Victor Davis Hanson: The Real Reset

 

Victor Davis Hanson thinks that things will get better. His column at American Greatness, “The Real ‘Reset’ Is Coming” concludes:

In the November 2022 midterms, we are likely to see a historic “No!” to the orthodox left-wing agenda that has resulted in unsustainable inflation, unaffordable energy, war, and humiliation abroad, spiraling crime, racial hostility—and arrogant defiance from those who deliberately enacted these disastrous policies. 

What will replace it is a return to what until recently had worked. 

Closed and secure borders with only legal and measured immigration will return. Americans will demand tough police enforcement and deterrent sentencing, and a return to integration and the primacy of individual character rather than separatist fixations on the “color our skin.”

The public will continue to tune out of the partisan and mediocre “mainstream” media. We will see greater increased production of oil and natural gas to transition us slowly to a wider variety of energy, strong national defense, and deterrent foreign policies.

The prophets of the new world order sowed the wind and they will soon reap the whirlwind of an angry public worn out by elite incompetence, arrogance, and ignorance.

I hope he’s right.  But if election integrity is not restored, all bets are off.  His full column is here.

# # #

Julie Kelly on political retribution: Canada and America

 

Julie Kelly has been exposing the unlawful incarceration without due process of the January 6 “insurrectionists.”  Here’s a short extract from her report at American Greatness:

. . . As freedom-lovers justifiably recoil at Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s crackdown on vaccine mandate protesters, Americans worry the same sort of political retribution could happen here. I’m sorry to report, it already has.

The scenes from Ottawa are matched or surpassed by the images here, including thuggish cops attacking January 6 protesters with mace and explosive devices. The difference? Instead of mounted police trampling a woman, ours merely shot and killed one woman and beat up a few more.

What the Trudeau regime is now unleashing against the truckers and their supporters has been underway in America for more than a year. Using January 6 as a pretext, the Biden regime is brandishing its authority to crush political dissent. Now, it appears Trudeau and his apparatchiks are stealing the U.S. Justice Department’s playbook of power and pain. 

The comparisons are stark.  . . .

Plenty more here. And it is not pretty.

# # #

It’s official: Lockdowns were useless

 

Eric Lendrum at American Greatness has shocking news: 

A newly-released study from the prestigious Johns Hopkins University revealed that the sweeping lockdowns in response to the Chinese coronavirus had “little to no effect on COVID-19 mortality.”

According to the Washington Free Beacon, the study was conducted through an analysis of 24 different studies that all focused on government mandates ordering the closure of various aspects of everyday life, including school and business shutdowns, mask and vaccine mandates, and stay-at-home orders, among others.

The comprehensive review, conducted by Johns Hopkins’ Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise, determined that these measures collectively reduced the rate of COVID fatalities in America and Europe by a mere 0.2 percent.

When the studies were narrowed down to individual types of lockdown measures, such as stay-at-home orders alone, the survey revealed that stay-at-home orders actually slightly increased the number of deaths during COVID. ...

Shocking!  Full report is here.

# # #

VDH: Totalitarian Wokeism

 

Victor Davis Hanson knocks another one out of the park. His “Wokeism is A Cruel and Dangerous Cult” at American Greatness begins:  

Wokeism has been described by its critics as the omnipresent use of race—and to a lesser extent, gender—to replace meritocracy and thus ensure equality of result. What follows from implementing that ideology are reparatory actions to reward those of the present by atoning for the injustices done to others in the past. 

Some see it as an update of 1960s cultural Marxism fads. Others scoff that it is just a return to 1980s-style political correctness. 

Still more see it as the logical successor to 1990s-type race, class, and gender obsessions—albeit with a shriller and more dangerous Jacobin, Soviet, and Maoist twist. Wokeism’s hysteria also invites comparisons to the Salem witch trials and McCarthyism. 

But few have described wokeism as the cruel creed that it is. 

Wokeism’s natural logic is to destroy the lives of people of both genders, of all races, and—if need be—those of every age, all to leverage an otherwise unworkable ideological agenda. It is nihilist and destroys everything it touches. It tears apart foes and friends alike, whether by fueling media-driven hatred of Donald Trump or faux-deification of the disaster that is now Joe Biden. 

One of the take-away quotes: "Equity in our Orwellian world is not equality, but payback." The full article is here. Recommended.

# # #

Britain, Czech Republic, Israel: no vaccine mandates!

 

Debra Heine at American Greatness reports:

Great Britain, the Czech Republic, and Israel are backing away from COVID vaccine mandates amid increasing evidence that the leaky vaccines are making the pandemic worse.

It is becoming harder to deny the glaringly obvious facts that COVID infection rates are increasing worldwide in proportion with the rate of vaccination, and that the injections have dreadful adverse side effects which may be contributing to a marked increase in all cause deaths.

In light of growing awareness that the vaccines are failing, it should not be a surprise that Moderna and BioNTech stocks are down 8-10 percent this week, 60 percent since August.

. . .

It’s a start. Read the full report here. 

# # #

We live in a Police State

 

Debra Heine report at American Greatness:

Dr. Robert Malone, Renowned Physician and Inventor of mRNA Technology, Permanently Banned From Twitter

Dr. Robert Malone, internationally recognized physician, medical scientist and inventor of mRNA and DNA technologies, was permanently banned from Twitter on Wednesday.

Malone had been arguing that the risks of the COVID vaccines outweigh the benefits when his account was suspended.

. . .

“We all knew it would happen eventually,” the doctor wrote in a post on Substack. 

Today it did. Over a half million followers gone in a blink of an eye. That means I must have been on the mark, so to speak. Over the target. It also means we lost a critical component in our fight to stop these vaccines being mandated for children and to stop the corruption in our governments, as well as the medical-industrial complex and pharmaceutical industries.

So, please spread the word – share this on your own twitter feed or whatever social media venue you wish.

Malone’s other social media links are:

https://gab.com/RobertMaloneMD
https://gettr.com/user/rwmalonemd
https://www.linkedin.com/in/rwmalonemd/

And his website is: www.rwmalonemd.com.

. . .

Full report is here. See also report at Twitchy here.

# # #

Fauci is “just a bureaucrat”

 

At American Greatness, Dan Gelernter describes the Orwellian Dr Fauci:

Anthony Fauci is a terrible man. And he has been identified in the public mind with a great deal of the evil in our current situation. But the real danger in Fauci is that not that he is unique, but that he is typical. Fauci is just a bureaucrat. He is no worse and—this is the key point—no better than the vast army of faceless fascists who have insinuated themselves into every aspect of our daily lives. His medical experiments on dogs and children are just routine to a genre of people whose idea of right is aligned entirely and absolutely with anything that will increase their own power and authority.

Fauci lacks the imagination and the intelligence to become a tyrant-king, but he offers the king his own insatiable greed, an eager helping hand, an impenetrable stupidity, a mind totally divorced from absolute moral distinctions. He will never be the top man, but he is just as dangerous in his enabling role—he represents the rest of government: the No. 2 man, all the way down to number 3 million. And apparently, we do have about 3 million federal government employees at this point—let that sink in for a moment. One percent of the country spends their lives taking money from the rest. We could call them one-percenters . . .

This is not to suggest that federal bureaucrats are evil—only that their jobs deliberately slice away their humanity, and suppress, through rules and regulation, the care they might otherwise have for a poorer neighbor. Bureaucracy allows people like Fauci to get the money and power they crave in the only way they understand—not by adding value or inventing new things, but simply by stealing it from other people.

. . .

Full article is here. 

# # #

Cracked Icons of the Left

 

Image credit:  Legal Insurrection

The inimitable Victor Davis Hanson provides a glimmer of hope in his American Greatness piece “Cracked Icons: The Corrupt and Mediocre Heroes of the Left are Imploding”:

With fits and starts, we are slowly returning to reality after four years of mass hysteria. Our media-deified, progressive icons are finally being exposed as the deceivers they always were.

. . .

He closes with “Basement Biden”:

Do we remember old Joe Biden from Scranton? He was the media fiction who hid his dementia in his basement for a year, spouting that Trump had wrecked everything and he would bring about decency, prosperity, an end to the virus, and “healing.” 

The Biden candidacy was one of the most cynical in American history. The unhinged far-Left adopted a befuddled Biden as the respectable veneer necessary to see their hard-core, but stealth socialist agenda finally enacted. Key to a virtual presidency would be virtual voting, as 102 million mail-in and early votes were never subject to the previous standards of authentication and statistical rejection rates of the past—rendering Election Day voting mostly a memory.

Good Joe was billed as the antithesis to the tweeting Bad Trump. Yet he clearly wasn’t. Even Joe’s tweets (e.g., “We are with you, Jussie”) were often more ridiculous.

Within days the “moderate” Joe Biden set in place policies that were guaranteed to begin wrecking the country, to send his polls down into the 30s, to ensure the likely wipe-out of his congressional majorities in 2022, and to make himself and the media who created his myth disliked, and the laughingstock of the country. Trump became unpopular when over 90 percent of media coverage was negative, and the Left concocted a never-ending circus of hoaxes, starting with Russian collusion; but Biden is disliked, despite an obsequious media and weaponized bureaucracies on his side.

We are in the first 10 months of a cognitively challenged president who is deteriorating geometrically not arithmetically, with a vice president in waiting whom the nation fears is more dangerous, even knowing Biden is half-senile. He may be reaching the point of embarrassment at which the media and Left no longer find him useful and begin leaking and staging his exit.

Single-handedly the Biden puppeteers have managed to restore the Trump record of achievement simply by doing the opposite of what Trump did, thereby ensuring their own failure and reminding voters of what once was working. 

Biden may end up with the most unrecognized achievement of the modern age: the radical transformation of leftwing Latinos into a conservative majority of fed-up voters—a development that will likely cause the Left to demand an end to open borders on the assumption too many Mexicans and Central Americans are ending up like wizened Cuban and Venezuelan immigrants.

We could add other fallen heroes of the Left who once saturated our recent air waves—Robert Mueller and his dream team that would rid the world of Trump, and the quartet of John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, and Andrew McCabe. They, by their dishonesty, prevarications, and careerism have almost single-handedly tarnished the reputations of the Washington-based intelligence and investigatory agencies. Yet now, the Left has no more need of them. They are already fading from the public awareness, as careerists who managed to erode support from all those who once most readily defended their own institutions.

The lesson of these fallen icons? 

They were deified for larger reductionist and anti-Trump agendas. Yet they were also always dispensable when their utility eroded, due to their mediocrity—of such a magnitude that even our American Pravdas could no longer continue to manipulate them for advantage.

Hanson further expands on “icons” Jussie Smollet, the Cuomo brothers, Kamala Harris, Adam Schiff, and BLM.  I hope he’s right (he usually is).  Full column is here.

# # #

Victor Davis Hanson: The Pillars of Our Civilization

 

Victor Davis Hanson is not optimistic.  He concludes his American Greatness essay “Losing Confidence in the Pillars of Our Civilization”:

In the current crime wave, brazen lawbreakers enjoy de facto immunity. Mass looting goes unpunished. Indictments are often aimed as much against those who defend themselves as against criminals who attack the innocent.

Conservatives now have lost their former traditional confidence in the administration of justice, in the intelligence and investigatory agencies, in the nation’s military leadership, in the media, and the criminal justice system. 

No one yet knows what the effect will be of half the country losing faith in the very pillars of American civilization.

His full article is here.  

# # #

Julie Kelly: horrific update on Jan 6 protesters

 

photo credit: timesofisrael.com

For months, Julie Kelly at American Greatness has been digging and digging into the arrest and detention without due process of protesters at the Capitol on January 6.  It’s worse than we thought.  Much worse.  Here’s a brief extract from Ms. Kelly's column yesterday:

. . . [Ryan] Nichols’ account is detailed in an appalling new court filing that confirms what American Greatness has reported for months: on January 6, D.C. Metro and Capitol police assaulted nonviolent protesters with explosive devices, rubber bullets, tear gas, and in some cases, their own fists and batons. A tunnel on the lower west side of the Capitol building became a dangerous—and, likely for at least one protester, deadly—battle scene as police viciously attacked American citizens on the “hallowed” grounds of the U.S. Congress.

Nichols, of Texas, has been behind bars since his January 18 arrest; he sits in the D.C. jail specifically used to house January 6 detainees, charged along with Harkrider with multiple offenses including assault of a police officer, civil disorder, and unlawful possession of pepper spray.

So, what on Earth turned two decorated veterans with a history of helping people in crisis into “insurrectionists” who attacked police officers? It was what they saw when they approached the tunnel around 3 p.m. on January 6. “They hear people screaming in pain and crying for help—women and old men are bloodied and injured,” McBride wrote in a motion seeking Nichols’ release. “Training and instincts kick in and they head to the tunnel, wondering if an accident had happened and if other people were even more seriously injured.”

McBride viewed three hours of surveillance video captured by Capitol security camera—the extensive system captured at least 14,000 hours of footage that the Justice Department and Capitol police are desperate to keep away from public view—and described for the first time what happened inside the tunnel where a combination of D.C. and Capitol police, ostensibly, were stationed to prevent protesters from entering the building:

“[Just] after 4:00 pm, Ryan is sprayed multiple times by an officer standing on a ledge in the tunnel,” McBride wrote in a November 1 filing. “He is also separated from a woman who stood next to Ryan at different times at the Western Terrace. She was middle aged and nice. Ryan promised to keep an eye on her. The woman was wearing a red shirt and a MAGA hat. Shortly thereafter, officers begin terrorizing people in and around the tunnel. People are screaming and getting crushed. There is a pile of human beings stacked on top of each other at the tunnel entrance. People are trapped and there is nowhere to go.”

McBride focused on the conduct of one officer in particular, with badge number L359 and wearing a white shirt. The unidentified officer begins “to beat a man for no apparent reason . . . [and] beats the man so badly that the man crawls over to the woman with the MAGA hat.” . . .

Much more here.  One reader comment suggested printing out the column and sending it to your representative in the House to ask what he/she can do. 

# # #

A View From Abroad

 

If you have been distressed at America’s downward spiral and dismayed by a media that will not report honestly, you are not alone. At AmericanGreatness, Conrad Black has the bad news:

After three weeks in Europe and extensive discussions with dozens of well-informed and highly placed individuals from most of the principal Western European countries, including leading members of the British government, I have the unpleasant duty of reporting complete incomprehension and incredulity at what Joe Biden and his collaborators encapsulate in the peppy but misleading phrase, “We’re back.” 

As one eminent elected British government official put it, “They are not back in any conventional sense of that word. We have worked closely with the Americans for many decades and we have never seen such a shambles of incompetent administration, diplomatic incoherence, and complete military ineptitude as we have seen in these nine months. We were startled by Trump, but he clearly knew what he was doing, whatever we or anyone else thought about it. This is just a disintegration of the authority of a great nation for no apparent reason.”

. . .

. . . And there is no precedent for the completely avoidable and shaming debacle of the American defection from its own alliance and helter-skelter flight from Afghanistan, leaving thousands of desperate people of many nationalities who had relied upon the United States, to fend for themselves against the new terrorist regime that seized power there (and $85 billion of U.S. military hardware along with it).

. . .

The thought of the most successful alliance in history being “led” for three more years by an American president whose round-the-clock gaffes are not protected in Europe as Biden is in the United States by a totalitarian social media platform cartel and terminally biased national political media is a subject of profound and general disconcertion. 

Mr. Black’s full article is here.  I don’t agree with everything he says, but he brings a sobering perspective from our erstwhile allies overseas.

# # #

Liberals Keep Voting for the Progressive Left

 

Dennis Prager posted "The Left Is Evil and Liberals Keep Voting for Them" last week at AmericanGreatness.  As we head into the next election, maybe we can try again to explain to our liberal family member and friends. 

. . . liberalism and leftism have virtually nothing in common. In fact, leftism is the enemy of liberalism—as a handful of liberals such as former New York Times writer Bari Weiss, former Young Turk Dave Rubin and others have come to recognize.

The Left has never believed in free speech and has suppressed dissent wherever it has assumed power. Free speech is a pillar of liberalism, and it has always embraced dissent.

The Left rejects the anti-racist ideal of colorblindness. Colorblind is the liberal racial ideal.

The Left supports racial segregation—such as all-black dorms and separate black graduations. Liberals have always advocated racial integration.

The Left has always loathed capitalism. Liberals were always major advocates of capitalism—recognizing that only capitalism has lifted billions of people out of poverty.

The Left has always been anti-Israel. Liberals have always been fervent supporters of Israel.

The Left has always held America in contempt. Liberals loved this country. A liberal wrote “God Bless America.” No leftist would write such a song.

Leftists want to defund the police. No liberal does.

The list of liberal-Left differences is as long as the list of left-wing positions.

Yet, it is liberals who keep the Left in power. Were it not for the liberal vote, the Left would have no power.

Why do liberals vote Left? Why do liberals vote for those who have contempt for virtually everything they, the liberals, hold dear?

The question is all the more apt given that it is conservatives who protect virtually every liberal value. It is conservatives who seek to preserve free speech, racial integration, love of America, a strong Israel and capitalism.

So why do liberals vote for the Left, for the very people who hold liberals and their values in contempt?

Mr. Prager has answers;  click here.

# # #

Conservatives: beware of Conservatism, Inc.

 

Ned Ryun at American Greatness cites Michael Anton’s Caveat Emptor for conservatives:

[Michael] Anton says, 

Now I’ll name names. If you’re at National Review, AEI or Heritage Foundation, your job is to pretend to oppose but really support; your whole business model as staff and management collapses if you don’t do that. It’s an open question why the donors donate to these places. I actually believe they’re deceiving their donors for the most part; that is I’d like to believe most donors to Conservatism, Inc. (NRO, AEI, Heritage) are writing checks because they believe these guys are fighting bad leftists, socialists, Communists, America-haters, critical race theory. They’re standing athwart yelling ‘Stop!’ They really think this. They don’t think, ‘I’m writing this check so that Rich Lowry, Ramesh Ponnoru, Jonah Goldberg and other fat useless grifters can have six-figure jobs to do nothing but sell out my country and pretend that they’re saving it.’ I don’t think they’re doing that, but to be completely clear, that’s what they’re doing.

There’s a lot to unpack just in that one 60-second statement, but Anton is absolutely correct: The overwhelming majority of “conservative” donors, knowingly or unknowingly, are getting played by Conservatism, Inc., which is really about 90 percent of the so-called “conservative” think tanks in D.C. but, quite frankly, it happens even in the smaller ones across the country.

. . .

If, as Anton says, donors think they’re funding these entities to actually fight the leftists, the question should be very simple: proof please of your work. Strongly worded statements and white papers don’t count, for the record. Show us the action items. . . .

If you contribute to conservative organizations or individuals, make sure the recipient(s) really is/are conservative.  Full article is here. 

# # #

These people live for power, so your vote won’t count

 

More A.F. Branco cartoons at Legal Insurrection

The other day at American Greatness, Dan Gelernter explained “Why Your Vote Won’t Count.”  He expects Terry McAuliffe to steal the upcoming Virginia gubernatorial election, just as he predicted that Gavin Newsom would beat the recall vote in California.  He thinks the game is rigged.  Those of us who follow Sundance and the Uniparty arguments will easily understand Mr. Gelernter’s main point:

The thing that ultimately renders our elections meaningless is people like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), Republican National Committee Chairman Ronna McDaniel and Georgia Governor Brian Kemp. They are the most important allies in the conspiracy to steal our elections, precisely because we expect them to be fighting on our side. Fraudulent elections cost Republicans seats—cost Republicans the presidency—so why wouldn’t the most powerful people in the Republican Party be fighting just as hard as they could to expose fraud and pass laws requiring in-person voting with ID?

Here’s the secret answer: These people hate you. Sure, they’re willing to pay lip service to America as a great nation, to churchgoing values, and so forth. But they’re really just Democrats with different special interests: They want to funnel all your money to military contractors instead of environmentalists. People like Donald Trump interfere with that. People like you interfere with that. Because you want the government to mind its own goddamned business. And, on that issue, Mitch McConnell is united with Senator Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) against you. 

These people live for power. They exist for the pleasure of spending your money to retain that power. And, now that they’ve managed to separate that power from public accountability by legalizing mail-in, no-ID, drop-box, multiple-ballot, and similar voting practices, you think they’re going to give all that up?

. . .

Unfortunately, Mr. Gelernter solution is a “Constitutional Convention that restores our elections to their original format: Voting on election day, and in-person.”  But a Constitutional Convention is not necessary;  the states can fix election laws on their own.  Yet what we are seeing right now in Michigan is that it’s always an uphill battle.  

# # #

 

Louie Gohmert: ivermectin is safe and effective

 

Congressman Louie Gohmert(R-TX) explained why the deliberate campaign to smear ivermectin as an effective treatment of COVID-19 is a “crime against humanity.” Below is most of his op-ed at American Greatness:

Just as we saw with hydroxychloroquine last summer, government alphabet agencies, the medical industrial complex, and their willing accomplices in the media have recently made it clear that there is yet another safe, effective treatment for COVID-19 they wish to torpedo. It’s the latest naughty word which will get you censored on social media and mocked and belittled by late-night “comedians”: ivermectin.

While ivermectin has been used by certain brave doctors around the world to treat COVID-19 for over a year now, it only recently became the target of a multi-pronged attack, with the U.S. government, the media, and Big Pharma all playing important roles in the deadly dystopian disinformation campaign against the drug. As more Americans became aware of ivermectin’s efficacy against COVID-19, like clockwork the government and its propaganda arm in the press jumped in to discredit it, referring to the drug snidely as a “horse dewormer.” 

We watched the FDA embarrass itself with its ridiculing tweet telling people “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it,” while linking to an agency article on why people should not use ivermectin to treat or prevent the China Virus. We saw Rolling Stone magazine forced to admit that its recent story about Oklahoma hospitals being overwhelmed by patients who overdosed on ivermectin was completely false. 

Pharmaceutical company Merck, which produces ivermectin, discredited its use for COVID by irresponsibly stating, “We do not believe that the data available support the safety and efficacy of ivermectin beyond the doses and populations indicated in the regulatory agency-approved prescribing information.” It is worth noting that Merck and Pfizer are developing their own oral antivirals that would directly compete with the cheap and effective ivermectin. These antivirals, unlike ivermectin, would be patented, creating the potential for pharmaceutical companies to rake in billions of dollars from their use.

What the globalist elites and the medical establishment won’t tell you is that those who discovered ivermectin and its use to treat parasitic diseases won a Nobel Prize in 2015—it was the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine’s only award for treatments of infectious diseases in six decades. 

Almost 4 billion doses of ivermectin have been prescribed for humans, not horses, over the past 40 years. In fact, the CDC recommends all refugees coming to the U.S. from the Middle East, Asia, North Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean receive this so-called dangerous horse medicine as a preemptive therapy. Ivermectin is considered by the World Health Organization (WHO) to be an “essential medicine.” The Department of Homeland Security’s “quick reference” tool on COVID-19 mentioned how this life-saving drug reduced viral shedding duration in a clinical trial. 

. . .   

Critics argue that ivermectin hasn’t been approved for use in the fight against COVID-19 and therefore should not be prescribed to patients. Doctors, however, often prescribe drugs to help patients that aren’t necessarily approved for their particular ailments—it’s called “off-label” prescription and according to the American Medical Association Journal of Ethics, 10-20 percent of all prescriptions are prescribed in this fashion.

Make no mistake, the evil, deadly, coordinated globalist attacks we are currently witnessing on ivermectin will go down in history as a vicious crime against humanity; a grievous public health policy error that can only be explained by following the money. Many top doctors agree that hundreds of thousands of American lives could have been saved had early treatment protocols such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine not been so maliciously vilified by authority figures, some pharmaceutical companies, and healthcare providers who just so happen to have financial incentives to suppress the truth about these cheap, effective drugs. 

Full column is here.

And for corroboration, click here for Justus R. Hope, MD’s detailed examination (at TheDesertReview) of the fake news media doing their best to hide the success of ivermectin in Uttar Pradesh, India. 

# # #

The collapse of the FDA and Tyranny-by-vaccine

 

Image via Sundance from protest in Australia (see link below)

A few headlines --  from the hundreds crowding the internet today -- shows the corruption, the censorship, and the growing tyranny in the western world:

From American Greatness: FDA Approves Pfizer Vaccine Even Though Multiple Safety Studies Won’t Be Completed For Years

From Freedom First Network: Vaccine-Pimping Us Surgeon General Proclaims Americans Have No Right To Spread Disinformation Which Means Anything The Regime Doesn’t Like

From Conservative Playlist:  Pandemic Panic Theater: Why All 14 ‘Gold Standard’ Randomized Controlled Trials of Face Masks have been Suppressed 

From Epoch Times via Citizen Free Press: Connecticut Goes Full Vaccine Nazi

From InfoWars via Liberty Daily: Military & Blue States Announce Vaccine Mandates MINUTES After FDA Approves Injection

And for a preview of how bad this will get, here’s Sundance on the tyranny now on full display in Australia and New Zealand:

Australian Police Beating More People in the Streets Than the Taliban

# # #

 

Think Piece of The Day: Victor Davis Hanson

 

This blog is a huge fan of Victor David Hanson. His perspectives as a specialist in classical history always gets my attention.  In his column at American Greatness, ("Trump Winds and Biden Whirlwinds"), he starts off:

Victimizers quickly becoming victims is a recurrent theme of Thucydides’ history. In his commentary on the so-called stasis at Corcyra, he offers his most explicit warning about the long-term dangers of destroying legal institutions, customs, and traditions that serve the common good for short-term gain. 

The historian notes that in the inevitable yin and yang of politics, the destroyers inevitably will seek, but do so in vain, refuge in what they have destroyed. Between 2017 and 2021 the Left has done exactly that. 

. . .

What was the catalyst that turned a left-wing Democratic Party into a cultural revolutionary mob? In other words, why in our 233rd year of the republic are Democrats so intent to destroy the Electoral College, pack the court, admit new states to the Union, junk the filibuster, and federalize national election laws? What was so wrong with assimilation, integration, intermarriage, the “content of our character,” and race as incidental rather than essential to who we are? What has the woke revolution offered us instead?

. . .

What are the lasting consequences of all this madness? 

The Left should hope that House Republicans are Marquess of Queensberry players and do not emulate the Democrats’ behavior. They should hope that a Republican chairman of the House intelligence committee would not monitor the phone records of Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.). For if the opposition did gain the majority in November 2022, Joe Biden’s past involvement with foreign monied interests, and the evidence of his shady behavior from his own son’s laptop texts offer a far more convincing case of impeachable offenses—failure to report to the IRS off-the-books income, influence peddling, and abject lying about foreign quid pro quo involvement—than does a single Ukrainian phone call.  All that exposure is well aside from Biden’s deliberate decision not to enforce, as his job requires, federal immigration law. 

Do read the rest here.

# # #

Josh Mandel's Senate campaign: not a good look

 

American Greatness has the update:

More Trouble For Josh Mandel:
Fundraising Staff Quits Over “Toxic Environment”
Created By Staffer Mandel Is Dating 

As the Republican senate primary in Ohio heats up, there’s more trouble for candidate Josh Mandel. Several women working on his campaign fundraising team have quit citing a “toxic environment” created by the fundraising director Rachel Wilson. Campaign manager, Scott Guthrie, says that the Mandel and Wilson have been dating since August, 2020.

Mandel is still fielding awkward questions arising from a messy divorce last year. The divorce was settled some time in 2020 (Mandel had the record sealed by the court) so it’s unclear if Mandel was dating Wilson while he was still married to his former wife, Ilana Shafran Mandel. Either way, women on his finance staff say that working for his girlfriend was untenable.

. . .

The report concludes:

Mandel’s base of support has been with social conservatives especially in northeast Ohio around Cleveland. Many have already had enough and have aligned with other candidates. The combination of a rolling series of personal problems – many believe that the problems that led to his divorce were behind him dropping out of the senate race in 2018 – and fundraising staff leaving en masse only complicate matters for Mandel in a competitive race.

Full report is here.  This blog has previously posted on Mr. Mandel and candidates Jane Timken and Mike Gibbons, here, here, and here.

# # #

 

Due process? Not any more

Innocent protesters are languishing in DC jail cells – with no due process and no relief in sight.  Patricia McCarthy at American Thinker reports:

Julie Kelly at American Greatness has been doing yeoman work exposing the crimes of the D.C. leftists who have targeted, arrested, and imprisoned hundreds of people who attended President Trump's speech and may have wandered toward or even into the Capitol on January 6.  While there were some bad actors there that day, most likely Antifa/BLM interlopers or genuine lunatics, most of those present were actually invited into the Capitol building, as some of the video has shown.

Who ordered the Capitol police to stand down?  Probably Pelosi, who very much wanted an "incident" with which to tar and feather Trump and his supporters.  It was possibly a calculated set-up.  Who else was involved remains to be seen, but as everyone knows by now, that event has been blown so far out of proportion as to no longer resemble at all what actually took place.

Unlike the Antifa/BLM riots that occurred across the country over the summer of 2020, the incident that day was like a schoolyard scuffle compared to the violent, destructive, and even murderous conflagrations that did hundreds of millions of dollars in damage to numerous cities.  People need to be reminded that the left, most especially Kamala Harris, Biden, and the leftmedia in its entirety, either supported those "protests" or called them "mostly peaceful" — which they certainly were not.

As for those caught up in the January 6 mêlée, not one of those who have been locked up, some in solitary confinement was armed.  Not one.  The only person killed was Ashli Babbitt, shot to death by a Capitol Police officer.  She was not armed.  The officer who shot her has yet to be named; Babbitt's family is suing to learn his identity.  Curious, since when a criminal is killed by police in the commission of a crime, the officer involved is usually identified and suspended immediately, even if the shooting was righteous.  Something is very rotten in Denmark. 

. . .

Indeed, the weaponization of all our federal institutions under the Obama administration transformed this nation in ways few of us could imagine.  Those alphabet agencies, by then viciously anti-Trump, kicked into high gear the minute Trump won the 2016 election.  Over the next four years, from the Russia collusion hoax to two phony impeachments to January 6, America became something like Putin's Russia. 

. . .

What is happening there is not only indefensible but depraved.  Julie Kelly has heard from some of those imprisoned that they are being punished for what was revealed on Mark Levin's Sunday program.  Can this be happening in America?  It is happening. 

. . .

Please, complacent GOP, go to bat for those people in the D.C. version of a Soviet labor camp.  Rescue them.  Stand and deliver.  Now is the time.

Read the full column here.  And here is the link to Julie Kelly’s piece on American Greatness a few days ago.

Socialism's seductive appeal

 

Roger Kimball has good history and philosophical lessons for us at American Greatness. He concludes:

For centuries, prudent political philosophers have understood that the lust for equality is the enemy of freedom. That species of benevolence underwrote the tragedy of Communist tyranny. The rise of political correctness has redistributed that lust over a new roster of issues: not the proletariat, but the environment, not the struggling masses, but “reproductive freedom,” gay rights, the welfare state, the Third World, diversity training, and an end to racism and xenophobia. It looks, in Marx’s famous mot, like history repeating itself as farce. It would be a rash man, however, who made no provision for a reprise of tragedy.

Such attitudes are all but ubiquitous in modern democratic societies. Although of relatively recent vintage, they have spread rapidly. The triumph of this aspect of Enlightened thinking, as [philosopher David] Stove notes, marked the moment when “the softening of human life became the great, almost the only, moral desideratum.”

The modern welfare state is one result of the triumph of abstract benevolence. Its chief effects are to institutionalize dependence on the state while also assuring the steady growth of the bureaucracy charged with managing government largess. Both help to explain why the welfare state has proved so difficult to dismantle. The governments that support the welfare state, Stove points out,

are elected by universal adult franchise; but an electorally decisive proportion of the voters—in some countries, approaching a quarter—either is employed by government or is dependent to a significant extent on some welfare programme. In these circumstances it is merely childish to expect the welfare state to be reduced, at least while there is universal suffrage. A government that did away with free education, for example, or socialised medicine, simply could not be re-elected. Indeed it would be lucky to see out its term of office.

Is there an alternative? Stove quotes Thomas Malthus’ observation, from his famous “Essay on Population,” that “we are indebted for all the noblest exertions of human genius, for everything that distinguishes the civilised from the savage state,” to “the laws of property and marriage, and to the apparently narrow principle of self-interest which prompts each individual to exert himself in bettering his condition.”

“The apparently narrow principle of self-interest,” mind you.

Contrast that robust, realistic observation with Robert Owen’s blather about replacing the “individual selfish system” with a “united social” system that, he promised, would bring forth a “new man.”

Stove observes that Malthus’ arguments for the genuinely beneficent effects of “the apparently narrow principle of self-interest” “cannot be too often repeated.” Indeed. Even so, a look around at the childish pretended enthusiasm for socialism makes me think that, for all his emphasis, Stove understated the case. Jim Carrey and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (not to mention a college student near you) would profit by having a closer acquaintance with the clear-eyed thinking of Thomas Malthus.

It’s the same lessons that gave America its first Thanksgiving;  when collective socialism failed, the settlers learned that freedom, incentive, and private property harnessed self-interest to the greater good.

Read Mr. Kimball’s entire essay here.

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