UPDATE TODAY: Saturday, June 26
President Trump’s northern Ohio rally on Saturday, June 26 at 7pm will be at the
Lorain County Fairgrounds Rally in Wellington, OH
in support of Max Miller's Campaign to unseat Anthony Gonzales. Mr. Gonzales voted for Trump's Impeachment.
Here’s the map – it’s south of Oberlin.
Reserve tickets here. They are free.
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The most recent edition of Hillsdale College’s Imprimis features an essay (adapted from
a speech) by the inimitable Mark Steyn.
It begins:
I live about 20 minutes south of
the Canadian border, which used to be called the longest undefended frontier in
the world. People moved freely back and forth across it all day every day. But
now it’s been closed for over a year. At one point my daughter asked me to
drive her up there, because there was a 30-minute opportunity for people on one
side to talk to their friends on the other. “Sad!” as President Trump would
say. It was like Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin during the Cold War, except that
both sides are now like East Berlin.
I don’t know how this happened, but
it is just one indication that America, and the West in general, have become
almost unrecognizable from what they were not that long ago.
Look at just three things we have
lost.
One is equality before the law,
something absolutely essential to a free society. In its place, we now have
politicized law. If a policeman fatally shoots someone, whether his name is
released to the public depends on whether the shooting is consistent with the
preferred narrative of the ruling class. A policeman recently took down a young
woman who was threatening the life of another young woman with a knife, and
that policeman was immediately identified—indeed, his photo was posted and he
was threatened by NBA superstar LeBron James on Twitter. On the other hand, we
know nothing of the policeman who shot dead an unarmed woman in the U.S.
Capitol on January 6. His name will apparently never be released to the public.
Second, border control. Functioning
societies, at least since the Peace of Westphalia three centuries ago, have
borders. America has no southern border and no plans to get one. The official
position of our government seems to be that any of the seven billion persons on
this planet has a right to come and stay in the U.S. for three years, until his
or her assigned court date comes up. As the number of people with pending cases
continues to grow, that three years will extend out to five or seven or 15
years. If we get all seven billion people to come here, the court system will
break down entirely and maybe we can go back to having a functioning border.
And third, dare I bring up the fact
that it is a real question whether we can go back to agreeing to have open and
honest elections? And if we don’t have open and honest elections, control of
our borders, and equality before the law, then we don’t have the conditions for
politics or free government.
And here’s the thing. It is not at
all clear to me that many of America’s conservative politicians understand the
seriousness of all this. You can see it in the fact that they go around trying
to scare people with the specter of a “radical socialist agenda.” For well over
a year now, we have been living in a world in which it’s accepted as normal
that the state has essentially unlimited power—and in which our freedom to
decide for ourselves has been diminished almost to invisibility. Why do these
conservative politicians think the words “radical socialist agenda” still scare
anyone in a time when the state can tell us whether we can have Aunt Mabel over
for Christmas? They are completely out of touch.
Over the same period as the
pandemic lockdowns, we have seen an escalation of so-called wokeness. And if
you look at one of the most startling manifestations of this, transgender
fanaticism—which involves, after all, the abolition of biological sex and, I’m
sorry to have to say it, the physical mutilation of children—one notices that
America is farther down this road than any other country in the Western world.
In other words, at this moment of crisis for Western Civilization, or for what
we used to call Christendom, the leading country of the free world is pulling
the wrong way.
Think of it. Your daughter has been
training since she was a little girl to run in school sports. Now at 17, she’s
in the state high school track championships, and you are forbidden even to
notice that she’s competing against a woman who is 6’2” with thighs like
tugboats, a great touch of five o’clock shadow on her face, and the most
muscular bosom you’ve ever seen. You’re not supposed to notice the craziness of
this, and the craziness is at its craziest right here in America.
We traditionally think of France as
being a bit screwy, but today there are French intellectuals who regard
themselves as hardcore leftists and yet who think America has gone bonkers on
this transgender issue. President Macron himself has said that American
wokeness is an existential threat to the French Republic, and he even found
bureaucrats in France’s education bureaucracy who agreed. There is not a single
bureaucrat in the Department of Education in Washington, D.C., who would agree,
but there are apparently a few in Paris.
If you look further east in Europe
to the lands that were once behind the Iron Curtain—to Hungary, Poland, and the
Czech Republic, which still function as conventional nation-states calculating
their best interests—you find tremendous fear of the threat of wokeness that is
being exported, sometimes aggressively, from America. So it is here in the U.S.
where we have to put the stake through these ideas.
But again, even most of our
conservative leaders and institutions seem oblivious. School districts in
America are talking about revising their curricula to cover transgender issues
from grade school on. Now, I went to an English boys’ school, and we were
expected to pick up sexuality on our own time. In those days people would have
looked puzzled if you had said, “We’re going to have to cancel geography or
Latin, because we need to put gay studies in there.” These days, instead of
going off behind the bike shed during recess to learn about sex, kids need to
sneak behind the bike shed to do a little bit of closeted geography or closeted
Latin. It’s completely backwards. And yet what do we hear from most
conservative politicians? That it would be nice to offer people a tax cut!
We are way beyond tax cuts. We’re
broke. We’re just a smidgen away from $30 trillion in federal debt—something
with no historical precedent. Talking about tax cuts today is like talking
about VAT tax refunds on the Titanic. It’s not actually what’s necessary at the
moment.
Another big issue that should take
our minds off tax cuts is China. I can’t get over the way we in the U.S. have
been ordered by our governors and the CDC to punish ourselves by living small,
shrunken lives, while the people in China who loosed this pandemic on the world
have paid no price for it.
Dr. Fauci has been a federal
government bureaucrat since 1968. He’s the J. Edgar Hoover of public health. He
talks about the COVID virus as if we’re at war. But he seems to think a country
wins a war by taking it out on its own population rather than the enemy, which
is what we’ve done.
. . .
Lots more here.
# # #
Seth McLaughlin at The Washington Times reports:
Trump-backed Max Miller targets ‘so-called Republican’
in Ohio congressional battle
Rep. Anthony
Gonzalez is akin to a car that has been deemed a lemon.
That’s according to Max Miller, the
Republican who launched a primary challenge against Mr. Gonzalez after
former President Trump called
for the scalps of GOP lawmakers
like Mr. Gonzalez who
supported impeachment following the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Mr. Miller says
voters in Ohio’s 16th Congressional District were sold on the idea that
Mr. Gonzalez would
fight for them in Washington, but have buyer’s remorse after discovering his brand
of politics is out of sync with Trumpism and the MAGA movement.
“I have no other interest in doing
this other than to serve the people of the 16th District and get an ‘America
First’ conservative in Congress and get one who is a so-called Republican out,”
Mr. Miller told
The Washington Times.
The 32-year-old former Trump aide
became more of a household name in February when Mr. Trump gave him his “Complete
and Total Endorsement!” and warned that Mr. Gonzalez does
not represent the “interest” or “heart” of voters in the district.
Mr. Trump is
set to sing the challenger’s praises Saturday at Lorain County Fairgrounds in
Wellington, Ohio, marking his first
campaign-style rally of the 2022 election cycle.
Full report at The Washington Times is here. Previous CTP post
on the Saturday June 26 Trump rally at the Lorain County Fairgrounds is here.
In other news, outgoing Ohio Senator Rob Portman is in the news again. Here's the headline over Matt Vespa’s Townhall
column:
GOP Senators Mobilize
to Stop Largest Gun Confiscation
and Registration Attempt in History
Under Biden
. . . Oh, who are the two Republicans who refused to sign onto this communique? That would be Sens. Rob Portman (R-OH) and Susan Collins (R-ME).
# # #
Paul Bedard at the Washington Examiner reports:
The trust people in the United
States have in the media is the lowest in the free world and is likely driving
more and more away from traditional news sources, according to a blockbuster
study of international media consumption.
Of 29 free nations surveyed in
the Digital News Report 2021, U.S. “trust” in the media ranked 46th of 46.
And cable TV is the worst,
according to the report from Oxford University and the Reuters Institute for
the Study of Journalism. The 164-page report said, “Cable news channels Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC have some of the highest levels of
distrust.”
. . .
Our household still gathers news from various aggregators (Politipage, Rantingly, Instapundit, News Ammo, etc.). In the past year, we have also reduced our daily television news consumption to one hour (on OANN) – down from three or four.
So it should come as no surprise that some of the foreign press report actual news better than CNN, Fox, or MSNBC. If you can stand it, try this 8 minute clip from Sky News Australia; it’s what the US media won’t report:
# # #
Brad Palumbo at FEE (Foundation for Economic Education - h/t Instapundit) confirms what many of us figured out maybe a month into the lockdowns:
We Just Got Even More
Proof that
Stay-At-Home Orders Lethally Backfired
A new study finds that lockdown
orders didn’t reduce overall mortality, and may have even increased it.
Life under lockdown was hard for
all of us. From economic destruction to social isolation, the costs of
restrictive government policies intended to mitigate the spread of COVID-19
have been steep. But now, yet another study suggests that the benefits wrought
by our collective sacrifice were negligible at best—and that stay-at-home
orders may even have increased overall mortality.
In a new
paper, economists from the University of Southern California and the RAND
Corporation examined the effectiveness of “shelter-in-place” (SIP) mandates,
aka stay-at-home orders, using data from 43 countries and all 50 US states. The
experts analyze not just deaths from COVID-19, but “excess deaths,” a measure
that compares overall deaths from all causes to a historical baseline.
The authors explain that lockdown
orders may have had lethal
unintended consequences in their own right, such as increased drug
overdoses, worsened mental health problems, increased child abuse, deadly
delays in non-COVID medical care, and more. So, to find out whether
stay-at-home orders truly helped more than they hurt, examining excess deaths,
not just pandemic outcomes, is key.
The results aren’t pretty.
“We fail to find that
shelter-in-place policies saved lives,” the authors report.
Indeed, they conclude that in the weeks following the implementation of these
policies, excess mortality actually increases—even though it had typically been
declining before the orders took effect. And across all countries, the study
finds that a one-week increase in the length of stay-at-home policies
corresponds with 2.7 more excess deaths per 100,000 people.
. . .
Read more here.
Flashback: In July 2020. this blog linked to Heather
Mac Donald’s Imprimis article “Four
Months of Unprecedented Government Malfeasance”; click here.
# # #
From our friends at Ohio Value Voters:
You can show your support of stopping
Critical Race Theory in Ohio by attending the proponent testimony hearing this
Wednesday at the Ohio Statehouse in Columbus:
[map here]
HB 327 Proponent Testimony in
opposition to Critical Race Theory in Ohio
COMMITTEE: State and Local Government
CHAIR: Scott Wiggam
DATE: Wednesday, June 23, 2021
TIME: 3:00pm
ROOM: Room 121
OVERFLOW: Room 122
H.B. No. 327
Rep. [Diane] Grendell, Rep. [Sarah] Fowler
Arthur
Prohibit teaching, advocating, or
promoting divisive concepts
2nd Hearing Prop/IP
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