Sunday, August 2, 2020

The Michael Flynn I Knew In Iraq Was A Brilliant Patriot


An inveterate teambuilder, Flynn’s conviction for deeds over words drew critical buy-in from external partners. The result was a robust synergism that proved lethal to America’s foes.


Late evening on June 7,, 2006, U.S. Special Forces dumped what was left of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s corpse onto the floor of the FBI’s work space on an Iraqi military base. While the ISIS mass murderer’s death represented the culmination of months of joint FBI/military operations, no festivity ensued that night. The animated Special Forces colonel who was the project’s intelligence director horsewhipped the agents in a sprint to confirm the biometric identification of the killer’s remains.

Seizing the strategic offensive by shaping a narrative of the terrorist leader’s elimination, rather than forensics minutia, propelled the colonel’s urgency. This type of operational friction conventionally devolves into “stay in your lane” tussles, or worse. But this officer, Michael Flynn, had fostered an unconventionally close relationship with the FBI team.

The connective tissue of that productive partnership was trust. Not the transactionary type so quickly disposed of at the first hint of resource competition or interagency parochialism. Rather, the affinity between Flynn and the FBI team derived from the bond between brothers in arms risking their lives in the crucible of battle.

They worked through the night. The forensic match was made before sunrise.

Unlike my other teammates in Iraq, I had previously encountered Flynn as the FBI liaison representative to Joint Special Operations Command. This unit is home to the most accomplished fighters in the American military.

Of the large cadre of colonels working for then Commanding Gen. Stanley McChrystal, Flynn was primus inter pares. Forward-leaning and imbued with a tremendous appetite for detail, his capacity for managing intelligence was unmatched.

The JSOC’s combat philosophy was a devout catechism of combined effects exceeding the sum of their parts. An inveterate teambuilder, Flynn’s conviction for deeds over words drew critical buy-in from external partners. The result was a robust synergism that proved lethal to America’s foes.

A decade later, a retired lieutenant general Flynn transitioned from his second career as a savvy policy commentator, and a less-than-savvy K Street merchant, to throwing in with a pit crew during the demolition derby that was the 2016 U.S presidential election.

Then arrived an ominous apparition that haunted our national psyche for the next four years. Russian spooks, aided by saboteurs from the Trump campaign, were imagined to have subverted the paragon of our democratic system, a free and fair election. This phantasm dwelled in the hearts of Donald Trump’s most strident political adversaries. More troubling, it lurked in the fevered ideations of our national security, legislative leadership, and justice system.

This all changed after a gush of declassified transcripts and affidavits began flowing into daylight. Through the clarity of original source documents and sworn testimony, the allegations of “foreign collusion” evaporated under facts, giving way to a shockingly egregious pattern of governmental abuse.

While malfeasance emerged from multiple institutions, no organization discredited itself more acutely than the Federal Bureau of Investigation I have been privileged to serve for 22 years. With conflagrations ravaging the 2016 electoral landscape, the FBI should have served as a rule-of-law firebreak. But that role was enthusiastically abandoned by FBI headquarters arsonists whose names we have come to learn and loathe.

The entire fiasco has been a gut shot to the thousands of former agents whose careers faithfully adhered to the Constitution. How did law enforcement’s premier investigative agency, steeped with expertise in quashing public corruption, become so thoroughly devoted to abetting it?

The full answer awaits the completion of U.S. Attorney John Durham’s formal investigation, and possibly the deliberations of a federal trial jury. But FBI veterans also seek to know, how on earth was this allowed to happen?

Former FBI Director Jim Comey’s conspicuous dissembling and the self-serving, cable-TV twaddle of Andy McCabe offer no insights, only evasions. Each new document trove reveals their pretentious “It’s possible, but I don’t know” suppositions about the Christopher Steele dossier to be nothing more than high-octane sham.

After mutilating the FBI’s legacy of trust, these deceivers seek to absolve themselves with allusions to subordinates’ bad judgment and systemic incompetency. But wisdom and experience recognize this as yet another masking maneuver aimed at covering a more awful reality of bad faith and abject moral failure.

No bureaucratic maltreatment in this case appears to exceed what the FBI inflicted upon Flynn. After suffering Covington and Burling’s pitiful legal representation and the Obama Justice Department’s shredding of his due process rights, Flynn continues to endure a tantrum of judicial petulance.

From Pakistan to Somalia and Palestine to Afghanistan, my overseas FBI counterterrorism missions consistently benefited from military intelligence briefings prepared by Flynn and his staff. The two organizations’ commitment to the protection of our country drove our efforts.

As a private citizen, when I regard how brazenly Flynn’s persecutors deprived him of his constitutional rights and reputation, I am shocked and alarmed, and you should be too. As a former colleague, when I imagine the good will Americans have for the FBI used to camouflage a scheme for entrapping him, I am deeply ashamed.

In ordering a review to evaluate the “FBI’s role in the Flynn investigation and determine whether any current employees engaged in misconduct,” FBI Director Christopher Wray has taken an important, albeit tentative, first step. The record depicts FBI employees lying to the FISA court, spurious source-handling, doctored reports, and evading federal records laws and oversite compliance. This must be confronted with an unblinking application of all pertinent regulations and laws.

I have to wonder, against all the fanaticism Flynn contended with in far-off hellscapes, could he ever have imagined that ideological extremism would threaten his security and the well-being of his family here in our country?

William J. Corbett is a retired FBI supervisory special agent. He currently teaches college in Hawaii. These views are entirely his own and not representative of any organization.

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The Moral Case Against Mask Mandates And Other COVID Restrictions


Resistance to overbearing regulations is about more than just 'freedom.'


People who resist COVID-19 restrictions are often accused of being selfish and caring only about their own freedom. While that might explain the actions of some, moral arguments can be made against many of the restrictions.

Although simple appeals to “freedom” are indeed less popular today than in the past, we should not disregard them. Nearly all our responses to COVID-19 require balancing one concern against another, and individuals and institutions will come to different conclusions as they try to strike that balance.

Freedom implies the right to conclude something different than the state and order your life accordingly. That is no small thing.

Local Decisions for Local Circumstances

On a political level, many of our COVID-19 restrictions also violate the principle that rules should be made as locally as possible by people who understand specific circumstances, not by a distant lawmaker who can only at most know general trends. Some concerns about freedom arise when power becomes centralized.

There’s more: Requiring people to behave a certain way teaches them “truths” about the world, regardless of whether those things are true.

A few days ago, I was bicycling on one of Lansing’s trails, and I watched a woman walking ahead in the distance. Every time someone got close to her, she would put on her mask and step off the pathway into the grass until he passed — and people passed often, so this was quite a disruption to her walk. The risk to her, being outside in mid-Michigan with people passing her at 15 miles per hour, is extremely small, but she appeared too afraid even to take a normal walk on a nature trail.

Instilling this unnecessary fear in people is cruel. The governor of Michigan tightening the mask rule the day prior likely increased this woman’s fear. Rules that imply the danger is higher than it really is are worth fighting for precisely that reason. Keeping people in such a state of fear and anxiety is not only unkind, it is causing measurable harm.

A moral problem also arises from a desire to manage rather than inform the population. The woman on the walking trail should have received a proper explanation of the risk of her environment, which likely would have reduced her anxiety.

Many in both our political and media classes, however, have no desire for people to be well informed about relative risks. People who are afraid, after all, will engage in socially demanded behaviors. So why risk giving them an accurate picture of their situation? Politicians and the media are not informing the public so much as managing it, an impulse we must call out and fight.

Inevitable Risk

We should also resist the ratcheting effect of a growing culture of safetyism, most excellently discussed in an UnHerd article by Matthew Crawford. He writes, “At the level of sentiment, there appears to be a feedback loop wherein the safer we become, the more intolerable any remaining risk appears. At the level of bureaucratic grasping, we can note that emergency powers are seldom relinquished once the emergency has passed.”

Accepting invasive rules that affect personal behavior in a low-risk environment conditions people to accept that kind of intrusion into their lives. This is one reason people are particularly against masking their children, who are especially prone to manipulation. If we do this, what kind of human are we helping to produce? People who care only about coronavirus statistics gloss over these negative consequences.

It is also morally problematic to indefinitely treat the healthy as the maybe-sick. Inasmuch as we are required to do this at all, we should do it with the lightest hand and for the shortest duration possible. “Eliminate all risk” is not a reasonable standard. Politicians, however, almost always eager central planners — with a few exceptions — seem willing to just drop the hammer.

Dehumanizing Regulations

Finally, onerous COVID-19 restrictions are dehumanizing. From keeping people apart to requiring them to cover their faces constantly, these rules should be employed as sparingly as possible. In early May, Jim Fitzgerald wrote a piece for The Aquila Report in which he objected to masks for several reasons: They encourage us to see other people primarily as a threat, and inhibit our ability to read their faces. He continued:

Imagine baptism with masks, or the Lord’s supper with masks, or sermons and singing with masks. At the very least, the obvious awkwardness would greatly distract us from the seriousness, solemnity, and joy that should accompany participating in the sacraments and other elements of worship.

Unfortunately, some people must no longer imagine. Christianity has been keen to stress that we are not souls trapped in an unfortunate body that we will someday be rid of for good, but a soul-body unity, still embodied when all things are made new.

Rules to cover up an important part of that body, especially given for light reasons and with no clear ending conditions, should be subject to severe scrutiny and, if employed, done so as rarely as possible.



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Fourth Grade Teacher Details How Schools Push Ban History And Leftist Agendas


'The parents don't even know what's going on because it's all at school,' says a fourth grade teacher in an interview. 'The parents question very little and they just assume the teacher knows what they're doing.'


A world without textbooks or homework and where getting the wrong answer is celebrated may sound like an elementary student’s dream, but if such a fantasy becomes a reality, it would damage a generation of young minds. That is, however, exactly what is happening in many public elementary schools.

Recently, I spoke with a fourth-grade teacher from the midwest, who shared her experience witnessing the shifting of curriculum from history and science towards overt political indoctrination, all to the detriment of students’ learning. To protect this person’s privacy, she will remain nameless.

In supervising fourth grade, she teaches a little bit of everything: math, reading, language arts, social studies, and science. Recently, her school district, like many others, switched to an “integrated curriculum.” On paper, an integrated curriculum sounds like a fair idea. Students learn subjects by exploring their intersections to deepen understanding. In practice, however, the curriculum all but eradicates history while working to push politics on impressionable children.

As the teacher reports, “It says ‘integrated curriculum,’ and some of its science, and some of its social studies but it really isn’t. It’s more of a push for the progressive movement.” Indeed, it’s a movement that has fundamentally altered her curriculum. As the school district’s new curricula are online, outsiders have the ability to dictate curriculum to teachers. The result? This teacher’s science and history classes were gutted.

History Deemed Expendable

In history classes, she taught things like U.S. government, the explorers, and the Civil War from a nuanced perspective that is still accessible to her young students. She told me:
I used to do a whole unit an Abraham Lincoln, and for some reason, it’s just all of that is gone, based on an integrated curriculum. When you look at our curriculum, they’ve removed everything that was in the textbook. They say, ‘Don’t use the textbook, and you don’t need to teach that anymore.’

The kids are missing out on learning why there was a civil war in the first place. They don’t learn the true meaning of slavery and how it got resolved because it’s just disappeared from the curriculum.

The only thing I can teach in social studies was a little bit of government. There wasn’t anything anymore about the Civil War; that was completely gone. I felt bad about that.
I spoke to a friend, who’s a fifth-grade teacher, and her Revolutionary War unit was gone. She used to do a great job on the colonists of America.

Science Replaced With Propaganda

Before the integrated curriculum began, this teacher engaged her students in an array of scientific studies. In the new curriculum, however:

My last unit of teaching was just a long unit on petroleum and how bad it was. It would talk about oil spills. We’d have an experiment that kids have to mix tempera paint and oil to simulate an oil spill, so when that happened, the kids would see how awful it was on plants and animals.

In reality, these are few and far between, where we have oil spills and causing great damage. But they take something that was awful that happened back in history, we’ll take that and say, ‘This is why no one should never use oil or gas.’

They’re trying to tell the kids that you are bad if you think that you should drive a car or a school bus without it being with renewable energy. I’m teaching renewable energy in the 4th grade and feeling that is there should be a debate on it, and it should be taught both ways.

Instead, it’s video after video after video how we killed animals, how it’s bad for the environment. It’s one-sided education instead of the time for debate. That is what it’s really changed in the elementary school year. It’s a one-sided script.

Science class under this curriculum mandate is not science, but political propaganda. Students have lost out on foundational skills that would benefit them greatly in middle and high school.

They don’t give you the base level of what these little students need, and so these younger kids are not experiencing what the past children learn, which was things like: how does the machine work?

They’re not looking at the different levels of electricity. They’re not looking at anything about the water cycle. It’s all in the electronics area or it’s always on the Internet. Nothing is about reading a book and learning about following directions anymore. It goes backward.

Science is taught in a very progressive manner. No longer the kids ever going to see a textbook in schools. It’s called ’21st-century learning’ so therefore without a textbook now.

I go to the Internet to get the curriculum guide and it’s about computers and making robots work. They’re just kind of step by step guides. Instead of learning where the energy comes from, we go right to the Internet and we just build a robot, but they don’t even know what’s going on. They don’t learn how the robot works.

Beloved Projects on the Chopping Block

In a tragic bit of irony, even the beneficial use of an integrated curriculum was taken from students. Every year, this teacher would allow each student to research a state and give a presentation and report about it.

The kids really had a great understanding of states, regions, and the economic reasons for them why you might want to grow up and go somewhere else based on temperature, based on jobs, based on the natural resources of each state…

It was so much fun doing state reports. Now, sadly to say, I’m told not to, because there’s no time for it. That it would be a waste of time. It was probably the best thing about 4th grade.

They say, ‘What are you doing, teaching states? Why are you letting the kids do a state report?’ I said, ‘It’s reading, it’s writing, it’s research.’ There is so much to learn, and now I’m not allowed to do that because of the integrated curriculum.

These state projects were not just social studies. They taught kids valuable research and communication skills. The cross-section of skills that coalesced into a beloved annual tradition is how an integrated curriculum should function. Now it’s gone, and so is the teacher’s ability to be creative in working with her students.

Throwing Out Textbooks

This teacher’s district, like many others, has not just done away with history and science, but also textbooks in general.

The frustrating part of being a teacher in elementary grades is that they have no foundational skills. The textbooks that were used went through the different states and regions, the government, Abraham Lincoln… As far as studying history, we kind of lost all of that because I was told, ‘Please discard all of your textbooks.’ That was frustrating, and I asked why over and over and over again and was told that we now have an integrated curriculum, so do not use textbooks.

Ditching all books for computers teaches students to disregard the information that can be found in books, the teacher noted. Instead, they are being taught that everything can and should be learned online. Despite this push towards the internet, the students are not taught how to evaluate online sources for accuracy.

In youth and inexperience, it can be easy to mistake a valid source of historical or scientific facts with a poor alternative. This is a recipe for ill-prepared children armed with a legion of bad facts.

Parents None the Wiser

With the removal of important foundational skills and basic subjects, one would think the school district parents would be up-in-arms about the schools’ curriculum shift. Conservative parents especially should be fighting the school’s attempted indoctrination of their children. However, they are unable to have opinions on their children’s education, because they have no idea what’s happening.

The parents don’t even know what’s going on because it’s all at school. We hardly give homework anymore, which is so frustrating. I just disagree with a lot of things, but they keep it in school so that the parents don’t have to worry. The parents question very little and they just assume the teacher knows what they’re doing.

With limited homework, parents lack a window into what is being taught to their children. Likewise, the students are losing an important aspect of early education — drilling foundational subjects, like basic math, in order to better understand in the future.

It’s Great to Get the Wrong Answer

Just like an integrated curriculum, a “growth mindset” sounds great in theory. Rather than focus on shame of past mistakes, students can use their errors to learn and grow. Yet often, the in-school application of a so-called “growth mindset” actually keeps students from learning and growing. The teacher explains:

The way of teaching is to get them to get the answer first, and then some of the kids won’t know how they got there because they’re always in a group setting. We have to work together. We’re always talking about cooperative learning. I feel that too much cooperative learning now. We don’t have the skill base anymore.

We test them, but by the time we’ve tested them, they really have never learned anything in the first place. We know they’re at the bottom and they stay at the bottom because nobody sitting there saying, ‘Well let’s just skill and drill.’ They’ve left out all the basic skills. They left out drills.

No longer can a teacher do things like math flashcards, because that’s not acceptable. Some principals think that that would belittle the children if they see that they’re not getting their math facts fast.

We’ve changed a lot of ways that used to work in the past by saying, ‘We can’t identify the kids that are low.’ So they try to pretend that that’s why we need cooperative learning. Just give the answer. Don’t let them say the wrong answer and feel bad about it.

And then, they come up with this new math, and just say, ‘Getting the wrong answer is good because that helps your brain grow.’ So we’ve got this growth mindset, which is fine but we’re really allowing kids to get wrong answers and not be curious about how do we get to this right.

The fear of belittling or saddening students is directly keeping them from learning and thriving academically.

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Understanding the gravity of the Russia Hoax





Understanding the gravity
of the Russia Hoax


Andrea Widburg • August 2, 2020


One of the claims Democrats love to tout about the Obama administration is that it was “scandal free.” For those who paid attention to the IRS targeting, Benghazi, Fast & Furious, and the cash smuggled to Iran, to name just a few illegal and/or immoral activities, that was always a peculiar boast. The Obama administration was up to its eyeballs in scandals. It was Obama who finally said what had really happened, which was that “We didn’t have a scandal that embarrassed us.”

In other words, the issue wasn’t that the administration was scandal-free. The issue was that the media protected the administration from voters’ wrath should they learn about those scandals.

The Russia Hoax has benefitted from the media’s continued unwillingness to report on Obama-era scandals. When it looked as if the Russia Hoax could achieve a coup against the Trump presidency, members of the press developed a form of Tourette syndrome that saw them obsessively mouth “Russia, Russia, Russia” all day, every day.

However, when Robert Mueller’s handpicked Democrat-friendly team, despite two years and 35 million dollars, was unable to find a smidgen of proof that Trump or his administration had colluded with the Russians, leftists inside and outside of the media fell silent. Sure, they’ll still raise the fact that Trump, at a press conference, said, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 [Hillary Clinton] emails that are missing,” but their hearts aren’t in it.

They know that normal people understand that Trump was making a pointed joke about the fact that the Russians, the Chinese, and every other hacker on earth had read through Hillary’s emails for years. Aside from leftists being utterly humorless, the media learned that raising this statement periodically was chum to the true believers but not very interesting to anyone else.

When it came to burying the whole Russia Hoax, the Democrats and their media lackeys were helped by the fact that the story is so gosh-darned complicated. It involved dozens of people (some genuinely bad actors and some useful idiots), several countries, thousands of pages of cryptic papers, and a dizzying timeline. It’s hard to get people who aren’t political junkies excited about something like that, and even harder to arouse them to a sense of outrage over what the Obama administration did.

And that’s where Andrew C. McCarthy’s latest column comes in. His columns are always interesting because they help explain each new revelation about the hoax. This time, though, McCarthy has opted to open with an overview of the entire scandal and why it matters. With unusual clarity, he explains how the Obama administration used the vast power of the intelligence agencies to spy on an opposition candidate and then try to commit a coup.

I’ve cherry-picked a few relevant paragraphs, but I urge you to read the whole thing. Once you’ve read it, you’ll understand why the Russia Hoax isn’t just an inside politics thing that ultimately doesn’t matter:




As I contended in Ball of Collusion, my book on the Trump-Russia investigation, the target of the probe spearheaded by the FBI — but greenlighted by the Obama White House, and abetted by the Justice Department and U.S. intelligence agencies — was Donald Trump. Not the Trump campaign, not the Trump administration. Those were of interest only insofar as they were vehicles for Trump himself. The campaign, which the Bureau and its apologists risibly claim was the focus of the investigation, would have been of no interest to them were it not for Trump.

You don’t like Donald Trump? Fine. The investigation here was indeed about Donald Trump. But the scandal is about how abusive officials can exploit their awesome powers against any political opponent. And the people who authorized this political spying will be right back in business if, come November, Obama’s vice-president is elected president — notwithstanding that he’s yet to be asked serious questions about it.

Congress’s investigation was stonewalled. The more revelation we get, the more obvious it is that there was no bona fide national-security rationale for concealment. Documents were withheld to hide official and unofficial executive activity that was abusive, embarrassing, and, at least in some instances, illegal (e.g., tampering with a document that was critical to the FBI’s presentation of “facts” to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court).

The Obama administration and the FBI knew that it was they who were meddling in a presidential campaign — using executive intelligence powers to monitor the president’s political opposition. This, they also knew, would rightly be regarded as a scandalous abuse of power if it ever became public. There was no rational or good-faith evidentiary basis to believe that Trump was in a criminal conspiracy with the Kremlin or that he’d had any role in Russian intelligence’s suspected hacking of Democratic Party email accounts.

In the stretch run of the 2016 campaign, President Obama authorized his administration’s investigative agencies to monitor his party’s opponent in the presidential election, on the pretext that Donald Trump was a clandestine agent of Russia. Realizing this was a gravely serious allegation for which there was laughably insufficient predication, administration officials kept Trump’s name off the investigative files. That way, they could deny that they were doing what they did. Then they did it . . . and denied it.


It is to be hoped that John Durham releases his long-promised investigative report sooner, rather than later. The American people need to understand just how scandalous the Obama administration and its holdovers were.




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It’s August: Rest, Fall will be Even Crazier

AG Bill Barr raises new questions with unusual and unexpected ...

Article by Clarice Feldmann in "The American Thinker"

If you had any doubt that the Democrats know they have a losing candidate (who has this week pushed back the announcement of his running mate) at the head of their ticket, their conduct the past week is the tell:

1.The outrageous House Judiciary Committee hearing with Attorney General William Barr, whose IQ surely bests that of the combined intelligence of the Democrats on the committee, was surely a desperation move to hold their base. Scott Johnson:

To say the Democrats must be crazy would be an overly charitable interpretation of their performance in the House Judiciary Committee spectacle starring Attorney General Barr yesterday. They only seemed crazy as they repeatedly disgraced themselves. The disgrace, however, was obviously premeditated.

It turns out they had called Barr as a backdrop for their own accusatory and disparaging speeches with the thought that they would cut him off and preclude him from responding. They prevented him from responding by “reclaim[ing their] time” virtually every time Barr sought to respond to the accusations. I can’t be the only one who thought to himself, “Forget your time. You need to reclaim your mind.” When it comes to the defense of the United States, they’re on the other side.

Barr was given no opportunity to respond to their ridiculous accusations, but he demolished the panel when given even a tiny opening. Michael Goodwin:

After the GOP’s Jim Jordan countered with an attack on the FBI’s spying on Trump’s campaign and played a video of pundits calling the violence in Portland and elsewhere “peaceful protests,” the air had left the room before Barr said a word.

When he got his chance, he didn’t just defend his tenure -- he went on offense to demand an end to the “demonizing of police” and the dangerous defunding movement.

The war against law enforcement, he said, is making police “more risk-averse,” and that is part of the reason crime is soaring across America -- leading to the deaths of the very people the Black Lives Matter movement says it wants to help.

“The leading cause of death for young black males is homicide,” he said, adding that about 7,500 are murdered each year, 90 percent by other black Americans.

 “Each of those lives matter,” the attorney general declared.

Thankfully, somebody is not afraid the truth will get him canceled.

It was the first of many times Barr turned the tables on his would-be tormentors. He often appeared bored, but when he was allowed to speak, his words cut through the room like a knife. He called the attacks in Portland and elsewhere “an assault on the government of the United States.”

Later, he chided Nadler & Co. for their silence in the face of clear criminal activity.

“This is the first time in my memory that the leaders of one of our two great political parties, the Democratic Party, are not coming out and condemning mob violence,” he said. “Can’t we just say the violence against the federal courts has to stop? Could we hear something like that?”

2. The Democrat mayors’ walkbacks of their overt support for the rioters now that it’s clear that most Americans prefer the rule of law to mob rule and that these mass “peaceful or mostly peaceful” riots are eroding the Democrats' hopes for a return to the Oval Office. Under our federal system there is little the president can do -- except protect federal facilities in cities whose mayors refuse to cooperate -- but some mayors are beginning to cooperate and I think it’s because they recognize this Democrat-supported mayhem is working against them.

(a) As murder rates soared in Chicago, Mayor Lightfoot relented and agreed to the President’s offer to have National Guard troops help restore order.   

The Chicago Tribune reports that both sides are still keeping their options open -- The President for sending in troops to patrol, rather than just aid in the investigations and Mayor Lightfoot to withdraw from the agreement, but I consider this a white flag on her part that her present tactics are only worsening the chaos. 

Trump on Wednesday said he is expanding “Operation Legend,” with the agents heading to Chicago to bolster existing law enforcement efforts -- not create a Portland-style camouflaged paramilitary strike force that is attracting widespread criticism.

The agents will work in partnership with Chicago police and Lightfoot’s office under the direction of U.S. Attorney John Lausch, who Lightfoot, a former federal prosecutor, knows and trusts.

Trump and Lightfoot are in agreement over the strategy of sending in agents to plug into existing operations. Trump, who has bragged since his 2016 campaign he knows how to easily solve crime in Chicago, did not take a future heavier handed response off the table. That’s why Lightfoot is wary. 

(b) Portland:

In Portland, instead of continuing to attack the placement of federal troops around the federal courthouse, Oregon has agreed to send in State Troopers and local police forces to protect the facility. Federal troops will withdraw conditionally from the courthouse but will remain in the area to return if Oregon doesn’t do what it has promised to do.

"The Department will continue to maintain our current, augmented federal law enforcement personnel in Portland until we are assured that the Hatfield Federal Courthouse and other federal properties will no longer be attacked and that the seat of justice in Portland will remain secure," said Wolf. "This has been our mission since the violent, criminal activity began."

(c) Seattle

The Seattle authorities passed a law banning police from using standard riot control techniques, but a federal court judge issued a temporary ban on that law, which Chief of Police Carmen Best noted would not allow her troops to handle riots. 

Again, federal troops will augment the force that Democrat officials are doing everything to hamstring.

Meanwhile, on Thursday, a federal government plan arrived in Seattle, carrying federal law enforcement officers who were expected to be deployed this weekend to protect federal buildings from any possible rioting.

They would augment the deployment of local police.

(d) Minneapolis

The mayor and city council, looking and behaving like a high school student council, have voted to defund the police. Local communities are forming their own self-defense operations.  

3. The push for mail balloting as evidence grows of its inadequacies. Among these are the fact they make voting by ineligible voters more likely; the mail delivery system is insecure and, worst of all, the slow counting of ballots and the challenges likely to ensue from such an absurd run around normal procedures guarantees prolonged election challenges and fights, possibly leaving the results in limbo as the parties wend their way through the court system.

4. RussiaGate

At the House Judiciary Committee Hearings, Democrats pressed Barr to agree that no criminal prosecutions would be initiated until after the election. He refused. Given that any trials of those involved would be in an almost 96 percent Democrat jurisdiction, I’ve always believed that the prosecutors need to have plea agreements. So it was of interest to read a report that Strzok and others are believed to be cooperating with the Durham probers. L.J. Keith of Community Digital News:

WASHINGTON, DC: Former FBI agent Peter Strzok is cooperating and working with the John Durham probe of the origins of the Russia Hoax, investigative reporter Adam Housley reports. If true, it would be a bombshell development in the investigation of the criminal conspiracy against Donald Trump.

Strzok would be a key witness against higher-ups at the FBI, the intelligence community, and the White House. He is at the center of both the Hillary Clinton exoneration and the origins of the Russia Hoax. He and Andrew Weissmann started Crossfire Hurricane. They used the Brennan Mifsud frame job of George Papadopoulos and the Steele Dossier to obtain fraudulent FISA warrants...

Adam Housley, an award winner former Fox News reporter tweeted on July 23rd: “Being told that Peter Strzok is talking with investigators.”

To recap, as we head into the national campaign, the Democrat mayors and councils have done little to protect their citizens and property, and only the federal government, despite the strictures of the federal system, has been working to restore law and order. It’s possible that indictments will be filed against the wrongdoers in the RussiaGate scandal before the election, and the Democrats are doing everything they can to make the election as chaotic and litigious as they possibly can. As if there is not enough chaos in ordinary national elections (and transitions), they hope to make it even more so. Doesn’t sound like they think they have this in the bag. Rasmussen says they certainly do not. He places the President ahead of Obama’s approval ratings at this point in time.

 



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America, You've Really Had a Wonderful Life

Why George Bailey (and I) didn't jump off that bridge. | It's a ...

Article by Peggy Ryan in "The American Thinker"

In the movie It's a Wonderful Life, an angel, Clarence, is sent to help George Bailey, a man who's sacrificed his dreams for family and community but is now falsely accused of stealing $8,000 and facing jail.  When George wishes he'd never been born, Clarence grants that wish. 

Suddenly, George finds himself in a world where his beloved hometown, Bedford Falls, has been turned into anarchy and slums.  The town's named Pottersville after a greedy, power-hungry oligarch, Henry Potter, who now owns everything.  In this new world, George sees people he'd helped to succeed now destitute, living in run-down projects, with no hope for anything but survival.  Here his once-quiet, peaceful town is a cacophony of flashing lights, sirens, drunken brawls, and strip clubs.  Those who haven't turned to drink or chaos are locked behind closed doors, trapped in fear, depression, and hopelessness. 

Like George Bailey, America's been given a glimpse of what our country would look like if Hillary Clinton had been elected president or what it will look like if Joe Biden wins in November.  In this new world, our beloved country is now the People's Republic of America.

In the  People's Republic, people stand helplessly by as their jobs disappear, as shortages of water, meat, toilet paper, and other essentials drive hoarding, panic.  They're confined to quarters, denied freedom of movement even on beaches and in parks. 

Here there's no competition, no pesky ads and commercials for restaurants, high-end sneakers, or luxury cars, because government allows only state stores, Walmart, Target, big-box stores.  Gone are the small businesses that offer designer clothes and shoes, the mom-and-pop ice cream shops, bookstores, jewelry stores, hair salons — the list goes on of businesses deemed nonessential.  In the People's Republic, it doesn't matter what people want; they'll get only what they need to survive.

"The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the law of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence." —John Adams

In this new world, paltry government handouts (stimulus checks) are supposed to heal the wounds of people forced out of business, of private schools that couldn't survive shutdowns, of people  who couldn't pay rent or feed their families once their paycheck stopped coming.

Here the streets are filled with violence, racist mobs who attack people for the color of their skin (white).  Looting, burning, even killing is condoned, even encouraged by  leaders.  These supposed leaders refuse federal help to put down riots because they don't want the violence to end.  It's their violence, their cause, their country. 

In the People's Republic, the Constitution is dead, the Declaration of Independence but a memory.  Americans have surrendered their right to free movement, religious freedom, property rights to a single despot, a governor.  One man or woman brought down an entire state with pen and phone.  Obama must be so proud. 

But most devastating is Americans' loss of their God-given right to pursue happiness.  From morning to night, America's airwaves carry nothing but soul-sucking, spirit-killing hatred.  Leftists preach either directly or through their mouthpieces abject hatred for white people, Christians, conservatives, pro-life advocates, the president of the United States and any who support him.  They preach seething hatred for America.

"The hearts of your soldiers beat high with the spirit of freedom - they are animated with the justice of their cause, and while they grasp their swords, can look up to heaven for assistance. Your adversaries are composed of wretches who laugh at the rights of humanity, who turn religion into derision, and would, for higher wages, direct their swords against their leaders or their country."  —Samuel Adams, American Independence speech, 1776

Media savage the American people with a daily dose of fear, panic over an epidemic that doesn't threaten our country's survival but promises to destroy our country's economy, our spirit, our liberty.

Thus, in the People's Republic, cheerful waves and smiles of neighbors or strangers are replaced by suspicious stares, accusatory shouts that people are standing too close or missing their masks.  Here people can't be all chummy with neighbors and friends because any one of them could be the silent carrier of the death virus.  Better to do without friends, not to see family, not to trust or welcome anyone if a lonely, destitute existence will "keep them safe."

Gone is the rush of joy when proud parents watch their kids or grandkids "walk," because in this world, there are no graduations, no celebrations, no joys.  Gone is the pride and sense of accomplishment when Americans land a great job, buy their first homes, or start their own businesses.  In the  People's Republic, these aren't accomplishments — merely proof of white supremacy, proof of capitalist greed. 

In It's a Wonderful Life, George no longer recognizes his hometown.  He confronts his guardian angel, demands an explanation for all the strange things he's seeing.  Clarence tells him there is no George Bailey, no driver's license, no 4-F card, no insurance policy because George Bailey was never born.

"You've been given a great gift, George: a chance to see what the world would be like without you." 

And you've been given a great gift, America: a chance to see what this country would be like if Donald Trump had never been elected president, a preview of if Joe Biden wins in November. 

But will we make it to November?   Governors drunk on power aren't releasing their grip on the people; they're doubling down, rolling back plans to reopen their states.  Many order everyone to wear a mask, proving they can control the people right down to the air they breathe.  Some are defunding police, paving the way for unopposed violent insurrection.  

For those who think government seizure of private business is justified because a pandemic calls for drastic measures or who see house arrest as citizens just doing their part, or excuse rampant anarchy and violent mobs because we're all racists and need to be punished, you've found your home: the People's Republic of America. 

But if you want the unbridled joy of true freedom, the miracle of America, then speak now or forever hold your peace.  Americans are settling into subjugation, tyranny is becoming "normalized."  Today, most Americans don't plan resistance; they quietly await their overlords' next edict, another shutdown, mail-in voting, mandatory chips.

"The time is now near at hand which must probably determine whether Americans are to be freemen or slaves; whether they are to have any property they can call their own; whether their houses and farms are to be pillaged and destroyed, and themselves consigned to a state of wretchedness from which no human efforts will deliver them.  The fate of unborn millions will now depend, under God, on the courage and conduct of this army. Our cruel and unrelenting enemy leaves us only the choice of brave resistance, or the most abject submission."  —George Washington

Governors will never cede their newfound power back to the people, will only tighten their grip, expand their orders.  They'll use their unchallenged authority to steal the 2020 election.

And then it will be as if Donald J. Trump had never been elected president. 

To paraphrase Clarence's final appeal from It's a Wonderful Life: "You see[, America], you've really had a wonderful life.  Don't you see what a mistake it would be to throw it all away?" 

Don't you see, America?





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The case for Trump will come down to his record. It’s a strong one.



President Trump’s record of accomplishments is easy to compile.

Most significantly, he has brought the existential threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party into the sunlight. No more nice words. No more treating the Tiananmen Square massacre as a bug, not a feature. The light is on. Trump has pulled the cord.


With huge help from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), Trump has put two justices on the Supreme Court, 53 judges on the federal courts of appeals, 144 and counting on the District courts, and more than 20 on the specialty courts. The Constitution has been buttressed.

Trump’s tax cuts, along with the massive deregulation he orchestrated, led to 3.5 percent unemployment until the regime in Beijing acted with criminal recklessness toward a virus that has devastated the world. Economic recovery depends on those rule rollbacks, and not just grotesque overreaches such as the Clean Power Plan and “Waters of the United States” rule, but on hundreds of other intrusions into the private businesses and onto the private property of Americans.

Trump took a military operating in President Barack Obama’s last years at about $600 billion and moved that budget by his third year to $738 billion, with more in the budget coming soon. The Navy necessary to meet China on the high seas, all 355 ships of it, is being planned and built.

Trump tore up the so-called Iran nuclear deal, which was a tower of absurd hopes built on a policy of appeasement and a foundation of hostility to Israel.

Trump moved the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem and blessed Israel’s necessary annexation of the Golan Heights. His peace plan is the closest to reality of any since Oslo.
Trump took the United States out of the unbalanced, absurd, doomed-to-fail Paris Climate Agreement and has instead focused on and delivered American energy independence. People have real job security in Pennsylvania as a result, if not in jetting off to Paris for follow-up seminars.

Trump ordered Iran’s master terrorist, Gen. Qasem Soleimani, killed, accomplished the complete physical destruction of the Islamic State caliphate and successfully hunted down its terrorist chieftain, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. The former was never contemplated by Obama, the latter couldn’t get done by him even though his scampering from Iraq in 2011 led to the rise of Islamic State and its thousand barbarities. The Syrian butcher, Bashar al-Assad, has twice used chemical weapons and twice had cruise missiles remind him that the red line is back and is real. Russian mercenaries attacked U.S. troops in Syria and were mowed down. Not an American was killed. Those are “Trump rules of engagement.” Even Cuba is back in its box, joined there by Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro.

At home, Trump pushed through the long-overdue justice reform legislation and the reorganization of Veterans Affairs, and, this year, the Great American Outdoors Act that fully funds the Land and Water Conservation Fund. House Democrats passed a piffling bill when covid-19 arrived, while Trump, McConnell and Senate Republicans advanced the innovative and massive Paycheck Protection Program that kept the U.S. economy from collapsing even as it contracted by nearly 10 percent in the second quarter as the China’s principal export, covid-19, ravaged the country.

Trump’s border wall, proceeding apace, makes obvious sense. More than 200 miles completed, with Trump tweeting Thursday the length with be 300 miles by September.
Trump got his United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, replacing the North American Free Trade Agreement. From dairy farms in Wisconsin to border businesses in Arizona, the USMCA was a huge win for the United States. Trump doesn’t want to deport the “dreamers” and won’t, but his deals with Mexico, El Salvador and Guatemala have helped stem a flow of illegal entries into the United States that Obama was helpless to halt.

While establishing himself as the most accessible-to-the-media president in modern times, Trump has also stripped off the veneer of objectivity from the “fake news.” “Blue Bubble” journalists are the last to know the contempt in which they are held beyond the Acela corridor and outside Silicon Valley and Hollywood. They mistake their small audience share for success. In fact, most of America would rather watch a mystery poetry slam than their “news.” Trump hammered that home, and journalists hate him for it. In turn, Blue Check Twitter confirms the contempt that “elites” feel for more than half of America.

Trump’s brawling, slugging, tempestuous approach to everything in every hour has worn down many, but his road is marked by these accomplishments. Former vice president Joe Biden’s near-50-year run in government is marked by . . . well, you fill that in. Polls say Biden is far ahead. We shall see.

There’s an aesthetic critique of Trump that has convinced elites that he must be beaten, that he is cruel and beneath the office. But Americans want their jobs and security back. They like the police. And, yes, most of the time they mostly admire Trump’s style and, almost always, his results.

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Patriots Come Out to ‘Back the Blue’ and Leftists Lose Their Minds


Seattle Introduces Bill 

To Further Reduce Police


Seattle has been one of the cities that has suffered the most from the radical “defund the police” movement. 

The majority of the council is already in favor of defunding the police by 50 percent. As a part of that effort, the council introduced a bill which would transfer a lot of present police responsibilities to a civilian-led “Department of Community Safety and Violence Prevention” which would handle things like the 911 call center. The council claimed that the police department wouldn’t be abolished but would be a smaller separate unit. 

The bill argued that the police department “perpetuates racism and violence” and upholds “white supremacy culture.” Instead they want to move the money to a civilian-led “Department of Community Safety & Violence Prevention” that would focus on “community-led activities” and on “housing, food security, and other basic needs” along with “culturally-relevant expertise rooted in community connections,” according to documents posted by Christopher Rufo, Director of Discovery Institute’s Center on Wealth & Poverty.


According to the proposal, to be considered, any groups involved must demonstrate that they are “well-versed in de-escalation skills” and are “trauma-informed, gender-affirming, anti-racist praxis” as well as “committed to hiring staff from the communities they serve.” 
Council Member Mosqueda spoke about “ramping up” to 50 percent reduction.

The council is considering nearly 40 SPD budget amendments, including asking the police chief to do what are called “out of order” layoffs so that recently hired officers, who are more diverse, are not fired first. 
Councilmember Debora Juarez warned that directive could be illegal.
She also cautioned against strong language in a resolution to create a new civilian-led safety department. 
“To me, it’s divisive. It’s not bringing us together as a city. I want to see how we actually defund the police department with a plan, not a pledge,” Juarez said.

So it still sounds like they’re confused about what they’re doing. 

This followed radical leftists marching on the homes of some of the city council members, as we previously reported.

The socialist member, Kshama Sawant, flipped out, claiming they weren’t being serious enough about it.


They’re may be having second thoughts at least about doing it quickly with all the violence they’re getting and the likely backlash they’re getting because of this. They’re having public comment on Monday. 

All this talk about defunding didn’t sit well with some of the sane people in Seattle who came out in support of the police in a rally on Saturday, putting even more pressure on the council.




Naturally any such rally in Seattle drew agitators on the left. 

There’s this lovely guy, Bennett Hazelton, as he told all of us, who was arrested.



These unhinged folks (turn down the sound a little or you might lose your ears). 



This guy was literally shaking. 



He probably doesn’t understand that he likely voted for the guy who built the “cages” for kids. 

But these two were perhaps the best of all. 

Check out this guy who wants to defund the police but is now complaining to the police about being assaulted and giving them a report. Which is it guys? You want the police when you need them?



But I have to confess this is my favorite one. Because it’s so emblematic of the movement. 



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