The 2016 “Flight 93” essay: Michael Anton vindicated

 

Yesterday’s blog linked to William A Jacobson’s “pep talk” for conservatives.  Today, the executive editor of The Federalist, Joy Pullmann, looks back on what Michael Anton was predicting in 2016, and why we all need those pep talks.  Here’s an extract – towards the end of her column:

Biden’s Destruction Of America Vindicates
Mike Anton’s 2016 ‘Flight 93’ Essay

. . Anton was also right that Trump’s top issues — border security, international trade, and endless foreign wars — were broadly popular and could form the basis of a national renewal. The Biden administration’s gross and dangerous mismanagement of all these issues has vindicated this analysis as well. We’re just two years into Biden’s divisive, lawless, scorched-earth reign, and one already wonders if there will be anything left of our country after two more.

On the flip side, Trump’s platform and four years in office transformed and united the Republican Party. The only people who haven’t figured that out are the people who misread the nation and their own constituents and refused to man up and admit it, forfeiting their credibility to lead. Their cowardice and softness have revealed themselves as more dangerous than Trump’s rudeness and intimidation, and voters are over it.

Riding the center of the maelstrom, Trump’s presidency did change the political winds, in ways Anton couldn’t predict. For one, Trump cracked the right’s tolerance for political correctness, a major victory. We are now free to say, yes, we do want our border secured, and to call that racist is simply unserious and callous to all the women and children trafficked and raped by the cartels. We can say that anti-white racism is also racism, and it’s the right that maintains the strictest zero-tolerance policy on racism.

Trump’s moderate appeal and bull-in-the-China-shop bashing of the racist stigma barrier set the GOP toward becoming a truly multiracial working-class and middle-class coalition party. The amplified media propaganda machine and woke incest between big business and government has prompted a deep and wide backlash, alienating normies from the Democrat Party. In this, Trump’s presidency helped people awaken to their true political foes and allies, clarifying what time we are in and who is a talk-only grifter and who’s a legit freedom fighter.

Anton also couldn’t account for Covid opening so many people’s eyes — except many among self-appointed conservative “leadership,” who acquiesced instead of fighting for actual constitutional rights such as freedom of assembly, free speech, and not being “deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law”! They left resisting the communists to ordinary citizens, such as the few Democrat lawyers who still believe in civil rights, apolitical doctors who formed impressive new messaging and policy coalitions, and mom bloggers with kids banned from school.

We don’t need the right’s Monday morning armchair quarterbacks to do anything but get out of the way as Ben Sasse did. . . .

Read Ms. Pullman’s full column here.  It’s one to bookmark.

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Ending the lockdowns now

Ohio is starting to re-open.  Not soon enough, but Ohio is faring better than New York.  New York Post (and Federalist) contributor David Marcus was on Fox News’ Tucker Carlson program yesterday evening to expand on his NY Post op-ed.  He wants New York to get back to work.  He’s right.  Here’s some of his editorial:

By prolonging the coronavirus shutdown long after its core mission was accomplished, Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio have plunged tens of thousands of New Yorkers into poverty.

It needs to end. Now.

In mid-March, we were told we have to endure a lockdown to ensure that hospitals didn’t get overrun. We did. The hospitals were not overwhelmed. We turned the Javits Center into a hospital. We didn’t need it. We brought in a giant Navy ship to treat New Yorkers. We didn’t need it.

We were told we were moments away from running out of ventilators. We weren’t, and now the United States has built so many, we are giving them away to other countries.

Meanwhile, the Big Apple is ­dying. Its streets are empty. The bars and jazz clubs, restaurants and coffeehouses sit barren. Beloved haunts, storied rooms, perfect-slice joints are shuttered, many for good. The sweat equity of countless small-business owners is evaporating. ­Instead of getting people back to work providing for their families, our mayor talks about a fantasyland New Deal for the post-coronavirus era.

Open the city. All of it. Right now. Broadway shows, beaches, Yankees games, the schools, the top of the freakin’ Empire State building. Everything. New Yorkers have already learned to socially distance. Businesses can adjust. The elderly and infirm can continue to be isolated.

. . .

Read the rest here.  

We also know that Dr. Anthony Fauci’s advice has been wrong every time.  For a listing of his continuing mistakes, here’s a column by Mark Simone posted earlier this month at the 710 WOR website.  Not to beat the dead horse, but today we are reading that “Mastermind of LOCKDOWN Dr. Anthony Fauci NOW says staying closed for too long could cause ‘IRREPARABLE DAMAGE’! (headline quote via Pamela Geller here.)  

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Mike Rowe's Job Market

I’ve been a fan of Mike Rowe’s ever since accidentally seeing him as a guest on Fox News. Rowe is known for his work on the Discovery Channel series Dirty Jobs and the CNN series Somebody's Gotta Do It. He recently received the Independent Women’s Forum “Distinguished Gentleman” award, and the report on his acceptance speech is here. He expands on five major themes and closes with:

“We don’t need American Idols,” he said. “We need American icons. Icons of work. The country needs a parapateia [turning point, or as Rowe put it “a reversal of fortune or a sudden change in circumstances”]. We need to tell better stories of men and women who master a trade. We have to stop telling kids to blindly follow their passion and show them the opportunities that exist. That was the big, overarching message of ‘Dirty Jobs.’ The message that the headlines that ultimately caught up to: There is dignity in all work and opportunity is alive and well.”

Rowe talks about

finding people who were willing to show up early and stay late and learn a skill that was actually in demand. The business of recruitment was a difficult thing. Everywhere I went on the road was ‘Help wanted’ signs. The least I could do was to shine a light on some opportunities that typically go ignored.

The statistics back Rowe up. There are currently 1.5 trillion dollars of student loans on the books, and seven million jobs available, 75 percent of which don’t require a 4 year degree. But they do require training. Rowe wanted to provide such training as a way to begin to bridge the gap between goals and completion, college and a job, and failure and dignity.

Help wanted. In demand. Opportunities. The Tea Party is all about free markets, and Rowe is doing a lot to bring them back in focus. The rest of the report at The Federalist is here; Rowe's speech is linked at the top of the page, including the video. 

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Gosnell, free speech, and free markets

image credit: thoughtsonfilm.com

The film about “America's all-time champion serial killer” Kermit Gosnell opens later this week at a few theaters, and its subject matter is outside Cleveland Tea Party’s core mission. But the topic of “free markets” is very much a core Tea Party value.

The film Gosnell has been an uphill battle from the start. It was difficult to produce, and efforts to market it are being thwarted as I type. If this film is emblematic of the closing of free markets and increasing censorship in the mainstream media and on social media, then it is very much on the front burner of the Cleveland Tea Party. How can one have free markets if a legal product is not allowed to be promoted in the marketplace?

Fox News is running paid ads, but NPR and PBS won’t run them, and Facebook has banned any ads promoting this film. It should not matter whether you are Pro Choice, Pro Life, or undecided. The issues of Roe vs Wade and abortion were hot talking points during the entire nomination process of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, so the film has a place in the current and ongoing debate. 

The other day I attended a presentation by the filmmakers Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer followed by a private screening of Gosnell. Mark Steyn’s must-read blog on the film is here. The website for the film is here and it includes a drop-down which specifies theaters showing this film, listed by state. Only two were located in the greater Cleveland area (Valley View and Solon).

The goal of the two film-makers is to get enough venues and audiences to get this film to be eligible for NetFlix general access/release. If I understood them correctly, if they get enough showings and viewings in theaters this year, they can get a much wider distribution for this film via NetFlix, and they intend to categorize it as a crime drama along the line of, say, Law and Order, to reach an audience that might otherwise not choose to watch a film advertised as being about abortion per se. I thought that was a good marketing strategy. And if you are reading this blog, I hope you will consider seeing the film later this week, even if you don't think you'll like it.

From SteynOnline:

If making the film was hard, breaking through the societal omertà is harder: The Hyatt in Austin, for example, just canceled a screening at the behest of Planned Parenthood. So do be alert both to bookings of Gosnell at your local multiplex and to attempts to get it bounced. As producers and (with Andrew Klavan) screenwriters, Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer set out to tell a story none of the big studios would touch, and their doggedness deserves to find an audience.

In a free market, the producers would be free to buy ads. Facebook claims the ad does not meet their “standards.” No, Facebook just doesn’t like the film and doesn’t want any more exposure of the Gosnell case. That’s not what's supposed to happen to free speech in free markets. How can you function in a free market when you are muzzled because you have a different view? No, that’s censorship, and that is why I posted with these links.

Exit question: Who will be censored next?

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Must Read of the Day

image credit: FreedomWorks 

This little blog tries to find news, activities, action alerts, and ideas of interest to Cleveland Tea Party people. Over the weekend, Clarice Feldman at the American Thinker linked to a piece in The Federalist that analyzes the unchecked propaganda machines in the media and in our government. It’s long, so I’ve extracted the sub-headings to give an idea of the ground Stella Morabito covers. It explains, for example, why the "Antifa" groups are the opposite of what they claim to be. Forget the length, it’s still a Must Read.

The title: America’s Post-Charlottesville Nervous Breakdown Was Deliberately Induced: Americans are being emotionally manipulated to take up cause with those whose ultimate purpose is the repeal of the First Amendment and erasure of national memory.

·         Why Are We Being Assaulted With Fringe Concerns?

·         Element 1: Loading the Language

·         Element 2: Using Distorted Language to Rub Resentments Raw

·         Alinskyite Cultivation of Hatred

·         Element 3: Mass Manipulation Via Mass-Media Propaganda

·         Media Collusion with Rioting

·         The End Result: Division and Loneliness

Conclusion: because of the gaslighting tactics of power elites, we are actually in the throes of a nervous breakdown.

It’s doesn’t make for fun reading, but it may help explain the daily “news” broadcasts - including all the violent images that seem to be running in endless loops - or some of the world-views of friends and relatives. Full article here. 

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Voter fraud: minimal or in the millions?

art credit: TheRealSide

 Data suggests millions of voter registrations are fraudulent or invalid. That’s enough to tip an election, easily.

JohnGibb, writing at The Federalist, argues that the potential for voter fraud is real, and actual voter fraud is a bigger problem than we might have thought:

This week, liberals have been repeating their frequent claim that voter fraud doesn’t exist. A recent Salon article argues that “voter fraud just isn’t a problem in Pennsylvania,” despite evidence to the contrary. Another article argues that voter fraud is entirely in the imagination of those who use voter ID laws to deny minorities the right to vote.

Yet as the election approaches, more and more cases of voter fraud are beginning to surface. In Colorado, multiple instances were found of dead people attempting to vote. Stunningly, “a woman named Sara Sosa who died in 2009 cast ballots in 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013.” In Virginia, it was found that nearly 20 voter applications were turned in under the names of dead people.

In Texas, authorities are investigatingcriminals who are using the technique of “vote harvesting” to illegally procure votes for their candidates. “Harvesting” is the practice of illegally obtaining the signatures of valid voters in order to vote in their name without their consent for the candidate(s) the criminal supports.

These are just some instances of voter fraud we know about. It would be silly to assume cases that have been discovered are the only cases of fraud. Indeed according to a Pew Research report from February 2012, one in eight voter registrations are “significantly inaccurate or no longer valid.” Since there are 146 million Americans registered to vote, this translates to a stunning 18 million invalid voter registrations on the books. Further, “More than 1.8 million deceased individuals are listed as voters, and approximately 2.75 million people have registrations in more than one state.” Numbers of this scale obviously provide ripe opportunity for fraud.

Don’t Let Data Contradict My Narrative

Yet in spite of all this, a report by the Brennan Center at New York Univeristy claims voter fraud is a myth. It argues that North Carolina, which passed comprehensive measures to prevent voter fraud, “failed to identify even a single individual who has ever been charged with committing in-person voter fraud in North Carolina.” However, this faulty reasoning does not point to the lack of in-person voter fraud, but rather to lack of enforcement mechanisms to identify and prosecute in-person voter fraud.

The science of criminal justice tells us that many crimes go unreported, and the more “victimless” the crime, the more this happens. The fact is, a person attempting to commit voter fraud is very unlikely to be caught, which increases the incentive to commit the crime.

. . ..

We have no reason to believe that the low number of prosecutions means only that exact amount of voter fraud is happening. Rather, it could mean a lack of enforcement is failing to reveal the bulk of the violations that are occurring. Thus, as with many types of crimes, especially victimless crimes, the real number of cases is likely significantly higher than the number reported.

. . .

What are some solutions to this problem? States like Michigan have Poll Challenger programs, where observers from both parties may be present at voter check-in tables at precincts. They check each voter’s ID against a database of registered voters for that precinct to ensure the person attempting to vote is actually legally qualified to vote in that precinct. If there’s a discrepancy, the poll challenger may officially challenge the ballot. Other states should implement similar programs.

States should sponsor initiatives to remove dead voters and correct the registrations of people registered in multiple states (make them choose just one state). Since many local jurisdictions are reluctant to clean their voter rolls, federal or state oversight with teeth may be necessary.

. . .

So let us not believe false claims that voter fraud doesn’t exist. It’s real, and we must work to stop it, while making sure those who are eligible to vote but without proper ID are accommodated fairly.

Read the entire article here.

If you are already signed up to work the polls, or act as an observer, etc., you’re doing your bit. What can others do at this late stage of the game? One thing is to spot check voter registrations in your own family. We know a lot of dead people are never purged from the rolls. So it occurs to me that the parent who died within the last several years might still be registered to vote. I can go to the BOE and check out that one in person; it probably helps if you have the photo ID, the death certificate, and (at least in my case) standing (power of attorney or documentation as executor). 

I can also check my own; I’ve been a registered voter my entire life, but for two recent elections, the signature facsimile in the sign-in book was not even close to my own signature. I wonder if that meant my details were also registered in another precinct. So I can check that as well.

Please add your suggestions in the comments.

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