Trump orders Pentagon to remove thousands of troops from Germany

Article by J. Edward Moreno in "The Hill":

President Trump has directed the Department of Defense to send 9,500 troops home from Germany, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, which would bring the total stationed there down to 25,000.

 

A defense official told the Journal the plan, which was ordered by national security adviser Robert O'Brien, has been underway since September and is not related to rising tensions between Trump and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Former acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell, who also served as Trump's ambassador to Germany, has advocated for the reduction of troops in Germany and pushed for Berlin to spend more on its own defense.

When asked, National Security Council spokesman John Ullyot did not confirm the move to The Hill, but said Trump “continually reassesses the best posture for the United States military forces and our presence overseas.”

“The United States remains committed to working with our strong ally Germany to ensure our mutual defense, as well as on many other important issues,” Ullyot said.

The Hill has reached out to the Department of Defense and the White House for further comment.

The Journal noted under current conditions, there can be up to 52,000 U.S. troops in Germany at a time as units rotate in and out or take part in training exercises.

The troop reduction will reportedly take place by September.

Trump has pushed for fewer U.S. service members to be deployed overseas, including in Afghanistan, the site of America's longest military conflict

https://thehill.com/policy/defense/501374-trump-orders-pentagon-to-remove-thousands-of-troops-from-germany 

Buffalo police riot squad quit to back officers who shoved man

 

An entire tactical unit of a US police department has quit after two officers accused of brutality were placed on unpaid leave, reports local media.

In a video that went viral on Thursday, officers in the city of Buffalo, New York, were seen shoving an elderly man to the ground.

The 75-year-old was seriously injured, and taken to hospital.

All 57 officers in the riot squad have now reportedly resigned in protest at their two colleagues' suspension.

According to the Buffalo News, the members have stepped down from the Emergency Response Team, but not the police department itself.

John Evans, president of the local police union, told the newspaper: "Our position is these officers were simply following orders from Deputy Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia to clear the square.

"It doesn't specify clear the square of men, 50 and under or 15 to 40. They were simply doing their job. I don't know how much contact was made. He did slip in my estimation. He fell backwards."

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said on Friday the two officers should be fired, and called for the incident to be investigated for "possible criminal charges".

In a statement, Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown said: "We can confirm that contingency plans are in place to maintain police services and ensure public safety within our community." 

He added that Buffalo police are continuing to work with other law enforcement agencies.

The officers were enforcing a curfew as a result of protests that have spread nationwide since the death in Minneapolis last month of an unarmed black man, George Floyd, after a policeman knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes.

What does the Buffalo video show?

The man is seen approaching a group of riot police as they advance. 

Two of the officers appear to push the 75-year-old, causing him to fall backwards and hit his head.

An initial statement from Buffalo Police Department said the man had "tripped" and fallen during a "skirmish involving protesters".

Police spokesman Jeff Rinaldo later attributed the statement to officers not directly involved in the incident.

Who is the elderly man?

His name is Martin Gugino, and authorities said he was taken to hospital, where he was in a stable but serious condition on Friday.

Mr Gugino is a longtime social justice activist in Buffalo, according to advocacy group Push (People United for Sustainable Housing).

He "has been a tireless fighter against injustice of all types for many years in our city both with Push and other grassroots organisations," they said in a statement, condemning police for his treatment

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52945190

Devin Nunes Discusses Rosenstein Testimony and Homeland Security Investigation

House intelligence committee ranking member Devin Nunes appears on FBN with Liz MacDonald to discuss the latest events around senate investigations into the Obama-era DOJ, FBI and Intelligence Community surveillance operations.

Utah National Guard confirms they were kicked out of DC hotel, mayor claims budget issue

 Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, pictured on the left, after kicking out Utah National Guard soldiers deployed to the nation's capital

Article written by Celeb Parke in "Fox News":

The Utah National Guard confirmed Friday that 200 service members are being kicked out of hotels in the nation's capital as D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser clashes with President Trump over the handling of the George Floyd protests in the city.

Bowser, who wants all non-D.C. troops out of the city, blamed the National Guard relocation on a budget issue and said the city will not pay for the accommodations — amid days of protests over racial injustice, some of which have been violent.

"Last night, we were informed that our service members would be relocated from their hotel rooms," the Utah National Guard said in a statement Friday.

Maj. Jaime Thomas told Fox News they identified another hotel and will relocate Friday.

"It has been heartbreaking for our Utah National Guard service members to witness the pain, suffering, and frustration in our communities across the nation," the National Guard added. "The Utah National Guard has been supporting civil authorities with our top priority of protecting lives as well as preserving property and critical infrastructure in our nation's capital."

The District of Columbia's National Guard said it is working to resolve the matter after hundreds of soldiers had been staying at a Marriott hotel near downtown Washington since being activated on Monday.

On Friday, Bowser said the removals were over a budget issue, saying D.C. residents would not cover the hotel bills. “This is overbilling,” she said.

Pressed on the matter, the mayor said they did not “evict anybody from a private hotel” but said the city will not pay for National Guard housing. She said they have no desire to see soldiers on the street but said the armory or the home state of the National Guard should pay for their arrangements. "If they are going to use rooms we reserved, they have to pay for them," she said.

"At no time did we intend or would we would be able to effect evicting any guardsman from any hotel," Bowser added.

Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah – who broke the news Thursday about the removals “Fox News @ Night" – has slammed Bowser as an "ungrateful mayor" over the situation.

Bowser said Friday she hasn't had a chance to talk to Lee.

In a new statement Friday afternoon, Lee said: “Evicting Utah National Guard personnel from their hotels after a late-night shift risking their lives to protect Washington is a shameful, petty, discrediting decision by Mayor Bowser.”

Lee, who has worked in all three branches of the federal government, said on Fox News he's "never seen a situation like this."

“I find this very strange,” Lee said. “They [the soldiers] came here at the request of their country and now, in the middle of it, in the middle of a deployment, in the middle of their fourth consecutive all-nighter, they’re being told they’re not welcome there. That is unpatriotic; that is unacceptable.”

The senator explained these young soldiers – with 10 hours notice – left their homes to protect the White House and other properties. He said many soldiers work overnight and will have to collect their belongings at 10 a.m. and find another place to stay.

President Trump slammed Bowser over the issue on Friday.

He tweeted: “The incompetent Mayor of Washington, D.C., @MayorBowser, who’s budget is totally out of control and is constantly coming back to us for “handouts”, is now fighting with the National Guard, who saved her from great embarrassment over the last number of nights. If she doesn’t treat these men and women well, then we’ll bring in a different group of men and women!”

Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump

 · 1h

The incompetent Mayor of Washington, D.C., @MayorBowser, who’s budget is totally out of control and is constantly coming back to us for “handouts”, is now fighting with the National Guard, who saved her from great embarrassment...

Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump

...over the last number of nights. If she doesn’t treat these men and women well, then we’ll bring in a different group of men and women!

 Heavily armed federal officers in tactical gear have been on the district’s streets for days, after demonstrators set fires, broke store windows and stole items from the shelves and left police officers injured.

The Trump administration has made an effort to show the use of force in Washington. Hours before a 7 p.m. curfew on Tuesday, cars were being stopped at military checkpoints downtown, and a cavalry of armored military vehicles could be seen driving through the district.

Bowser said the administration had floated the idea of taking over the Metropolitan Police Department, a proposal she strongly rejected. She threatened to take legal action if the federal government attempted to do so.

Trump announced from the White House on Monday that if “a city or a state refuses to take the actions that are necessary to defend the life and property of their residents, then I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them.”

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/utah-national-guard-confirms-they-were-kicked-out-of-dc-hotel-mayor-claims-budget-issue 

Public Heath Experts Have Undermined Their Own Case

by Robby Soave for ReasonMagazine

Public Health Experts Have 

Undermined Their Own Case for 

the COVID-19 Lockdowns

Police violence is a metaphorical disease. Coronavirus is a literal disease.

6.4.2020

(Michael Brochstein/ZUMA Press/Newscom) 

In theory, the mass protests following the alleged murder of George Floyd put public health officials who have ceaselessly inveighed against mass gatherings in a difficult position. They have called for a moratorium on most types of public activities, but particularly gathering in large crowds where increased aerosolization from loud talking and yelling could spread the COVID-19 virus to massive groups.

But when it comes to the protests against police brutality, many medical experts think there should be an exemption to the COVID-19 lockdown logic.

More than a thousand public health experts signed an open letter specifically stating that "we do not condemn these gatherings as risky for COVID-19 transmission. We support them as vital to the national public health and to the threatened health specifically of Black people in the United States."

The letter conceded that mass protests carried the risk of spreading coronavirus, and offered some good—if naive—advice for people who are going out anyway: wear masks, stay home if sick, attempt to maintain six feet of distance from other protesters. Many protesters are wearing masks, but others are not. And while we can blame the police for forcefully corralling people into close quarters, it's a bit rich for public health experts to endorse protesting under conditions that they know are impossible for protesters to meet.

Indeed, for the purposes of offering health care advice, the only thing that should matter to doctors is whether their harm-reduction recommendations are being followed: how big is the event, is it outdoors, are masks being worn, etc. However, the letter distinguishes police violence protesters from "white protesters resisting stay-home orders," as if the virus could distinguish between the two types of events. While I am not a doctor, my understanding is that it cannot.

The letter led a Slate writer to claim that "Public Health Experts Say the Pandemic Is Exactly Why Protests Must Continue." The argument here is that coronavirus is more deadly for black people because of systemic racism and that protesting systemic racism is a sort of medical intervention.

"White supremacy is a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to COVID-19," the letter continues.

There is much truth to this! Black people in America do have worse health outcomes, but so do low-income people of every race and ethnicity. Is it medically acceptable for a poor person to protest against lockdown-induced economic insecurity? For people who live paycheck to paycheck to protest looming evictions and foreclosures? What about people experiencing loneliness, depression, and bereavement? Again, my understanding is that the virus does not think and thus does not choose to infect us based on what we're protesting.

Many people all over the country were prevented from properly mourning lost loved ones because policymakers and health officials limited public funerals to just 10 people. For months, public health officials urged people to stay inside and avoid gathering in large groups; at their behest, governments closed American businesses, discouraged non-essential travel, and demanded that we resist the basic human instinct to seek out companionship, all because COVID-19 could hurt us even if we were being careful, even if we were going to a funeral rather than a nightclub. All of us were asked to suffer a great deal of second-order misery for the greater good, and many of us complied with these orders because we were told that failing to slow the spread of COVID-19 would be far worse than whatever economic impact we would suffer as a result of bringing life to a complete standstill.

People who failed to follow social distancing orders have faced harsh criticism and even formal sanction for violating these public health guidelines. To take just one extreme example, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio threatened to use law enforcement to break up a Jewish funeral.

After saying no to so many things, a significant number of public health experts have determined that massive protests of police brutality are an exception to the rules of COVID-19 mitigation. Yes, these protests are outdoors, and yes, these experts have encouraged protesters to wear masks and observe six feet of social distance. But if you watch actual footage of protests—even the ones where cops are behaving badly themselves—you will see crowds that are larger and more densely packed than the public beaches and parks that many mayors and governors have heavily restricted. Every signatory to the letter above may not have called for those restrictions, but they also didn't take to a public forum to declare them relatively safe under certain conditions.

"For many public health experts who have spent weeks advising policymakers and the public on how to reduce their risk of getting or inadvertently spreading the coronavirus, the mass demonstrations have forced a shift in perspective," The New York Times tells us.

But they could have easily kept the same perspective: Going out is dangerous, here's how to best protect yourself. The added well, this cause is important, though, makes the previous guidance look rather suspect. It also makes it seem like the righteousness of the cause is somehow a mitigating factor for spreading the disease.

Examples of this new framing abound. The Times interviewed Tiffany Rodriguez, an epidemiologist "who has rarely left her home since mid-March," but felt compelled to attend a protest in Boston because "police brutality is a public health epidemic." NPR joined in with a headline warning readers not to consider the two crises—racism and coronavirus—separately. Another recent New York Times article began: "They are parallel plagues ravaging America: The coronavirus. And police killings of black men and women."

Police violence, white supremacy, and systemic racism are very serious problems. They produce disparate harms for marginalized communities: politically, economically, and also from a medical standpoint. They exacerbate health inequities. But they are not epidemics in the same way that the coronavirus is an epidemic, and it's an abuse of the English language to pretend otherwise. Police violence is a metaphorical plague. COVID-19 is a literal plague.

These differences matter. You cannot contract racism if someone coughs on you. You cannot unknowingly spread racism to a grandparent or roommate with an underlying health condition, threatening their very lives. Protesting is not a prescription for combatting police violence in the same way that penicillin is a prescription for a bacterial infection. Doctors know what sorts of treatments cure various sicknesses. They don't know what sorts of protests, policy responses, or social phenomena will necessarily produce a less racist society, and they shouldn't leverage their expertise in a manner that suggests they know the answers.

It's clear that we've come to the point where people can no longer be expected to stay at home no matter what. Individuals should feel empowered to make choices about which activities are important enough to incur some exposure to COVID-19 and possibly spreading it to someone else, whether that activity is reopening a business, going back to work, socializing with friends, or joining a protest against police brutality. Health experts can help inform these choices. But they can't declare there's just one activity that's worth the risk.

Joe Biden: 10% to 15% of Americans ‘not very good people’

OAN Newsroom
UPDATED 8:26 AM PT — Friday, June 5, 2020

Presumptive Democrat nominee Joe Biden recently declared a tenth of Americans are not good people.
During virtual Town Hall event Thursday, Biden renewed his criticism of President Trump by claiming the president promotes divisiveness.
Yet, his remarks took an unexpected turn as he appeared to condemn a significant portion of the population, in turn, bringing to mind Hillary Clinton’s now-infamous labeling of Trump supporters as a “basket of deplorables.”
 This is the latest in a series of gaffes from the former vice president, including one during a recent radio interview when he seemed to imply that black Trump supporters were not really black.
https://www.oann.com/joe-biden-10-to-15-of-americans-not-very-good-people/

The Struggle Sessions Are Here, And...

by John Daniel Davidson for The Federalist

The Struggle Sessions Are Here, 

And They’re Not Going Away

The left’s multi-decade project to teach everyone that America is irredeemably racist has led to the emergence of a new regime in American life.

Amid the scenes circulating on social media this week of protesters and rioters and burned out storefronts and police barricades, two of them stand out as harbingers of what all of this means for the future of mainstream American society.

The first was a video clip of a small group of white people kneeling down before a group of black people. A white man at the head of the kneeling group was praying, his voice shaking with emotion: “Father, we ask for forgiveness from our black brothers and sisters for years and years of racism, of systematic racism.”

The second was a clip of a large gathering in the affluent DC suburb of Bethesda, Maryland. Nearly a thousand protesters, most of them white, their hands raised as if in prayer, engaged in a kind of collective woke sermon, repeating after a man on a microphone: “I will use my voice in the most uplifting way possible, and do everything in my power to educate my community. I will love my black neighbors the same as my white ones…”

More than the rampant looting and the street battles, more than the clashes between police and protesters, these scenes of white people genuflecting in mass public affirmations of their own guilt is the key to understanding where all this is headed.

The model at work here is the Chinese Cultural Revolution, with its mass “struggle sessions” in which anyone deemed insufficiently sympathetic to the proletariat, or thought to have an excessively bourgeois lifestyle, was subjected to public humiliations, paraded through the streets, assaulted, denounced, and put on display as objects of scorn. Often these struggle sessions ended in false confessions and pleas for mercy.

Obviously, no one in America is being paraded through the streets against their will. But by rushing to profess their supposed guilt for racism, these people are admitting that they need publicly to affirm their allegiance to woke identity politics. This represents nothing less than the emergence of a new regime in American life. What is now a voluntary and seemingly spontaneous public affirmation of progressive ideology will in time become a requirement. If you want a career or a public platform or a professional life in mainstream society, you’ll have to profess allegiance to the cultural left.

Here’s How The New Regime Will Work

Already, we see examples of how this will play out. This week, Sacramento Kings play-by-play announcer Grant Napear, who has called NBA games since 1988, resigned after tweeting “ALL LIVES MATTER” Sunday night in response to a question from former Kings star DeMarcus Cousins asking him for his take on the Black Lives Matter movement.

Within days, Napear had also lost his popular sports talk radio show. He later issued a public apology to the Sacramento Bee. “I’m not as educated on BLM as I thought I was,” Napear said. “I had no idea that when I said ‘All Lives Matter’ that it was counter to what BLM was trying to get across.”

No matter. For the sin of being insufficiently woke about BLM, Napear’s career is over.

You don’t need to stretch your imagination to see how this process might repeat itself in the future, and on a mass scale. Anyone with a job in the public eye or even a significant social media following who doesn’t publicly affirm the ideological preferences of the Left might be subject to similar treatment. To a certain extent, this is already the case.

And it has been a long time coming. What we’re seeing now is the result of a decades-long project on the left that is now bearing fruit in American civic life. That project has perhaps found its fullest expression in the New York Times’ 1619 Project, which takes as its starting point that America was founded to protect and preserve slavery, and that the American constitutional system is the source of our society’s ills, foremost among them being racism.

That is, America as such is the root cause of the evils that now beset us, and it is America as such that must be transformed in order to right the wrongs of the past. And if you don’t get on board with that transformation then you probably won’t have a place in the new America.

Jim Jordan Discusses Rosenstein Testimony: “Rod Rosenstein Was Afraid”

Ohio representative Jim Jordan gives his opinion on the testimony of former Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein to the Senate Judiciary Committee.  Jordan outlines a sequencing of events that was transparently obvious to Rosenstein in 2017, and shares a viewpoint that Rosenstein was afraid and too weak to shut down the corrupt investigation led by Mueller.

It is clear the DOJ, FBI and Intelligence Community group who put the nation through three years of nonsense; and their allied and facilitating media who helped push the investigative fraud; are now attempting to avoid any accountability by calling any review of their malign activity a “conspiracy theory.”  A stunning irony all things considered.

In this example the willful ‘conspiracy’ is not a theory.

Anger Games, Night 9 – BLM Window of Opportunity Starts to Close

Today in Minneapolis was the first of three funerals for George Floyd in three states.  The next funeral will be held in North Carolina on Saturday; then the grievance tour travels to Texas for a full day viewing on Monday, and final funeral on Tuesday.

What media will not discuss is the lack of visible support across social media on the first day of the five official days of public mourning.  Perhaps the BLM and AME network have overplayed their hand; and/or, people are burned-out over the continued use of the race card.  It also did not help that Al Sharpton played the lead role for funeral one.

Now, considering the amount of media coverage, what I just wrote might sound odd; but I’m not looking at media… I’m looking at the national audience response to the overblown media coverage.  There is a big difference and a massive disconnect.

The media are hyping the five days of national mourning and live broadcasting the funerals and events.  However, the downstream reception rate appears very poor.

There is a much lower reception and redistribution rate with George Floyd than Trayvon (Orlando), Mike Brown (Ferguson) or Freddie Gray (Baltimore).  Those were the last times the Black Lives Matter (BLM) and the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME network) were in full alignment.

What this indicates to me is a far more significant percentage of the targeted audience are now awake to the manipulative effort of both BLM and AME networks.

Additionally, the long-standing Achilles heel has still not been overcome.

The internal racism within the “people of color” coalition was always the inherent problem for Barack Obama, Eric Holder and Tom Perez (Team BLM), because the Nation of Islam and New Black Panther Party absolutely dislike Latinos.

When Barack Obama attempted outreach to the Latino community he even changed the language.  Gaining Latino support was the reason the DNC sent out guidance to use the phrase “people of color” instead of “black” during media coverage.  Additionally, Obama’s attempted outreach to the Latino community was always through the illegal alien angle, the “dreamers”; but Obama never delivered on his fake promises and the PoC lingo could not help.

Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam do not like Latinos and/or Hispanics.  The New Black Panthers do not like Latinos and/or Hispanics.  These groups are always in constant conflict.  The friendly political relationship between La Raza and the radical Democrats doesn’t compensate for this massive divide amid Blacks and Latinos.

In one way it is still a generational problem.  Latinos lean heavily Christian; while the radical NoI and NBPP elements who agreed to align within the BLM movement are heavily influenced by Islam.   This is why there are two internal black coalitions.  BLM is influenced by Islam, while the AME coalition is Christian.

Through the religious prism the AME network could gain support from the Latino community; “people of color” could work.  However, the AME network is not the center of activist energy.

The BLM network is the center of activist operations and that means Islam is favored. [Keep your “people of color”, because the BLM prefers “black”.]  Hence, Minneapolis is a good fit for BLM activation because Minneapolis leans Muslim thanks to the decades long influx of Somali refugees imported by Bush and Obama.

The media, especially the political media, are never allowed to talk about the internal ideologies behind the two camps: Team Obama (BLM – Islam) and Team Clyburn (AME – Christian); but the issues are very real and keeping the coalition together is not easy.  Seeing Al Sharpton (AME team) deliver his racial narrative to the Minneapolis funeral audience today is a reflection of how important and tenuous the dynamic really is.

The BLM foot-soldiers do not like the lack of purity within the Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton messaging.  Two-J’s and Sharptongue are both old-school AME members where religious worship kneels foremost in front of the altar of money.

Those behind the BLM network are more ideological and they see the AME’s lust for money as a risk.  It’s a weird interplay and ultimately that’s why the two factions keep splitting apart.

Floyd family lawyer, Benjamin Crump, is more AME than he is BLM.  Al Sharpton was Crump’s mentor going all the way back to the Martin Lee Anderson case in 2006. But at the same time Crump needs the BLM foot-soldiers to drum the social justice message in order to achieve maximum impact.

Bottom line today is that Minneapolis opportunists, specifically the Muslim community, will benefit from the current anti-police narrative.  The Somali Muslim community wants Sharia-enforcement officers instead of traditional law enforcement. Ergo the Ellison/Omar agenda will benefits from recent events.

However, beyond the local benefit, the new BLM/AME alliance does not seem to be moving the national needle.  If you look closely it appears more and more people have caught on to the unspoken and divisive agenda.

Lastly, the long standing issues between Latinos and Blacks is an important angle to watch; especially with 2020 Democrat candidate Joe Biden going down on his knees in favor of the BLM/AME network.

There is a risk that Democrats might lose more Latinos than they will gain amid blacks. This type of political calculation always carries a risk; this is what happens when ideology intersects with the assembly of special interests.

.

https://ewerickson.substack.com/p/the-status-quo-of-virtue-signalin 

The Status Quo of Virtue Signaling

Erick-Woods Erickson

All lives actually do matter.  A sports announcer last week lost his job for using the phrase “all lives matter” instead of “black lives matter.”  Our cultural superiors insist on certain phraseology these days or else.  It is just another effort in the culture war to make you care and think in particular ways.  

The phrase “all lives matter” came about in pushback to aggressive efforts a few years ago by Black Lives Matters activists.  This statement of fact is now presumed to be a calling card of white supremacists. 

Last Tuesday, people rushed to social media to add black squares.  Major corporations shut down their websites.  People protested in the streets.  I saw more than one person shamed for innocently using the phrase “all lives matter” or, as a worse offense, putting up a picture other than a black square on Instagram.

We have replaced virtue with virtue signaling.  Activists would have us believe the governments that brought us slavery, Jim Crow, anti-interracial marriage laws, affirmative action, and police brutality are the governments that will solve the problem. The government that started a war on poverty to bring us a great society actually managed to keep people in poverty and destroy families.  But this time, just you wait, the government is going to fix it.

Our social betters who demand we use certain phrases as a secular religious rite and display certain empty squares as a sacrament also demand we vote for Joe Biden.  The man who served as a Vice President for eight years and served in government for forty years and who authored the very crime legislation many argue made things worse is now the solution.  The man who helped destroy a generation of young black men through aggressive crime legislation can preside over the government that presides over increasingly brutal police and he will solve the problem.

Or not.

Progressives who insisted Americans continue to stay home even after the COVID-19 curve flattened would now have us believe mass protests are fine.  Livelihoods and businesses are destroyed.  Gather to riot and get a pass, but gather for church and go to jail.  Ironically, these same people think healthcare insurance is awful, but your property and casualty insurance will be just fine to make you whole after the riots.

This is not to excuse the other side.  Some can watch the George Floyd video and not see a problem. There are those who thought the optics of the park service clearing out a crowd of protestors with pepper pellets and smoke canisters so the President could hold up a Bible he does not read in front of a church he does not attend was a brilliant political move.  It was not.  There are those who think the President’s tweets do not stir the pot.  They are wrong.

We increasingly, as a society, do not allow thinking outside tribal comfort zones.  Much of the press leans left and so is more sympathetic to that tribal thinking.  Concurrently, politicians from both sides feed off grievances for power.  Neither side has any incentive to find a solution when both profit by keeping the discord going.

Americans would be better off abandoning the quaint and repeatedly proven false notion that Washington has the solution for what ails us. Washington, inevitably, makes most things worse outside the core functions of government.  Americans are too obsessed with Washington.  They are too obsessed with Trump.  They are too obsessed with Biden.

People think Washington will provide the solutions if you just put up enough black squares on Instagram.  But Washington will not provide the solution and most likely your state capitol will not either.  You will provide the solution.  Seek the welfare of your city and there, not Washington, will you find your welfare.  If you can give sweat equity, work.  If you can’t, give money.  If you can’t, give prayer and support.  Give it to the local food bank, the local soup kitchen, the local homeless shelter, the local battered women’s clinic, the local public school — give, work, pray, and invest in your city.  You, not politicians and political parties, will fix this.

Protests Expose Lockdowns and...

Tristan Justice reporting for The Federalist

Protests Expose Lockdowns And Social Distancing Shaming As A Farce 

It was just more than a week ago that crowds gathered at Missouri’s Lake of the Ozarks to enjoy the Memorial Day weekend. With the celebrations however, came sharp criticism over the lack of social distancing featuring fearmongering elites shaming those relishing the springtime sunshine.

Former Missouri Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill was among those quick to demonize the apparent selfish behavior as “embarrassing” for her home state.

“Hope none of them have parents fighting cancer, grandparents with diabetes, aunts and uncles with serious heart conditions. Because clearly they could care less,” McCaskill wrote on Twitter.

When it comes to the massive protests in the wake of George Floyd’s death in police custody however, McCaskill is cheering them on, retweeting somber images of the demonstrations and calling Missouri’s decision to deploy the National Guard to Washington D.C. after days of rioting as “disgusting.”

The densely crowded protests would soon draw the attendance of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren, both over the age of 65 putting them at higher risk of serious complications from the Chinese virus.

The sudden disregard for social distancing from avid lockdowners expose the extreme measures that tanked the nation’s economy and destroyed the nation’s psyche to be nothing more than deeply unserious methods to combat a virus that poses nearly no danger to low-risk groups.

More than 40 million Americans have now filed for unemployment. An estimated 100,000 small businesses have already permanently shut down. About 1 in 3 Americans are experiencing signs of clinical anxiety and depression. Thousands of others have put of critical health procedures so hospitals could build adequate capacity for an overwhelming surge in cases that never came in most of the country.

Yet while thousands gather in protest against police brutality across the country, no one seems to care about the ongoing public health pandemic after chastising those who dared break social distancing rules to reopen their states and reclaim their livelihoods.

In today’s America, churches can’t host socially distanced sermons including more than ten people but a violent mob can burn it down in the name of social justice. States had already made their priorities clear providing bars and casinos with greater freedom than houses of worship it deems nonessential, illustrating just how far we’ve strayed from faith even as millions of Americans desperately need it.

Floyd’s funeral is slated to take place in Houston on June 9 and is expected to draw an attendance of thousands, including prominent figures such as former Vice President Joe Biden. Many in the rest of the country however, were barred from properly saying their goodbyes to lost loved ones because the government declared it too dangerous, even this week and in the coming days. 

But the media doesn’t care. Before downplaying the violence from days of lawless anarchy terrorizing a dystopian nation because the message fit their own progressive agenda, legacy media painted the anti-lockdown protestors as heartless grandma killing rubes. These Americans, the media said, were reckless, selfish, dangerous, suicidal, racist because they could spread the virus to black people, and didn’t deserve medical attention. One would be hard pressed to find that kind of reporting on even larger protests today, because it doesn’t exist.

If nothing else is clear in the aftermath of these time-defining protests, it’s past time to end the lockdowns. Shut down the nursing homes, insulate the at-risk population and move on.

Lancet Retracts Medical Study Critical of Hydroxychloroquine

Study Results Were Designed 

for Political Purposes

The medical journal Lancet has now fully retracted their prior claimed “scientific study” against the use of Hodroxychloroquine.  The Lancet study was quickly and purposefully used by all major media outlets to attack President Trump for his advocacy of the drug as an effective treatment for the COVID-19 virus.

It now appears the purpose of the fraudulent “scientific study”, conducted by a sketchy outfit called Surgisphere – who mysteriously appeared only after President Trump advocated for the treatment, was to weaponize medicine for political purposes.

After they were exposed for their role in pushing manipulated data, Lancet has now fully retracted their study in an attempt to retain credibility.

LANCET – Today, three of the authors of the paper, “Hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine with or without a macrolide for treatment of COVID-19: a multinational registry analysis”, have retracted their study.

They were unable to complete an independent audit of the data underpinning their analysis. As a result, they have concluded that they “can no longer vouch for the veracity of the primary data sources.” (continue reading)

Don’t expect the media to announce the Lancet retraction, or apologize for their role in pushing the political narrative around it.   Journalism is dead as the entire profession has now been exposed as nothing more than narrative engineers.

The Wuhan Virus was exploited for maximum economic damage and political value by an international group of operatives who needed to stop the rise of economic nationalism.

There are trillions at stake, and the desperate need to retain control of global economics by a small group of institutional elites in the banking, trade and finance sector; led to the virus being exploited.  The resulting global crisis is based on their hoax.

The Third Worlding of America

William Marshall for Townhall

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own 

and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall

The Third Worlding of America

Source: AP Photo/John Minchillo

The death of George Floyd was something out of the Third World. Anyone can empathize with the plight of another human being, hands cuffed behind his back, prostrate on the ground, with the knee of another person pressing into their neck for nearly nine minutes. A horrific scene.

But now the knee of the mob is crushing the neck of prostrate, civilized America, as we descend into a Third World cesspit with astonishing rapidity.

The images every night for the past week have been surreal. Hordes of Americans, black and white, burning, ransacking and pillaging with near impunity in cities across America, smashing windows and looting high fashion outlets and mom-and-pop stores alike. Police officers being thrown to the ground like ragdolls. Police officers being shot in the head or stabbed in the neck while trying to maintain order. Ivy League-educated corporate lawyers throwing a Molotov cocktail into a police car filled with officers. An old woman being beaten with a viciousness reminiscent of a beating delivered upon Jews by SS guards in the Warsaw ghetto. Her husband meets the same fate as he tries to defend her with a golf club.

A heroic 77-year-old retired black police captain shot to death trying to prevent looting. Shot to death for some televisions. Shot to death as he tried to protect the property at a friend’s pawn shop, after he’d spent a career defending the people of St. Louis.

God bless David Dorn. His final moments of life, captured by someone on a cell phone camera, were surely as painful to watch as those of George Floyd. And while no one should die as either man did, Mr. Dorn’s life exemplified what all Americans should aspire to, serving his fellow man. The same cannot be said of Mr. Floyd.

The brilliant conservative commentator, Candace Owens, did research into Mr. Floyd’s background. Her findings were very illuminating and can be seen here in a must-watch video. How many people know that Mr. Floyd, who many are holding up as a pillar of the community, was found by the medical examiner to have methamphetamine and fentanyl in his system? Or that he had served five separate stints in prison for various crimes? Or that one of those crimes was a home invasion, in which he stuck a pistol in the belly of a pregnant woman, while four cohorts ransacked her home looking for drugs and money? They settled with stealing her wallet and cell phone. Fortunately, the woman’s neighbor, suspicious of the activity at the home, caught the license plate of the men’s vehicle and called police. When caught, Mr. Floyd was driving the getaway car.

Yes, I understand that none of the foregoing excuses the actions of police officer Derek Chauvin in subduing Mr. Floyd while he was being arrested, yet again. No police officer I’ve ever met would condone kneeling on any detainee’s neck.

But if nationwide wilding and mayhem are to occur, with all the attendant deaths and destruction we have witnessed, how paradoxical it seems that the Great Rage should result from the unjustified death of home invader George Floyd, while David Dorn’s life was so casually forfeited by those claiming to be outraged at police brutality visited upon blacks. David Dorn was a police officer too, defending fellow blacks, and Missourians of every other stripe, for nearly four decades. His death has produced no similar outrage.

Kneeling into the neck of George Floyd only began our descent into national madness. Kneeling continues to be a theme in this continuing societal trauma as we witness the creepy spectacle of a crowd of “progressive” white automatons kneeling, with hands raised, before black activists demanding penitence. It appears to be some sort of ritualistic obeisance to blacks as atonement for the supplicants’ sin of having enjoyed “white privilege.”

The psychic damage evident in so many Americans today in the form of ideologically-based self-loathing has become shockingly apparent. No society whose members evince such self-hatred can be long for this world. Others with self-confidence will see opportunity and eventually seek to displace them, just as a lioness on the African plain can smell weakness among her prey.

Those who do the displacing may take the form of Islamic militants or anarcho-communists who call themselves Antifa, officially labeled a domestic terrorist organization recently, that is well-known and long-studied by those in the national security establishment. (For an excellent discussion of Antifa’s history, methodology and threat profile, see this Washington Times piece.)

The current anarchy is just the latest symptom in the Third Worlding that has been going on in America in recent times. Flashing warning signs have abounded for years.

Barack Obama weaponized the entire national security establishment of our country to remove his party’s political opponent in a fraudulently predicated counter-intelligence operation worthy of a tinpot South American dictator. Of course, even before he launched that seditious campaign, he had sicced the IRS on conservative Tea Party groups, which effectively crippled them before the 2018 elections, helping his party retake the House of Representatives that year.

And of course, we’ve had a pandemic virus, whose origin (whether in a lab or in a wet market) is still to be definitively ascertained, sweep the land. This resulted in the mandating of face mask-wearing for most Americans, like equatorial tribespeople in sub-Saharan Africa. This policy proved oh-so-helpful as the aforementioned Antifa destroyers could blend so seamlessly into crowds of similarly masked protesters as they went about their ransacking ways.

And finally, we’ve had most of the country’s population under virtual house arrest for nearly three months.

The total picture in America today – between virus, Visigoth-like mayhem, and economic shutdown - is so shocking as to be almost incomprehensible. It will be the responsibility of the current president and the one elected, or re-elected, in November, to restore sanity. Let us hope a return to the First World awaits.

William F. Marshall has been an intelligence analyst and investigator in the government, private, and non-profit sectors for more than 30 years. (The views expressed are the author’s alone, and not necessarily those of Judicial Watch.)