried to blame the need to raise the federal debt limit on (you guessed it) President Trump and his “reckless tax and spending policies” that Biden claims added $8 trillion to the debt in four years.

https://www.westernjournal.com/biden-blames-trumps-reckless-tax-spending-policies-need-raise-debt-ceiling-now/

Reality check: under the eight years of Obama/Biden, the debt doubled from $10 trillion to $20 trillion, and that was without a pandemic to deal with. They also had the first trillion-dollar deficits in history. Under Trump, the economy boomed, unemployment plummeted to record lows and there were no trillion-dollar deficits for three years. Then, China (yes, I said it) unleashed a pandemic, and the government had to spend trillions of dollars to keep the shut-down economy afloat. Democrats not only supported that spending, many complained it wasn’t nearly enough.

And now Biden actually wants us to believe that it’s Trump’s fault that we have to raise the debt limit, even as he’s pressuring Congress to pass nearly $5 trillion in additional spending.

So for the record, no, I’m not stupid enough to believe that it’s Trump’s fault we have to raise the debt limit. Are you, Mr. President? Really?

Although maybe he does believe that most Americans are stupid enough to believe that...

https://www.westernjournal.com/biden-slip-just-little-thinks-american-people/

"Changed circumstances"

October 6, 2021

Citing “changed circumstances,” the Supreme Court vacated a district court ruling that the Trump White House couldn’t use Pentagon funds to build a border wall. The SCOTUS also ordered the notoriously leftwing 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to reconsider its ruling upholding the original district court decision.

https://www.westernjournal.com/biden-dealt-major-blow-biden-dealt-major-blow-as-scotus-orders-lower-court-to-reconsider-border-wall-funding-changed-circumstances-orders-lowers-court-reconsider-border-wall-funding-changed-circu/

Trump had declared the porous border a national emergency, but on his first day in office, President Biden halted border wall construction, calling it a waste of money (it’s a microscopic fraction of the money he’s pushing to spend, BTW) “that diverts attention from genuine threats to our homeland security.”

It’s not clear what the SCOTUS means by “changed circumstances.” Are they referring simply to the change in Administrations rendering the case moot, or that the change in the situation at the border has made it clear this is a genuine emergency? I’m not a legal scholar so the only thing I can say with certainty is that the #1 genuine threat to our homeland security at the border is President Biden.

I’m very glad to see that Attorney General Merrick Garland’s plan to engage federal, state and local law enforcement to intimidate parents who protest the actions of leftist schools boards is being met with the overwhelming furious backlash it deserves. One commentator said this might be the straw that broke the camel’s back (sorry for triggering any animal lovers) for the Democrats’ dwindling hopes in the midterm elections. This is such an outrageous assault on the most basic rights of all citizens to engage in free speech and protest, and of all parents to have a say in how their children are educated, that the outrage cuts across all political and racial lines.

To be clear: I'm not defending anyone who makes actual physical threats against school board members. But Garland cited no examples of actual threats to justify this. Instead, his statement included vague and overly broad terms such as “harassment” and “intimidation,” which signals that this is really an abuse of power designed to chill free speech. He also offered no justification for literally making a federal case out of these hypothetical threats, which are already covered by laws and police on the local level. The only reasons to federalize this are to assert more control in picking targets and to ramp up the intimidation factor (ironically, Garland is the one who seems to be guilty of attempting to harass and intimidate people.)

Here’s a round-up of just some of the reactions to this Orwellian abuse of power:

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis blasted Garland for “weaponizing the DOJ by using the FBI to pursue concerned parents and silence them through intimidation,” adding, “Florida will defend the free speech rights of its citizens and will not allow federal agents to squelch dissent.” His spokeswoman also called it “despicable and un-American,” saying, “Florida law enforcement is perfectly capable of responding to crimes in Florida, and we have never heard the FBI suggest otherwise. However, disagreement is not harassment. Protest is not terrorism, unless it involves rioting, looting, and assault, like some of the left-wing protests of summer 2020.”

https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2021/10/05/desantis-throws-down-the-gauntlet-confronts-garland-on-troubling-fbi-announcement-n452335

Speaking of that, while the DOJ and FBI busy themselves with surveilling Trump voters and intimidating concerned parents, murders took the biggest spike in history in 2020, nearly 30 percent (thanks, all you police-defunding blue state Governors, mayors and city councils!)…

https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/573550-murders-up-30-percent-in-largest-increase-on-record

And while the FBI is ignoring that, they’re also doing virtually nothing about actual violent terrorists and anarchists like Antifa, as long as they’re on the left.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/spencerbrown/2021/10/04/fbi-admits-agents-dont-track-antifa-violence-vandalism-n2596814

IMO: A shocking violation

October 6, 2021

This is an outrage and in my opinion a shocking violation of the Hippocratic Oath. The Colorado health system UCHealth has reversed an earlier approval for a life-saving kidney transplant for a woman in stage five renal failure because she and the donor are both unvaccinated for COVID. She was told she’ll be removed from the transplant list if she didn’t take the vaccine.

https://www.foxnews.com/us/colorado-health-system-denies-kidney-transplant-unvaccinated

Earlier, she was told that the vaccine would not be a prerequisite for her surgery, and she’s willing to sign a waiver absolving the hospital of any responsibility, but that’s not good enough. The hospital says contracting COVID raises the mortality risk for transplant patients, so apparently, they’re willing to let her go without a kidney and die for certain in order to slightly lower her risk of dying. She’s now scrambling to find a hospital outside Colorado that will do the surgery.

Recently, late night host Jimmy Kimmel proposed that hospitals should turn away unvaccinated people and let them die. Now, we’re seeing that shocking proposal being put into effect. Incidentally, this was the same Jimmy Kimmel who tearfully promoted Obamacare by declaring that medical care was a human right. If so, then are hospitals and the government now deciding who qualifies as human?