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Friday, May 21, 2021

Coercive Control: Fauci Speaks

 


We’ve all noticed (read: we are unable to avoid seeing or hearing) ads promoting COVID-19 vaccination.  Ohio’s Governor DeWine added million dollar lotteries to vaccinated Ohioans in order to bribe encourage people to get the jab.  Why are federal and state governments trying so hard to promote an experimental vaccine?  It would seem that they might be pushing too hard.  

And Megan Fox at PJ Media has a column on “The Age of Coercive Control:  We’re in an Abusive Relationship with Our Government Now.”  The full article is here, and it considers government over-reach on COVID-19 and other matters.  But here are two headlines that reveal some of the carrots and sticks to force people to get the jab. 

At The Blaze:

Dr. Fauci: Expect cruise lines and airlines to require proof
of vaccination before you can travel 

At Breitbart

Anthony Fauci Predicts Airlines, Universities
Will Require Proof of Vaccination

Ms. Fox looks at other ways that Americans are now being controlled, including by “Monitoring Activities” and surveillance, isolation, financial restrictions, and other controls.  This blog linked to information on vaccination passports here. Tea Party people want to get the information and then make up their own minds. 

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Independence Day fireworks: they’re on



Marc Bona at Cleveland.com reports:

The Fourth of July fireworks are coming back to downtown Cleveland for the first [time] since 2019. Light Up the Lake – Downtown Cleveland Alliance’s annual free, family-friendly fireworks show – is scheduled for Sunday, July 4. The 2020 display was canceled because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Folks can head downtown with blankets and chairs between 8 p.m. and midnight. Fireworks are slated to go off from Dock 20, which is just southwest of FirstEnergy Stadium.

The location offers a variety of viewing vantages downtown. Suggested viewing areas include the Flats – both East and West banks - and North Coast Harbor.

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Thursday, May 20, 2021

Vaccine Passports: a bad idea

 


Although author Janet Levy is drawing on some California statutes, her analysis on vaccine passports applies to all of us. From American Thinker:

. . .digital records can be used to track people. Cyberattacks and data glitches could reveal private medical information. Worst of all, vaxxports create a two-tiered society. Those who choose not to be vaccinated – for religious reasons or because the non-FDA approved vaccines are of dubious safety and efficacy – wont be able to move about freely and lead normal lives.

Peggy Hall, a community leader who runs the website The Healthy American, exposes the duplicity of the countys Board of Supervisors. She says that by not formally mandating vaxxports, the county can affirm adherence to the California civil code (CIV Sec 51), entitling every individual free and equal access to all services in any business establishment of any kind whatsoever, regardless of their medical condition.” The true fight, she says, is to get the Board of Supervisors to state on record that they will prosecute businesses for discrimination should they demand vaccine passports from customers.

Ms. Hall also draws on another California law – the Protection of Human Subjects in Medical Experimentation Act – giving individuals the right to determine what is done to their own bodies” and the right to decide or consent or not to consent to a medical experiment without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, coercion or undue influence on the subjects decision.” Since all anti-COVID vaccines remain unapproved, they may be deemed experimental. Therefore, individuals have the right to refuse and should not be penalized in any way for doing so.

Ms. Levy’s full article is here.

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Wednesday, May 19, 2021

The Tyrants Among Us



The Editorial Board at Issues and Insights gives us fair warning on returning to normalcy:

 Of course they’re not going to let a crisis go to waste.

   . . . 

There’s a natural progression from the pandemic lockdowns to restrictions on freedom in the name of saving the sky from global warming. But the tyrants among us won’t stop there. We find it useful here to quote the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s international affairs analyst, who realized more than six months ago that “the virus of tyranny has already found itself in the bloodstream of liberal democracies.”

For instance:

  • President Joe Biden and his party hope to saddle Americans, through undisciplined spending, with debt and a de facto tax (inflation) that can be repaid only by mortgaging the future and bondage to the federal monster.
  • There is a core on the left, not even the hard left, that is resisting a return to normal. It wants liberty-shackling rules in place in perpetuity.
  • Our freedom to speak will continue to be abridged.
  • Our ability to make independent and individual health care decisions will be curtailed further.
  • Second Amendment rights will be in danger of being rolled back because of “public health” needs.
  • Expect to be forced out of our fossil-fuel-burning automobiles and herded into mass transit.
  • Protests and rallies will be put down as insurrections – unless they are in service of the “right” groups, such as Black Lives Matter and Antifa.

Once lost, freedom is difficult to regain. “Be warned,” says author Michael Walsh. “If you think the petty tyrants currently making your lives miserable are going to willingly relinquish their illicit powers, think again. They’ve got a taste for it now.”

So intoxicated from their deep swig of power are they that they no longer see boundaries, just opportunities to subjugate. Fight back, or lose in a few years what has made America unique and great for more than two centuries

The entire editorial is here.

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Tuesday, May 18, 2021

A columnist’s heroes: David Horowitz and Donald J. Trump

 


Bruce Bawer is a regular contributor to Front Page Magazineonline.  In his view, David Horowitz and Donald J. Trump are not “principled conservatives” – except that the opposite is true.  Here’s Mr. Bawer:

In their article, [Ronald] Radosh and [Sol] Stern contrast David Horowitz to what they call “principled conservatives.” This is a term we see often these days. It is used by never-Trumpers to describe their own wonderful selves. It is premised on the notion that before Trump came along, the GOP was a party of perfect dignity and decorum, seemliness and respectability, ethics and honor. Well, let me put in my own two cents here. Nearly four decades ago, I began my career writing for conservative publications – mostly about cultural topics (novels, poetry, movies), rarely if ever about politics per se. At first, it didn’t matter that I was gay. Homosexuality wasn’t a frequent topic in political magazines in those days. A few years later, however, as gay-rights issues heated up, it began to matter quite a bit.

Even back then, there were many gay writers at conservative publications. But some weren’t out to their editors, fearing that they would be fired if they revealed themselves. (One of them told me at the time that his editor looked upon him as a son, but if he knew he was gay, “I’d be dead to him.”) Many others were out to their editors, but, knowing the unwritten rules, didn’t mention their sexual orientation in print. One friend of mine was an exception: not understanding those unwritten rules, he published a book in the early 1990s in which he referred in passing to his homosexuality. As a result, he was, to his everlasting shock, given the boot by the editor of the conservative magazine to which he was a frequent contributor. His offense, the editor made clear, wasn’t being gay – the editor had never had a problem with that – but mentioning it in print. Anywhere.

It was a different time.

In 1993 it was my turn. In that year I published a book, A Place at the Table: The Gay Individual in American Society, that argued for the full inclusion of openly gay people in American society while also criticizing the “queer” left for its far-left radicalism, hatred of America, and love of its own marginality. I saw it as a deeply conservative book. But it made many conservatives, especially members of the pre-boomer generation who still held the reins at the magazines and journals, uncomfortable. Over the course of a year or two, I found myself estranged from all my conservative outlets – an estrangement that would last two decades, until (in most cases) a younger generation of editors took over. Some of those publications closed their doors to me; others I walked away from, recognizing that, for the time being at least, my continued presence there made both me and my editors uneasy, and that my hours there were almost surely numbered anyway.

And it was at precisely that point that David Horowitz – a virtual stranger to me, but aware of what I was going through – reached out, inviting me to write for his magazine Heterodoxy. It was a gesture – dare I say a principled gesture? – that I have never forgotten.

My feelings about David Horowitz are in many ways mirrored by my feelings about Donald Trump. As noted, self-regarding conservative veterans like Radosh and Stern tend to write about the pre-Trump GOP as if its leading figures were amalgams of Edmund Burke and St. Francis of Assisi. For my part, I cast my first presidential vote ever for Gerald Ford and my second for Ronald Reagan. But after that, the party’s presidential candidates, whether they won or lost, held little appeal for me. (This is not to say that their Democratic counterparts were any better.) They all used ugly, malevolent gay-bashing to win votes, implying that gay people were the greatest threat of all to American values. Trump – “vulgar” Trump – never stooped that low. He never came close. During the 2016 campaign I kept holding my breath waiting for it to happen – it had to happen; he was a Republican – and it never happened.

Vulgar? Nasty? No, in thunder. He was nothing less than noble. Not just in the way he talked to gays, but also in the way he addressed blacks, women, Latinos, Asians, Appalachian coal miners, Midwestern farmers, the military, the police. There was not a hint of Democratic identity-group pandering, and none of the awkwardness of a George H.W. Bush, say, trying desperately to pretend to relate to people about whose lives he was utterly clueless. Yes, Trump was a billionaire, but he had spent his adult life on construction sites rubbing shoulders with plumbers, carpenters, welders, roofers, glaziers, electricians, and other working stiffs; and he had hired and promoted – and fired – on the basis of excellence and nothing else.

And that was only a small part of what he did. He effected changes in the GOP that I had been dreaming of my whole adult life. His love for America, and respect for Americans, high and low, were palpable. He made most of the GOP presidential hopefuls before him, and most of the Republicans in Congress during his own tenure, look like wimps, hacks, careerists, phonies, cowards. Unlike all those “principled conservatives” whom Radosh and Stern celebrate, Trump was a Republican presidential candidate whom I could cheer without serious reservation. He knew what the real issues were. He knew who the real enemies were. He knew the real America, and was fully on its side. And through it all, he was never afraid to speak the truth, loud and clear.

Just like – yes – a certain American hero named David Horowitz.  

Full article is here.

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Monday, May 17, 2021

Mark Steyn on post-constitutional America

 


Mark Steyn concludes his column “America’s PoliticalPrisoners”:

In post-constitutional America, there is no equality before the law: If you riot violently in Minneapolis or Portland, you'll be cheered on by the media and Democrats, and bailed out by Seth Rogen or a Kamala Harris staffer. If you're let into the US Capitol by its so-called "police" and leave the statuary et al untouched, you'll be charged with trespassing, and, despite having no criminal record, will languish in prison (for over four months so far) until trial begins.

Those jailed for the events of January 6th are what we would call in other countries "political prisoners". Mr Chansley is in the slammer to concentrate his mind: right now, it's trespassing, but we see you used an ATM en route to DC, and you wouldn't want us to throw in "disrupting interstate commerce", would you?

As I've said for a long time, "federal justice" is an oxymoron - and, if you get a whiff that you're attracting the attention of this dirty rotten stinkin' evil system, flee the country. Meanwhile, I'm thinking of making a complaint to the UN Human Rights Council about the detainees of January 6th: If nothing else, it'll give the Cubans and Sudanese a laugh.

Mr. Steyn’s full column is here.

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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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