Thousands of President Trump supporters took to the water for another MAGA boat parade in Jupiter Inlet, Florida (video below). Apparently President Trump heard of the parade and gave the following statement: “Wow! I hear they have thousands and thousands of boats parading in Jupiter, despite the fact that they tried to cancel us. Everyone is having an incredible time. On this day, we especially appreciate everyone who served and fought for our great Country. I love you all! ”
Two videos below:
Have you ever seen a parade of any kind showcasing support for Joe Biden?
Once upon a time long ago, we agreed there were certain immutable laws of human nature. These laws were based on facts, reality, and data.
In other words, we accepted common sense about the way the world worked according to logical and even “scientific” principles. That assumption defined us as “enlightened” rather than Dark Age reductionists and ideological- or myth-driven zealots.
Not now. “Progressives,” especially the media, are most often regressive, anti-Enlightenment, and intolerant people, who start with a deductive premise and then make the evidence conform to it—or else.
Regressives
For example, we used to believe that if the government printed more money without commensurate sudden rises in population or economic output, inflation followed. And money cheapened in value all the more so if the government simultaneously both incentivized labor non-participation through over generous entitlements, and promised or enacted higher taxes and more regulations. The latter inevitably would discourage production as demand from a stimulated economy rose.
In 100 days, we’ve either done all of those things or, at least sent messages to producers that we shall do so shortly. Why then are we surprised that monthly consumer prices are spiking after nearly 20 years of very low inflation? Why are our essentials such as lumber, gasoline, housing, appliances, and food skyrocketing? Is the current idea that there is no science of economics? Or is inflation good by “spreading the wealth” through decreasing the value of money for those who have too much of it?
Deterrence is also an ancient law. Humans make instant cost-benefit analyses and act accordingly—from nation states that weigh the advisability of war to potential criminals who gauge the chances of their arrest and punishment.
In deterrent terms along the border, what happens if the United States signals Latin America and Mexico that it will cease construction on an effective border wall, promise in advance blanket amnesties, reinstate “catch and release” rules, stop prior efforts to recalibrate easy “refugee status,” and pull back from detaining unlawful border crossers? Logically, would not potential illegal immigrants believe that the rewards of U.S. healthcare, safety, housing subsidies, entitlement support, education, and even affirmative action outweigh the increasing unlikelihood of meeting resistance at the border—or any later consequences for residing illegally in the United States?
The result is now true “chaos” at the border. Tens of thousands of unvetted immigrants illegally stream into the United States, in a fashion that is not diverse, not legal, not meritocratic, and not measured—the old foundations of rapid melting-pot assimilation.
Did the Biden Administration simply by fiat declare that such obvious human laws did not apply to their superior moral impulses? Or did it deliberately violate them to change the demography of the American southwest in ways that eventually will benefit the hard Left? Likewise, could it be that rising crime is due to efforts to defund or cut back police forces, or allowing criminals to be freed without bail, or district attorneys not prosecuting crimes deemed matters of social justice.
Nation-states, like people, acknowledge the laws of deterrence. Signal to the Middle East that crippling sanctions against Iran are ending. Assure the world that the United States will be cutting back on domestic fossil fuel development and thus inevitably will become more dependent on others who produce “dirty” oil and gas. Assume that America now trusts Iranian negotiators and thus will reenter the Iran nuclear deal. Attest that the Palestinians are again front and center in all Middle East diplomacy. Act as if Israel no longer enjoys the full support of the United States, as money pours into Palestinian coffers without audit. Deride the Abraham Accords. And, finally, treat Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas as if they are the Middle East intersectional counterparts to marginalized people of color in the United States (Israel playing Derek Chauvin to Hamas’s George Floyd). Is not all that logic assurance that there would be a war within 100 days?
Surely, even the woke Biden Administration knows something about deterrence. So was it naïve—or simply “leveling the playfield” to ensure Shiites and Persians were affirmed to receive their “fair share” of Middle East respect and influence, while Israel and the Gulf States surrendered their unearned privilege?
The War Against Science and Logic
To violate natural laws requires mocking empiricism, science, and data, or at least reducing them to irrelevance—for political, careerist, or ideological agendas.
Take the now infamous and pseudo-scientific “Steele dossier” and the “Russian collusion” mythography. From 2016 to 2018 Christopher Steele’s high school-like, jargon-filled, mish-mash folder was cited as near scientific “proof” of Trump’s perversions, treason, and various corruptions.
Steele, we were told, was a Russian “expert.” He was a “seasoned” British intelligence officer, albeit “retired,” with access to impeccable (though anonymous) sources.
CNN and MSNBC wheeled out all sorts of former FBI and CIA “professionals”—headed by ex-CIA chief John Brennan, and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, both previously known for admitting to lying to Congress under oath.
All our experts periodically “confirmed” Steele’s impeccable “credentials.” And then suddenly, 22 months after Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation was jump started in part by a leaked “dossier,” it folded. There was no evidence of actionable “collusion.” Abruptly, “expert” spy Christopher Steele offered no sources to substantiate his “data” or “revelations.” The cable news heartthrob quietly was reduced to the status of Ponzi-schemer Bernie Madoff. There were no more media “bombshells” and “walls are closing in” Steele dossier revelations.
Mueller, the architect of the dream team special investigation and himself a former FBI director, suddenly claimed under oath he had no idea who Christopher Steele even was, much less what his dossier said. James Comey, yet another revered ex-FBI director, whose leaks jump started the Mueller special counsel probe, claimed more than 250 times under congressional oath he could not remember, or did not know much of anything—often in reference to the information in or used as a result of the dossier. In the end, the sum total of the science, the dossier, the data, and the experts proved only to be what a group of corrupt bureaucrats, media ideologues, and Clinton partisans found useful for their own agendas.
Do we remember last year’s “science” behind the origins of the Wuhan virus? Our alphabetized bicoastal “medical professionals” followed the “science” in assuring us that the virus originated with bats—or were they pangolins?—in a “wet” meat market. The scientific chorus echoed the “impossibility” that the “viral sequencing” could ever have been altered by humans. To suggest so, was racist, xenophobic, Trumpian, and backward.
A lab origin theory was left only to Neanderthals and the-earth-is-6,000-years-old deplorables, of an “anti-science,” know-nothing sort. Yet just a short distance away from the supposed ground-zero wet market, there was coincidentally a Level-4 virology lab with ties to Chinese military. And it was known to engage in “gain of function” viral research of the most dangerous sort. The lab’s sloppiness had gained the attention of visiting U.S. medical professionals.
No matter. The unlettered who do not read the New York Times or the Washington Post, or follow the fact-checkers, or listen to NPR were further roundly disregarded when they wondered why, if the virus sprung naturally from innocent meat peddlers, did the Chinese Communist government go to such great lengths to lie about the dates of the virus’s likely birth, and the nature of its transmission? Why were they ostracizing, censoring, or “disappearing” any of their own scientists capable of giving an accurate account of what, if any, might be the connections between the lab and the virus?
For good measure, our own “scientists” and “professionals,” from the mendacious Dr. Anthony Fauci to multibillionaire tech wizard Bill Gates, assured us that China was transparent. They had no reason to hide anything, they added. And, indeed, China was doing its best as a good global citizen to join in the global effort to stop this naturally occurring virus—albeit from time to time lying that the lab “hoax” was mostly either a racist Trump Administration talking point or a cover-up of the U.S. military’s creation of the virus.
Then suddenly . . . poof!
The faith-based “science” melted. Reason returned. The lab was suddenly seen as much more logically the birthplace of the SARS-CoV- 2 virus. Despite his protestations and denials from authority, Fauci, our epidemiological and virology “expert,” really did approve U.S. funds to be routed through Dr. Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance to help conduct gain-of-function research at Wuhan, despite Congress banning such funding.
We also learned, mirabile dictu, that Daszak had assembled an “international team of experts” to reassure the world that the Chinese research at the Wuhan lab—that he supported and had financially enhanced—had nothing to do with the COVID-19 pandemic. That “scientific,” explanation, a euphemism for an ideological and careerist-based cover story, is now inert. And Daszak has joined the likes of Fauci and WHO’s director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus as those “experts” whose scientific judgment cannot be fully trusted because they proved all too human in their worries over careers, reputations, and politics.
The Dark Age Mind
What can learn from the rise of this new Dark Age mindset?
1) Ignoring reason is easier than abiding by it. Printing money, for example, is easier than paying it back later—but easiest of all when we swear that there is no longer a need to pay it back at all.
2) Falsifying knowledge is always justified by higher moral purposes—in our case progressivism substituting for religious doctrine. Laws of human nature and logic are merely constructs when it is a matter of welcoming in the oppressed from Latin America or substituting race-based quotas for meritocratic criteria, or comparing Israelis to racist 1980s apartheid South Africans or Nazis.
3) Modernism is a poor cloak of age-old ignorance. Living in the 21st century is no guarantee that humans will not act as if they are in the 16th. Our modern-day inquisitors share the same anti-science fury as those who put Galileo under house arrest for the crime of Copernicanism. Claiming that “white supremacists” are responsible for current epidemics of violence against Jews and Asian-Americans—when most data and evidence point, in the former case, to Hamas supporters, and, in the latter, most frequently to African-American males, is our version of institutionalized geocentrism.
4) “Authority” is often a construct, if it is not based on, and continually audited by, meritorious achievement. Letter combinations like B.S., M,S,, Ph.D., M.D., a string of alphabetically abbreviated agency affiliations, and name-dropped university ties are no substitute for humility, common sense, and a disinterested mind. Anthony Fauci is no more immune fromJuvenal’s age-old warning “Who will police the police?” than is Derek Chauvin, or, for that matter, the Marxist real estate investor and her fellow grifters at Black Lives Matter.
5) Balzac’s famous platitude “Behind every great fortune lies a great crime” can be applied to false knowledge: “Behind all pseudoscience is an agenda.” Christopher Steele really did despise Donald Trump. Steele felt his lies were noble as long as they empowered Hillary Clinton and his firewall employers. Ditto the legions of his aiders and abettors. The decision of our international pharmaceutical companies, and their government enablers, to insist that those with acquired antibodies from a prior COVID infection still needed to be vaccinated promptly—when available vaccinations were scarce in January and February and Americans were still dying in droves—was not predicated by the “science,” but either by groupthink or financial considerations.
6) The scientific/unscientific establishment stymies outsiders and claims they pay no attention to “proven science.” In classics, some of the greatest breakthroughs in knowledge about the ancient world came from Heinrich Schliemann, George Grote, Milman Parry, and Michael Ventris. All were eccentrics, and often non-classicists. Take away the supposed “nuts” like Generals William Tecumseh Sherman, Curtis LeMay, George S. Patton, and Matthew Ridgway and the United States would have lost tens of thousands of more lives in its wars as we listened to their supposedly more sober and judicious betters.
7) The enemy of science is always dogma. In the medieval period, dogmas were often ossified Aristotelian concepts that were institutionalized by the Church on the theory they enhanced Christian exegesis and ritual, or, if lost, would eventually lead to an erosion of authority. In our era, the new religion is progressivism that prohibits free discussion of most of the major issues of modern life: When is life established in the womb? What is the degree of man-made climate change versus natural, cyclical climate change? Which groups are most likely to commit hate crimes? Is sex biologically determined or culturally constructed? What is the role of cultural attitudes in crime and social dependency?
It may seem a stretch to suggest that the Left is leading us back to the pre-Enlightenment, given its corporate wealth, academic monopolies, Silicon Valley technological wizardry, and progressive sanctimoniousness. But arrogance, wealth, and received authority are always the super-spreaders and force-multipliers of false knowledge, and none more so than in the present age.
China
has announced that it will allow couples to have up to three children,
after census data showed a steep decline in birth rates.
China
scrapped its decades-old one-child policy in 2016, replacing it with a
two-child limit which has failed to lead to a sustained upsurge in
births.
The cost of raising children in cities has deterred many Chinese couples.
The latest move was approved by President Xi Jinping at a meeting of top Communist Party officials.
It
will come with "supportive measures, which will be conducive to
improving our country's population structure, fulfilling the country's
strategy of actively coping with an ageing population and maintaining
the advantage, endowment of human resources", according to Xinhua news
agency.
But some experts were sceptical of the impact.
"If
relaxing the birth policy was effective, the current two-child policy
should have proven to be effective too," Hao Zhou, a senior economist at
Commerzbank, told Reuters news agency.
"But
who wants to have three kids? Young people could have two kids at most.
The fundamental issue is living costs are too high and life pressures
are too huge.
On a rainy, bleak day in Beijing I was out buying a coffee when the news broke.
People
started looking down at their phones as they beeped and whirred with
the headline flashing across their screens - China to allow couples to
have three children.
This is big news in a country which didn't start suddenly producing more babies when the one-child policy eased off to two.
In
fact, many are asking how a three-child policy might mean more children
when the two-child version didn't and why birth restrictions have
remained here at all given the demographic trend.
Very good questions.
One thought is that, amongst those prepared to have two children, at least some parents will have three.
However,
I have interviewed many young Chinese couples about this subject and it
is hard to find those who want bigger families these days.
Generations
of Chinese people have lived without siblings and are used to small
families - affluence has meant less need for multiple children to become
family-supporting workers, and young professionals say they'd rather
give one child more advantages than spread their income amongst several
kids.
What did the census say?
The
census, released earlier this month, showed that around 12 million
babies were born last year - a significant decrease from the 18 million
in 2016, and the lowest number of births recorded since the 1960s.
The
census was conducted in late 2020 where some seven million census
takers had gone door to door to collect information from Chinese
households.
Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas is reportedly
considering the development of tools that would help America's children
discern truth from lies and know when they are being fed
“disinformation.”
The Washington Times, which first reported the story, says a
department spokesperson declined to give details, but that more
information would be revealed “in the coming weeks.”
Mayorkas might want to start by fact-checking his recent claim that
the U.S. southern border is “closed.” He made the statement when news
pictures showed waves of people crossing the border. Should kids believe
him, or their “lying eyes”?
Should anyone, regardless of political party or persuasion, be
comfortable with government telling especially children what they can
believe and whom they can trust? This is what totalitarian states do.
It's called propaganda.
We are already inundated with political correctness, cancel culture
and woke-ism. TV networks spend more time delivering opinion and
slanting stories to particular points of view than what once resembled -
if not objective journalism - then at least fairness.
The list of government officials who have lied is long and dates back
to the founders of the nation. Some lies could be defended on national
security grounds. Others were used to cover up wrongdoing or enhance the
image of the one who lied.
In recent years, we recall
President Clinton's denial of having sex with Monica Lewinsky, President
Obama's claim about his health care program: “If you like your doctor,
you can keep your doctor,” President George H. W. Bush's “Read my lips,
no new taxes,” assertions by the George W. Bush administration that
Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, Richard Nixon's lies
about Watergate, the lies told by Lyndon Johnson, members of his
administration and generals about how we were winning the war in Vietnam
(Johnson had pledged during the 1964 campaign not to send Americans to
fight in Vietnam, another lie), and the CEO of R.J. Reynolds telling a
congressional committee in 1994 that “cigarette smoking is no more
'addictive' than coffee, tea, or Twinkies.” The Washington Post reported
in January that by the end of his term, former President Trump “had
accumulated 30,573 untruths during his presidency -- averaging about 21
erroneous claims a day.”
I could go on, but you get the point.
George Orwell was prescient when he wrote in “1984" about Newspeak
and the Ministry of Truth. We have already achieved the former in what
we are allowed to say, or not say, lest we be smeared with nasty
rhetorical stains. Let's revisit the Ministry of Truth for those who
haven't read the book or need a reminder.
The Ministry of Truth was related to Newspeak in that it had nothing
to do with truth, but propaganda by another name. Its job was to falsify
historical records in ways that aligned with government policies and
its version of those events. It was also tasked with defining truth,
which sometimes resulted in “doublespeak,” or contradictions, that
served the purposes of the state.
Truth has become subjective and relative in modern times and is now
personal. You have your “truth” and I have my “truth.” Even when they
contradict each other, it doesn't matter as long as we both feel good
about it.
This flawed notion has contributed to our cultural decline.
Try this experiment if you want to see how far we have moved from
objective truth. Go to any popular definition website and type in
“truth.” They assume truth exists and can be discovered.
The truth is supposed to set us
free, but if we can't recognize or define it, we will be in bondage.
Secretary Mayorkas should reread Orwell's novel and then abandon any
plans to indoctrinate schoolchildren.
Article by Geoffrey P. Hunt in The American Thinker
Deception Wearing the Mask of Truth
For
Joe Biden/Kamala Harris devotees, the 2020 ubiquitous election lawn
signs in my neighborhood read “Truth Hope Decency.” While most of these
moralizing bromides did not survive the winter, some are still
implanted, reminders of how cheap political speech was soon enough
self-repudiated.
Exhorting
“Decency” was the refrain decrying President Donald Trump’s occasional
crude and coarse cloudbursts, usually unfiltered via Twitter. Yet the
substance of decency has eluded Joe Biden and his Democrat handlers,
ushering instead a new era of
grotesque depravities, where at the top Biden/Harris have endorsed,
supported, and invited the unrestrained abject horror of drug
trafficking, sex trafficking, and human trafficking via a deliberately
porous open southern border, resettling unaccompanied children all
across America.
Illegal
alien sex and child trafficking continues with impunity under Biden’s
open borders policy while a surge in overdose deaths from
methamphetamine,and oxycontin laced with fentanyl -- all managed by
Mexican cartels given sanctuary by Joe Biden -- merits a VP Kamala
Harris response that “climate change is the root provocation for the
border challenges, and Mexico should plant more trees.”
Decency? No, neither stupidity nor incompetence, instead an abomination and disinformation by design.
And
why is the Biden/Harris regime, obsessed by race and cultural Marxism,
aligned with BLM, and the fraudulent 1619 project -- where modern-day
slavery and indentured servitude, from the Mexican cartels to South Sudan to Communist Chinese subjugation of the Uyghurs, elicits nary a peep?
Where
is “working class/lunch bucket union guy” Joe, whose executive orders
and indifference have destroyed thousands of union jobs from pipelines
to rare earth mining, induced Weimar Republic-style inflation on food,
building supplies, and gasoline -- all taxes on regular Joes and Marys?
While Joe’s Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm tells motorists facing
1979-like gas shortages, “well if you drove an electric car gas
shortages wouldn’t matter,” and his Transportation Secretary Pete
Buttigieg touts riding a bicycle to work, accompanied by two black GMC
Tahoe SUVs.
Working
class Joe is seeing gas prices at the pump from less than $2.00 a
gallon to over $3.00 a gallon in 100 days. Nice job, Joe, in
knee-capping your favorite constituents. Imagine if working class
deplorables were loathed and ignored.
How
is it not indecent that the Biden administration denies fundamental
biology, while insisting that boys whose affliction with the mental
illness of gender dysphoria should play in girls’ sports? Or that Joe
Biden’s appointee as Assistant Secretary of HHS is transgender Dr Rachel
Levine, formerly Dr Richard Levine, who fathered four children, now an
open advocate of chemical castration and genital mutilation for
children, who instead need psychiatric counseling for gender confusion.
How is this decent or moral?
Or
the monstrous assertion -- coming from Joe Biden himself, and his US
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi-- that all white people are racists,
accompanied by abject nonsense that white supremacy is the greatest
threat to the nation. And that 75 million Trump voters are domestic
terrorists. This now passes as decency?
Or
the required re-education -- Soviet/Mao style propaganda -- about
critical race theory, where everyone should hate one another while the
US Constitution deserves to be sent to the bonfire, and where monuments
to Abraham Lincoln, and Ulysses Grant, and the Rochester, NY home of
Frederick Douglass, deserve to be trashed. This is decency?
Why
has a US Air Force/Space Force commander been fired for denouncing
Marxism as a training requirement, while Biden’s DOJ refuses to identify
the killer of an unarmed citizen at the hands of the US Capitol
Police? Or the FBI 6:00 am raid -- invading the home of a wholly
law-abiding innocent couple in Alaska -- seeking Nancy Pelosi’s lost
laptop using a phony search warrant. Or insisting the January 6
trespass into the US Capitol was an armed insurrection when no weapons
were found or confiscated?
Oh,
perhaps a minor nit, but insulting just the same, Kamala Harris shaking
the hand of South Korean president Moon Jae-In, then immediately wiping
her hand on her pantsuit. Or Secretary of State Anthony Blinken’s
capitulation to Chinese diplomats trashing the US on American soil. What
a disgrace!
Indecent and immoral, or virtuous and noble?
And so, where does immoral/indecent cross over into the realm of dishonesty?
Dishonesty
begins with Joe Biden reversing course during the campaign, insisting
he wouldn’t get rid of fossil fuels, especially fracking of natural gas,
notably in Pennsylvania. Of course, on day one president Biden
cancelled the Keystone XL pipeline eliminating some 11,000 union jobs
overnight.
Meanwhile
Biden removed sanctions against the Russian natural gas pipeline to
Germany. How is closing the XL Keystone pipeline following climate
science, but encouraging the Russian pipeline is instead a diplomatic
accommodation having no affect on climate?
Dishonesty
is Biden/Harris asserting that Trump administration had no Covid-19
vaccine plan, despite Trump’s authorization of operation Warp Speed,
including the federal government pre-purchasing 190 million doses from
Pfizer, and vaccinations starting in late November. How did Biden/Harris
get vaccinated in December if there was no program, and no plan? Or
were Biden/Harris jabbed with an empty needle and vial?
More
dishonesty about structural racism, tax hikes, Covid pandemic relief
legislation, voting rights, the Chinese Communist Party having no role
in Covid 19, Hunter Biden, the Green New Deal, infrastructure, and
unity.
Remember
the campaign exhortations about facts, data, and evidence: follow the
science? Once inaugurated, the new administration has had none of it.
Where
is the science behind mask wearing and lockdown restrictions? There
isn’t any, unless one counts political science. In fact, studies from
MIT and University of Louisville
among others, have conclusively shown mask wearing has had no effect on
Covid 19 cases, hospitalizations, or death rates. The CDC advisories,
often led by Dr Anthony Fauci, who changes his guidance regularly, and
now found to have perjured himself testifying before the US Senate,
pushed data to the side, relying on political posturing, and untested
presumptions.
On Good Morning America recently, Fauci admitted mask wearing was useless, good for theatrics and optics, but not much else.
Follow the Science?
The
CDC guidance on more obfuscating rules and delaying tactics for
re-opening public classroom in-school teaching was written --
word-for-word -- by the American Federation of Teachers. Even Randi
Weingarten, the AFT union president, admitted she was astonished that
the CDC accepted the AFT school re-opening conditions without a single
edit, and without any reference to scientific evidence, for example,
that children are not vectors of Covid-19.
Election
campaign lawn signs can easily be forgotten, discarded into the nearest
dumpster. Biden/Harris acolytes, erstwhile subscribers to Truth Hope
Decency might rediscover the virtues of recycling those election lawn
signs to carry more extant messages -- dishonesty, disinformation, and
deception.
Overlooked in Edward-Isaac Dovere’s much-discussed new book on the 2020 election, Battle for the Soul: Inside the Democrats’ Campaigns to Defeat Trump, released May 25, is his credulous account of Russian interference in the 2016 election. Relying heavily on Barack Obama’s key national security people, Dovere seems unaware that they have used him to launder their wretched history.
In Dovere’s retelling, the drama begins when CIA Director John Brennan arrives at a private White House lunch with a package of classified material. “The Russians weren’t just coming,” Dovere writes. “They were already here.” Dovere traces this hush-hush meeting, the first of many, to late July 2016. Being a “do-it-by-the-book” kind of guy, Obama did not want any of this information to leak.
“We knew that this was a threat to our democracy,” Obama National Security Adviser Susan Rice tells Dovere, “and it was potentially going to affect candidates up and down the ballot in every state and every party.” Had Mike Lindell said something this hyperbolic, at least 16 states would have banned MyPillows outright.
Dovere swallows it all. For him, there were “elements of the interference that everyone could see.” He cites — as though equal threats to the Republic — Trump’s joke about Hillary’s 30,000 missing emails, Trump’s (nonexistent) meddling in the Republican platform language about Ukraine, Wikileaks’ supposed mucking about in a South Florida campaign to benefit Roger Stone, and, oh yeah, the Steele dossier. Dovere describes the dossier as “the famous mishmash of rumors compiled by a British former espionage expert” and drops the subject completely.
Dovere repeatedly reminds the reader of the White House’s insistence on keeping the Russian intel tight. Brennan, however, was told to provide classified briefings to the four top congressional leaders. Reportedly, House Speaker Paul Ryan was all ears, telling Brennan, “As you know, I’m not a fan of Trump.” Unfortunately, this exchange seems all too believable.
Of the four, only Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell pushed back. To his credit, if true, McConnell told Brennan that “the report seemed as if it might just be an effort by the CIA to undermine Trump.” As Dovere sees it, McConnell’s resistance was incomprehensible. Without intending to, Dovere suggests that McConnell may be sharper than we think.
Intelligence community operatives had been feeding the media rumors that Trump and his team were in bed with Putin long before Brennan’s breathless July revelations. In February 2016, Mark Hosenball and Steve Holland launched the disinformation campaign with a hit on Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn in a Reuters article teasingly titled “Trump being advised by ex-U.S. Lieutenant General who favors closer Russia ties.” Anonymous operatives continued tempting the media with Russian collusion allegations throughout 2016.
In September 2016, Michael Isikoff wrote a lengthy breakout article for Yahoo News based on a briefing by “multiple sources,” the most notable of whom, unnamed in the article, was Steele. As Isikoff reported, intelligence officials were investigating Trump adviser Carter Page’s “private communications with senior Russian officials.”
Apparently, former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid could not keep his classified information to himself. Isikoff reported that Reid had briefed the FBI Director James Comey on the “significant and disturbing ties” between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin, information Reid got either from Brennan or the dossier.
The word was spreading, and it was being spread intentionally. Dovere spares his readers the inconvenient truth that the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign commissioned the Steele dossier. He would rather have them believe Susan Rice, who told him, “The most important thing we were trying to do was not politicize” Russian interference.
A few weeks after the publication of the Isikoff article, the DOJ and the FBI packaged the article in their application to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), specifically to monitor Carter Page. As the report by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz made painfully clear, the FBI relied heavily upon the Steele dossier to get FISA authorization on Page. Dovere makes no mention of the latter.
The FBI then submitted the Isikoff article as independent evidence, knowing full well it was simply reheated Steele material. Of course, none of this FBI mischief makes it into Dovere’s book. What the reader gets instead is MSNBC-grade fiction: “Reid blames Comey directly for the lack of more action from the FBI, accusing him of letting his Republican leanings get in the way of his duty of investigating Trump.” Dovere is either unfamiliar with or fully indifferent to the serious research that has gone into debunking the Russia collusion hoax, a hoax orchestrated in large part by Dovere’s sources.
These sources — Rice and Brennan most obviously — have used Dovere to create their own counter-mythology. For history’s sake, the Obama people need to justify their Russia hysteria given that nothing of what they predicted happened. Russian interference did not, in fact, “affect candidates up and down the ballot in every state and every party.” More damning, the mechanism they set up allegedly to deter Putin was inarguably used instead to destroy Trump.
Obama himself had set the stage for the rewrite in a December 2016 press conference. As he told the story, he confronted Putin at the G20 summit in China in September 2016. “I felt that the most effective way to ensure [more hacking] didn’t happen was to talk to him directly and tell him to cut it out,” said Obama, “and there was going to be some serious consequences if he didn’t. And in fact, we did not see further tampering in the election process.” Here is how Dovere imagines the encounter:
At six foot one, he [Obama] towered over the Russian leader, looking down on him and pointing at him as he spoke. Rice watched from a distance, struck by Obama’s forcefulness. Don’t touch the voting machines. Don’t touch the data. Stay out of the systems. The CIA could see they were trying to get in.
Dovere then allows Brennan to imagine Putin’s response to Obama’s threat:
I think Putin had to do his calculus, take into account that “I can do these things and maybe I’ll even try to affect the vote tallies, but if she does win, we’re probably going to have a rough time of it.” So if I were Putin at that time, I think my calculation would have been “OK, I’m not going to do the stuff on the technical front, because if we do something on the technical front, they’re probably eventually going to find out that. But if we do things on the information front, that’s basically propaganda.” That’s the type of stuff that intelligence services have been doing forever.
After the 2020 election, most media outlets forbade discussion of even the possibility that foreign entities were able to “affect the vote tallies,” let alone that they might actually have done so. As to the “propaganda front,” in the four years before the 2020 election, there was no need for foreign actors to intervene. The American media did not job quite nicely, especially with scoundrels like Brennan and Obama Director of National Intelligence James Clapper spreading anti-Trump disinformation from their respective perches at NBC and CNN.
In his book Hate Inc., renegade Rolling Stone reporter Matt Taibbi writes a line that should be posted on the wall in every newsroom: “Being on any team is a bad look for the press, but being on team FBI/CIA is an atrocity, Trump or no Trump.” Dovere, alas, seems to be on that same team. He sums up his discussion of the Russia hoax thusly: “Between the Mueller report and the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report, Obama’s national security team feels vindicated that they had their facts right.”
If I hadn’t already used up my 2021 quota of Orwell quotes — it’s been that kind of year — I might be tempted to conclude with this one: “And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed — if all records told the same tale — then the lie passed into history and became truth.” To be clear, Orwell never expected 1984 to be used as a training manual.
From the Veterans Administration Office of Public and Intergovernmental Affairs
Memorial Day History
Three years after the Civil War ended, on May 5, 1868, the head of an
organization of Union veterans — the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) —
established Decoration Day as a time for the nation to decorate the
graves of the war dead with flowers. Maj. Gen. John A. Logan declared
that Decoration Day should be observed on May 30. It is believed that
date was chosen because flowers would be in bloom all over the country.
The first large observance was held that year at Arlington National Cemetery, across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C.
The ceremonies centered around the mourning-draped veranda of the
Arlington mansion, once the home of Gen. Robert E. Lee. Various
Washington officials, including Gen. and Mrs. Ulysses S. Grant, presided
over the ceremonies. After speeches, children from the Soldiers’ and
Sailors’ Orphan Home and members of the GAR made their way through the
cemetery, strewing flowers on both Union and Confederate graves,
reciting prayers and singing hymns.
Local Observances Claim To Be First Local springtime
tributes to the Civil War dead already had been held in various places.
One of the first occurred in Columbus, Miss., April 25, 1866, when a
group of women visited a cemetery to decorate the graves of Confederate
soldiers who had fallen in battle at Shiloh. Nearby were the graves of
Union soldiers, neglected because they were the enemy. Disturbed at the
sight of the bare graves, the women placed some of their flowers on
those graves, as well.
Today, cities in the North and the South claim to be the birthplace
of Memorial Day in 1866. Both Macon and Columbus, Ga., claim the title,
as well as Richmond, Va. The village of Boalsburg, Pa., claims it began
there two years earlier. A stone in a Carbondale, Ill., cemetery carries
the statement that the first Decoration Day ceremony took place there
on April 29, 1866. Carbondale was the wartime home of Gen. Logan.
Approximately 25 places have been named in connection with the origin of
Memorial Day, many of them in the South where most of the war dead were
buried.
Official Birthplace Declared In 1966, Congress and
President Lyndon Johnson declared Waterloo, N.Y., the “birthplace” of
Memorial Day. There, a ceremony on May 5, 1866, honored local veterans
who had fought in the Civil War. Businesses closed and residents flew
flags at half-staff. Supporters of Waterloo’s claim say earlier
observances in other places were either informal, not community-wide or
one-time events.
By the end of the 19th century, Memorial Day ceremonies were being
held on May 30 throughout the nation. State legislatures passed
proclamations designating the day, and the Army and Navy adopted
regulations for proper observance at their facilities.
It was not until after World War I, however, that the day was
expanded to honor those who have died in all American wars. In 1971,
Memorial Day was declared a national holiday by an act of Congress,
though it is still often called Decoration Day. It was then also placed
on the last Monday in May, as were some other federal holidays.
Some States Have Confederate Observances Many
Southern states also have their own days for honoring the Confederate
dead. Mississippi celebrates Confederate Memorial Day on the last Monday
of April, Alabama on the fourth Monday of April, and Georgia on April
26. North and South Carolina observe it on May 10, Louisiana on June 3
and Tennessee calls that date Confederate Decoration Day. Texas
celebrates Confederate Heroes Day January 19 and Virginia calls the last
Monday in May Confederate Memorial Day.
Gen. Logan’s order for his posts to decorate graves in 1868 “with the
choicest flowers of springtime” urged: “We should guard their graves
with sacred vigilance. ... Let pleasant paths invite the coming and
going of reverent visitors and fond mourners. Let no neglect, no ravages
of time, testify to the present or to the coming generations that we
have forgotten as a people the cost of a free and undivided republic.”
The crowd attending the first Memorial Day ceremony at Arlington
National Cemetery was approximately the same size as those that attend
today’s observance, about 5,000 people. Then, as now, small American
flags were placed on each grave — a tradition followed at many national
cemeteries today. In recent years, the custom has grown in many families
to decorate the graves of all departed loved ones.
The origins of special services to honor those who die in war can be
found in antiquity. The Athenian leader Pericles offered a tribute to
the fallen heroes of the Peloponnesian War over 24 centuries ago that
could be applied today to the 1.1 million Americans who have died in the
nation’s wars: “Not only are they commemorated by columns and
inscriptions, but there dwells also an unwritten memorial of them,
graven not on stone but in the hearts of men.”
To ensure the sacrifices of America ’s fallen heroes are never
forgotten, in December 2000, the U.S. Congress passed and the president
signed into law “The National Moment of Remembrance Act,” P.L. 106-579,
creating the White House Commission on the National Moment of
Remembrance. The commission’s charter is to “encourage the people of the
United States to give something back to their country, which provides
them so much freedom and opportunity” by encouraging and coordinating
commemorations in the United States of Memorial Day and the National
Moment of Remembrance.
The National Moment of Remembrance encourages all Americans to pause
wherever they are at 3 p.m. local time on Memorial Day for a minute of
silence to remember and honor those who have died in service to the
nation. As Moment of Remembrance founder Carmella LaSpada states: “It’s a
way we can all help put the memorial back in Memorial Day.”
There have been some classic “never quit” quotes over the years, some real, some unconfirmed but nevertheless referenced often, and some scripted for TV and movies and used in countless Internet memes.
Though Democrats would no doubt disagree (but who cares what they think on these matters anyway, right?), one of the most legendary authentic quotes of all time about standing firm in the midst of a storm came from then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, who in 1991 was under relentless attack by Senate Democrats led by then-Senator Joe Biden, who was the Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman at the time.
Unlike most SCOTUS nominees, Thomas was subjected to a double round of confirmation hearings after 11th-hour accusations of sexual harassment had female Democratic Senators successfully pushing Biden to reopen the hearings on those grounds. The campaign to destroy Thomas and his reputation was brutal, and a weaker man might have withdrawn to spare himself and his family from having to go through such an ordeal.
But Thomas, as we learned then and has been reaffirmed numerous times since, was not a weak man. And as the hearings dragged on, Democrats learned that the hard way.
At one point during the hearing, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) asked Thomas about the rumors that he planned on backing out of the nomination, and asked what he was going to do. Thomas’ answer (seen on page 260 of the transcript here) was a prescient warning for conservatives as to how they should respond to similar baseless smear attacks from Democrats in the future:
Hatch: Judge, you’re here, though. Some people have been spreading the rumor that perhaps you’re going to withdraw. What’s Clarence Thomas going to do?
Thomas: I’d rather die than withdraw. If they’re gonna kill me they’re gonna kill me.
Hatch: So you’d still like to serve on the Supreme Court?
Thomas: I’d rather die than withdraw from the process. Not for the purpose of serving on the Supreme Court, but for the purpose of not being driven out of this process. I will not be scared. I don’t like bullies. I’ve never run from bullies. I never cry uncle and I’m not going to cry uncle today, whether I want to be on the Supreme Court or not.
Hatch: Well, Judge, I hope next Tuesday you make it and I believe you will, and I believe you should. And I believe it is important for every American that you do.
Because I think in your short 43 years of life that you have just about seen it all and if anybody’s in a position to help their fellow men and women under the Constitution, then I have to say you are. And I am proud of you. I am proud of you for not backing down.
Watch the classic exchange below:
I get goosebumps just watching that. Now more than ever we needed that reminder from Thomas, who was one of the originators of the “never bend a knee” quote in his own way.
Here’s a reminder, too, for Joe Biden on just how unsuccessful he was at stopping Thomas:
Fast forward to now, and it’s Thomas who is getting the last laugh – literally:
