Leo Terrell doesn’t think too highly of Joe Biden.
As covered by RedState’s Bonchie, the President gave a speech in Tulsa, Oklahoma Tuesday that may not have hit it out of the park.
Firstly, Joe laid into Caucasian corruption: According to the Commander-in-Chief, “White supremacists are a greater threat than ISIS and Al Qaeda.”
But if you wonder just how supreme white racists are, here’s a path to better understanding.
Consider the fact that black people can’t get lawyers.
At least, entrepreneurs don’t.
From the Leader of the Free World:
“The data shows young black entrepreneurs are just as capable of succeeding, given the chance, as white entrepreneurs are. But they don’t have lawyers. They don’t have accountants.”
Silver lining:
“[T]hey do have great ideas.”
It seems Joe really wants to help those black people.
He’d love for ’em to be able to vote — if only they could figure out how to get online:
Back to the shade of one’s skin determining whether they’re accounted for, Fox News host Sean Hannity invited civil rights attorney Leo Terrell and author Larry Elder to address such a claim.
“Yet again,” Sean began, “[Biden] made an insensitive remark about African Americans…”
“Joey, as you like to say, ‘C’mon, man.'”
Leo was bursting at the seams:
“I wanna go first! I wanna go first!”
The ex-Democrat dropped a bomb:
“Joe Biden — look at me. I’m black, I’m a lawyer. Larry’s a lawyer. There are thousands of black lawyers. This is insulting. It’s offensive. I’m black. I’m a lawyer — thirty years as a lawyer.”
Terrell continued:
“I have black clients. White clients. Yellow clients. This guy plays the race card. … I’m black. I’m a lawyer. I can’t say anything else. I’m black. (shrugs) … Breaking news.”
Larry was ready, too:
“How ’bout this part — studies have shown that black entrepreneurs are just as capable as white entrepreneurs. Well, duh…”
Biden, as you may know, assumed congressional office in 1973.
Larry doubts his business wizardry:
“Who gets business advice from a guy who’s never… … This is a man who’s never even run a lemonade stand…”
As for Leo, he’s not big on the Donkey Party in general.
In September, he talked of his transition from the bunch:
“I had to get away from the asylum. And guess what? I escaped, and I’m not going back.”
On Fox Wednesday, Sean said people are tired of relentless racializing: “Everyday Americans — all races — they’re tired of the constant playing of the race card dividing all of us.”
Leo bottom-lined things brutally:
“Somebody needs to tell [Joe Biden] he’s a racist.”
Utah
police said they got "quite a surprise" when they found a nine-year-old
girl driving a car with her four-year-old sister in the passenger seat
early on Wednesday morning.
The sisters told officers they were heading to California because they wanted to "swim in the ocean".
They drove on two major roads, hit another car and then crashed head-on into a lorry, police said on Twitter.
The sisters were both wearing their seatbelts and were not hurt.
Utah's
West Valley City Police Department said the girls woke up at about 3am
on Wednesday, and took the Chevy Malibu while their parents were
sleeping in their West Jordan home.
Their plan was to drive from the landlocked state to California - at least a 10 hour journey - for a beach holiday.
The
nine-year-old drove the car for about 10 miles (16km) before she hit
another vehicle, drove over a central reservation and crashed into the
lorry, police said on Twitter.
The lorry driver, who was also not injured, had already called police after he saw their car hit the other vehicle.
Video
from the body camera of one of the police officers at the scene shows
the aftermath of the crash, and the damage to the red Chevy Malibu. One
of the officers can be heard saying: "It's crazy! She's driving?".
The
sisters' parents did not know they were missing until police woke them
up and told them about the crash, Detective Scott List of West Jordan
police said.
"The parents were horrified and very shocked to find their kids were gone," he told local media.
There
was a similar incident in Utah a year earlier, when a five-year-old boy
took his family car to go and buy a Lamborghini, telling police he had
left home because his mother refused to buy it for him.
You know what I love about Karma? She’s got one hell of a wicked sense of humor. Take the last 24 hours in the life of Anthony Fauci. Yesterday, it was reported that Fauci would be releasing a new book Expect the Unexpected next November.
Think of it as Tony’s version of Andrew Cuomo’s book.
Okay, so the book Expect the Unexpected is announced.
Then just hours later Buzzfeed and the Washington Post both released a crap-ton of Fauci’s emails written during the early months of the Wuhan pandemic that don’t make him look so good.
Whoops. How unexpected!
The emails I’ve seen on Twitter and at different websites are really damning.
And not just the ones where Fauci is scrambling in a panic over that pesky gain of function research.
There was also some pretty damning stuff in the most, dare I say it, unexpected places as well.
Here are a couple examples tweeted by the Federalist’s Sean Davis:
Those two tweets are especially damning when you consider in some of the emails I read, Fauci was acting all demure and humble over the fact that he had become a media sensation. You know the drill — pretending it was all so silly and he hoped it would end soon. Hahahahaha! Right. That’s why he prioritizes Morgan Fairchild and MSNBC over members of Congress. He’s not in it for the fame and attention.
Then, and here’s where Karma really outdid herself, today — just one friggin’ day later — it’s reported that Fauci’s Expect the Unexpected got yanked from Barnes & Noble’s and Amazon’s websites. Poof. Gone.
Talk about unexpected.
Say, do you think Fauci was expecting that particular unexpected or no?
Now, I suppose it is just as likely that Expect the Unexpected went poof because Fauci can’t make up his mind about what to write. That coming from him would certainly not be unexpected.
“Dr. Fauci, we were expecting you to send us the latest draft. And we haven’t gotten it yet.”
“Well, now. See, here’s the thing. I changed my position on 95% of the things I wrote and now I need to rewrite it.”
I’d write more about this hilarious story, but honestly, I can’t stop chuckling.
Ah, Karma. If you were a real person, I would so want to hang out with you.
The
French health minister has said it is too soon to say whether a number
of reported deaths were the result of a network outage that disrupted
the number for the emergency services.
The outage on Wednesday left people unable to reach help for hours.
Health
minister Olivier Véran said three or four deaths had been registered
nationwide, but added that it was "too soon to draw conclusions".
He promised a "full report on the human consequences" of the outage.
Stéphane Richard, CEO of Orange, said he had met with government officials and the situation was "now stabilised".
"The Orange group apologises to those who have been affected in recent hours," he tweeted.
French government sources posted alternative emergency numbers online after the problems began.
Issues with the network first started at 18:00 local time (16:00 GMT) on Wednesday.
Dr
François Braun, president of the emergency medical services provider
Samu-Urgences, told BFM television channel that "one in three calls, one
in two depending on location, could not be completed".
Problems
emerged across the country but were particularly bad around Paris and
the regions of Hauts-de-France in the north and the Grand-Est (east), he
said.
As yet the cause of the problems remains unclear.
Orange
told the AFP news agency that a "technical incident on a router" had
disrupted voice over internet calls in some regions, and Mr Richard told
channel TF1 it was not the result of an attack, instead saying it was
likely a "software failure".
On Thursday morning Mr Darmanin criticised the "serious and unacceptable malfunctions".
He
said at a press conference that a person in the Morbihan region in
northwest France who suffered from a heart condition reportedly died
after failing to put through a call to emergency services.
While
it is not clear the death was directly caused by the outage, "what is
beyond doubt is that people have told us that they tried calling several
times and that they couldn't get an operator immediately," he said.
Two people with heart conditions in the overseas department of Réunion were also reported to have died.
President Emmanuel Macron said he was "very concerned" about the situation.
Orange
France head Fabienne Dulac tweeted that their teams were still watching
the situation and were "fully mobilised to ensure a return to
normality".
In 2019 the Netherlands suffered its largest telecoms outage in years,
with the emergency service number 112 knocked out across the country.
The authorities advised people to go directly to hospitals, or to police
and fire stations if they needed emergency help.
President
Biden traveled to Tulsa, Okla., Tuesday to mark the 100th anniversary of a race
riot that destroyed a prosperous black community and is estimated to have left
hundreds of people dead. The trip recalls President Obama’s 2015 trip to Selma,
Ala., where police had beaten and tear-gassed peaceful civil-rights protesters
50 years earlier.
These historical milestones are
certainly worthy of commemoration. Properly understood, they demonstrate how
much racial progress has been made in this country in a relatively short time.
Yet for progressives and their friends in the media, the events are also an
opportunity to push for racial preferences and bigger government. The goal is
to link today’s racial disparities to past wrongs and to play down or ignore
the far more significant role that contemporary black behavior plays in social
inequality.
When a National Public Radio reporter
asked George Patrick Evans, Selma’s mayor, how events of 50 years ago fit into
the “current conversation about race relations,” he balked at the question.
“I’m not sure how it fits,” Mr. Evans, who is black, replied. “We have a lot
more crime going on in 2015 all over this country than we had in 1965.
Segregation existed but we didn’t have the crime.” Asked about the city’s high
black unemployment rate, he still refused to racialize the issue: “Well, from
the standpoint of jobs, we have lots of jobs. It’s just that a lot of people do
not have the skill level to man these jobs. And that’s the biggest problem we
have.”
In the run-up to Mr. Biden’s Tuesday
address, the White House announced several new initiatives to “combat housing
discrimination” and increase the amount of federal contracting with
minority-owned small businesses. Putting aside the dubious legality of
race-based government assistance, it’s worth noting that the black residents of
Tulsa 100 years ago didn’t wait around for the federal government to come to
their rescue. Within two decades of the riots, homes and churches had been
rebuilt, and black-owned businesses again anchored the community.
The
political left is much more interested in black suffering than in black
accomplishment, but black history is about more than victimization at the hands
of whites. It’s also about what blacks have achieved notwithstanding that
victimization. And in the first half of the 20th century, long before an
expanded welfare state supposedly came to the rescue, blacks accomplished quite
a lot. Incomes rose, poverty fell dramatically, and education gaps narrowed.
Blacks entered the skilled professions—medicine, law, accounting, engineering,
social work—at faster rates in the years preceding the 1960s civil-rights
legislation than they did in the years afterward. Among racial and ethnic groups
rising from similar circumstances, historians have described the rapidity of
these gains as unprecedented.
Black Tulsa residents of a century ago
would also be shocked to learn that it is no longer racist white vigilantes but
black criminals who pose the bigger threat to safety in black communities.
Liberals blame today’s disproportionately high black criminality on the
“legacy” of slavery and Jim Crow. But violent crime among blacks declined in
the 1940s, then dropped even further in the 1950s, while remaining relatively
stable among whites. In other words, blacks living during Jim Crow segregation,
and much closer to the era of slavery, experienced significantly lower rates of
violent crime and incarceration both in absolute terms and relative to whites.
The Biden administration would much
rather discuss white criminal behavior in Tulsa 100 years ago than black
criminal behavior in Chicago, Baltimore or St. Louis today. Likewise in his
Selma address, Mr. Obama invoked high-profile police shootings, “unfair
sentencing” and “voter suppression,” giving the impression that little had
changed in the past 50 years, his own election and re-election notwithstanding.
Liberals focus on this history of black suffering rather than success because
it helps Democrats get elected and activists raise money. What’s less clear is
how any of this helps the black underclass improve its situation.
This country’s racist past should never
be forgotten or sugarcoated, but neither should it be used as a blanket
explanation for present disparities. History teaches us that the progress of
blacks and other minorities in the U.S. is not conditioned on racial tolerance.
Asian-Americans are one of any number of groups that have faced racism and mob
violence. One of the largest mass lynchings in U.S. history targeted Chinese
immigrants in Los Angeles, and Japanese-Americans were put in internment camps
during World War II. Today, both groups outperform whites academically and
economically and have for decades.
The left’s focus on the past behavior
of whites, while ignoring the present behavior of blacks, might offer some
people catharsis, and it might help groups like the NAACP or Black Lives Matter
stay relevant. But where is the evidence that such an approach facilitates
black upward mobility?
Our democracy is in peril, according to unbiased experts of
expertise who really want Joe Manchin to roll-over on the filibuster.
We have to pass the Perpetual Democrat Control Act now, or it’s curtains
for our democracy, exclaim said experts passionately, with tears and
teeth gnashing. Experts, of course, are never wrong, except when they
are, which is pretty much all the time. Greg Sargent of the WaPo opined
about the terrible terrors these experts fear in a column titled, “A frantic warning from 100 leading experts: Our democracy is in grave danger.”
Whoa, a whole 100! And you know it’s getting real because they are
“frantic.” After all, “[o]n the line is nothing less than the future of
our democracy itself.” Oh no, not our democracy! Of course, we’re not a
democracy, but whatever – hack clichés are gonna hack.
This
all sounds pretty serious. Look at the looming threat posed by voter
ID. Making people show an ID to vote is pretty awful for reasons and
because and shut up, racist. But no one tell the Mexicans that – they
require ID. So does most of the free world. They will be totally bummed
to hear they are pretty much Nazis for making sure voters are who they
say they are.
Also, and this is totally odd – all these
neutral, objective experts that we are supposed to obey seem to find
that the only reforms that threaten democracy are the ones that might
help Republicans. Every Democrat bill is essential; every Republican
proposal is Jim Crow on HGH. You would think, statistically, that there
would be at least one GOP reform these unbiased arbiters would support
that would gore their own donkey, but no. Lucky Democrats – the experts’
expertise all supports everything you want! What are the chances?
About 100%. For instance, look at money. Money is
bad, except when it’s not. They are mucho cool with liberal billionaire
bucks. Buying elections is fine if the buyer is in your caste. Facebook
CEO Mark Zuckerberg spent more than $419.5 million via non-profit
organizations to influence the 2020 election, but that’s fine because it
helped Democrats. Spending that helps patriots, not so much.
But
we should ignore our misgivings and respect our betters, and we should
listen to their totally sincere and not-self-serving warnings. The
expert firepower they are unleashing is formidable: “What’s striking is
that the statement is signed by scholars who specialize in democratic
breakdown, such as Pippa Norris, Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky.”
Hell, if Pippa Norris, Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky are aboard,
count me, and Joe Manchin, in! Sargent does mention someone we have
heard of before, Francis Fukuyama, but we know of him only because he
was so fabulously wrong when he wrote “The End of History and the Last
Man.” So, the experts are nobodies and wrongbodies, but hey, they’re
experts. And experts are smart and worthy of respect. Everyone wear your
masks. I mean, don’t wear your masks. I mean double mask. I mean…damn
it, just stop asking questions and obey!
Yeah, sure,
Republicans are a massive threat to democracy, claim the pet experts of
the billionaire-backed people who want Democrats to be able to cheat.
There’s no serious doubt within anyone who isn’t already invested in the
narrative du jour that this perilous peril is not just baloney but the
whole lunch meat counter. Americans are appalled by the rigged 2020
election – rigged by a combination of outright fraud, by norm and
law-breaking rule changes designed to benefit the Dems, and informally
by an entire media actively campaigning to install * in office. And they
demand the GOP provide election security regardless of the liberals’
experts’ whining.
This all comes at the same time the liberal
elite is collectively soiling itself over the idea that somehow Donald
Trump is going to organize a military coup to put him back into power.
Well, if there’s one group of people that loves Trump, it’s the
generals. Anyway, there’s no time for our woke military to interfere in
domestic politics, not with all those other vital strategic imperatives
out there, like addressing climate change, imposing critical race
theory, and ensuring all our soldiers have the maximum transexual
awareness.
But look on the bright side – pretty soon
President * is going to call a permanent lid on his *administration and
Klockwatcher Harris is going to take over, but she can’t pull off a coup
either. It’s not like the woke generals could defeat those scruffy
bandits in a relatively small country in two decades. I’m sure they
would do better against 100 million armed American patriots, especially
after most of their own troops decided to opt-out of waging war on their
own kin for the benefit of liberal elitists.
The idea that there’s going to be an armed attempt to
return Trump in triumph to Pennsylvania Avenue by the end of this summer
is ludicrous, but that’s part of the charm for its intended audience of
MSNBCNN fans. They adore any narrative that provides them the kind of
fake boogeyman – like climate change or systemic racism – that they love
to battle. They get to pretend they are courageous knights by slaying
toothless dragons, like the Great Insurrection that never seems to come.
Never have so many thought themselves so brave for risking so little:
“We need to fearlessly resist Donald Trump before he destroys our
democracy – send tweet!”
So, the experts should unbunch their panties and take
a deep breath. We’re not going quit securing our elections, and it
doesn’t look like their high-pitched, girlish shrieks are going to cause
Joe Manchin to commit ritual electoral suicide in his deep red state.
The Dem’s trash election fraud initiative is swirling down the toilet.
Experts schmexperts, they’re just going to have to live with an
electoral system that is almost, but not quite, as fair, honest, and
secure as Mexico’s.
Krystallnacht Nov. 1938--Nazi riots against the Jewry in Germany
Article by Rabbi Michael Barclay in PJMedia
Is the United States Beginning to Imitate 1935 Germany?
Memorial Day is the holiday honoring
American military members who have died in service to our nation. But
this past Memorial Day and the week before may go down in history, God
forbid, as the true sign of 21st-century America emulating the patterns of Nazi Germany in 1935.
Not because a president and vice president ignored mentioning the holiday in favor of tweeting about ice cream and a long three-day weekend.Not because of the hatred found in the words of gun-toting racists at a march in Tulsa screaming, “We will kill everything White in sight.”Not
even because of the hate-filled speech of “leaders” like Reps. Ilhan
Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or the cowardice of
the Biden administration in dealing with the repeated anti-Semitic
violence that has been visited upon Jews more in recent weeks than in
decades. No, the truly frightening sign that the United States is
starting to parallel 1935 Germany can be found overseas in the most
insidious of ways: the supplanting of the American flag.
On January 30, 1933, the Nazi Party
came to power as Adolph Hitler was elected chancellor of Germany. The
national flag of the Weimar Republic was quicky scrapped, and on March
12, 1933, a ruling established two legal national flags: the older
tricolor flag of the German Confederation (based on the 1778 tricolor
flag of Prince Heinrich XI) and the swastika flag of the Nazi Party.
With Hitler’s ascension to fuhrer in 1934, it took less than a year
before the dual flag was eliminated and the Nazi swastika became the
national flag of Germany. In only a few years, the Nazis had gotten
legitimacy for their party (the Nazi Party was only created in 1920).
They also promoted hatred and violence through “political activism,”
especially anti-Semitism, elected their leaders to national positions,
and created a new national flag that rejected the relationship with the
ancient history of Germany. At that point, any ties to historical
Germany were consciously broken by the Nazi, and a new regime of evil
had taken over a nation that had existed in one form or another for
close to two thousand years (the region of Germania was documented since
before 100 A.D.).
Germania was an ancient nation;
German territories had formed a central part of the Holy Roman Empire by
the tenth century. The German Confederation was formed in 1815, and the
singular nation of Germany existed by 1871. But it took less than
twenty years for the Nazis to destroy the history, culture, and values
of Germany and transform them into the most evil empire to ever try to
conquer the world.
And the moment of transition, the
moment when it became clear that the Nazis were no longer a fringe
group, came in 1933, when, on a national level, the evil of the Nazis
had been so accepted that their flag could fly side-by-side with the
more traditional German flag.
The parallels between then and now are frightening.
BLM is an organization as evil in its
formation and base as the early Nazi Party of Germany. This is not to
put down the value that ALL lives matter, and that racism of all sorts
is evil, or to compare the atrocities of the Nazis with anything that
BLM has done so far. There can be no comparison of any human being to
Hitler, and no equation between what the Nazi Party became to what any
group has ever done. But the similarities in their formation are truly
scary. While it is true that black lives matter, so do all human lives,
and the organization of BLM has been filled, from the moment of its
chartering, with goals of worldwide domination, anti-Semitism, and a systematic plan for economic and political control.
Their charter of 2014, which has never been recanted nor revised to
change these goals, is clear. They unabashedly state that “America is an
empire that uses war to expand territory and power.” They desire to
control American policy both domestically and internationally and
consider themselves a global movement.
BLM leaders are often corrupt, and many of them, such as Tamika Mallory, Linda Sarsour, and Melina Abdullah,
are self-proclaimed disciples of Louis Farrakhan, one of the most
racist and hate-filled people on the world stage for the last fifty
years (who has called Jews “termites” who should be exterminated). BLM has supported Hamas’ goal of the annihilation of Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East. This is the same Hamas whose charter says that “the Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims kill the Jews.” The same Hamas whose leader Fathi Hamad
brags that women and children make the best human shields, and enjoins
his people to “cut off the heads of the Jews with knives.” Within the
BLM “peaceful protests” we find anti-Semitic rhetoric and even violence
against Jews, as well as threats to “kill the Jews” and “rape their
daughters”.
Again, as during the establishment of
the Nazi Party almost a century ago, we find anti-Semitism as a
foundation stone in a party’s platform that is also dedicated to goals
of worldwide economic and political control.
In the 1920s, the Nazi Party of
Germany was a fringe movement. But by 1933, it had achieved enough
acceptance that its flag hung with the German national flag. That was
the moment that the entire world recognized that the Nazis really were
in control. It was the beginning of the end of a culture and the start
of the world’s greatest example of hatred.
And now, when we should be honoring
the brave men and women who died protecting the United States, we find
that the U.S. State Department has authorized the flying of another flag
of hatred, the BLM flag, at our embassies.
Gratefully, there are still some in
Washington, D.C., who see the dangers inherent in flying the BLM flag.
Reps. Nicole Malliotakis, Elise Stefanik, Ken Buck, Darrell Issa, Brian
Mast, Pete Sessions, and Michael Guest introduced the Stars and Stripes
Act of 2021 on Friday, May 28, which would prohibit flying BLM flags at
embassies and consulates. These courageous leaders are choosing to point
out the dangers of promoting an anti-American organization within the
U.S. government. They are aware of the disturbing potential, and can
simply look at the dual-flag practice of 1933 Germany to see where this
could, God forbid, lead.
Prior to March 23, 1933, Germany was a
democratic nation. With aisles packed with Nazi stormtroopers, the
Reichstag met in a Berlin opera house to vote on the Enabling Act, which
ended democracy in Germany and established Hitler as the dictator of
the Third Reich. We must all now support and fight for the passage of
the Stars and Stripe Act of 2021, and keep the American flag in its
unique place in our culture and values, and prevent the destruction of
our democracy.
Santayana’s statement that those who
cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it is as true today as it
was a century ago. The parallel of the Nazi hatred, practices,
processes, and map for political control in the charter, riots, and
practices of BLM are frighteningly clear. Equally clear is the
similarity in the blatant anti-Semitism of both organizations. And as
true as Santayana’s statement is, BLM has made it clear that Jackie
Mason has a quote that is equally true: “There are three constants in
life: death, taxes, and anti-Semitism.”
In order to fight the hatred,
anti-Semitism, and anti-Americanism that is becoming more and more
prevalent in the world today, we must remember that the key to fighting
darkness is always to shine a light. We must shine a light on the evil
hidden in plain sight within BLM, and demonstrate the anti-Semitism and
hatred inherent in BLM leadership. We have an obligation to reach out to
our political leaders and passionately encourage them to support the
Stars and Stripes Act of 2021, and to remove all vestiges of BLM from
U.S. government institutions. And most importantly, we need to describe
the hatred inherent in BLM to all of our well-intentioned friends who
currently support the organization, and educate them in the frightening
historical parallels between the United States/BLM and Germany/The Nazi
Party.
May we all have the courage to shine a
light in the darkness of this hatred, to educate, and to bring peace in
this world based upon the righteous foundations of this nation.
During America’s first-ever national lockdown, thousands of unelected bureaucrats, as well as federal and state governments, assumed enormous powers not usually accorded them.
They picked and chose which businesses could stay open without much rationale. They sent the infected into rest homes occupied by the weak and vulnerable.
Their rules of prosecuting those who violated social distancing, sheltering in place, mask-wearing, or violent protesting hinged on political grounds. Their spending bills on “infrastructure” and “health care” were excuses to lard up redistributive entitlements.
Conservatives moaned that left-wing agendas were at work beneath the pretenses of saving us from the pandemic. And the giddy Left bragged it was true.
After the 2008 panic and meltdown, Barack Obama promised to “fundamentally transform” the country. Now he is back, weighing in on the panic-driven, massive multitrillion-dollar spending that has pushed America’s debt to nearly $30 trillion:
“There’s a teachable moment about maybe this whole deficit hawk thing of the federal government,” Obama pontificated. “Just being nervous about our debt 30 years from now, while millions of people are suffering—maybe that’s not a smart way to think about our economics.”
Translate Obama’s incoherence into English: He means that borrowing tons of money in a pandemic and not worrying too much about paying it back is a new, better way of economics
California Governor Gavin Newsom on April 20, 2020, boasted similarly about leveraging his own statewide quarantine. “There is opportunity for reimagining a progressive era as it pertains to capitalism, a new progressive era and opportunity for additional progressive steps,” Newsom babbled. “So yes, absolutely, we see this as an opportunity to reshape the way we do business and how we govern.”
Newsom himself resonated what Hillary Clinton gushed at about the same time of the then two-month-old pandemic:
“That this would be a terrible crisis to waste as the old saying goes. We’ve learned a lot about what our absolute frailties are in our country when it comes to health justice and economic justice.”
Hillary’s “old saying” was actually a recycled quote from old Clintonite Rahm Emanuel who was Obama’s chief of staff. He too bragged of the 2008 panic that would empower the Obama transformation project: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”
Three, behind the fancy slogans like not wasting crises, “teachable moments,” and “resets” is the panic porn reality that these initiatives are not popular in normal times because they are mostly absurd and defy common sense.
If Americans tried Obama’s new economics with their own family budgets they would either go broke or go to jail—after piling up tens of thousands of unpaid debts. Only elites, with security guards and the money and influence to keep safe, talk of resetting or defunding the police. Few of the woke who fly their carbon-spewing jets into Davos ever fly economy class. Fewer have Obamacare health plans. None live near an open border.
Four, our rich revolutionaries have no record of policy success. So far, the left-wing reset of open borders, massive borrowing, increasing government powers of coercion, restrictions on personal freedom, higher taxes, and more regulations don’t appeal to Americans. Brexit and pushbacks against the European Union suggest the same is becoming true abroad.
Most of our familiar reset left-wingers—the Clintons, Newsom, and Obama—long ago became multimillionaires by monetizing their political careers through lucrative insider networking.
Yet a cynic might conclude they didn’t go full reset until as good capitalists they first got filthy rich—allowing them not to live like, think like—or listen to—the rest of us.
Three, behind the fancy slogans like not wasting crises, “teachable moments,” and “resets” is the panic porn reality that these initiatives are not popular in normal times because they are mostly absurd and defy common sense.
If Americans tried Obama’s new economics with their own family budgets they would either go broke or go to jail—after piling up tens of thousands of unpaid debts. Only elites, with security guards and the money and influence to keep safe, talk of resetting or defunding the police. Few of the woke who fly their carbon-spewing jets into Davos ever fly economy class. Fewer have Obamacare health plans. None live near an open border.
Four, our rich revolutionaries have no record of policy success. So far, the left-wing reset of open borders, massive borrowing, increasing government powers of coercion, restrictions on personal freedom, higher taxes, and more regulations don’t appeal to Americans. Brexit and pushbacks against the European Union suggest the same is becoming true abroad.
Most of our familiar reset left-wingers—the Clintons, Newsom, and Obama—long ago became multimillionaires by monetizing their political careers through lucrative insider networking.
Yet a cynic might conclude they didn’t go full reset until as good capitalists they first got filthy rich—allowing them not to live like, think like—or listen to—the rest of us.
Well, it's pride month, which is a time of celebration for all orientations, biological sexes, and genders. Thirty full days of celebrating all the letters in the LGBTQ+ alphabet -- what fun! We at The Babylon Bee don't want to get left behind, of course, so let's kick off Pride Month with a list of our top two genders!
We had all our writers vote on their favorite genders and narrowed it down to just the best two. Here they are:
1. Women - Women took the top slot this year. Congratulations, women! Women are great. One of the best genders of all time-- everyone says so. They are really beautiful to look at, especially when they are married to you and they smile at you with those beautiful faces of theirs. According to experts, women make life worth living and fill the world with sweetness, warmth, and love! They have the amazing ability to think about 32 things at the same time and predict infinite possible outcomes to every scenario, kind of like Dr. Strange. Amazing!
Women are so amazing, in fact, that men spent thousands of years fighting wars and building civilization just so women could have air conditioning. Many of us Babylon Bee writers have even selected one wonderful person of this gender to spend the rest of our lives with, since they are so amazing.
Great job, women!
2. Men - Coming in a close second was men. Many of us were surprised that men didn't take the top slot. They have the distinct advantage, after all, of being able to pick what restaurant they want to go to. They are handy around the house. They also drive better and are way better at telling Dad jokes. They also risk their lives climbing high telephone poles and working on dangerous oil rigs, all so women can have air conditioning. But those factors just weren't enough to push them to the top. They tend to be way less good-looking than women, and way smellier. Better luck next time, men!
Congrats to the winners, and check back next year to see whether the same two genders top our list!
You don’t get your thoughts in a vacuum. You have
to be able to freely associate with others who speak freely in order to
develop thoughts, and even to develop the ability to think on your own.
Too few people these days seem able to imagine what life would be
like without freedom of expression. To put it plainly, without the First
Amendment we’d have no recognized right to a private life or personal
relationships. Period. Are you okay with that?
Below I’ll try to explain the connection. But first, we need to
understand that the war on free speech started decades ago in America.
Prince Harry’s recent comments
calling the First Amendment “bonkers” is merely the latest in a long
line of public beatings. Such talk should mystify any freedom-loving
person, American or not. Yet the ground has rapidly softened for it.
The slogan “free speech is hate speech” has gained a lot of traction on college campuses
since the 1990s. People are easily canceled today for any misplaced
word. More than five years ago now, nearly 40 percent of young adults polled by Pew Research said they considered free speech dangerous. They don’t have a clue how dangerous this road is.
Those of us committed to freedom of religion, speech, and association
talk about it mostly in the context of daily life and business. We
rarely discuss the deeper purpose of the First Amendment, which is to
preserve our right to build families, our right to make friends without
state interference, and even the right to think our own thoughts.
In short, the First Amendment serves as a shield against social
isolation. You are being socially isolated whenever the mass state or
Big Tech regulates your speech so that you can’t express an opinion
without fear of losing your livelihood.
Such isolation would be a huge effect of the Equality Act
because it’s so blatantly unconstitutional. It would abolish freedom of
religion and speech in defiance of the First Amendment, which
explicitly states “Congress shall make no [such] law.” In any case, once power elites start forcing regulations on speech, the First Amendment’s shield against social isolation is gone.
Bonkers Is as Bonkers Does
Another
narrative that serves social isolation is the peculiar idea that the
First Amendment is something only conservatives are concerned about
preserving. When major news outlets reported on Prince Harry’s comments,
they focused less on his words than on the “backlash” of supposed
right-wingers.
A headline in Newsweek said he made “Red America ‘Raging Mad.’” Vanity Fair
ran a snarky headline claiming Harry’s words “gave some talking heads
an excuse to re-litigate the Revolutionary War.” Another article claimed
that Harry “has a good point” because free speech can be abused. Of
course, any and all freedoms can be abused, and are. But the biggest
abuse would be outlawing the guarantee of freedom.
Without the protection of the First Amendment, you lose the
government’s protection of your right to speak freely. You’re thus less
able to speak to those with whom you wish to speak. You’re cut off from
hearing those to whom you would choose to listen. Thus, cut off from
open conversation, your ability even to think — to generate new ideas,
consider new ideas from others, improve those ideas by communicating —
evaporates. In turn, your ability, your right, to develop new relationships and friendships erodes drastically.
Prince Harry admitted he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. And
his comments on the First Amendment are not really intelligible: “You
can find a loophole in anything. You can capitalize or exploit what’s
not said rather than uphold what is said.” This indicates his clear lack
of understanding about what’s at stake.
Maybe
if Prince Harry understood the connection between freedom of speech and
the right to live and let live, he would not be so quick to call the
First Amendment “bonkers.” Maybe he’d understand that it is the entire
basis of what protects his right to establish — or disestablish — his
personal relationships at will. Maybe he’d even come to appreciate it.
How to Think About the First Amendment
If our government didn’t recognize the First Amendment, those who run
the state and its allies in Big Tech and media would eventually have
the power to dictate everything we could say to anyone, supposedly for
our own protection. Prince Harry’s work
with the Aspen Institute’s “Commission on Information Disorder,” is,
after all, meant to decide for everybody what is “misinformation” and
what is not. Presumably, we don’t have the wherewithal to figure it out
on our own.
Unfortunately, that push for censorship is routine today. The
techno-lords at Twitter, Google, and Facebook now openly censor content.
They say they do so on grounds that some information is “disputed,” or
that their (anonymous) fact-checkers have determined falsehood, or that
the content is dangerous, or just inappropriate. The real grounds are
“because conservative,” as we see in media narratives that criticize
conservatives for wishing to protect the right to free expression.
These tribunals’ efforts are actually building a void of
information, an ironclad single narrative where no other exchanges of
ideas are permitted. This vacuum curtails your ability to communicate
with others and therefore your ability to verify reality with others of
your choosing. If we let this go on indefinitely, civil society will
ultimately collapse, just as it always does in regimes that put a lid on free expression.
Let’s also consider how the freedoms are ordered
in the First Amendment. It starts specifically with freedom of
religion, belief, conscience, and thought. Then, freedom of speech is
noted, giving you the right to express your conscience. Next, freedom of
the press means you have a right to record your thoughts in writing or
other media.
Freedom of association gives you the right to deliver your ideas to
anyone willing to listen. You also have the right to get together with
people peacefully, and power elites have no business listening in. If
any of these rights are violated, you have the right to petition
government with your grievances to fight back against that abuse of
power.
This order of freedoms is instructive. But it also shows an
interconnected, interdependent loop that works in both directions. What
you think is really the source of what you speak. But you don’t get your
thoughts in a vacuum. You have to be able to freely associate with
others who speak freely in order to develop thoughts, and even to
develop the ability to think on your own.
So if you have thrown in the towel on privacy being a “thing of the
past,” and believe you’d be okay if the state regulated your speech,
maybe you don’t understand that once your speech is regulated, then your
relationships are susceptible to state control. Keep going down that
road, and you end up in a state of virtual solitary confinement.
Totalitarians Always Abolish Speech First
Political philosopher Hannah Arendt noted that all totalitarian systems depend upon cultivating social isolation in people.
Isolation renders people powerless. So it’s no wonder that freedom of
expression is always first on the chopping block during and after
authoritarian takeovers. A cursory look at communist and fascist
governments in the 20th century confirms that they’re always intent on
destroying the entire sphere of private life and relationships.
Consider, for example, the Cultural Revolution in China from
1966-1976. Chairman Mao Zedong unleashed millions of Red Guard youth to
promote “correct” communist thought. This meant getting rid of any “old”
ideas, and subjecting the then-unwoke to ritual humiliations in struggle sessions that would lead to forced and false confessions.
Likewise, the stated goal of Soviet Russia’s founders was to wipe out
all private life. They promoted the ideal of the “New Soviet Man,”
which meant citizens were to have no personal loyalties, only total
commitment to the communist state.
Sure enough, such things led to the end of social trust, with people
snitching on neighbors and family members. The same dynamics played out
in a host of oppressive governments going back to the Jacobin Reign of
Terror during the French Revolution. We see it writ large today in
Communist China, where speech is muzzled by a social credit system that
demands strict conformity with the regime in exchange for access to
goods and services.
Sadly, in America we can now sense some unsettling shadows of the above. Recall governors and mayors setting up snitch hotlines to inform on neighbors not complying with COVID mandates. We see leftist speech codes invading all institutions, including the military. There’s virtual book burning on Amazon. People have to walk on eggshells to avoid being canceled.
When Twitter mobs smeared Boston Celtics star Kemba Walker for wearing a Gadsden Flag jacket,
he pleaded ignorance, distancing himself from the flag as a symbol of
conservatism. Actually, that flag serves as a symbol of the First
Amendment, with its protection of private life. “Don’t tread on me” is a
universal sentiment. I suppose our presumed overlords would prefer we
all wear signs that say, “Tread on me, please!”
In the end, there are two paths.
One is pro-thought and the other is anti-thought. Prince Harry and his
anti-speech allies have put themselves into the anti-thought camp. That
also means anti-relationship. Perhaps Harry should, while he can, ponder
a point of his countryman, G. K. Chesterton: “There is a thought that
stops thought. That is the only thought that ought to be stopped.”
