The Logic of California’s Leftists Will Keep Us All Children Forever

There’s a word to describe people who believe that unpleasant ideas can be eliminated by banning the “trigger words” that represent them: Such people are called children.

by Dan Gelernter for American Greatness

Los Angeles, Oakland, Sacramento City, and San Diego Unified school districts have found a novel way to improve academic results—they’re getting rid of D and F grades. One imagines this will improve results immediately. On paper.

Reporting from San Francisco, KRON 4 News, writing in semi-literate English, informs us, “If a student fails a test or doesn’t complete their homework, they’ll be able to retake the test and get more time to turn in assignments.” 

The assistant principal at Fremont High School in Oakland, speaking in semi-literate English, told KRON, “Right now, we have a system where we give a million points for a million pieces of paper that students turn in, without much attention to what they’re actually learning.” 

I don’t think anyone will dispute that schools are not paying much attention to what kids are learning. But banning Ds and Fs won’t help students as much as it will help teachers and principals in these districts look less awful by comparison, or else make comparisons with schools that retain a full grading system impossible. The real goal is to rescue teachers’ unions and professional administrators from what they’re doing to the kids. 

To take a random example from the English readers on my desk, a seventh grader of a century ago, learning, no doubt, in a one-room schoolhouse with just enough funding for these text books, would have read Shakespeare, Lord Byron, Keats, Poe, Ruskin, Sir Walter Scott, Longfellow, Kipling, Thoreau, Whitman, Washington, Lincoln and Marcus Aurelius, to cite just a small subsection of the included authors. Selections range from stories and poems to nature study, science, and history. These authors have long since gone the way of the D and F grades: Better to eliminate challenging material than create the impression students are failing. Which really means—better to eliminate material than create the impression that teachers are failing to teach their students.

For all their supposed erudition, leftists have always had trouble with symbolism. That is, they tend not to understand that a concept may represent another concept, rather than being the thing itself. They think that by getting rid of bad grades, they can get rid of what the bad grades represent—failure, ignorance, and laziness, on the part of students and teachers both.

Just as they think that by getting rid of terms like “fat,” they can make people healthier and more “body-positive.” Or that by replacing “fireman” and “policeman” with “firefighter” and “police officer” they can end male dominance in these dangerous professions. Or that they can make a man into a woman just by changing what he calls himself—and that it’s a triumph when one of these “women” joins a girl’s swim team and smashes all previous records by a gigantic margin. 

This fundamental flaw in leftist thinking goes all the way back to its French revolutionary origins. The revolutionary council, finding that bread shortages did not disappear after the collapse of the monarchy but instead got dramatically worse, came upon a brilliant solution: They would simply decree that bread should be less expensive. Why didn’t the king think of that? With all the economic sophistication of a group of spoiled children, they announced “le maximum,” a stated maximum price that bakers were permitted to charge for a loaf. This had the effect of closing down most of the bakers in Paris and unleashing inflation on a scale never before seen in the history of government-issued money—and not to be seen again until the Soviet Revolution. 

But the French revolutionaries had confused the concept of money with what money represents: value. They didn’t realize that, whether you charge one franc or 10 kopeks or 1,000 złotys, the value represented by the loaf of bread—the cost of ingredients, the difficulty in obtaining them, plus the labor of the baker—is unaffected. 

Identical thinking drives leftist demand to raise the minimum wage. They fail to realize that you can’t make someone’s labor more valuable by decree. You can only make it more expensive.

If you think that people with such a shallow understanding of the world can’t be trusted to run our schools, you’re obviously correct. There’s a word to describe people who believe that unpleasant ideas can be eliminated by banning the “trigger words” that represent them: Such people are called children. They might force me to refer to them as “adults,” but that won’t make them grow up. And if you let a child teach a child, all you end up with is a child. So here’s a toast to the California school system: Children forever!

X22, And we Know, and more-Dec 15

 

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Comfortable Tyranny

To combat the rise of comfortable tyranny, we have to strengthen our own virtue of self-government and be ready to exercise it in the face of a regime that seeks to destroy it.

by Blaise Ebiner for American Greatness

“What have you done to us, bringing us out of Egypt? Did we not tell you this in Egypt, when we said, ‘Leave us alone that we may serve the Egyptians?’ Far better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness.” 

—Exodus 14:11-12

All forms of slavery are dehumanizing, but not all forms of slavery are involuntary. The Israelites lost their identity as a free nation under the oppression of the Egyptians. Once honored guests in Egypt, they became slaves to a distrustful ruling class. Yet they complained and hesitated every step of the way on their journey to freedom in the Promised Land. Too many of them preferred the comfort of knowing what slavery was like under the ruling class and lacked the courage to face the uncertainty that following Moses and living in freedom would bring.

Human nature being what it is, the Israelites under Moses were subject to the same tendency to cowardice, comfort, and servitude Americans today and all human beings are subject to when they cannot summon the nerve to defend their freedom. They also had the same capability for courage, freedom, and virtue. We are still capable of it today. 

But do we remember?

How We Got Here

The pandemic of the past 21 months has made evident a divide in American society that likely has been dormant for a long time. On the one hand are those who, to varying degrees, are willing to question the official narrative put forth by government and media elites, violate woke taboos, and live with the consequences. On the other is a large segment of American society that actually believes in, or at least significantly conforms to, the official narrative and the latest dictates and contradictions of the ruling class. 

COVID made clear this desire for conformity when our public health overlords continued to make contradictory demands and claims, which were immediately followed by those who buy the narrative. Too many people unthinkingly fell in line when told to follow and believe these absurd contradictions: “don’t wear masks!,” “wear a mask!,” “wear two masks!,”  “masks aren’t required for the vaccinated!,” “masks are required regardless of vaccination!,” “vaccines are dangerous!” “vaccines are safe and effective (and you’ll lose your job if you don’t get it).” Now they’re telling us to get their boosters because their vaccines weren’t effective enough.

Every time they did this, people had a chance to recognize the farce and choose not to conform. Some did. After the “15 days to slow the spread” was up, people started to catch on. A few more did after the mask mandates began, still more when the “surge” and second wave of lockdowns happened. But each time, the number of people escaping the cycle was smaller. Escaping the cycle took courage—and humility—because they had to admit that they’d been duped.

For the others, each time they chose conformity they made it harder to break out at the next opportunity. Each successive decision weakened their will and, therefore, their ability to choose differently. Moreover, they further clouded their minds. Many of us can think of previously ideologically similar friends who are now almost unrecognizable as a result of their submission to the regime.

Every exercise in self-contradiction conditions people for subjugation. Compelling a willing populace to hold beliefs as true today that were false yesterday detaches people’s minds further and further from logic and reality and places them at the feet of their rulers. The more willing people are to give up their own minds for the sake of whatever today’s narrative may be, the better their rulers can mold them for whatever future designs they may have. The ease with which people continue to give in may be a harbinger of things to come. Future leaders with worse intentions than those in power now can take note and succeed in even more nefarious aims.

The principle of our ruling class is power: power over everyone, for whatever reason (or no reason), whenever they please. But what do their subjects believe in? Why do so many of our nation’s once free and independent-minded people simply bow down to this authority and willingly do its bidding?

Is there any point at which these millions of people will realize their rulers are just making it up as they go? Maybe some do realize. Maybe they just don’t care.

Culture of Comfort, Culture of Cowardice

They don’t care because the truth is not their priority. The summum bonum of our emasculated society is comfort—this is why people are deathly afraid of illness, why “stay safe” is our new national motto, why everyone is so conflict-averse, why nobody wants to question the official narrative in public or in private conversation.

Most people don’t admit outright that their priority is comfort. Instead, they redefine goodness to mean comfort. This redefinition of the good convinces them that conformity with what the culture wants of you (i.e., being “nice”) is actually compassionate, when in reality it is only self-serving. It convinces them that putting self-care over self-sacrifice is good, when it is only obscene narcissism. 

This doesn’t only apply to the Left. Generally, leftists who agree with the regime’s agenda are loud; many conservatives who don’t agree hold their silence. But they hold to the same principle: do what’s comfortable for you. The culture encourages loud support for leftist views and silence about conservative ideals. Conservatives can only claim to be a “silent majority”: we may only be a majority in our unspoken beliefs. In practice, too many of us are indistinguishable from the rest of the subjects.

Comfort is the enemy of truth. It means prioritizing yourself over goodness. It means the elevation of the subjective over the objective. This is what makes comfort the perfect gift to our ruling class. If the only thing to which one tethers himself intellectually is himself, then his mind and will are at the mercy of whatever force is most powerful. The subject is the ultimate coward, because no matter what the ruling class says or does, its subject will never choose a hill of resistance to die on, because nothing is worth dying for. Nothing can be more important to this subject than the subject himself. 

Only with courage can one escape from this mindset. Only a courageous society can be a good society. It was no mistake Aristotle placed the virtue of courage first in his Nicomachean Ethics. Courage is the prerequisite to all virtue. Without it, you do not possess the strength to achieve any other virtue. Without courage you won’t convince anyone else to be good.

Our Godly Authorities

Unwavering support for the regime and its narrative fulfills another sort of comfort as well. Having rejected the divine, the subjects need something to fill their godless void. With no belief in a transcendent natural law, people follow worldly authorities as if they were following the dictates of their own conscience. Feeling the need for ultimate authority, and having decided to look nowhere but earthward, people fulfill that need in earthly powers and governments.

This earthly power provides its subjects a religion of comfort. First, it ensures that comfort is everyone’s goal. Success is measured by GDP, unemployment, access to the internet, diversity, popularity, and other measurements of worldly comfort. Of course, these things are not wrong per se, but none of them measure the state of the souls of the citizens. By focusing the narrative on these measurements of success, the regime is able to ignore the deplorable moral and spiritual state of so many people.

After ensuring that society revolves around comfort, the regime takes away the subjects’ means of comfort, blaming it on outside forces or on the subjects themselves (e.g., lockdowns). In return for conformity, it promises redemption, which is nothing more than returning to the comfort one had before, at the price of some liberty or genuine good that people were able to pursue previously. But nobody can truly hope to ever be saved, because one lives in fear and trembling that his salvation will be taken from him. Death is the final damnation for the religion of comfort. This is why every death must be a tragedy for those who follow this religion. In order to divert the subject’s attention away from this inevitable conclusion, the regime treats all death as preventable.  

No End To It

For a while, in response to continued reports of government abuses, many of us optimistically proclaimed, “the American people won’t stand for this!” But those who still believed in distinctive American principles—liberty, natural rights and law, government by consent, and personal responsibility—were outnumbered and overmatched by those who had abandoned those beliefs to serve the regime. In many regions of the country, there simply weren’t enough Americans left who were willing to defend our nation’s core principles.

The result was that a majority of people, themselves willing slaves, forced the rest unwillingly into bondage. The government and elites don’t have to do much at this point. Now the people enforce the elites’ will upon themselves.

Those who choose to serve the regime cannot be forced to be free. They must be led to freedom, unwilling and hesitant as they are. This is not a battle that can be won merely on intellectual grounds. The American people must also learn to have the will—the courage—to convert our ideals into practice. 

This is not a war that can be won only on a large scale, either. Your greatest tweets and funniest memes may serve as a good encouragement for our side, and they may get lots of views and comments, but it’s not going to be the best way to convert others. Regardless, we are quickly getting to a point where your presence on social media will only be allowed if it serves the interests of the regime. We need a better alternative.

That alternative has always existed. Your example to those surrounding you in real life is invaluable. Just like fear, courage can be contagious. Your support of like-minded friends and friendship with those who believe differently can have a much greater effect.

You will not be able to change everyone, but at least you can change yourself. Strengthen your virtue of self-government and be ready to exercise it in the face of a regime that seeks to destroy it.

Mr. Brandon’s Opus

If you liked how Joe Biden bungled the Afghanistan withdrawal, you're gonna be thrilled with his Ukrainian sequel.

by Ray McCoy for American Greatness

Almost a year ago I asked “who killed the anti-war Democrats?” It’s safe to say that in the time since then, Joe Biden has done everything to make sure that they are now fossilized. 

Sitting as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations is Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), a defense hawk who recently echoed Joe Biden’s threats to impose the worst economic sanctions against Russia if its forces invade Ukraine, as the entire media seems to think will happen. As a result, the public is on daily alert for some new conflict with a nuclear power and without a real answer as to what America’s goals and interests are in the region. 

Does the United States support NATO membership for Ukraine? How about EU membership? Some tone-deaf Republican politicians, like Senator Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), figure Biden isn’t bringing about America’s ruin fast enough, so he recently and helpfully urged a nuclear strike against Russia. Thankfully, Biden has so far limited his commitments to economic sanctions and has ruledout sending U.S. troops.

If there was any theme that was constant during the four years of the Donald Trump presidency it was the notion that he was Vladimir Putin’s puppet,compromised by Putin, a devotee of Putin hoping to get loans from him, and most entertainingly that he was cultivated as a spy by the KGB in the 1980s and remained undetected throughout the next 30 years despite the downfall of the USSR. After being ignored prior to the 2016 election, such allegations exploded into the mainstream in 2017, becoming an almost constant refrain among Democratic politicians and corporate media. 

When Biden took office in January his new policy toward Russia was a marked departure from previous administrations since the end of the Cold War. During the Clinton presidency Russia was so weak and seemingly cowed following the fall of the USSR that Putin’s predecessor Boris Yeltsin purportedly wandereddrunk and alone out of the Blair House guest quarters in Washington, D.C. seeking a cab to go get pizza. George W. Bush talked about getting a sense ofPutin’s soul during their first meeting in 2001, while Secretary of State Hillary Clinton famously brought a “reset” button in 2009 to her press conference with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in hopes of bettering relations after the 2008 Russo-Georgian War. 

By the time Trump had taken office in 2017 the preceding Obama-Biden Administration in which Secretary Clinton served had brought U.S.-Russian relations to their lowest point in decades. This was owing to Ukraine’s Euromaidan revolution of February 2014 and the subsequent Russian invasion of Crimea as well as tensions over U.S. support for rebel groups in Syria. The “Russian collusion” hoax saga consumed Trump’s first two years in office, causing him to take harder lines on Russia in the form of sanctions and lethal military aid to Ukraine in its war with Russia over the Donbas border region.

When the collusion narrative collapsed in the wake of the Robert Mueller report’s failure to yield evidence of a conspiracy, Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) immediately began a new one known as “Ukrainegate.” Schiff alleged Trump had leveraged U.S. military aid to Ukraine in exchange for political dirt against Joe Biden. This allegation led to the first Trump impeachment process and further dismantled attempts to peaceably resolve the U.S.-Russia tensions. True, the impeachment fell flat. But by then, three years of Trump’s term had been wasted over contrived controversies relating to Russia and Ukraine. The fourth year would be wiped out by the COVID-19 pandemic response and the concurrent 2020 election cycle.

Team of Failures

Had Trump been re-elected it is difficult to speculate about where his Russia policy would have gone. As it happens, Joe Biden began his term doing his best to pick up where his old boss Obama had left off. His first conversation with Putin, while including an opening to renew the important New START agreement on nuclear disarmament, was otherwise an exercise of finger wagging. Biden even brought up the issue of media reports of Russian bounties on U.S. troops by the Taliban. Almost six months earlier when this salacious story had surfaced, U.S. defense officials had told the House Armed Services Committee that it was uncorroborated.

Since then, the Biden White House’s approach to Russia and its conflict with Ukraine has trended in the same downward spiral as his other policies. Russia is the world’s third-largest producer of petroleum, and under Biden U.S. imports of crude oil from Russia reached record levels, which is a strange way of treating the nation deemed by the media as the biggest threat to American democracy amid a spike in gas prices for U.S. motorists. 

In the run-up to the final U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, Biden had also pitched the idea of staging U.S. troops in one of the former Soviet republics of Central Asia to Putin during a June 16 meeting. This proposal was unsurprisingly rejected as Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov told the Wall Street Journal that his nation did not see how such a presence advanced the interests of any of the Central Asian states nor of Russia itself.

It is unsurprising that Biden has pursued a track that exacerbates Russo-American relations given the group of defense, intelligence, and foreign policy officials he has picked. In 2020 I wrote about the foreign policy group that Biden had kept in storage at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement. Many of these persons have now been re-inserted into the Biden Administration:

•  Former PBC managing director Antony Blinken now serves as Secretary of State. 
• Alison Berengaut, Blinken’s former speechwriter when he was deputy secretary of state and who also served at the PBC in an executive capacity now serves as a senior advisor to National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, who himself was allegedly involved in the “Russian collusion” hoax. 
• Colin Kahl, who served at the PBC as a “strategic consultant” while also being a professor at Stanford University, was previously assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East and national security advisor to Biden when he was vice president. Kahl now serves as the undersecretary of defense for policy. Kahl was an architect of the Iran Nuclear Deal and also a public proponent of the “Russian collusion” hoax through an editorialin December 2017 for Foreign Policy magazine. 
• Michael Carpenter, Blinken’s successor as managing director of the PBC, is Biden’s recently confirmed ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. A former State Department official in the Office of Russian Affairs under Obama, in 2019 during a panel discussion at Penn’s Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy, Carpenter was the primary speaker and used his time to accuse Russia of undermining western democracy including the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

With many of these figures having already been involved in the previous failures with regard to Crimea and Syria under Obama, how much confidence should be placed in their steering of current policy? And these staffing issues are compounded by the Biden family’s Ukraine business dealings. 

As with his infamous laptop, this issue of Hunter Biden’s flagrantly unethical and potentially illegal activities in Ukraine was dismissed by the media as an irresponsible conspiracy theory before the 2020 election. Yet Ukrainians are now being told in order to protect their nation against a shakedown by Russia they should trust a U.S. president who is using their crisis to his own advantage. The media’s coverup of the Biden-Ukraine saga was akin to a mother bird defending its nest. The Washington Monthly, a publication by D.C. insiders for D.C. insiders, even published a column stating that “former Vice President Joe Biden should be commended for what he did in Ukraine, not maligned.”

Lurching toward MADness?

Throughout November, the U.S. media has continued to hype reports that Russia is building up troop levels along the Ukrainian border and plans to invade its neighbor. This pattern of pointing at Russia in order to magnify its threat based on dubious intelligence was masterfully employed during the Trump years. Some examples that were absurd even at the time were the allegations ofhacking into the DNC, a Russian plan to orchestrate the escape of Julian Assange from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and the use of the National Rifle Association as a “foreign asset” ahead of 2016 according to Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.). Given that all of these stories either turned out to be false, as in the case of Assange, or richly embellished, is it to be expected that Americans will believe the latest scare tactics regarding Russia? 

Biden’s decision to remove sanctions on Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline program with Germany raised more eyebrows as well, given how it supposedly poses such a threat to the West. Even Politico saw it as a major area where the White House had inexplicably shifted direction in relation to policy.

Yet thanks to the fickle nature of his camp, Biden’s pendulum shifts on Ukraine policy largely go unnoticed. Few Democrats are conscious of how ironic it is that they voted for a president willing to plunge Eastern Europe into needless conflict over geopolitical brinkmanship in the same way as the hated Bush Administration did with Iraq; a policy that many of them probably protested only 15 years ago. 

It’s not as if this change has been an unintentional mistake. The New York Times on December 11 published a guest op-ed by Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman (Ret.), a former defense official best known as the face of the first Trump impeachment effort. It was an appeal for Biden to commit to more lethal aid to Ukraine, a “generational investment” that according to Vindman could help trigger Russians “to eventually demand their own framework for democratic transition.” For those of you slow to process the translation, this is the new and improved way to say, “regime change.”

After more than seven years of warfare in eastern Ukraine through three American presidents, the United States may be in a weaker position than ever. Twice in the past 20 years Ukraine broke with Moscow; in 2004 during the “Orange Revolution” that deposed pro-Russian incumbent President Leonid Kuchma and in 2014 when they toppled another one, Viktor Yanukovich. 

The U.S. military is overstretched and with the public’s attention more devoted to economic woes and civil strife associated with vaccination mandates and criminal policing, there is nothing to indicate that it has the appetite for another dangerous foreign adventure on behalf of an ally. Lavrov, speaking at the OSCE conference in Stockholm on December 2, warned against the “nightmare scenario” of a hot war in Europe. This means that Biden’s ultimate move could be to blink and concede to Putin, possibly in the form of guaranteeing Ukraine will not be admitted to NATO. 

The Associated Press reported that such a deal could already be in the works, with the United States urging Ukraine to grant greater autonomy to the Donbas region. Such an outcome could bring closure to a decades long struggle with nothing having been accomplished. It would be the perfect seal on Biden’s career of epic foreign policy miscalculations.

Twitter Cracks Down On Vaccine Tweets

Twitter is getting tough on misleading vaccine tweets — including those that claim vaccinated people can spread COVID-19, even though federal authorities say such transmission is possible.

The social media platform has announced it will start slapping penalties on users who claim vaccinated people can spread COVID-19 or other misleading information on the virus.

The rule was quietly added to the website’s terms of service on Dec. 2, according to Wayback Machine archives retrieved by Reclaim the Net. 

"When tweets include misleading information about COVID-19, we may place a label on those tweets that includes corrective information about that claim," Twitter notes in a section about COVID misinformation.

"We may apply labels to tweets that contain, for example… false or misleading claims that people who have received the vaccine can spread or shed the virus (or symptoms, or immunity) to unvaccinated people."

Mediaite noted Wednesday that stricture appears counter to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance. 

The CDC guidance reads, in part: "Investigations are ongoing. to further assess the risk of transmission from fully vaccinated persons with SARS-CoV-2 infections to other vaccinated and unvaccinated people. Early evidence suggests infections in fully vaccinated persons caused by the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 may be transmissible to others; however, SARS-CoV-2 transmission between unvaccinated persons is the primary cause of continued spread."

Twitter’s new "COVID-19 misleading information policy" will also impose sanctions on tweets about PCR tests, and health authorities, the social media giant said — and include removing and labeling tweets.

The sanctions also result in Twitter users collecting strikes on their account that can lead to a permanent suspension. Penalties range from a 12-hour account lock after the second strike, and a permanent suspension — or ban — on the fifth strike. 

The crackdown comes two weeks after former CEO Jack Dorsey’s Nov. 29 announcement that he was stepping down to focus on cryptocurrency, leaving Parag Agrawal as his successor.

Mediaite reported Agrawal raised eyebrows among critics a day later with a change about "sharing personal media."

"Sharing personal media, such as images or videos, can potentially violate a person’s privacy, and may lead to emotional or physical harm. The misuse of private media can affect everyone, but can have a disproportionate effect on women, activists, dissidents, and members of minority communities. When we receive a report that a Tweet contains unauthorized private media, we will now take action in line with our range of enforcement options."  

https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/twitter-policy-vaccinations/2021/12/15/id/1048797/

Tyrannical COVID Mandates Are Pushing Citizens Worldwide To The Breaking Point

Shawn Fleetwood reporting for The Federalist

As governments worldwide continue to implement authoritarian COVID restrictions on their citizens, people across the globe are taking drastic actions in defiance of such tyrannical mandates.

Germany

In Germany, a man reportedly killed himself and his entire family over fears that his fake vaccine card would be discovered by his employer. According to The Blaze, “German police said they were called to a gruesome scene at the man’s home on Saturday by witnesses who saw lifeless bodies through the windows” and “discovered five members of a family killed at the home in the town of Königs Wusterhausen, outside of Berlin.”

Among the bodies found include those of the two 40-year-old parents and three children, aged 10, 8, and 4 years old. Police say they found a suicide note at the scene, which explained “that the man had obtained fake vaccine cards for himself and his wife, but that the employer had discovered the false documents.”

After firing the man, the employer threatened to report the family to government authorities, which prompted fears among the husband and wife that their children would be taken away. Police believe the man first killed his wife and children before killing himself and have indicated that he was in duress after losing his job over the fake card incident.

Belgium

In Belgium, recent protests in Brussels over the country’s COVID restrictions turned violent, which prompted police to use tear gas and water cannons on protestors. According to Raidió Teilifís Éireann, “[S]ome 8,000 people marched through Brussels towards the headquarters of the European Union, chanting ‘Freedom!’ and letting off fireworks.” Among the protestors were off-duty firefighters, who were protesting against forced vaccination.

After reaching the building, the large crowd dispersed into smaller groups, upon which approximately 100 protestors ran into a riot barricade blocking access to the European Commission. According to ABC News, “[A]fter a brief stand-off with police, protesters hurdled trash and other objects, including a bicycle, at police and set off firecrackers and flares,” with authorities using a water cannon and tear gas to disperse the crowd.

New Zealand

A little further south in New Zealand, a man allegedly received upwards of 10 COVID shots in a single day on behalf of other citizens hoping to avoid the country’s COVID shot mandate, which applies to roughly 40 percent of New Zealand’s workforce. According to The Blaze, “Astrid Koornneef – group manager operations for the Covid-19 vaccine and immunization program in New Zealand – noted that the country’s Ministry of Health was aware of the person who received 10 COVID-19 vaccine shots and was taking the matter very seriously.”

“To assume another person’s identity and receive a medical treatment is dangerous,” Koornneef said. “This puts at risk the person who receives a vaccination under an assumed identify and the person whose health record will show they have been vaccinated when they have not.”

Authorities say they suspect the man visited multiple vaccination sites and was “likely paid for the shots in order to make it appear that [others] were fully vaccinated.”

Big Government-Championing Leftists Are Big Business' Best Friends

Seton Motley reporting for RedState

Last week we wrote….

Decades of Our Corrupt System Has Created Today’s Gambling Culture:

“(T)he degradation gambling indicates is really that of America’s institutions.  Americans’ greater acceptance of — and penchant for — gambling and its risks has risen along with their distrust of America’s institutions….

“Our entire system is corrupt.  Americans have watched decades’ worth of ever-increasing cronyism between Big Government and Big Business — to the detriment of US.

“Wall Street — and government flunkies with no skills save for selling US out to the Street — grow ever richer.  While Main Street grows ever poorer….

“The American Dream — that hard, honest work will pay off — is nigh dead and gone.  Because the American People no longer believe in it.  Because America’s institutional corruption has given them absolutely no reason to believe in it.  If you aren’t on the rich Big inside, you are on the poor outside looking in.”

The day we published that, this was released….

A Huge Study of 20 Years of Global Wealth Shows the Rich are Taking Most of the Gains for Themselves

Sometimes, even the Left is right:

“Inequality has remained persistently high for decades, and a new report shows just how stark the divide is between the richest and poorest people on the planet.”

Big Government keeps getting bigger. Which makes it an ever-more-enticing recipient for bribes from Big Business. Which of course lead to ever-more-crony policies from Big Government. Lather, rinse, repeat….

It appears the mid-1990s was a tipping point for Big Government big-ism:

“Billionaires now hold a 3% share of global wealth, up from 1% in 1995.”

This transformation was accelerated further still by the global China Virus lockdowns. About which we warned way more than a year ago….

Trillion Dollar Big Tech Companies Will Use China Virus Scam to Take Over America

Government has kept open Big Business – while locking down their Little Guy competitors.

How Big Government Stacked the Deck Against Small Business:

“Small businesses have been pummeled by excessive and insane governmental lockdowns of the economy. Experts warn that one third of small businesses could ultimately shut down for good, and hundreds of thousands have already done just that.

“Meanwhile, Amazon’s sales increased 40 percent in the second quarter alone, while their stock price increased 97 percent. Apple hit a $2 trillion market cap, the first publicly traded company to do so, and reported nearly $60 billion in revenue. Since the pandemic began, Facebook’s stock rocketed up 85 percent, Google’s by 50 percent, Netflix by 63 percent, and Microsoft by 57 percent. All saw their revenues greatly increase compared to last year’s numbers as well.”

So then this happens….

Billionaires Got 54% Richer During Pandemic

But even when the Left is right – it’s for all the wrong reasons…:

“The data serves as a complete rebuke of the trickle-down economic theory, which posits that cutting taxes on the rich will ‘trickle down’ to those below, with the cuts eventually benefiting everyone.”

The Left’s myopic fixation on tax policies leads to them missing much of the forest for the trees. Big Government regulatory policies are also hugely responsible for the vast and increasing wealth disparities they decry.

And the Left has always championed these Big Business-helping Big Government reg policies. Starting with the China Virus lockdowns – and working backwards. Oops.

Always and forever, Big Government hurts the Little Guy more. The Wealth Gap – between the rich and everyone else – is as big or as small as the government doing the damage.

Big Government is expensive and oppressive. Big Business is FAR better capitalized and equipped to handle Big Government than is the Little Guy.

Big Business can hire lots of people to deal with Big Government’s massive regulations. The Little Guy gets buried by regs – and then buried in the Little Guy Graveyard.

Big Business never really objects to massive regs – and often ask for them. Because they know all of this.

Big Business Loves Big Government:

“Consider the $15 minimum wage. People think of that law as pro-worker. But big companies like Walmart, Costco and Amazon lobby in favor of it. Why?

“Because big business can afford robots. Their competitors often cannot.

“‘Capitalism is a cutthroat thing….But this isn’t capitalism. When you turn to government to regulate your competitors out of business, that’s where we need to say this is wrong.’

“‘Maybe you’re too cynical….Maybe (Amazon boss Jeff) Bezos really just does want people to be paid more.’

“‘If Jeff Bezos wants people to be paid more…he can pay people more! But what Bezos is trying to do is outlaw competing business practices.’

Whether wittingly or unwittingly, the Left has long been helping Big Business – by demanding ever-expanding regs from Big Government.

To wit: We are one Joe Biden Federal Communications Commission (FCC) confirmation away from a massive Big Government regulatory expansion on the Internet.

Biden’s FCC Pick Will Be Instrumental in Net Neutrality Fight

Net Neutrality is horrendously bad policy – for which the Left has fought for decades.

Leftists Still Trying to Bring Back Net Neutrality

You know who else wants Net Neutrality? Big Tech – made up of the biggest businesses in the history of the world.

Huge Coalition Led by Amazon, Microsoft, and Others Take a Stand in Favor of Net Neutrality:

“A sizable coalition of technology companies has today taken a stand in favor of net neutrality in the form of a letter to the Federal Communications Commission. The group, led by giants including Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Netflix, Twitter, and Yahoo….”

Apple Tells FCC It Favors Net Neutrality

Why does Big Tech want Net Neutrality? Because it is huge Big Government cronyism for them. For which We the Little Guys will pay – naturally.

We’re About to Pay Billions More Per Year for Big Tech’s Latest Government Cronyism:

“Net Neutrality outlaws Internet Service Providers (ISPs) from charging Big Tech companies — Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, etc — anything at all for all the Internet bandwidth they use. And Big Tech companies use a LOT of bandwidth.  This is a HUGE crony gift from Big Government to Big Tech….

“Government outlawing Big Tech being charged for the titanic bandwidth they use means we will be charged exponentially more for the tiny bandwidth we use.  Net Neutrality is government forcing us to mass-subsidize Big Tech.”

Oh: And we are paying on our phones the Universal Service Fund (USF) tax. An ever-increasing tax rate – raised automatically every quarter-year, and by FCC vote whenever they wish – of greater than 33.4%.  Imposed to pay for government wasting hundreds of billions of dollars pretending to connect people to the Internet.

If the FCC reimposes the Title II regulatory regime while reimposing Net Neutrality – and they will?

Title II Is the Key to Net Neutrality

The monster USF tax can (and will) also be imposed upon our Internet connections.

Except Big Tech doesn’t contribute to the USF fund. At all. Despite benefiting more massively than anyone else on the planet from people being connected to the Internet.

So: Title II and Net Neutrality will make Internet connections for We the Little Guys DRAMATICALLY more expensive. (And then Big Government will spend hundreds of billions of additional dollars on Internet connections – because more people aren’t connected to the Internet.)

Meanwhile, Title II and Net Neutrality provide DOUBLE cronyism for Big Tech. Net Neutrality means they don’t have to pay for their Internet connections. And because they don’t have to pay for their Internet connections – they won’t have to pay the monster USF tax when Big Government imposes it upon We the Little Guys.

And these are the Big Business-favoring Big Government policies the Left has long been championing.

Because the Left knows absolutely nothing about how the world works.