Five Years Later: The Spawn of Crossfire Hurricane

The five-year arc between July 2016 and July 2021 is stunning.

by Julie Kelly for American Greatness

Five years ago this week, Glenn Simpson, co-founder of Fusion GPS, boarded a train in Washington, D.C. bound for Philadelphia. The Democratic National Convention was in chaos after WikiLeaks released emails that showed party officials rigged the primary process in favor of Hillary Clinton.

Bernie Sanders supporters were mutinous; Debbie Wasserman Schultz, then-head of the Democratic National Committee, resigned on July 25, 2016.

Simpson and his business partner hightailed it to the City of Brotherly Love to woo the media away from the escalating scandal. The well-connected pair met with top journalists and editors, including New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet, to spin a dark tale about the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia including rumors of prostitutes in a Moscow hotel.

It worked like a charm.

“The WikiLeaks dump had forced every publication to devote multiple reporters to dig through the cache of emails,” Simpson wrote in his 2019 book, Crime in Progress. Simpson bragged of his success. “The Russia element was beginning to snap into focus.”

While Fusion spin masters were doing damage control in Philadelphia, their hired British source, Christopher Steele, was in Washington, D.C., meeting with a top Justice Department official. Steele was being paid by the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign while working as an FBI source at the same time.

On July 30, 2016, Steele met with Bruce Ohr, the assistant deputy attorney general, to discuss his dirt-digging on Donald Trump. Also present at the breakfast: Nellie Ohr, Bruce’s wife, who also was working for Fusion GPS on the Trump hit job.

The next day, James Comey’s FBI opened a counterintelligence probe into Donald Trump’s campaign team. Steele’s unsubstantiated dossier on Team Trump’s ties to the Kremlin served as the pretext to infiltrate, spy on, and destabilize Trump’s presidential campaign.

That last week of July 2016 exposed the seamless and shameless web of paid political operatives, top news organizations, Democratic Party honchos, and the upper tier of the most powerful government agencies in the country. It culminated with the official launch of Crossfire Hurricane on July 31, 2016, an investigation ostensibly about four campaign associates’ collusion with Russia but which, in reality, targeted Trump himself.

For the past five years, Donald Trump and the country have been subjected to various iterations of Crossfire Hurricane: Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation, numerous U.S. Senate and House inquiries, the first and second impeachment trials, and countless media microaggressions sought to achieve what Comey’s FBI ultimately did not—the personal and political destruction of Donald Trump.

The Capitol breach probe, the title of the Justice Department’s “unprecedented” investigation into the events of January 6, is the latest version of Crossfire Hurricane. Tuesday’s maiden meeting of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s select committee on January 6 provides the stage where partisan actors will overdramatize what happened that day. Attention-seeking police officers will emote about the psychological trauma they suffer from the roughly four-hour disturbance, which, by the way, largely was stoked by police officers themselves. 

Trump, the public would be told over and over, incited it all.

But this time, Donald Trump isn’t the only one in the crosshairs. Democrats, the media, and plenty of Republicans have leveraged every moment of January 6 not only to finish off the former president but also his supporters in Congress and across the nation. More than 500 Americans have been arrested and charged in connection to the Capitol protest, and Joe Biden’s Justice Department isn’t done yet.

The five-year arc from July 2016 to July 2021 is stunning.

It took less than five years from the time the Justice Department told a secret court that Carter Page was a foreign agent to the Justice Department telling a federal judge that a working-class Trump supporter from Florida is a domestic terrorist.

It took less than five years from the time the FBI ambushed National Security Advisor Michael Flynn in the White House to the FBI ambushing Iraq war veterans and Alaskan spa owners in their own homes. And it took less than five years from the time Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort was placed in solitary confinement under a pre-trial detention order to dozens of Trump supporters languishing in solitary confinement conditions in jail under pre-trial detention orders for mostly nonviolent crimes.

Meanwhile, those protected by the legal system and the news media roam free—and continue to rake in the dough.

Hunter Biden for years acted as a pass through between corrupt foreign regimes and the Biden family’s flush bank account. But while Biden still faces no criminal charges related to his overseas grift—in fact, we just learned federal prosecutors delayed any overt action to keep an investigation into Hunter Biden concealed until after the 2020 election—Tom Barrack, the chairman of Trump’s 2016 inaugural committee, was indicted on July 20 for several counts of foreign lobbying violations and obstruction of justice.

The investigation into Barrack, who was released after posting a $250 million bond, began under Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who took the reins of Crossfire Hurricane. “The special counsel’s work put a spotlight on violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, known as FARA, and led to a greater effort by the Justice Department to enforce it,” the New York Times reported last week. “The law requires those who work for foreign governments, political parties or other entities to influence American policy or public opinion to disclose their activities to the department.”

Except if your last name is “Biden” or “Podesta.” Hunter Biden worked as an unregistered foreign lobbyist disguised as a “board member” for years, pocketing millions while his father was vice president and continuing after the “Big Guy” left office; he now collects steep fees for his artwork.

Tony Podesta, a longtime D.C. lobbyist and brother of John Podesta, was investigated by Mueller for violating foreign lobbying rules but not charged. He just signed a lucrative gig lobbying for Huawei, a Chinese telecom company at odds with the U.S. government. 

It’s unclear how Barrack, a billionaire, profited from his alleged lobbying activity, or even if the accusations laid out by prosecutors represent legitimate “lobbying.” But none of it matters. The only thing that matters is Barrack’s longtime friendship with the Beltway’s bogeyman, Donald Trump.

Just ask Rudy Giuliani or Roger Stone or Mike Flynn or anyone in Trump’s inner circle how that works.

As cases pile up against Trump pals and supporters, no charges are forthcoming for Hunter Biden. Ditto for the corrupt architects of Crossfire Hurricane. John Durham, the U.S. attorney appointed in 2019 to investigate the origins of Crossfire Hurricane, seemingly has disappeared. Trump-Russia collusion perpetrators such as Lisa Monaco and Avril Haines, not to mention Joe Biden himself, now hold powerful posts in the federal government so they can continue what they started five years ago. 

And, like five years ago, when Glenn Simpson and the Democrats used Trump-Russia collusion to obscure a legitimate scandal and then destroy Donald Trump, the Capitol breach probe and January 6 select committee are the diversion from a real American scandal: a rigged presidential election that gave Joe Biden the White House. The media, as usual, is playing along, insisting January 6 was a terror attack comparable to 9/11 while claims of election fraud are a “Big Lie.”

The only question now is—will it work?

Veep Joe Biden Skirted ‘no see’ Mail Law with Private Accounts

Then-Vice President Joe Biden would frequently use private email addresses, Hunter Biden's laptop shows.AP Photo/Charles Dharapak, File

Miranda Devine reporting for NY Post

As vice president, Joe Biden kept a variety of private e-mail addresses from which he would sometimes forward and receive government correspondence, Hunter Biden’s laptop shows.

“Robin Ware,” “Robert L. Peters” and “JRB ware” were three such pseudonyms on e-mails that mixed official and family business.

In a four-week period in 2016, for instance, John Flynn, who worked in the Office of the Vice President, sent Joe his official daily schedule to his private e-mail address Robert.L.Peters@pci.gov and copied Hunter.

There were 10 such e-mails copied to Hunter between May 18 and June 15, 2016.

In one e-mail from Flynn to Joe, a k a Robert Peters, on May 26, 2016, and copied to Hunter, the schedule includes “8.45am prep for 9am phonecall with Pres Poroshenko.”

Poroshenko was president of Ukraine and, at the time, Hunter was being paid $83,333 a month to sit on the board of corrupt Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings Ltd. Hunter introduced top Burisma executive Vadym Pozharskyi to his father in April 2015 at a dinner at Café Milano in Washington, DC.

In December 2015, Biden famously threatened Poroshenko that he would withhold $1 billion in US aid unless he fired Ukraine’s top prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who at the time was investigating Burisma owner Mykola Zlochevsky. Shokin was removed from office on March 29, 2016.

Burisma executive Vadym Pozharskyi paid Hunter Biden $83,333 a month to sit on its board.

Bella Bellini

State Department officials have testified that they tried to raise concerns directly with Biden that his son’s Burisma involvement was a conflict of interest that undermined US anti-corruption efforts in Ukraine, but they were rebuffed.

Joe forwarded another e-mail about Ukraine through one of his pseudonymous private e-mail addresses, RobinWare456@gmail.com, to Hunter and his brother Beau, then Delaware attorney general, on March 26, 2012.

The e-mail was from Deputy Secretary of State (now Secretary of State) Antony Blinken, forwarding an e-mail from US Ambassador to Ukraine John Tefft: “Beau visited Kyev [Ukraine] on the Friday and gave a talk on corruption at the Hyatt . . . then attended reception at the residence where he met many young Ukrainian lawyers. We received many compliments on his presentation and for simply a frank discussion of a problem that still bedevils this country.”

Then-Vice President Joe Biden threatened then Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in 2015 to oust prosecutor Viktor Shokin.

AP Photo/Sergei Chuzavkov

The Robert Peters e-mail address used a @pci.gov domain, a service labeled as problematic by the DNS Institute’s Domain Name System security report last year.

The use of private e-mail not only could represent a conflict of interest with official duties, the services are also more prone to hacking than government accounts.

Ukraine’s top prosecutor Viktor Shokin was fired in 2015 while probing Burisma owner Mykola Zlochevsky.

Sergii Kharchenko/NurPhoto via Getty Images

John Solomon, founder of the Just the News media organization, drew comparisons this week between Joe Biden’s use of private e-mail addresses and Hillary Clinton’s private e-mail server, pointing out that, under federal records law, the then-vice president had an obligation to preserve all emails involving his government work.

“The Presidential Records Act required Joe Biden to make sure that any of his gmail account e-mails, including these e-mails to Hunter Biden, were forwarded to a government account so they could properly be handled by the National Archives,” Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, told Just the News.

Then-Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken was receiving emails from Vice President Joe Biden when his son Beau visited Ukraine in 2012.

Al Drago / Pool via CNP

Hunter’s former partner Tony Bobulinski was warned of the need for discretion about Joe’s role: “Don’t mention Joe being involved, it’s only when u are face to face,” wrote James Gillar, another business partner of Hunter’s, in a WhatsApp message on May 20, 2017. “I know u know that but they are paranoid.”

Top 10 Reasons You Should Just Turn Your Guns Over To The Government TODAY

Babylon Bee🐝

So, you still have guns in your house, huh?

First of all, shame on you. Second of all, we realize you may be slightly hesitant about just turning them all over to the government, so we put together a list of reasons (out of the hundreds of reasons) you should just turn in your guns right now. Read and learn, you bitter clinger! 

1) The government is very trustworthy and would never hurt anyone: Also, they have nukes. Resistance is futile. Just hand 'em over! 

2) With your gun safe empty, you now have a neat place to hide when robbers break into your home: Let your gun safe keep YOU safe! As an added bonus, you can now use your gun safe to store all your surgical masks and vaccination cards! 

3) Instead of shooting clays on Thanksgiving, you can play great games with your family, like Monopoly: Nothing brings a family together like Monopoly!

4) The government needs your guns so they can shoot people trying to sell loose cigarettes: Donate your firearms to the noble cause of fighting the evil forces trying to sell untaxed cigarettes to people who can't afford a full pack!

5) You can spend the time you used to spend at the gun range educating yourself: With time, maybe you can learn to be less problematic. 

6) The government will donate your guns to a noble cause: Like drug cartels and insurgents in the Middle East. Think of how much good your gun could be doing right now in the government's hands! 

7) You can rest assured knowing that criminals will turn in their guns too: Criminals always do the right thing when given the chance. 

8) Now you can defend your home with a cool spiked mace and broadsword: Come on—who doesn't want to do this? Turn in your gun and defend your home like a REAL man. 

9) You'll be a rich man not having to buy ammo: Aren't you tired of getting in fights with your wife about how much you spend on guns and ammo? Plus, you'll have more money to spend on masks! 

10) What's the worst that could happen? Just give it a try! Could be fun, actually! 

Why Democrats’ Massive Effort To Suppress Election Concerns Is Dangerous

Americans should see 2020 and the January 6 riots as a wake-up call to the future our nation faces should election integrity not be restored.

by Margot Cleveland for The Federalist

“This man was elected president of the United States of America,” Joe Biden declared of Al Gore during a 2013 campaign event when introducing George W. Bush’s Democrat opponent.

“There’s no doubt that the Russians did interfere in the election, and I think the interference, although not yet quantified, if fully investigated would show that Trump didn’t actually win the election in 2016,” former President Jimmy Carter proclaimed during a 2019 panel discussion sponsored by his nonprofit organization.

“He knows he’s an illegitimate president,” Hillary Clinton seethed when asked about Donald Trump during a CBS interview nearly two years ago, later telling the audience the election was stolen from her.

“Rush thought we won, and so do I,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News following radio personality Rush Limbaugh’s death in February 2021, later calling the contest “the fraudulent presidential election of 2020.”

Three different presidential elections and four different presidential candidates all claimed the man inaugurated commander-in-chief stole the election. Yet while tolerating claims that Clinton and Gore actually won the White House, the corrupt media immediately co-opted the Nazi comparison Joe Biden deployed in response to Trump’s claims of fraud, branding his charges “The Big Lie.”

A Highly Useful Smear Since November

Democrats and their paramours in the press didn’t limit the catchphrase to Trump’s claims of widespread fraud during the 2020 election. Rather, when confronted with evidence of illegal voting, disregard of election laws, or states’ violations of the Elector’s Clause of the Constitution, the left casts the complaints as all part of “The Big Lie.” Following the January 6, 2021, assault on our capitol, Democrats need only brandish “The Big Lie” slogan to silence those fearing to be accused of being responsible for, complicit in, or apologists for, the riots.

The Left knows this and has sharpened sickles for Sens. Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, who raised constitutional objections to counting Arizona and Pennsylvania’s electors. They also wielded this weapon to sow further division in the Republican caucus when the GOP decided to remove Rep. Liz Cheney from her leadership position. The press and politicians also brandish “The Big Lie” talking point to discredit investigations into voting irregularities, such as in Arizona.

The most effective use of “The Big Lie” storyline, however, has been weaponizing that narrative to mute the growing evidence of widespread illegal voting and other election irregularities and to combat efforts by state legislatures to enact voter-integrity laws.

When The Federalist broke news recently that evidence indicates more than 10,300 Georgia voters cast illegal ballots in the 2020 presidential election, corporate media kept mum, while FactCheck framed the reporting under the header of “More Trump Election Distortions.” Then, after a local Atlanta investigative journalist went door-to-door confirming that yes, voters on the list of more than 10,300 names had moved counties, as reported, the chief operating officer for the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office excused illegal voting in the wrong county as “ordinary Georgians” just exercising their right to vote.

Republican Capitulation Doesn’t Spare Them

That a top official with the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office would defend apparent violations of state election law calls into question the seriousness of the office’s supposedly ongoing investigation into whether those 10,300-plus Georgians voted illegally, especially given that Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has also adopted “The Big Lie” narrative.

Predictably, co-opting “The Big Lie” slur from anti-Trump partisans hasn’t saved Raffensperger from attacks from the left: Earlier this month the Biden administration’s Department of Justice filed a highly politicized and frivolous lawsuit against Raffensperger and the state of Georgia, charging the state’s newly adopted voting-integrity statute violates the Voting Rights Amendment.

In challenging Georgia’s Election Integrity Act of 2021, Biden’s attorney general, Merrick B. Garland, focused heavily on “the accusations of fraud around the absentee voting process and the tabulation of votes,” that “circulated widely” following the 2020 election, “despite a dearth of evidence.” The DOJ then argued in its complaint that “the lack of evidence of voter fraud in the 2020 election cycle, and numerous statements from the Secretary of State’s office debunking voter fraud claims, tend to undermine the justifications proffered by proponents of” the law.

‘The Big Lie’ Claim Is a Dodge

Before these filings, Biden had attacked Georgia’s voting-integrity law as “Jim Crow in the 21st century.” While Democrats’ current focus is Georgia, the talking-point of the party (and the press) is that voting rights are “under attack by GOP-controlled states ‘after Republicans seized on former President Donald Trump’s false claim of massive voter fraud in the 2020 election as a pretext for passing new legislation curtailing ballot access.’”

Biden later repeated the Jim Crow canard in pushing H.R. 1, the so-called “For the People Act,” which could gut many mainstream state statutes designed to ensure voting integrity, such as voter ID laws. In a speech in Philadelphia earlier this month, after branding state election-integrity laws a “21st-century Jim Crow assault,” the president sought to connect Trump’s attacks on the validity of the 2020 election—calling it both “the Big Lie” and “the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War”—the January 6, 2021 storming of the capitol, and the supposed imperative for passage of H.R. 1.

There is a dangerous confluence of factors at play here that has permeated the press’ coverage of election-related matters. By coloring all criticism of the 2020 election as part of The Big Lie, the left allows itself to ignore evidence of actual fraud, widespread illegal voting, violations of the Elector’s Clause, and, frankly, just plain incompetence.

Politically, this approach may currently serve Democrats’ interests because their guy won, but our country is too divided to survive in the long-term if half the populace believes the election was rigged. And while the left blames Trump for “Republicans’ lack of faith in our current election infrastructure,” the evidence tells a different story.

Lack of Trust in Election Integrity Is Bipartisan

Trump didn’t cause Biden to declare Gore the rightful president. Nor did Trump cause Carter and Clinton to claim the latter won the 2016 election, unless you hold him responsible for Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Trump also bears no blame for the fact that 37 percent of Americans surveyed in 2016 believed Russia definitely or probably “tampered with vote tallies in order to get Donald Trump elected President,” with 52 percent of Democrats polled believing such hacking of voting systems took place. By 2018 the percentage of all Americans who believed a foreign country had definitely or probably altered vote totals in Trump’s favor jumped to 42 percent of all Americans and a whopping 67 percent of Democrats.

A comparison of the perceptions of the 2016 and 2020 presidential contests likewise exposes a nonpartisan distrust in election results across America. Only 51 percent of all Americans polled believed Trump won the 2016 election fairly, with that percentage dropping to 21 percent of Democrats. When asked if Trump won the presidency in 2016 because of Russian interference, 62 percent of Democrat respondents answered affirmatively and so did 33 percent of all respondents.

When questioned about Biden’s victory in 2020, a higher percentage of all respondents, 57 percent believed the former vice president won “fairly,” including 28 percent of Republicans. Overall, 34 percent of respondents believed Biden won because of voter fraud, while 61 percent of Republicans polled shared that view.

That a majority of both Democrats and Republicans believe the opposing party’s candidate won the presidential election because of voter fraud or the hacking of votes by a foreign power demonstrates the issue concerns election integrity, not Trump. Yet the left is leading the country down the path of less election integrity by pushing for H.R. 1, which will destroy many of the safeguards designed to protect the American electoral system. As 2020 taught us, those safeguards are woefully insufficient.

Why We Should Not Tolerate Any Voting Errors

Nonetheless, the refrain seems to run that any problems seen in 2020 would not have changed the outcome of the election. First, that is not necessarily true.

Second, so what? Every fraudulent and illegal vote disenfranchises a legal voter, and just as we as a country would not tolerate the disenfranchisement of any voters by locking the ballot box to them, we should not tolerate the disenfranchisement of any legal voter by acquiescing to the stuffing of the ballot box by a non-dispositive number of voters.

Third and most importantly, our country is too divided to survive unless both the right and the left trust the outcome of the election. Here, we are not merely talking about the presidency. Since Republicans’ victory in 1994 gaining control of the House for the first time in 40 years, a slim margin has separated the majority and minority parties in both the House and the Senate.

Further, with enough individual House and Senate races to flip the majority having been decided by narrow margins of victory, confidence in election results is imperative. Such trust in election results proves especially important given the deep divide on not just matters of policy and priority, but core American values.

Elections are too tight and the populace too divided for “close enough for government work” to cut it anymore. The American voting system must be reformed to ensure security, transparency, replicability, and election officials’ uniform compliance with state election law.

Not only would the passage of H.R. 1 do the opposite, but by branding time, place, and manner regulations of voting “Jim Crow 2.0,” Democrats have guaranteed that the failure to pass H.R. 1 will render their next election loss illegitimate in the eyes of their voters. Given this, Democrats likely view H.R. 1 as offering them a win-win scenario. But any short-term political victory to them will come at a great cost to our country.

Americans should see 2020 and the January 6 riots as a wake-up call to the future our nation faces should election integrity not be restored. And the left is naïve to think that its voters, who raided the capitol to protest the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh and torched Saint John’s Church, will peacefully accept a loss marketed to them as racist by Democrats, the media, Major League Baseball, and corporate America.

 

Article by Andrea Widburg in The American Thinker

 

More on a Dallas social activist group planning to dox rich Dallas Dems

Yesterday, I wrote about the fact that a group called Dallas Justice NOW (“DJN”) sent to Democrats in Dallas’s wealthy Highland Park neighborhood asking them to take a pledge to keep their kids out of America’s top colleges and universities, including the Ivy League. The group further threatened that those Democrats who failed to do so would be named and shamed – or, in today’s parlance, doxed. In my post, I couldn’t praise the plan enough and other conservatives seem to agree.

To appreciate why DJN’s approach is being applauded from the right, you need to understand Critical Race Theory (“CRT”). CRT asserts that America was created to perpetuate racism, that Whites are inherently racist, that there is systemic racism, and that all White success is due to White privilege. It is an ideology so toxic that it will destroy this country.

America is a nation predicated upon the belief that all of us are equal before the law and under God. If Democrats succeed in enforcing CRT across America, we will be a more racist country than we were at the height of slavery – for then, only half the country had slavery, and the other half was willing to die to defeat that institution.

Currently, CRT is the official platform of the Democrat party. Biden continuously mouths its platitudes; our military is slowly being destroyed as the Pentagon imposes CRT upon it; and academia, the teacher’s unions, and the media, a toxic trio that is the backbone of the Democrat party, trumpet it relentlessly and seek to indoctrinate all Americans in its precepts. Every Democrat who does not publicly denounce CRT is complicit in this scourge.

In other words, the Democrat party’s embrace of CRT is so dangerous that it requires a full-throttle opposition. Normally I deplore doxing. But when I deplore doxing, I’m thinking of the leftists who successfully destroyed a small pizza parlor because the owner dared to say that she didn’t see her little ship catering a gay wedding. And of course, the entire Democrat establishment tried to ruin Nicholas Sandmann for smiling nervously when an activist banged a drum in his face on the Washington Mall. Doxing happens to ordinary people who inadvertently violate the left’s ever constantly shifting list of shibboleths. It’s like getting the death penalty for littering.

 Embracing CRT is not mere “littering.” First, as I noticed, dangerous. Second, as DNJ emphasizes, all Whites who espouse it are hypocrites because none will actually sacrifice their alleged “White privilege.” There’s a whole industry of White people, from Robin D’Angelo down, making massive sums of money going to schools and workplaces telling Blacks they’re inferior and Whites they’re evil. The White academics are doing the same, telling White students they’re complicit in White privilege while refusing to give their own well-being, prestigious jobs to Blacks or other preferred minorities.

And of course, there are tens of thousands of smug White people living in comfortable neighborhoods, sending their children to excellent public or private schools preparatory to a trip to the Ivy Leagues, and sporting “Black Lives Matter” signs on their lawns. They virtue signal CRT, but wouldn’t dream of aligning their money, homes, jobs, and children’s comfortable upbringings with that vapid virtue-signaling. Their mindless platitudes are destroying America and they need to be made to put up or shut up.

At least, that’s what I think. Steven Hayward seems to agree.

[T]here’s actually much to recommend this if you think about it for a moment: what Dallas Justice Now is doing is calling out the smug virtue-signaling of liberal “white allies” and demanding that they put their money (and their children’s futures) where their mouth is.

He adds, which I had not thought of that,

The benefit of this letter is that it makes explicit what the CRT advocates try to obfuscate, which is that their ultimate aim is radical redistributionism, if not some kind of retribution (but call it “reparations”). In which case I think we should encourage more of this kind of direct, tangible challenge to smug white liberals. It will be fun to watch wealthy white liberal elites squirm as they struggle to say “no” to these demands while maintaining their fierce loyalty to supporting “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” I’d like to see “Marin Justice Now” demand that liberal, white, and super-rich Marin County expand their housing opportunities to “underrepresented” groups.

Paul Mirengoff also sees the virtue in what DJN did:

I suppose we can also give DJN back-handed credit for something else. The group has given Dallas-area liberals a feel for the absurdity of the BLM movement. That movement is not just about defunding the police (thereby making people of all races less safe). Nor is it about mildly redistributionist programs of the type that liberals comfortably can get behind.

BLM thinks all successful Whites owe their success to racism. And BLM wants its pound of flesh not just from all successful Whites, but also from their children.

[snip]

Let’s hope that DJN’s letter causes left-liberals to reconsider whether they really want to be allies with this extremist and racist movement.

Finally, you’ve got to love Mark Steyn’s take on it:

Mark Steyn: Virtue-signaling liberals receive a letter | https://t.co/mc6ddnEeG1

— Bookwormroom (@Bookwormroom) July 27, 2021

 

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/07/more_on_a_dallas_social_activist_group_planning_to_dox_rich_dallas_dems.html 

 

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Article by Thomas Buckley in The American Thinker

 

The Many Guises Of The Totalitarian Impulse

Wouldn’t it be nice and fair and simple if all the voting systems across the country were the same?

Wouldn’t it be nice and fair and simple if every school in the nation were equally as good?

Wouldn’t it be nice and fair and simple if everyone had access to robust and identical health care programs?

Whether or not one agrees with these statements, it must be said that they have a certain visceral appeal – what could be wrong with structural equality? – and they have a definite rhetorical advantage because if one does not see their merits, one must, therefore, be in favor of structural inequality.

And it is this rhetorical advantage that is so sublimely being used now – and always has been used throughout history - to mask the woke’s quest for dominance.

For each of the above notions – among countless others – have something important in common: The need for centralization; that is, the need for a centralized power to determine and then enforce exactly what equal means. And that requires people to wield that power.

Totalitarians seldom attempt to gain power based on a platform that overtly and specifically states that they plan to take over your personal life, control societal interactions, and re-set cultural norms as much as possible. Instead, they use these types of pleasantly barbed “nice, fair, and simple” hooks ad nauseum to win the public’s trust.

An underlying authoritarian urge can be hard to detect, but to protect the rights of the individual in a free society it is important that a nation look beyond the details of a specific statement or policy proposal and, instead, get to the root impetus to determine, as objectively as possible, whether what is being put forward centralizes or decentralizes power. It can be argued that power is a zero-sum game and that the amount of “power” in a given system doesn’t actually change, but the center and concentration of power can change often. It should also be noted that, once such changes are made, they can be difficult to rectify, especially if that power is embedded in essentially eternal organizations that have little, if any, direct public oversight. As Sir Humphrey Appleby once said: ‘Permanence is power; rotation is castration.”

By using the centralization question as the first filter through which all public policy (and, arguably, cultural manifestations) must pass, a society can better defend itself.

For example, take HR 1 (the voting rights bill) that the Democrats want to pass. The bill would set national standards and systems for conducting elections – again, an idea that could sound reasonable. But at its core, it is absolutely totalitarian in nature, shifting all power over the most basic action taken in a democracy to one, centralized, controllable place. Therefore, no matter the theoretical convenience, “fairness,” or what have you, it is an authoritarian concept.

Let’s now look at the concept of ending the Senate filibuster. While many – if not most – political factions would at some level, deep down, possibly, like to end the practice, whether or not they would actually do so is telling. At its heart, the filibuster is about protecting transitorily minoritized viewpoints and enshrining the idea that power itself should be – at some level, at least - a shared thing. Overtly and strictly limiting the rights of the party temporarily out of power is a totalitarian concept.

This same argument can be made with respect to the establishment of speech codes and/or the desire to pre-emptively limit what can be said by those who may be in opposition. A crucial aspect of any totalitarian political culture is the outright control of speech and thought, or at least the creation of societal strictures that best ensure that thoughts and speech conform to the empowered group’s wishes.

Therefore, the attitude taken towards speech should strongly inform the public about the true nature of a political movement or specific policy; in other words, if a political – or societal – group even contemplates, let alone allows or supports, limits on free speech and open debate it can be rightly be described as totalitarian, no matter what “pleasant” reason is given or any other justification offered.

This attitude towards centralization does not have to be openly and specifically all-encompassing to have an impact. When it comes to cities and counties (i.e., local, diffuse government), the California legislature has been considering bills that would strip them of – or at least lessen their control over -- land use and zoning. This may seem to be a bit esoteric, but it goes to the heart of the issue of centralization.

Traditionally, in America, when local land use issues were involved, it was almost always deemed best to leave such matters in local hands. Obviously, when those decisions were taken out of spite, were incredibly harmful to the common good, or were racially motivated, higher powers should, could, and eventually did, step in. But to preemptively make such decisions at the state or federal level is anathema to more individualistic political concepts. A good example of this is Biden’s land use language in a recent bill, which, while it does not technically require higher densities, does include massive financial “incentives” for them, incentives that can be turned on or off by federal bureaucrat.

An especially worrisome, if rather obvious, part of the totalitarian/collectivist playbook recently has been the issue of federalization. As created, our federal system was, ironically, specifically designed to thwart the federalization of policies and practices. The dispersal of power to multiple levels of governance was seen then – and remains today – the best possible way to resist this type of centralization (it’s even embodied in the federal government itself through the “balance of powers” idea). Therefore, any policy that increases federal power at the expense of more local control is, at its heart, in the authoritarian mode.

The idea of centralizing power is, forgive me, central to the continued and/or potential success (depending upon your viewpoint) of the more totalitarian streams of current political thought. The more concentrated a regime is, the easier it is to control the (fewer and fewer) levers of society. To echo Caligula (or Nero or Stalin -- either way not the best company to be in) things would truly have been easier if, in fact, “Rome had only one neck to strangle.”

We may all just have to stick our necks out to make sure that never happens.

 

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/07/the_many_guises_of_the_totalitarian_impulse.html 

 

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