Media Demands Darkness, Not Sunlight, on January 6 Tapes

What we are hearing from the media industrial complex is fear, not concern.

Julie Kelly reporting for American Greatness

Ever since Axios reported that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) gave Fox News host Tucker Carlson unfettered access to surveillance video captured by Capitol security cameras on January 6, 2021, the corporate media has experienced a collective convulsion bordering on a nervous breakdown.

Guardians of the fourth estate long ago abandoned their self-proclaimed role as watchdog over those in power in exchange for the role of lapdog. But apparently the last ones to get the joke are reporters, editors, and cable news hosts themselves, who still operate under the delusion they maintain a vaunted place in the pecking order of American society rather than rank in popularity just below the toxic sludge smoldering in East Palestine, Ohio.

Not long ago—or maybe it has been a long time?—journalists would salivate at the chance to report on the contents of a massive trove of footage related to what the government calls a terror attack, especially if the same government pulled every trick in the book to keep it under wraps. Compelled by slavish idolatry of the state and contempt for the common man, the media, for lack of a better term, is acting as if the release of unseen video recorded on January 6 is a crime in progress.

This comes, mind you, after two full years of uncritically repeating every talking point about the so-called “insurrection” which involves calling it an “insurrection” even though no one has been charged with “insurrection.” No cop cried too unconvincingly, no lawmaker made too outlandish a claim, no occupant of the White House told one too many lies to jolt the slumbering curiosity, or even innate sense of skepticism, of corporate media apparatchiks.

“Breaking news” bulletins sought to grab the attention of their shrinking audience before airing a cherry-picked clip gleaned from the very collection of tapes now considered sacrosanct. 

It’s hard to know where to begin in the January 6 Hall of Hypocrisy, but let’s start with an easy target: Washington Post political columnist Philip Bump. Shortly after Donald Trump won the 2016 election, the Post famously changed its motto to “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” 

Since January 6, few newspapers have devoted more column inches to the four-hour disturbance that only temporarily delayed the certification of the 2020 election. A three-part series published in October 2021 provided a novel-sized exploration into what happened before, during, and after the protest. Proceedings of the January 6 select committee earned nonstop coverage including reposting, you guessed it, clips of surveillance video played by the committee to an international audience.

Bump now bristles at the thought of fair play. “We should have no confidence that Tucker Carlson will do anything but use the video to which he’s been given access for anything other than promoting his own narrative,” Bump sneered in a February 21 column. “It’s not just that Carlson cannot be relied upon to actually consider the video in an objective way, though he certainly can’t be. It’s also that there is no reason to think that he will present the video in context, to include information that moderates what’s being shown on the screen.”

Darkness, it appears, is not a threat to democracy if it pertains to a blackout of taxpayer-paid recordings that might lay bare the biggest political scandal in U.S. history.

Over at MSNBC, Rachel Maddow fretted that Fox News will “use this government material to concoct an alternative narrative to give us some more convenient revisionist history about what happened on January 6.”

Not to be outdone, Maddow’s MSNBC colleague Joy Reid warned that Republicans could “twist the footage” to help “criminals get out of jail.” This from the same network that infamously reported the 2020 riots were “mostly peaceful” as property burned behind a reporter.

Reid and her guest, Representative Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) then quickly defaulted to the Democrats’ favorite villian: Russian President Vladimir Putin. Prideless and shameless after years of portraying Putin as the bogeyman in every fabricated smear operation, Raskin and Reid lamented how Carlson was, once again, doing Putin’s dirty work. 

“Tucker Carlson is a pro-Putin, pro-Orban, pro-autocrat propagandist,” said Raskin, the propagandist would-be autocrat who twice attempted to remove a duly elected president from office.  “I mean, that really is out of Putin’s playbook.”

“Oh, absolutely,” Reid responded.

Aside from empowering Putin—the Biden regime’s escalating involvement in the Ukraine-Russia conflict notwithstanding—Carlson’s team could endanger “national security” by releasing footage not approved by lawmakers such as Raskin or the bureaucrats running the Capitol Police department. 

“Democrats and former Republican members of the Jan. 6 committee say that by releasing the footage to Carlson, McCarthy could divulge security methods used by law enforcement to defend the Capitol complex,” Time magazine claimed this week. Those concerns, however, escaped consideration when the committee broadcast dozens of shots of the inside of the Capitol over the course of 18 months, including then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s trip to a secure location on January 6.

And, of course, no January 6 sob story would be complete without a cameo by Michael Fanone, the former D.C. Metropolitan Police officer turned book author turned CNN contributor. “[This] guarantees that it will be selectively edited to fit an extreme MAGA narrative without care for the safety of Capitol police, members of Congress and congressional staff,” Fanone said in a statement to CNN. “Airing footage of restricted areas of the Capitol and sensitive evacuation protocols all while spreading misinformation about the nature of the attack on the Capitol endangers everyone working in the building.”

Perhaps Carlson can also get his hands on Fanone’s body-worn camera recordings, which remain under protective orders to this day.

What we are hearing from the media industrial complex is fear, not concern. Either ignorant about the underlying facts of January 6 or fully aware of the dirty side until now shielded from the majority of the public, the news media is afraid of what Carlson will reveal. And not even they are braced for impact.

X22, And we Know, and more- Feb 24

 

Want a real moodkiller right before the weekend, here's 1: The long goodbyes on the NCIS LA set began today, final scenes for actors and crew members have began. Which means that early next week is when it'll all be over.

Yup. Biiiig moodkiller there.

Here's tonight's news (which ain't a moodkiller):

A Great Awakening Decades in the Making

posted by J.B. Shurk at American Thinker 

Over at The Conservative Treehouse, Sundance has again managed to generate a treasure trove of anecdotal history, evidence, and analysis from those who visit his site.  

Last month, he asked readers: if "[y]ou did not take the COVID-19 shot, why not?"  The thousands of personal responses were illuminating and created a kind of timeline showing how irreconcilable conflicts pitting available scientific knowledge and common sense against the government's own actions, orders, statements, and censorship heightened public distrust of COVID mandates and "vaccines," until various tipping points spilled over into outright rejection of political, medical, and media authorities. 

This month, Sundance asks a more foundational question: "When did you start really paying attention?"  In other words, when did you "recognize that things around you, things you perhaps didn't pay attention to before, were not what you thought they were"?  What was the moment when "your political awakening began"?  

The thousands of responses to this simple question are a cornucopia of rich history, personal reflection, and insightful analysis.  Just as last month's COVID question created a powerful timeline documenting the last three years of COVID-1984 insanity, this month's more general question has generated nothing less than a near-century's worth of details and stories tracking people's "aha moments" as they discovered that the promises of American self-government are often but an ornamental fabrication plastered upon the stratagems of ruthless government actors pushing propaganda, accumulating power, and sacrificing American lives.  Interestingly, they come from people traversing back and forth across the political spectrum.  From a research point of view, the collected information is staggeringly comprehensive, impressive, and invaluable.  From a personal point of view, the selfless entries and recorded memories are emotional, poignant, cathartic, and often deeply revealing.  I encourage you not only to read through some of the many responses, but also to continue the conversation here at American Thinker, whose commenters, like those at The Treehouse, are well known for their crisp intellectual engagement.

What you will find is a compendium stretching all the way from before the Second World War to the present day, in which ordinary people describe jarring, face-to-face experiences with institutional corruption, malice, cover-ups, cognitively dissonant government propaganda, intimidation, sanctioned lies, and public betrayals.  Some of those experiences are well known events: the perplexing details surrounding Lee Harvey Oswald's assassination of President Kennedy, followed directly by Jack Ruby's unbelievable live on-air assassination of Oswald; the Gulf of Tonkin incident that escalated the Vietnam War; the FBI's massacres at Ruby Ridge and Waco; the mysterious disappearance of the FBI's John Doe No. 2 after the Oklahoma City bombing; the explosion of TWA Flight 800; the FBI's and CIA's failures leading to 9/11; the use of predominantly Saudi hijackers to justify wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq; the PATRIOT Act; Obama and Holder's redirection of the PATRIOT Act into a political weapon for targeting American civilians; the 9/11/12 Benghazi attack; IRS, DOJ, and FBI harassment of conservatives; the conspiracy among Obama's FBI, Hillary's presidential campaign, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and a morally corrupt media to frame Donald Trump as a Russian spy; statistically inexplicable vote totals after the introduction of security-free and fraud-prone mail-in-ballot elections; COVID-1984; the persecution of J6 prisoners; and dozens of events in between.  These high-profile matters prompted people to question government "narratives" with much more scrutiny.

Alongside such historical nodes are numerous personal experiences in which normal Americans observed members of the U.S. government engaging in unethical, immoral, and at times criminal activities that shocked the formerly oblivious from their states of relative complacency.  Some were military brats stationed all over the world who saw events as they were and not as they were reported.  Many witnessed firsthand how news media distorted events right outside their doors.  Others watched as federal authorities got away with outrageous lies.  Most encountered some form of government corruption that was unmistakable yet covered up to this day.  

It is worth pointing out that, just as with the great bulk of readers at American Thinker, the respondents at The Treehouse are generally America-supporting, freedom-loving patriots either who have directly served the nation through the military and supporting professions or whose parents, spouses, children, or other loved ones have made such sacrifices.  These are not people who hate America, as the 1619 Project propagandists do.  They do not cause reckless harm to their nation, as Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and other anti-American (yet DOJ and FBI-supported) rioters, arsonists, and left-wing shock troops do.  Even after having had their "aha" experience, often in a personally gut-wrenching way in which some element of the U.S. government directly betrayed their trust and loyalty, these are people who would overwhelmingly still volunteer to be first in line to protect America and stand in harm's way. 

Truly, this has always been the most disheartening aspect of our current reality — that Americans who have given their all to their nation and would do so yet again are the very people targeted today as "extremists," "terrorists," spreaders of "disinformation," and purveyors of "hate."  Well, they are none of those things.  They are truth-tellers, honest historians, keepers of liberty's flame, righteous warriors, and the generational glue still somehow preventing society from breaking in two.  When a nation not only turns its back on those most critical for its survival but also denigrates their service, commitment, opinions, and personal loss as somehow contemptible and undeserving of respect, that nation will not endure many more days.  Read the responses to Sundance's question, and you get a prophetically penetrating glimpse into any future answer should the depressing question one day be asked: why did America fall?  Should America disappear from the map, it will be because decades of government corruption and abuse were never addressed until it was simply too late.

In fact, this growing collection of personal accounts from ordinary Americans, in which they take to task not only the inherent failings of any system of government, but also the specific train of abuses and usurpations choking too many Americans under the yoke of petty despotism, should be regarded as one of two things: a stark warning that decades of government lies and betrayals must rapidly come to an end, or as an autopsy report preserved in time capsule form for future generations to one day study and comprehend.  Either more and more Americans will use forums such as these to stomp out the cancer before it finally takes the host, or the blessings of liberty will skip over several generations, until a time when those of principle and resolve rise to clear a space of Earth free from the evils of State tyranny once again.

Do not let the stories of so many thousands of passionate, patriotic Americans be this country's swan song, when they can just as easily be the accelerant spread across the land waiting for a divine spark.  Do not assume that evil and pain presage more of the same, when they can just as effectively open up minds and hearts to the coming of a better age.  People who find the courage to exercise "free will" will free themselves.

It is crystal-clear that more and more Americans (and Westerners generally) are awakening to the dispiriting reality that successive self-serving governments have turned our most cherished rights and freedoms on their head.  This process, far from taking place overnight, has been many decades in the making.  After so many generations have endured harms at the behest of Constitution-betraying bureaucrats and self-loving proto-tyrants, we are on the precipice of real change.  It is a choice.  It belongs to you.  Do not be misled.  Seize the day.

The Freedom Not to Wear a Mask

The Freedom Not to Wear a Mask

John Tamny for Brownstone.org

“Put on your mask, Dude.” That was said to me in an office building amid peak lockdown. “Where’s your mask?” was a question angrily posed to me by a sour-faced shopper in the parking lot of a Whole Foods in Washington, DC around the same time. 

At another Whole Foods in nearby Bethesda, a rather self-regarding customer (redundancy?) let me know that “in Bethesda, we wear masks.” Close friends lectured me on the importance of wearing masks while scoffing at my surely knuckle-dragging disdain for the cloth. For a brief time in the summer of 2020, American Airlines banned me for removing it too much during a flight.

So many more anecdotes like this could be mentioned, and there’s a strong desire to talk about them. Loudly. There’s also a yearning to gloat around those who thought me doltish for rejecting the alarmism that led to so many so obediently masking up in 2020 and beyond.

Why now? The answer is simple. Like so many people, I’ve read New York Times columnist Bret Stephens’s summary of a recent study on the effectiveness of masks by Cochrane, which Stephens describes as the “gold standard for its reviews of health care data.” So what did the Cochrane study reveal about masks? Stephens cites an interview with the study’s lead author (epidemiologist Tom Jefferson) in which Jefferson concludes about masks “That there is just no evidence that they make any difference.” Do N-95 masks work in ways that the rectangular ones do not? According to Jefferson, it “Makes no difference – none of it.”

To read this is to be so tempted to once again gloat. The mask-wearing were and are such a supercilious lot. Shouldn’t they be mocked unceasingly for allowing their nail-biting alarmism to so thoroughly cloud their minds? The easy answer is yes. If the mask-religionists are forced to own up to how wrong they were, maybe they’ll learn to be more open-minded in the future? It all makes so much sense, except that it doesn’t.

It brings to mind a line from Northwestern professor Joseph Epstein’s book, Charm. Paraphrasing the author, “I’ve never lost an argument, but I’ve never won one either.” For those of us who properly rejected the mask hysteria, and who more importantly were live-and-let-live about how to respond to the virus, let’s be real. 

We’re not going to win the argument with mask parishioners, and we won’t for the same reason that the brilliant Epstein has never won an argument: they’ll never admit just how wrong they were. There will always be “Yes, but” replies if they’re reasonably polite, and then if they’re not, the mask-compliant will remain the same vicious, sniveling people they were before the virus brightly magnified their worst qualities.

Worse, and as I argue in my 2021 book about the tragic political response to the virus, When Politicians Panicked, it’s important to stress that winning the arguments about lockdowns, masks, and survival rates from the virus is losing the war. Put another way, the best arguments against lockdowns and mask enforcement were never medical or statistical. That is so simply because freedom to live as we want is much more valuable than allegedly salutary health outcomes arrived at via force. Freedom is its own brilliant virtue, and it includes the right to do what we want even when doing what we want is thought to be detrimental to our individual health.

From there, it cannot be stressed enough that free people produce information. By doing what they want free people inform us through their actions. Applied to March of 2020 when the global political and expert class lost its collective mind, there was so very much the world didn’t know about a virus that was supposedly so powerful that it would cause mass-hospitalization absent lockdowns, and worse, death by the millions. All of which explains why freedom was most crucial to maintain at a time when it was trampled on. Think about it.

Precisely because the experts were making such grand pronunciations about the lethality of the virus, freedom was needed to test the hysteria. In other words, those who freely reject expert opinion when experts are predicting Armageddon are most crucial when people all around them are losing their heads, locking down, washing hands feverishly, and then sanitizing what has been washed. Figure that a wide range of approaches to a spreading virus – from total lockdown to spending every night in crowded bars – will produce the information that will test the beliefs of the expert class.

Except that in 2020 we didn’t get that. While well-run businesses adhere to the “one-size-fits-one” maxim, governments approach things with one-size-fits-all. Which was what the lockdown and mask-hysterical clamored for in 2020. Not willing to live-and-let-live, they had to control those who merely desired choice. 

Those who desired choice, including the right to live as they always had were derided as “selfish.” Actually, it was the lockdown, mask and expert-reverential who were selfish for foisting their fears on the rest of us. If they wanted to stay home, and if they wanted to be double-masked when out given their deep belief in the effectiveness of masks, no one was keeping them from doing as they wished.

The simple truth is that the one-size-fits-all approach didn’t protect us from the virus as much as it blinded us to its reality; one that only could have been arrived at via freedom. We didn’t need medical studies, and the reality is that still we don’t need medical studies. What we needed and need is freedom. With the latter once again comes knowledge from different people doing different things, and all of us learning from their successes and failures.

This is yet again of crucial importance given the damning-to-masks conclusions in the Cochrane study. For the mask-disdainful to lead with the study’s truths is for them to imply that if the study had revealed masks as wildly effective, that mandates and other requirements would have made sense. No. Never. If doing something makes sense, or if it protects us from illness and death, no force is needed.

Let’s please keep this in mind now. Once again, the best arguments against mandates and lockdowns aren’t medical, nor will they be found in studies. Freedom is the best argument, and once we ditch freedom in favor of results-based cases, we set ourselves up for a hideous taking of our freedom in the future when the next pathogen invariably rears its lethal – or meek – head.

Reprinted from RealClearMarkets

When Media Say Biden Is Winning, They Mean He’s Succeeding In Radicalizing America

The corporate media are touting Biden’s ‘winning streak.’ But their idea of winning is a president in thrall to his party’s left-wing base.

Jonathan S. Tobin reporting for The Federalist

Inside the corporate media bubble, President Joe Biden is a champ on a winning streak. From an economy that is in not quite so dire straits as it was last summer to a midterm election result that was not as disastrous as expected and the passage of massive spending bills to fund the Democrats’ pet causes on the environment and the war in Ukraine, left-wing outlets are all in agreement that everything’s coming up roses for Joe.

Every opportunity they get to reinforce this theme, including a lackluster State of the Union speech, is treated as more evidence of Biden winning. When some Republicans in the House chamber refused to sit quietly while the president smeared them as heartless politicians who want to take Social Security and Medicare away from seniors, they treated this raucous exchange not as a good opportunity for a fact-check of that collection of half-truths, fibs, and flat-out lies, but instead cited it as proof that Biden had exposed his political foes as louts and extremists.

But this Biden victory narrative is not just missing a more sober perspective that would point out that most of his alleged victories are, in fact, not so much wins as they are examples of avoiding complete disaster or outright defeats. What those touting his winning streak are really cheering is the way his administration has faithfully done the bidding of his party’s left-wing base. With his abandonment of the country’s southern border, the hijacking of legislation that was supposed to address inflation and collapsing infrastructure but instead poured funding into the Democrats’ climate change projects, and the takeover of the government by exponents of the DEI — diversity, equity, and inclusion — racialist catechism, what Biden has given Americans is more or less what they feared would be the result of a Bernie Sanders presidency.

Press Covering for the President

Though radical leftists are far from entirely satisfied with what they’ve gotten from Biden in his first 25 months, he has given them deeply consequential achievements that have, in fact, far outpaced what the left received from President Barack Obama during a similar time span at the start of his presidency.

The notion of Biden’s success is largely the result of favorable coverage. Biden’s press cheerleaders have acted as faithful bodyguards since his party rallied around him as the only plausible alternative to Donald Trump in 2020, when it seemed as if Sanders was on his way to the nomination. Despite some fleeting hiccups of journalistic integrity in which they have noticed his hypocrisy and incompetence (i.e., classified documents stored in his garage or the disgraceful rout in Afghanistan), they’ve stayed true to him. Nor have they called him out when he engaged in divisive rhetoric demonizing Republicans rather than acting on the unifying agenda he ran on.

Corporate media coverage has been a studied disinterest in dwelling on Biden’s impressive list of failures, or attempts to interpret them in ways that made them seem less bad.

Record inflation, which has been a catastrophe for middle-income and working-class Americans, was consistently dismissed as insignificant by major media outlets until it was time to start saying it was going down, an outcome that was, again, treated as a Biden win rather than a natural result of a disaster bottoming out.

Corporate Media and Democrats Unite in Gaslighting

The same networks and publications have dutifully followed administration talking points about his two great legislative victories. The 2021 “Build Back Better” and the 2022 “Inflation Reduction Act” were wins that demonstrated some remarkable discipline on the part of a Democratic Party with slim margins in both the House and the Senate. The more conservative and moderate factions of the Republican Party wage near-continuous civil war on each other. Democrats may snipe at each other, but they understand that when it comes to passing the kind of game-changing massive spending bills that can help transform America into a place that more closely resembles their nightmare leftist vision, disunity is not an option.

In both cases, Democrats understood that the labels on the legislation were a successful attempt to gaslight the public. What they passed were bills that put the full weight of the federal budget behind a radical environmental agenda that might have fallen short of New York Democrat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s “Green New Deal” plan but gets the country closer to it than most people understand.

The same applies to the back-and-forth on the left about the disaster at the border. Leftists can be counted on to vocally oppose even the slightest evidence of the administration enforcing immigration laws. They know that what Biden has done is essentially create the open border that the hard left has wanted for decades. This has resulted in the country being flooded by millions of illegal immigrants, resulting in a massive humanitarian disaster as well as a boost for the Mexican drug cartels that have been the engine of the opioid epidemic afflicting working-class America.

Racial Quotas

Perhaps even more significant but also far below the radar screen even for many conservatives is the opening that Biden gave his party’s intersectional left-wing base to take over the government bureaucracy. On Biden’s first day in office, he signed an executive order mandating that every government department and agency create action plans to implement the woke DEI agenda that is the embodiment of critical race theory ideas about making an obsession with race the centerpiece of American society. He followed this up with further executive orders culminating in one issued last week that mandated implementation of these plans, which are blueprints for racial quotas.

The entire idea of “equity” is a rejection of the idea of a society based on equality and inculcates a mindset that sees the goal of a color-blind society as not merely unattainable but undesirable, freezing in place race as the primary way to define individuals. This will have the sort of far-reaching effect on government allocations, hiring, and administrative actions that is nothing less than making official policy from the worst of the toxic CRT ideas promoted by racial hucksters like Ibram X. Kendi and “White Fragility” author Robin DiAngelo. Far from acting as a restraining force on the Black Lives Matter movement and the far left, Biden has been essentially recruited into its ranks.

Biden’s decisions and actions demonstrate the way the Democratic Party establishment has undergone a fundamental shift since the 1980s and ’90s. He was expected to despise his party’s radicals and their ideological obsessions. But as president, he and his inner circle wound up leaving little daylight between the White House and the rhetoric of the congressional “squad” and other hard-core leftists.

Rather than being the expression of the moderation of the Democratic Party that had governed successfully during the Clinton presidency, Biden’s White House has signaled the death of that wing of their party. Instead of cooling down political rhetoric, Biden’s claims about Republicans being “semi-fascists” and opponents of democracy fueled the continuing decline of public discourse into bitter vituperation. What the media have called a White House winning streak is just evidence that the forces that Biden was elected to resist are the ones who are winning.

DeSantis Hosting Donors and Social Media Influencers During 3-Day Palm Beach Event

posted by Sundance at Conservative Treehouse 

Around July 2022 was when CTH first noticed the visible fingerprints of a coordinated GOPe strategy toward the goal of presenting Florida Governor Ron DeSantis as the acceptable Republican candidate to remove the threat of the America First MAGA movement.

At first, I didn’t say anything, preferring to watch and check the data points to see if they all aligned in this one visible direction.  However, as soon as the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago took place and DeSantis went into a bunker, it became obvious there was a working plan in place {Go Deep}.

From that early August moment forward, the background pretenses became increasingly obvious. The rebranding, the new communication team, the national launch, the funding mechanisms, the Rupert Murdoch funded book tour, the social media and Big Con media effort… all of it flowing in one direction.

Once this recognition was made, then hindsight could be applied.  How long had this been planned?  The early review was simple, there was a January 6, 2022, assembly of ‘conservative influencers’ arranged by Christina Pushaw sometime in late December 2021.  However, since then a deeper look would reflect the strategy was in place likely going back to when Pushaw first joined the DeSantis team.

With trillions at stake, the anti-America First insurance policy that DeSantis provides is worth billions to the club that stands behind him.

FLORIDA – (Reuters) – Florida Governor Ron DeSantis will host an event for top donors and social-media influencers this weekend, the latest in a flurry of moves that suggest he’s ramping up to battle former President Donald Trump for the 2024 Republican nomination.

About 150 guests are expected to attend the three-day event at the Four Seasons resort in Palm Beach, Florida, including wealthy Republican donors and conservative social-media influencers whom DeSantis’ camp has courted in recent months ahead of a widely expected presidential run, according to a source who asked not to be identified in order to share details.

The gathering will come on the heels of a fundraiser that Trump, who has already announced another White House bid, is expected to attend on Thursday at his Mar-a-Lago home in the same island town.

The Republican race to take on Democratic President Joe Biden next year has gotten off to a largely quiet start. Former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley joined Trump in the Republican field this month, but several other prospective candidates have yet to jump in. (read more)

Three Huge Reasons Why Electric Vehicles Will Never Dominate American Roads

Three Huge Reasons Why Electric Vehicles Will Never Dominate American Roads

Mark Tapscott for PJ Media on February 23, 2023

AP Photo/Evan Vucci

Here’s the most important fact about plug-in electric vehicles (EV), courtesy of the liberal content-creators at Wikipedia in the opening sentence of their post on “Government Incentives for Plug-in Electric Vehicles:”

Such incentives “have been established around the world to support policy-driven adoption of plug-in electric vehicles. These incentives mainly take the form of purchase rebates, tax exemptions and tax credits, and additional perks that range from access to bus lanes to waivers on fees (charging, parking, tolls, etc.).” (Emphasis added).

The campaign by the Western elite in the U.S. and Europe to force everybody else to stop driving cars and trucks powered by fossil-fueled internal combustion engines and adopt EVs instead is a product of the elite’s policy choices, not ours.

No matter that hundreds of millions of Americans own and depend upon their cars and trucks to earn their livings, go where they can purchase the basic necessities of life, and visit any place they choose to go to in this vast land.

President Biden has made a regulatory policy decision that half of all vehicles sold in America will be EVs by 2030. He is spending billions of tax dollars to install half a million EV charging stations around the country to serve the anticipated explosion in demand for electric “refills.”

And federal tax credits are available to help obscure the fact EVs remain extremely costly for consumers and offer unproven maintenance and reliability records. No wonder that, despite the immense pressure being put upon consumers to buy EVs, they still only make up about seven percent of all new-vehicle purchases.

The fact that Ford, GM, Toyota, Honda, and the rest of the world’s automakers are rushing to offer EVs throughout their model lineups is a response to the government, not consumers.

In other words, the elites in government, media, academia, woke corporations, entertainment, and non-profit advocacy communities are doing everything they can to sell EVs, but the vast majority of Americans aren’t buying. That’s the first of three huge reasons EVs will never dominate American roads.

The second reason is seen in a recent analysis by John Eichberger, executive director of the Fuels Institute, a research and advocacy group backed by a coalition of energy and transportation firms.

Eichberger told me in an email:

The decision by several governments to mandate all vehicles sold by 2035 be ‘zero emissions vehicles’ got me thinking – how would such a decision affect the United States.

Disclaimer for the nerds like me: Unlike the Fuels Institute reports that you may be familiar with, this is not an exhaustive analysis – it does not consider how or should or buts – and it is not a forecast. It assumes the planets align and all works out to achieve 100 percent of sales in 2035 are ZEV.

Assuming average vehicle sales and scrappage rates and an average annual increase rate in ZEV sales to achieve 100 percent market share, a 2035 ZEV mandate could convert 16.5 percent of the fleet by 2035 and 60 percent by 2050. This means 83.5 percent of vehicles in operation in 2035 will be primarily powered by liquid fuels.

Think about that. Even under an optimistic scenario of achieving a 100% market share of annual vehicle sales in 12 years, less than one-fifth of the nation’s overall vehicle fleet will be EVs. That means more than 83% of all the cars and trucks on the road will still require gasoline or diesel.

When I asked Eichberger about the Biden schedule, he responded, saying he “did do a 50 percent of sales by 2030 achievement and kept ZEV sales growth constant beyond that date. Results in 6.6 percent fleet conversion by 2030, 100 percent sales by 2035, and 21 percent fleet conversion by 2035.”

Put another way, elected officials and bureaucrats who think they can simply wave their regulatory magic wands to achieve their policy aims might as well order the sun and moon to reverse their courses.

And that brings us to the third huge reason EVs will never dominate American roads, a study recently published by an environmental advocacy group, the Climate +Community Project. According to the study’s authors:

A crucial aspect of electrified transportation is new demand for metals, and specifically the most non-replaceable metal for EV batteries– Lithium. If today’s demand for EVs is projected to 2050, the lithium requirements of the US EV market alone in 2050 would require triple the amount of lithium currently produced for the entire global market. This boom in demand would be met by the expansion of mining (emphasis added).

Large-scale mining entails social and environmental harm, in many cases irreversibly damaging landscapes without the consent of affected communities. As societies undertake the urgent and transformative task of building new, zero-emissions energy systems, some level of mining is necessary. But the volume of extraction is not a given. Neither is where mining takes place, who bears the social and environmental burdens, or how mining is governed.

To their credit, the researchers acknowledge the reality that exploding demand for the batteries that power EVs will require an exponential increase in mining the lithium those batteries require. That increased mining activity will result in much greater environmental damage if lithium demand is not curbed.

But check out the researchers recommended approach to limiting lithium demand:

This report finds that the United States can achieve zero emissions transportation while limiting the amount of lithium mining necessary by reducing the car dependence of the transportation system, decreasing the size of electric vehicle batteries, and maximizing lithium recycling.

Reordering the US transportation system through policy and spending shifts to prioritize public and active transit while reducing car dependency can also ensure transit equity, protect ecosystems, respect Indigenous rights, and meet the demands of global justice.

Note there is not a word about consumer choice in that prescription. The desired end of researchers is to be achieved through the use of government force — AKA “federal regulation” — to make all of us non-elitists toe the elite line.

In other words, just so the elitists can pursue their EV policy goals, everybody else will have to all but give up the vast freedoms afforded every American with a car or truck to go where they please when they please. Reducing “car dependence” means all but ending private ownership of cars and trucks.

Famous Marxist Black Power Activist Finds out She's Descended From Whites, and It's Must-See Television

Bonchie reporting for RedState 

What happens when a long-standing race activist and member of the black power movement finds out she’s descended from white people and the cameras are rolling? Must-see television happens.

Angela Davis, a self-proclaimed Marxist and person who has profited off sowing racial division for decades, appeared on the PBS series “Finding Your Roots.” But while she was expecting to find out that she descended solely from the evils of the slave trade, it turns out that one of her earliest ancestors came over on the Mayflower.

According to PBS’ findings, Davis descended from William Brewster, who was white and one of the original signers of the Mayflower Compact.

Here’s the clip of how it went down.

At first, Davis clearly thinks Gates, the host of the PBS show, is joking. She confidently proclaims, “No, my ancestors did not come here on the Mayflower.” Her laughter and dismissiveness quickly diminished, though, as the reality of the situation settled in, with Gates repeating the results of the genealogy test. Davis responds, “Oof. That’s a little bit too much to deal with right now.”

The Daily Wire reviewed the episode and laid out a bit more of what was found, including the fact that her ancestors owned slaves.

According to the episode, Davis’s father, Frank Davis, was legally the son of Mollie Spencer and Edward Davis. But Edward Davis was not his biological father; Spencer and Davis separated before he was born. Instead, Frank Davis was the son of Mollie Spencer and another white man named Murphy Jones. Experts were able to map Davis’s family line through Jones all the way back to William Brewster, an original signer of the Mayflower Compact and a leader of the Plymouth Colony.

Also in the episode, Davis’s maternal grandfather was a white Alabama lawyer and state legislator named John Austin Darden. Through Darden, she is the descendant of a man named Stephen Darden, a drummer born in Virginia who served in the Revolutionary War. Darden then moved to Georgia, where he owned a farm and at least 6 slaves.

“I always imagined my ancestors as the people who were enslaved,” Davis said. “My mind and my heart are swirling with all of these contradictory emotions.”

While this all makes for good television given how wrapped up Davis’ identity has been in false assumptions about her lineage, the cardinal issue remains. Why does this matter? Clearly, Davis has some black ancestry as well, and in a world where people like Davis didn’t push racial division for profit, none of this would matter.

Davis is one of the original figures behind the reparations movement. So, how exactly does that work? Does the white, slave-owning part of her write a check to the black part of her? In a world where we force people to pay for the sins of their forefathers, that ceases to be a joke and becomes a valid question.

The point here is not to deny that Davis has faced racial discrimination in her life, though, I think joining the black power movement and becoming a terrorist (after the Civil Rights Act) was the wrong way to handle it. Rather, the point is to show that when you start trying to assign collective guilt to present generations based on the actions of past generations, things get complicated very fast–and those types of complications are repeated in the ancestry of millions upon millions of Americans.