Article by Kurt Schlichter in Townhall

The Coma Before the Storm

It’s beyond any reasonable dispute that the slack-jawed old pervert staggering through this punchline presidency is getting more senile by the day. All the while, his cackling understudy is biding her time everywhere but at the border, getting huffy at being questioned, and generally failing at a job historically assigned to morons as a role where they could do little damage. The only people who dig their hep jive – yeah, go on and believe the 79% approval numbers among people now paying $5 a gallon for unleaded – are the talking tubers of cable news. But even the tater thots of Brian Stelter, who is a potato, can’t dispel the growing sense of unease that watching these incompetent weirdos brings.

This epoch is the interregnum, a caretaker presidency presided over by a human asterisk who cares only about his post-lid bowl of mush and being wrapped in a shawl, set in front of the tee-vee, and allowed to watch his stories. The only thing moving less expeditiously than his bowels is his ridiculous legislative agenda, and all the prunes in the world aren’t going to help clear out that particular constipation, not with Joe Manchin and Kristen Sinema refusing to commit ritual political suicide on the altar of coastal leftist dreams.

The progs were so close, just a vote or two away, to the unrestrained power they thought they could flex and thereby secure their control forever. But * is no Franklin Roosevelt. Nor is he Teddy Roosevelt. Nor Eleanor Roosevelt, though he could be if he really, really wanted to be. He’s not even Melvin Roosevelt. Instead, Grandpa Badfinger is a rickety joke, bumping elbows with his younger fellow-incompetents at the G7, wandering about mindlessly chasing moths until his ridiculous wife, with her ridiculous “Dr.”, wrangles him back into the hapless pack. You look at this sorry set of leaders of the formerly-free world and the vibe you get is “exhaustion.” There’s no energy, no drive, no hope. Boris Johnson, formerly a man, explained to a bored UK that that “nations coming out of the pandemic need to ‘build back better’ in a ‘greener,’ ‘more gender neutral and perhaps a more feminine way.’” Hack clichés are their solution, but these relics have nothing else. They are weak and stupid and they represent a spent elite that cares about nothing except just a little more time holding fast to their uncertain sinecures.

You can feel the tension beneath the surface, the sense that something is coming, a great changing. Oh, the elite at Davos fantasizes about a “Great Reset,” but they mean it literally – they want to reset the world back to how it was set when they were young and had energy and people hadn’t yet noticed that their venality and incompetence was matched only by their insanely inflated sense of their own abilities. But why would they be any better at pulling that off than they are at anything else? When the shattering disruption comes, they are the ones who will be disrupted, they and the whole post-War establishment our betters thought would last a thousand years and that won’t make it past 80. The elite aren’t, not even close, and we all know it now and we all sense that their Jenga tower o’ power can’t keep from toppling over even as they pull more and more blocks out of it, shredding norms (just this once – it’s always “just this once”) to keep their grip.

But what comes next? Something big, but the question is “What?” The only thing for certain is that the people running things now won’t like it. It’s been said here many times that Donald Trump was not our last chance, but theirs, our final fair warning to our failed elite from back when, at some level, we still thought the ruling caste acknowledged that we normals had at least some theoretical right to participate in our own government. But such illusions, to the extent they had endured, got shattered last November. We heard for four years how the 2016 election had been hacked, stolen, whatever the hyperbole du jour was, and the minute they could proclaim His Asteriskness president questioning elections became treason. But we saw the cheating, and we saw the judicial and executive sleight-of-hand that changed the rules in ways a real Supreme Court would have objected to, and we saw the informal rigging of the election through the lies and covering-up of the professional, licensed, and registered janitors of narrative journalism.

Now it’s all about holding onto power no matter what the cost. The corrupt feds toss trespassers into solitary while letting Antifa/BLM scumbags walk. Their tech buddies desperately try to play whack-a-mole with the unapproved ideas that keep popping up. The garbage media celebrates noted onanists while it ignores the Snortunate Son’s latest entry on his CV of shame – he’s added racial epithets to his remarkable and remarkably unremarked-upon record of tapping the tills of Slavic oligarchs, tapping rando strippers, and re-imagining the classic 80s novel of coke-fueled excess as Bright Lights, Big Guy (who gets his 10%).

It can’t last. Maybe if these puffy clowns were pros they could keep their boots on our throats forever, but they don’t own boots – too cis – and their Guccis and Birkenstocks just don’t have the same heft. They are weak, and stupid, and they are not even cunning enough to ensure that the cops and military, who would be expected to provide their final protective fire when accountability comes to overrun them, are prepared to do their dirty work. They need a savage Praetorian Guard – who doubts they would turn the razor-sharp gladii of their legionnaires on the people if that’s what it took to keep power? – but instead they’ve driven the best LEOs out via defunding and persecution and they’ve turned the Army into a camo-clad Ivy League faculty lounge that, over the last couple decades, has won precisely the same number of military victories as an Ivy League faculty lounge. 

You can see the signs and hear rumblings out there. You can feel the growing anger. We are flocking to Ron DeSantis and others who pick and poke at the status quo, while rejecting the Nikki!s and Asa!s and Kristi!s who still take the Chamber of Commerce’s calls. Change is coming, not just here but throughout the West. The smart set refused to see the signs or hear the rumblings. Part of the fun will be seeing the surprise on their smug, perpetually-masked faces.

And now the elite has reached peak zombie with President * literally stumbling through his tenure as the tongue-bath media not only praises the Emperor’s new clothes (and literally praises Dr. Empress’s tacky duds) but marvels at his ability to feed himself. Look for a 99% approval rating to come down the pike even as we’re told that the biggest threat to Our Democracy is those wicked insurrectionists and their insurrectiony ideas about normal people having a say in their own governance. 

Tick tock.

It’s not clear what’s going to happen, but this mess is unsustainable and what happens next may get ugly. They aren’t just going to shrug and give up power any more than we’ll shrug and submit to the serfdom they have planned for us. So, enjoy this coma before the storm, because the storm is coming.

https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2021/06/14/the-coma-before-the-storm-n2590897 

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FL Governor Ron DeSantis Discusses the Number Two Threat to The United States

The three top threats to the United States are: (1) The corrupt United States Intelligence Community, (2) Big Tech’s ideological manipulation of information, and (3) corporate U.S. media as a propaganda tool; in that order.   There are other big issues, but those three create the ripple effect that is destroying our Constitutional Republic.

In this interview Florida Governor Ron DeSantis discusses a variety of current events, issues of importance and his positions. However, the primary focus of the interview is the #2 threat from Big Tech and what DeSantis is doing in Florida to confront the dangers of ideological manipulation, censorship and deplatforming.

The current line of defense against the JoeBama agenda rests on Governors and state legislatures.  Florida is a solid example of both the Governor and legislature working together to push-back against the unconstitutional fiats of a federal government that is out of control.

The population of Florida is exploding as blue state policies create a hostile environment for freedom and liberty.   However, there is a concern that blue locusts will arrive with their screwy ideology and try to make deep-red Florida turn purple again.

Reporter who Broke Story of Clinton-Lynch Tarmac Meeting Found Dead

Miguel Torres, Arizona Republic

Reporter who Broke Story of
Clinton-Lynch Tarmac
Meeting Found Dead

By CMiguel Torres, Arizona Republic • June 13, 2021

Veteran Alabama reporter and anchor Christopher Sign, who previously worked in Phoenix for more than a decade, was found dead by the local Hoover police Saturday morning, according to Hoover Police Department Capt. Keith Czeskleba.

Sign broke the news of a 2016 meeting between former President Bill Clinton, whose wife Hillary Clinton at the time was running for president and was being investigated by the FBI, and the then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch at the Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport tarmac. At the time, their meeting was cast as a potential conflict of interest.

A report by the Office of the Inspector General of the Department of Justice detailed what took place at that meeting.

Sign moved from Alabama to Arizona in 2005 and spent 13 years working in the Valley of the Sun where he won numerous awards including an Edward R. Murrow Award for spot news and an Emmy for breaking news coverage on the search for the 'Baseline Killer' and 'Serial Shooter,' according to a bio from ABC 33/40.

Phoenix colleagues remember Sign

In Phoenix and across the Valley, an outpouring of condolences from former readers and former colleagues filled social media.

"All of us who had the pleasure of working with him, and calling him our friend, are shocked and devastated by the news of his passing. Our hearts go out to his friends and family in Arizona, and Alabama," ABC15 anchor Steve Irvin said on Facebook.

"Always hopeful. Always encouraging. Always honest. Always inspiring. ALWAYS a REAL friend," ABC15 anchor Kaley O'Kelley posted.

"He taught me so much about life in & out of the newsroom," ABC15 anchor Danielle Lerner wrote. "He was an incredibly talented and dedicated journalist... but more importantly, was a devoted husband, father and friend."

Sign is survived by his wife and three sons.

Hoover police received a call around 8 a.m. of a person down, found Sign and pronounced him dead, according to Czeskleba.

Police said his death appeared to be a suicide.

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Biden accused of violating royal protocol during visit with the Queen

 

​President Biden is being slammed for violating royal protocol in his meeting with the Queen, after he couldn’t be bothered to take off his sunglasses when he greeted the monarch at Windsor Castle, and then went on to spill details to the press about what they discussed over tea.

Biden, who with first lady Jill Biden met with the Queen on Sunday following the G7 summit in Britain, told the media at Heathrow Airport that the 95-year-old royal was interested in hearing more about Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

“We had a great talk. She wanted to know what the two leaders that I … the one I’m about to meet with, Mr. Putin, and she wanted to know about Xi Jinping, and we had a long talk, and she was very generous,” Biden said.

But revealing private details of a conversation with the Queen is a royal faux pas.

 

 A former butler to the royals pointed out that when someone meets the Queen “face-to-face, there’s no sunglasses or anything like that.”

 

 President Biden kept his sunglasses on when he met Queen Elizabeth II.

 

 

 

 “President Biden, by revealing that the Queen had asked about the Russian and Chinese leaders, did breach this rule. It is very possible that, as the G7 sees itself as a bulwark of democracy against regimes such as Russia and China, that this comment may have been prearranged in line with this theme,” he added.

 

 

Biden is scheduled to meet Putin in Geneva, Switzerland, on Wednesday for a summit amid the backdrop of heightened tensions between the two countries following the ransomware attacks on US businesses by Russian-based hackers and Moscow’s military buildup near Ukraine.

Biden’s other gaffe involved keeping his sunglasses on while first meeting the Queen at Windsor Castle.​

 

 

 

Grant Harrold, a former butler to Prince Charles and Camilla, said Biden should have ditched the shades immediately instead of halfway through the ceremony — even if the sun was bright and temperatures rose into the 80s.

“​If you’re meeting the Queen face-to-face, there’s no sunglasses or anything like that at all because eye contact is quite important with any introduction​,” Harrold told Newsweek.

“​It’s fine for Biden to have had sunglasses on but he should have removed them when he actually met the Queen. Everyone else has to, it doesn’t matter who you are, even royals remove sunglasses when they meet royals​,” he added. ​

​”​It’s one of those rules I always write about in my etiquette texts. It is a breach of protocol. I get the sun might have been shining in his eyes but the Queen didn’t have sunglasses on. Jill, the first lady, didn’t have sunglasses on,” Ha

Speaking with reporters Sunday, Biden said he invited the Queen to the White House for a visit and said she reminded him of his mother.

“I don’t think she’d be insulted, but she reminded me of my mother, the look of her and just the generosity,” the president said.

https://nypost.com/2021/06/14/biden-accused-of-violating-protocol-during-visit-with-the-queen/?utm_campaign=SocialFlow&utm_medium=SocialFlow&utm_source=NYPTwitter 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Anatomy of the Woke Madness

How did such collective madness infect 

a once pragmatic and commonsensical America?

by Victor Davis Hanson for American Greatness

Wokism has become our most popular secular religion—at least for a moment dethroning climate change. It reduces all of the past and present into puerile binaries between “whites” and “non-whites.”

Its aim is for the present generation to rewrite our history—whether by The 1619 Project and cancel culture or iconoclastic statue-toppling and Trotskyization of names and places. Wokism becomes a child’s morality tale of noble non-white victims versus villainous white victimizers. Erasing the past and its language supposedly fuels a recalibration of the future, all in the here and now, a holy Year Zero

In the process, wokism has done a lot of damage to America, and will do even more if left unchecked. Here are its chief characteristics.

Elites vs. Elites

First, remember that wokism is a top-down phenomenon. It started in academia with “critical race theory” and “critical legal theory.” These are bastard offshoots of harebrained “critical theory,” which arose from a demoralized and adrift Europe after the cataclysms of two devastating European-spawned world wars.

These ‘theories” are merely adolescent delusions that norms, customs, traditions, laws, and rules are just arbitrary “constructs.” Thus they should have no authority over those whom they “oppress.” These relativist props are the tools of the white male hierarchy to gain and consolidate their “power.” So they can only be resisted by rejecting all these insidious “norms,” whether  the canons of physics and math, jurisprudence, standardized test scores, or the idea that police keep the “peace.” 

Outside of the campus, the media, the entertainment industry, the corporate boardroom, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley, thousands of rank-and-file social justice warrior demonstrators are not demanding, for example, to enroll women in Special Forces combat units. Grassroots America does not insist on subsidized transgendered surgeries.

Instead, leftist Washington politicos and bureaucrats pressure the Pentagon brass, in quid pro quo fashion. The subtext is that those who promote woke policies are assured of promotion and future exemption from audit of lucrative retirement consulting for defense-related corporations.

The people⁠—that is, 51 percent of America—is not organizing for more cancel-culture censorship on Facebook, or even greater percentages of college admissions determined largely by race. Inner-city residents are not clamoring for less police patrolling. Defunding law enforcement is an elite obsession of those who do not live in insecure places. 

Whether in the corporate boardroom or in Hollywood casting meetings or in the campus president’s office, race-based obsessions mostly reflect intramural wars between elites for the lucrative spoils of the one-percent’s news anchorships, roles in TV shows and commercials, diversity deanships, and admissions quotas to the Ivy League.

As a result, class considerations have vanished. They are replaced by absurd racial reductionism. For example, CNN mediocrity Don Lemon, by virtue of his race-mongering, can pose as a multimillionaire victim. The anonymous white deplorables at Walmart, caricatured as smelly in the Lisa Page-Peter Strozk text trove, are his proverbial anonymous oppressors.

Apparently, we can only prevent the tragedy of thousands of young black males killing each other and hundreds of innocent bystanders each year in our major cities—if Oprah, at her $90 million estate, conducts a series of TV interviews with Meghan Markle (denizen of a $15 million mansion) about the psychodramatic slights she feels she received from the Royal Family, or if Black Lives Matter founder and Marxist Patrisse Marie Khan-Cullors Brignac gets her $35,000 new fence around her new Topanga Canyon home, in an era when “walls don’t work.”

The elite Woke are now obsessed about race because of leftist failures in the past to galvanize a permanent class of victims of the grasping rich—given the upward mobility and expanding economy of the United States.

Race, in contrast, is deemed immutable. The Left sees it as permanent proof, a stamp of victimization and thus deserving of reparatory government action. LeBron James may be worth $1 billion, but he will always be a needy voice of the helpless given his race. Or so the woke would have us believe.

Performance Virtue Signaling

Second, given its elite origins and spread, it is no surprise that wokism is a psychological mechanism that exempts the privileged by virtue signaling and performance grievance-mongering in lieu of meaningful real action. Wokism is neither consistent nor logical. Its self-serving selectivity means Hunter Biden’s serial use of the N-word is not inconsistent with his father’s lectures that the deplorables pose an existential racist threat to the nation.

America’s inner cities are unsafe, violent, often dangerously unclean, and characterized by terrible schools, plagued by terrible municipal administration, and suffering terrible housing. Yet wokism never holds the mayors, the district attorneys, or the city councils of these urban failures accountable for the misery they inflict on the non-white and poor. 

When a shrill Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) produces a selfie video about the planet burning up in 12 years, or claims “racism” explains efforts to ensure that immigrants come in legal fashion, she believes that she is then exempt both from doing anything concrete about urban crises, and from any guilt about living a privileged lifestyle.

Kicking “racist” Donald Trump off social media apparently means Mark Zuckerberg does not feel too bad about building a monstrous 57,0000-square foot mansion on a pristine Hawaiian island site. The social justice warrior and Facebook billionaire might as well have been a 15th -century Florentine Catholic sinner, ponying up 1,000 golden florins to gift a few blocks on the rising Duomo to ensure he could indulge himself on his $12,000 electric surfboard, and that his future stay in Purgatory would be short, and in Paradise long. 

Before being pre-COVID-19 woke, Colin Kaepernick of mixed racial ancestry, was a so-so multimillionaire NFL quarterback. He was known mostly for being suspended for using a racial N-word slur. Kaepernick was raised by white parents and apparently worried whether he was authentically one of the oppressed.

But after joining the church of wokism, he became an approved voice of the victimized. And so he began lodging collective grievances against the supposed sins of America while building a fortune hawking Chinese-approved products.

So wokism is so often an empty indulgence for the elite that enjoys exemptions it never extends to others.

When Individuals Disappear

Third, Wokism destroys individualism. We cease being persons and instead become categorized peoples. What does it matter that Al Sharpton was a racist demagogue, that Jesse Jackson a skilled shakedown artist of corporate America, that Bayard Rustin, in contrast, a brilliant civil rights strategist, or that Martin Luther King, Jr. was an ecumenical believer in the inherent goodness of a flawed America of his times—once they are all to be reduced to being just black, and therefore just equally victims?

In the same manner, did Robert Kennedy, Lester Maddox, Hubert Humphrey, and Bull Connor equally suffer from “whiteness”? Wokism, then, is a nonstop tribal warfare that reduces everyone on one side into uniform victims, despite their naturally varying morality, and on the other into cookie-cutter victimizers, although some were and most were not.

Racist obsession strangles individual character and renders everything irrelevant in comparison. Are we now to stop watching “Saving Private Ryan” because most of those who died on Normandy Beach were white? Thus what does it matter that some soldiers were braver than others? And what did it matter in a larger sense that a mostly white majority America defeated an all-white Nazi Germany? Were Churchill and Roosevelt, and Stalin and Hitler, just a bunch of old white people, given it was irrelevant that the former were democratic leaders who saved Western civilization and the latter were mass murderers?

Racism Everywhere—and Thus Nowhere

Fourth, race is not unimportant, but it is not the only catalyst of history or arbiter of life in the present. Cancer couldn’t care less about the race of the cells it warps. COVID-19 is not a white or black pandemic, for all the efforts to make it so. Google “racism” and learn that everything from gluten allergies to robots are now products of racism. 

Segregation of the U.S. military was a travesty during World War II, and had grave implications of abject hypocrisy for a democracy at war, but it was still not the central issue that explained the global conflict, at least not in comparison to the 6 million dead of the Holocaust, or the 20 million killed on the Eastern Front, or the 15 million whom Japan butchered in China. To the extent racism drove the death count of World War II, by the numbers it was mostly a matter of the Japanese intersectionally slaughtering supposedly inferior Asian Chinese and Germans exterminating white, supposedly non-“Aryan” Jews and Russian “Untermenschen.”

Pericles’ Funeral Oration, the Magna Carta, and the Declaration of Independence can be appreciated apart from race and gender. In contrast, wokism takes every event of the past and present and warps it into a racial litmus test, and thus a banality of oppressor and oppressed, as if history is always third-grade melodrama rather than complex tragedy.

Merit is Racist

Fifth, wokism’s existential enemy is merit. Critical Race Theory claims that meritocratic criteria are rigged or “constructed” in subtle ways to reflect the dominant hegemonies of the white male heterosexual hierarchy. Thus physics has no innate laws across time and space. There are no race-neutral skills or lack of the same in a United Airlines pilot.

We know the wages of such woke relativism. Indeed, we have seen the pernicious effects when sex or religion or race or ideology in the past has been used to calibrate talent in lieu of merit, whose measurement can transcend how we look or in what faith we believe.

Wokeism dictates that if the “oppressed” are “underrepresented,” it is because of society’s rigged rules of exploitation. So the woke’s remedies trump considerations of quality and excellence. Yet we know what happened when ideologues in 1930s Germany purged university departments, when commissars overruled Soviet officers in World War II, when Jim-Crow white racists found ways to ensure talented blacks could not go to college, or when brilliant female law graduates were offered only secretarial work in prestigious law firms: Society at large suffered from unscientific, crackpot -isms that knowingly warred on talent for purposes of political control. 

The ancient American idea is now dead that if a group was collectively underrepresented in particular fields and professions, the remedy was simply twofold: organize to ensure equality of opportunity, and then when a fair shot was guaranteed, prepare, study, and sacrifice to ensure quantifiable excellence to capitalize on the opportunity. All that to the woke is now “racism.”

The final irony of wokism? Its efforts to intrude on private lives come right out of the pages of 1984 and Animal Farm. Its racism is a more sophisticated form of Confederate one-drop racial lunacy. Its methodology operates according to the rules of the Spanish Inquisition. And its cancel culture mimics the system of Soviet commissars.

How did such collective madness infect a once pragmatic and commonsensical America?

Nascent wokism went viral during the terror of COVID-19, our first global pandemic in a century, the first ever national quarantine, the first ever self-induced recession, the most destructive riots in U.S. history after the death of George Floyd, and the first ever election where well over 60 percent did not vote on election day. And the country went stark-raving mad in response.

As the virus fades, the lockdown becomes porous, pent-up demand fuels an economic recovery, the absence of law enforcement becomes far more deadly than its omnipresence, violent crime spikes and seeps into the suburbs, and the people resist the Left’s unconstitutional hijacking of state protocols of voting, then what happens?

Do we revert to the norms of the civil rights movement where the content of our character alone matters, not the color of our skin?

Or have we sunk so deeply into the woke quicksands, that we cannot thrash our way up to the air, and thus suffocate from the ancient pressures of the bog that have always destroyed civilizations?

HAPPY BIRTHDAY PRESIDENT TRUMP

 

No, Director Wray, the FBI is Not ‘All In’ on Antifa/BLM Riot Cases

Republican lawmakers were right to be skeptical of Wray’s claim that the FBI is motivated to address all domestic terrorism threats equally.

by Kyle Shideler for American Greatness

In House Judiciary testimony Thursday, FBI Director Christopher Wray told members of Congress that the FBI had “one standard of justice” when it came to domestic terror issues and was “all in” on investigating crimes committed during George Floyd riots—which lasted all last summer—just as rigorously as it is pursuing the investigation of the January 6 riot. 

As of June 10, 516 defendants have been announced in the January 6 case, a single incident that lasted just hours. Many of those defendants are being held on misdemeanor charges, without bail, in a special facility just for January 6 defendants, as American Greatness’ Julie Kelly has documented extensively. 

In contrast, according to “The Prosecution Project,” there were only 367 federal cases related to George Floyd protests over the entire summer of 2020. That is out of 13,000 criminal charges issued over the same period. 

Even here Wray’s FBI deserves limited credit, as those 367 are not just FBI cases but include arrests by U.S. Marshals and Federal Protective Services (FPS) during riots outside federal facilities such as the Mark O. Hatfield federal courthouse in Portland which came under sustained siege for more than 3 months.

Both federal and state prosecutors have dropped the vast majority of charges against summer rioters, however. Portland’s district attorney dropped nearly 70 percent of charges, while federal prosecutors had dropped nearly half of all Portland federal cases as of April. In other cases, federal prosecutors have offered deferred resolution agreements, which allow for those arrested to maintain a clean criminal record in exchange for community service and keeping a clean record for a short period. 

An analysis by the left-wing Guardian of London claimed nearly 90 percent of charges were dropped in dozens of jurisdictions, almost all of them in very left-leaning urban areas.

In the January 6 cases, the FBI and federal prosecutors have worked aggressively to imply the role of conspiracy by linking defendants together through defendants’ alleged membership in such organizations as the Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, and so-called “three-percenter” groups. 

In comparison, however, little to no effort has been expended to identify or allege any larger organizational effort behind BLM riots. Indeed, Wray continues to insist that there is no larger Antifa organizational structure. 

There is no indication that the FBI has made any serious attempt to investigate the role played by various Antifa chapters such as Rose City Antifa, the Youth Liberation Front, or similar anarcho-communist organizations, in orchestrating the summer violence.

Director Wray attempted to argue that because of the nature of the January 6 attack, federal charges were the obvious result, whereas the summer riots were more likely to draw local and state charges. This seems on its face to be a reasonable position, but it ignores the widespread use by Antifa rioters of destructive devices such as commercial-grade fireworks and Molotov cocktails—threats that were not present at the January 6 event, and whose use easily justifies federal charges. Wray’s argument also does not consider the role of interstate rioting—a federal crime—as Antifa and BLM rioters often traveled between cities during the course of the summer. It also ignores that in the case of Portland, state law enforcement officers were deputized as federal marshals, as part of the Trump Administration’s effort to restore order in the face of a local Portland government quasi complicit with the riots. Assaulting law enforcement officers deputized federally is a federal crime.

And, of course, unlike January 6 where Capitol Police can be seen waving defendants into the building, in Portland federal officers aggressively resisted efforts by Antifa rioters to target federal property.

Wray’s attempts to claim that the FBI has maintained an even-handed approach to domestic terrorism is belied by his organization’s continued refusal to accurately assess the nature of the Antifa threat, and by its embrace of heavily politicized definitions of threats. 

Republican lawmakers were right to be skeptical of Wray’s claim that the FBI is motivated to address all domestic terrorism threats equally. The FBI and Justice Department’s overzealous behavior in regards to January 6, compared to its lackadaisical response to month after month of Antifa/BLM rioting tells the true tale. 

 

Article by Jeff Lukens in The American Thinker

 

Election Fraud is an Issue that Will Not Go Away

There are many reasons to doubt the 2020 election results.  No question, strange things were happening on Election Night.  Democrats' push for universal mail-in balloting made fraud much easier to commit.  There is evidence of massive foreign cyber-interference as well.  The media say there is nothing to see here, but we cannot move on from November 3 until we fully understand what happened.

Voting fraud has been going on for many years and has not been confronted in any meaningful way.  The Democrats' playbook for a long time has been to steal elections.  This time, it was on a grand scale.  Ironically, had Trump won his second term, election fraud would continue endlessly into the future with little comment.

Arizona is nearing the completion of a full forensic audit, and lawmakers from other states are traveling there to see how it is done.  The issue is reaching critical mass.  Election integrity is finally getting the attention it deserves, and the truth of the 2020 election is going to come out. 

In his report, Peter Navarro provides abundant evidence that the presidential election results resulted from widespread fraud, ballot-stuffing, and other election irregularities.

Navarro claims that the Democrat grand strategy was to dramatically increase absentee and mail-in ballots while dramatically decreasing ballot verification in battleground states.  The goal was to tip the election to Biden with a flood of illegal votes.  Molly Ball confirms this strategy in her infamous TIME Magazine article.

 

Trump received millions more votes in 2020 than in 2016, and Republicans swept most congressional and down-ballot offices.  It is simply not believable that Biden won the election honestly.

Trump won bellwether Ohio, which no winning president has failed to carry in that state's history, by a more considerable margin than he did in 2016.  Pennsylvania was trending the same on Election Night until they mysteriously stopped counting votes late in the evening.  Moreover, Philadelphia blocked access to Republican poll-watchers on Election Day — despite a U.S.  Supreme Court order — to investigate the irregularity.  Similar fraudulent actions occurred in Maricopa County, Atlanta, Las Vegas, Detroit, and Milwaukee.

And then there is the cyber-fraud.  Against all odds, a private citizen, Mike Lindell, is exposing the cyber-election fraud in his friendly Midwestern way.  He has a new social media site that cannot be de-platformed by Big Tech.  He has done his homework on foreign cyber-interference in the election.

Yes, Lindell is that guy who was a gambling and crack addict and is now a born-again Christian.  He believes that God will deliver him on his divine appointment.  He is fearless, and there is nothing Joe Scarborough or Rachel Maddow can do to stop him.  The more the big-box stores ban his MyPillow products, the more the deplorables step up their online purchases directly from the company.  The spectacle of Lindell's approach brings much attention to his message and the scale of the cyber-in the 2020 election.

Data compiled by Mike Lindell, edited by Jeff Lukens. 

Lindell estimates that close to 3,000 cyber-attacks occurred from around the world on Nov.  3–4.  He has identified 20 attacks alone where Trump votes were flipped for Biden votes and were enough to change the election outcome.  Notice the timestamp, source, and target I.P. address, and the number of Trump votes flipped to Biden.  This evidence demonstrates irrefutable foreign interference in our election.  The evidence is hard proof that cannot be changed or altered or explained away. 

Lindell has filed a court case and insists that Biden will be removed from office after a 9-0 Supreme Court decision on his case, but that remains to be seen.

Both Navarro's ground fraud and Lindell's cyber-fraud were enough to swing the election independently.  Together, there is overwhelming evidence that the election was stolen.

So now, further evidence is being uncovered ballot by ballot in a laborious forensic audit in Arizona.  The audits will find corroborating documentation to help frame the questions that need to be asked as we go forward with this process.

The 2020 election saw an unusual influx of private funds into local election offices, which then decided to ignore state laws regarding election integrity.  Where are the ballot transfer forms documenting the chain of custody of Fulton County, Georgia, on ballots placed in neighborhood drop boxes?  How were millions of dollars from Facebook used by local election offices, and did it give preference to one candidate over the other?  Why did state officials make a deal with a voting machine contractor that doesn't allow them to obtain data and computer code on the machines essential for a forensic audit? 

To have confidence in the 2020 election, these questions and more will need to be answered.   Government officials dodging questions makes us question the election even more.  If there is nothing to hide, why are Democrats putting up huge money for criminal defense attorneys for election issues? 

Maricopa County, Arizona is nearing completion of its full forensic audit, and Georgia is about to begin its own.  There are rumblings that Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and other states will soon do the same. 

The U.S.  Senate may look quite different after the audits are complete.  We may find that David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler from Georgia should be seated in the Senate, and Martha McSally from Arizona, and John James from Michigan.

The 2020 election fraud is one of the most egregious crimes in history.  Much detailed preparation went into stealing this election across all states.  It was planned well in advance to be sprung on Election Day to put Biden over the top, and it will soon be fully exposed.

We all know that elections matter.  Well, stolen elections matter even more.  And a groundswell is brewing on the right.  These folks were once called the Silent Majority, but now they're suddenly not so silent anymore.  When the left invalidated the people's votes with all their cheating, they also lost the people's consent to be governed by them.  People are ticked off and have had it with the lies of the left and are not going to take it anymore.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/06/election_fraud_is_an_issue_that_will_not_go_away.html 

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Article by Ronald Bailey in reason

Keystone Pipeline's Cancellation Shows How Arbitrary Presidential Power Subverts the Rule of Law

Citizens and companies increasingly cannot count on the stability of the law when making decisions about their lives and businesses.

The rule of law can be serviceably defined as restricting the arbitrary exercise of power by subordinating it to well-defined and established laws. Unfortunately, politicians have learned how to subvert the rule of law by laundering their decisions through supine federal bureaucracies that interpret badly-defined laws and regulations to suit the desires of the president and his minions.

The decade-long saga of the Keystone XL oil pipeline is a near-perfect example of how this works. (Don't get me started on arbitrary presidential power to impose tariffs and exercise secret emergency powers.)

Earlier this week, bowing to President Biden's January declaration that its pipeline was not in the U.S.'s national interest, the builder of the pipeline, TC Energy, announced that it was permanently canceling construction of its Keystone pipeline. That project would have transported more than 800,000 barrels of Canadian oil daily to refineries on the Gulf Coast.

Let's jump into the federal policy WABAC Machine to see how this capricious melodrama unfolded. Back in September 2008, TransCanada Keystone Pipeline (TC Energy now) filed an application for a Presidential Permit with the Department of State to build and operate the Keystone XL Project. That began a three-year-long process in which the Department of State oversaw the compilation and issuance of a Final Environmental Impact Statement in 2011 that concluded that the Keystone XL would have "no significant impact" on land and water resources along its route and a negligible effect on man-made climate change.

All that these sorts of assessments are supposed to do is supply the information to federal agency appointees who then make national interest determinations. Reasonable people would agree that a finding of "no significant impact" would suggest that the project is in the national interest and should be approved, right? Wrong.

The findings were evidently not the right answers for then-Secretary of State John Kerry, so he sent the report back for further deliberation. The requirement for further deliberation meant that certain deadlines were missed and the company was obliged to reapply for a presidential permit in 2012. Because President Obama did not want to alienate either the blue-collar unionists who favored the pipeline or the environmental activists who were protesting frequently in front of the White House, he strategically dithered for years.

In 2013, a Draft Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement again concluded, "Approval or denial of the proposed project is unlikely to have a substantial impact on the rate of development in the oil sands, or on the amount of heavy crude oil refined in the Gulf Coast area" and would be unlikely to alter the future trajectory of global greenhouse gas emissions. Again, the wrong findings. So the bureaucrats were sent back to their desks again for further consideration.

The result was a January 2014 Final Environmental Impact Statement that more comprehensively analyzed the project's greenhouse gas emissions and their likely impact on global climate. Among other things, the new report outlined a scenario in which blocking the pipeline would shift Canadian crude oil transport to railways. That switch would actually increase greenhouse gas emissions by 27 percent over those emitted by the proposed pipeline.

Despite yet another finding that building the pipeline would have only minor impacts on land, water, and climate, on November 6, 2015, Secretary Kerry issued a determination that "the proposed project would not serve the national interest." Kerry stated, "The critical factor in my determination was this: moving forward with this project would significantly undermine our ability to continue leading the world in combatting climate change."

Then came the 2016 election of Donald Trump as president. During the presidential campaign, Trump promised to allow the Keystone pipeline to be built in return for "a big piece of the profits" for the American people. Four days after he took office, Trump issued the Presidential Memorandum Regarding Construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline, in which he basically ordered the same bureaucracies to redo the Final Environmental Impact Statement on the pipeline. When various court fights delayed that process, President Trump acted unilaterally and simply issued a Presidential Permit on March 29, 2019, authorizing construction, connection, maintenance, and operation of the project at the U.S.-Canada border.

Still, the wheels of bureaucracy ground on. In December 2019, the Trump administration's Department of State issued an updated Final Environmental Impact Assessment that concluded that the effects on land use, water, biological and cultural resources, and climate change of the building and maintaining the pipeline would range all the way from negligible to minor.

During the 2020 campaign, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden promised to reverse the decision allowing the construction of the pipeline. Biden didn't even bother with ordering another Environmental Impact Statement. Citing Kerry's 2015 determination, Biden on his first day in office revoked the permit, declaring that "approving the proposed Keystone XL pipeline would not serve the U.S. national interest." Why not? Because "the Keystone XL pipeline disserves the U.S. national interest" due to the cumulating effects of man-made climate change.

Thirteen years after the pipeline was first proposed, the $8 billion project is kaput.

During his tenure, Trump arbitrarily reversed Obama administration decisions, including those on vehicle fuel economy standards, methane emissions, appliance energy efficiency standards, the establishment of national monuments, oil drilling in Alaska and offshore, calculating the social cost of carbon emissions, and clean water regulations. Now Biden's first executive order has arbitrarily reversed Trump's reversals.

This is not to say that either Trump or Biden is right or wrong with respect to the policies they seek to impose on the rest of us. The machinations around the Keystone Pipeline project highlight how modern American politicians have become adept at bending ostensibly fair and transparent bureaucratic procedures to justify decisions that they have already made. The result is that citizens and companies increasingly cannot count on the stability and certainty of the law when making decisions about their lives and businesses. Ever-expanding administrative autocracy is the opposite of the rule of law.

https://reason.com/2021/06/11/keystone-pipelines-cancellation-shows-how-arbitrary-presidential-power-subverts-the-rule-of-law/ 

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