Indictment of Trump and our Secret Police

 

Margot Cleveland at The Federalist puts the indictment of President Trump into the larger context:

Manhattan grand jury has indicted former President Donald Trump, a spokesman for the district attorney’s office confirmed following late-Thursday media leaks. While the indictment remains under seal, one thing seems certain: America has now entered the era of “show me the man and I’ll show you the crime” politics.

The Democrat district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, breathed new life into the infamous boast of Joseph Stalin’s secret police chief, Lavrentiy Beria, when the Manhattan prosecutor targeted the former president in connection to a 2016 payment made to Stormy Daniels. Bragg’s decision to push for an indictment against Trump, presumably for falsifying business records, promises to herald in a new political age — one in which local prosecutors will target partisan enemies, big and small, making a mockery of the criminal justice system in the process.

The fact that news of the charges leaked to the left’s favorite scribes at The New York Times, while the indictment remained still under seal, punctuates perfectly the Sovietesque times in which we live: The legacy media may not be state-run, but they peddle propaganda nonetheless.

And Ms Cleveland concludes:

. . . if the indictment contains no new details, the piling on to reach the reported 33 counts against the former president doesn’t make Trump look more guilty — it makes Bragg look more like Beria. 

Much more at the link here.

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COVID propaganda is killing us

 

Molly McCann cuts through the propaganda fog at TheFederalist. Here’s the opening section:

Pretending COVID Is An Emergency Is Killing America

There is no justification for the continued suspension of the American form of self-government that secures all our individual rights and liberties.

The Western world is living a massive COVID lie. That lie is strangling the life out of liberty, and it will destroy our constitutional order if we do not end this horrifying charade.

A recent article in The Guardian discussing France’s vaccine passport unconsciously provides the perfect example. It describes the Great Plague that struck Marseille in 1720 (the final contortion of the Black Death), noting that it “kill[ed] more than half of the city’s population.”

“[S]truggl[ing] to find a delicate balance between halting the spread of the disease and damaging vital commerce,” the city authorities, The Guardian tells us, ordered travelers “to carry a ‘bill of health’ and ships arriving at the Mediterranean port underwent a 40-day cordon sanitaire or quarantine.”

“Three hundred years on,” The Guardian seriously intones, “President Emmanuel Macron is walking an equally tricky tightrope . . .” Hopefully, you spotted the glaring problem with this comparison. In 1720, the Great Plague in Marseille killed more than half the city’s population.

We have gotten to the point in this “pandemic” where government leaders and a worryingly high percentage of the American people are acting like COVID is a crisis on par with Marseille’s Great Plague. We have been buried in facts, figures, mountains of data, constantly shifting information, misinformation, and more. We are relentlessly briefed by the media about rising infection rates or the current capacity of local ICUs.

But cut through it all and ask — how many Americans are dying? According to Johns Hopkins, the fatality rate of COVID in the United States is 1.7 percent, which means that 98.3 percent survive. That takes into account all deaths, including people who had underlying conditions and the elderly. Excluding those who are obviously high-risk, the survival rate is close to 100 percent.

. . .

Read the rest here.

RELATED:  Dr. Joseph Mercola at BasedUnderground reports ‘Pandemic of the Unvaxxed’ Is a Lie: 60% of Those Older Than 50 Who Die From COVID Are Double Vaxxed.

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A.F. Branco: Dr Fauci’s magic goalposts

 

A.F. Branco cartoon credits: Townhall and Legal Insurrection 

Related headlines:  

At RedState:  New York Legislature -- Dominated by Dems -- Strips Gov. Cuomo of his Pandemic Emergency Powers

At The Federalist:  Texas Governor Announces 100% Reopening, No More Mask Mandate After Months Of Closures (to take effect on March 10)

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David Harsanyi on The Tea Party

David Harsanyi takes a look at the inception of the Tea Party and its activities today (“The Left Can’t Stop Lying About The Tea Party”). He concludes:

. . .

The Tea Party, whether some of their champions later turned out to be hypocrites or not, didn’t want to change the Republican Party as much as they wanted to force conservative politicians to keep their promises. The movement initially backed a number of terrible candidates, but it learned.

In the end, the Tea Party successfully re-energized Republicans, who went on to win two wave elections and stifle Obama’s presidency for six years.  Whether the movement was a long-term failure, as the Times argues, is a debatable contention.

One things is true, though: the majority of Tea Partiers were white. You know what that means, right? And, as those of us who covered the Obama administration remember, no matter how historically detailed or ideologically anchored your position might be, the very act of opposing a black president was going to be depicted as act of bigotry.

This cheap and destructive rhetoric now dominates virtually every contemporary debate, most of which have absolutely nothing, even tangentially, to do with race. It’s a kind of rhetoric, in fact, that now retroactively dominates our debates, as well.

Full article at The Federalist is here.

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Border Security and Illegal Immigration, continued

photo credit: ABCNews.go.com

John Daniel Davidson at The Federalist reported yesterday on the border crisis:

The day after President Trump’s rally in El Paso, Ortiz-Gonzales crossed the border, along with a group of 16 other adults and children, all from Central America. They had spent the night in a safe house in Juarez, and after paying $2,000 a head they were taken to a spot on the edge of the Rio Grande and told to walk across. (In downtown El Paso, the Rio Grande isn’t much more than a stream—easy to walk across, even for children.)

All but one of the adults in the group were men, and they all had more or less the same story: they have wives and other children back in Central America, they are coming here to work and send money home, they have networks of family and friends in the United States, and they intend to return to their homes at some point after they have made enough money. All of them are claiming asylum, but none of them, based on the accounts they gave, will likely qualify for it.

If you spend enough time on the southern border, where record numbers of migrant families from Central America are turning themselves in to U.S. Border Patrol—including 1,800 on the day of Trump’s rally—you begin to see this pattern emerge. Media outlets often repeat the now-familiar line that Central American families are fleeing poverty and violence, which is true (Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras are among the most violent countries in the world). But according to federal law, suffering poverty and violence doesn’t make you a refugee.

. . .

What goes unmentioned in most media coverage of family migration from Central America is the role that Mexican cartels play. Cartels control everything that happens on the south side of the border, not only the movement of drugs but also the movement of people.

The full report is here.

A previous CTP blog linked to opposing analyses of the recent budget provisions for Border Security. Paul Bedard at Washington Examiner considered the compromise a step in the right direction. Rush Limbaugh saw it as a step backward.

Steve Salvi at the Ohio Jobs & Justice PAC  considers the Border Security bill “disastrous” – and had this to say on his FB page:

We can no longer depend on most of our public officials to protect US citizens or our nation's sovereign right to control our borders.

Pres. Trump and the US Congress signed off on a disastrous bill that will result in:

1.    More American citizens killed by illegal aliens

2.    Encourage more illegal migrants to enter the US

3.    Help drug cartels/gangs expand human/child sex/labor trafficking

This is not America First! It was an ‘open-border illegal alien First-Americans last’ bill!

Even NumbersUSA has not issued an Action Alert that satisfactorily reconciles these disparate concerns.

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