Key Point – Western Government Pushback is Finance Focused

posted by Sundance at Conservative Treehouse 

Given the increased awareness to the control mechanisms of Western government, it is perhaps beneficial to review one of the key points that can be overlooked. [The Tweet was from December 2018]

In parts of Europe, we see grassroots pushback against the larger globalist agenda as carried out by various EU entities.

In Holland and Germany, we note significant pushback against the Build Back Batter (WEF) agenda by farmers, citizens who support them, and broadly middle class industrial workers. In France the ‘yellow vest’ movement was similarly organized at a grassroots level amid similar concerns.

Now, remember back to the “Canadian truckers protest” and the approach taken by the Canadian government.  Notice how the government of Canada approached the issue of opposition to the COVID mandates by targeting the banking and finance system of the protest group.

Then, overlay how the U.S. banking system was the tip of the spear against gun sales, and the second amendment advocates along with retail gun sellers were targeted through the use of the financial system.  Additionally, the Tea Party organizations were previously targeted through the use of the IRS, again financial targeting.

As you keep this in mind, overlay how resistant voices are targeted by the Big Tech systems through the process of demonetization.  Further, all of the activist efforts, including DEI advocacy and including the organized Anti-Defamation League/Media Matters effort, involves financial targeting – in those examples through advertising.  Again, financial targeting.  The key point is that revenue in general, and banking/finance sectors specifically, are the preferred ‘Western’ attack vector.

♦ BIG PICTURE – CTH has outlined how the “Western government” sanctions against Russia were not really about shutting Russia out of the Western finance and banking system, but rather were targeted to build a financial wall to keep those inside the West controlled through the financial system.

It might seem like a small and yet obvious point, but as you get geographically closest to the epicenter of the Dollar-based financial system, it is the banking and finance sector that becomes the immediate preferred weapon.  Similar ideological social pushback happening further away from U.S. dollar finance control (EU), does not illicit such an immediate jump to the financial weapon.

If you stand back and look at this dynamic, it becomes easier to see the motives and intentions of those who are building the financial wall around us.

No one in the grey zone is really getting locked out of anything; WE ARE GETTING LOCKED IN!

As you head back up to the wall, here’s the elevator question to plant the seed:

…Did you ever wonder why the Canadian Trucker protests were targeted through the banks, but the Dutch farmer protests were not?

From Insurrection to Satire: Biden’s Valley Forge Speech Fails to Cement the Trump-Dictator Narrative

I would not be surprised if future historians singled out Joe Biden’s Valley Forge speech as the moment his campaign began its final retreat into senile collapse.

by Roger Kimball for American Greatness

How deeply has Donald Trump burrowed into the psyche of the Democratic establishment?  I’d say the takeover is nearly total.  For proof, you need only contemplate the alarming pantomime that Joe Biden just acted out at Valley Forge.  It lacked the totalitarian, Riefenstahlich trappings of his speech at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall in Sept. 2022. At that time, the President’s puppeteers believed that they could scare voters by turning the acronym “MAGA” into a negative epithet and affixing the extreme-sounding intensifier “ultra” to its front end.

They managed to scare themselves, but hardly anyone else. By the fall of 2022, the wrecking ball that is Joe Biden’s administration had already smashed its way through the American economy, our southern border, and our foreign policy.  Suddenly, “Make America Great Again” sounded like a pretty good formula.  And if Trump and his supporters were advocating “MAGA with knobs on,” then why not?

That’s what more and more of that most irritating cohort, voters, seemed to think.

Biden’s handlers attempted a variation on the Independence Hall theme at Valley Forge.  Noting the date, they decided to take a risk and memorialize the jamboree at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. That prefabricated entertainment, brought to you by deep state actors like Nancy Pelosi with an assist from extras supplied by Trump Industries, Inc., was at the time baptized as a frontal assault on “Our Democracy™,” the worst thing since 9/11, nay, since Pearl Harbor or the Civil War.

It did not take long for observers to understand that the carefully orchestrated Reichstag-like outrage of January 6 was more of a hoax than an “insurrection.” But that memo had not made it to the C-suite of Biden HQ, where the strategy was formulated and the narrative honed.  They still thought that voters believed January 6 was an existential threat to the Republic.  So that was the message they had downloaded to Joe Biden’s larynx for his Valley Forge speech.

It didn’t work.

For some weeks now, the Soros-funded, Obama-tutored troops have been repeating the catechism that Donald Trump is a would-be “dictator” who, should he somehow find his way back to the White House, would exterminate his enemies, obliterate the Constitution, and wield autocratic power in a manner that would make Macbeth envious.

Sound extreme? Well, it is extreme.  But that is The Narrative.  “There is a clear path to dictatorship in the United States,” Robert Kagan recently wrote in The Washington “died-in-darkness” Post, “and it is getting shorter every day.”  Heavens.  What happened? “In 13 weeks,” Mr. Kagan explained, “Donald Trump will have locked up the Republican nomination.”

Yep.  And the clock is ticking.  The dreaded day when Trump becomes the presumptive nominee is just around the corner now.

The Trump-will-be-dictator meme has been everywhere the last month or so. It’s function has been like the preliminary shelling of enemy territory—a softening-up exercise. That is, it has been intended to confuse, disarm, and weaken its target.

It’s my sense that it has failed miserably.

The reception of Joe Biden’s Valley Forge speech has strengthened that sense.

In a word, it has been laughed at, guyed, ridiculed, and satirized.

According to Joe Biden, January 6 is “a day forever seared in our memory.” Why? “Because that day, we nearly lost America.”  How’s that? Why, because that was the day Donald Trump showed he was willing to “sacrifice democracy” by unleashing a “violent mob” to storm the Capitol and undertake an “insurrection.”

But no one believes this. Why? Because the more footage we see from the events of that day, the clearer it becomes that what happened on January 6, 2021, was not an insurrection.  Moreover, Donald Trump, far from egging on his supporters to violence, went out of his way to urge them to protest peacefully.  “I am asking for everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful,” he Tweeted that afternoon. “No violence! Remember, WE are the Party of Law & Order – respect the Law and our great men and women in Blue. Thank you!”

The reaction to Joe Biden’s histrionic demonization of Trump has been swift and merciless.  Remember the chap who was photographed carrying a lectern across a room in the Capitol? He now Tweets under the handle “Lectern Leader.” He posted the photo and had this to say about Biden’s speech: “Throwback to the time I brought America to its knees by moving furniture tens of feet and became king.”

There have been lots of spoofs like this:

It was 2:20 p.m. on this day in 2021. I was in my classroom- quadruple masked- explaining to my students how queer slaves actually wrote the Constitution, when I heard it: sobbing from the hall.

I went outside to find my colleague, an English teacher, sobbing uncontrollably. At first I thought Ron DeSantis had made our jobs even more difficult by banning us from discussing our kinks in the classroom, but it was far worse.

“A white supremacist insurrectionist has his feet on Nancy Pelosi’s desk,” they/them cried.

I rushed back into my classroom to see the look of fear on my students’ faces.

“Are we going to lose access to our puberty blockers?” a purple-haired demiboy asked.

“If they overthrow our democracy, yes,” I replied.

For the next several hours we watched the TV in fear as several hundred terrorists searched the Capitol for Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, so they could have their way with her.

Thankfully,  a brave police officer of color shot a hysterical Karen in the face, sending the MAGA idiots running for their lives at the sight of such a strong Black man.

Uh oh. You’re not supposed to make fun of the worst tragedy in American history.  But everybody is.  Consider this hilarious clip.  It shows protestors proceeding calmly through the Capitol, guided by welcoming security guards, to the satirical voice-over of some naughty satirist. What we had here, Vivek Ramaswamy scoffed, was a scene of “The bloody battle that nearly ended the republic on January 6, caught on film.”

The great Julie Kelly, who has been terrier-like in investigating what really happened on January 6, is right.  Joe Biden’s over-the-top execration of all things Trump in his Valley Forge speech shows that the official narrative about January 6 is crumbling. “They thought it would end the GOP and result in mass defections to the Democratic Party,” Kelly wrote.  “They thought it would end questions about the 2020 election. They didn’t think anyone would ever question what happened, how it happened, or expose the lies it was built upon. They thought their dirty secrets would be hidden forever.”

Au contraire.

It’s all collapsing right when they need the narrative to hold most. Jack Smith’s J6 prosecution of Trump is teetering. SCOTUS could overturn the most common felony count.

Polls show more people now vs 2021 think the 2020 election was illegitimate. . . And suspicion about the animating role of the FBI and other government agencies continues to grow.

As well it might.  Joe Biden’s Valley Forge speech was supposed to inaugurate his 2024 campaign.  I would not be surprised if future historians singled it out as the moment his campaign began its final retreat into senile collapse.

X22, And we Know, and more- January 8

 

Will We Govern Ourselves or Be Governed by a Small Elite?

posted by Mark Lewis at Townhall 

“The issue today is the same as it has been throughout all history, whether man shall be allowed to govern himself or be ruled by a small elite.”

I deliberately did not provide the author of the above quotation, though I will do so shortly.  I want readers to ponder the quote for a moment.  Most of you will probably nod your head and say, “Yes, that is true.  That is what we face today.  Are we going to govern ourselves—be free—or will we be governed by a small cadre of power-hungry ‘elitists’ who want to control and dictate our lives?  Freedom or tyranny?  Yes, that is the issue today.”

You are probably suspicious by now about who wrote the above quote, so I will go ahead and tell you—Thomas Jefferson.  As always, it appears that Mr. Jefferson is describing modern-day America.   What he wrote about freedom, tyranny, government, etc., he wrote over two hundred years ago, of course.   But his thoughts are just as relevant today as they were when he first penned them because human nature doesn’t change.  There exists that clique of elites today—there always has been and always will be—who love power, think they know better how to run our lives than we do, and will forever grasp for the supremacy they crave.  If we want to be free, it is essential we crush them. Jefferson knew that, and wise men today know it, too.

Let me break down Mr. Jefferson’s quote a little.

1.  “The issue today...”,  i.e., over 200 years ago when Jefferson wrote.         

2.  “...is the same as it has been throughout all history...”  The perceptive can discern that what Jefferson wrote 200 years ago is true today, too.  It was true 2,000 years ago.  It will be true 200 years from now.  It will be true 2,000 years from now.  Americans today haven’t learned the lesson, and as a result, we are under a growing threat of losing our freedom and being governed by tyrants.  And we will have no one to blame but ourselves.  

3.  “...whether man shall be allowed to govern himself...”  In other words, whether man will be free or not.  That is what self-government is—freedom, the right to “govern ourselves” in harmony with the laws of God, Who gave us our freedom.  “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are CREATED equal, and endowed by their CREATOR with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”  Notice especially that in the American tradition, our right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness comes from God.  That God is a righteous God and, to have the freedom He provides us, we must be virtuous.  I've written many times before—quoting Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, Burke, et al.—that virtuous people don't need much government.  Virtuous people control themselves, and that is exactly what true freedom is—a self-controlled people.  A non-virtuous person cannot be free—“their passions forge their fetters” (Burke).  Obviously, not all people are “virtuous,” and because they aren’t, we must have some government, some laws to protect us against these selfish, uncivilized barbarians who would rob us of our rights.  But, the more virtue in the people, the less government needed to regulate them.  We clearly have an increasingly degenerate, decadent, godless society—led largely by the Democratic Party and hardly opposed by the Republicans.  We are drifting farther and farther away from God, and it is not in the least bit coincidental or surprising that the greater the distance we move from the virtue God teaches us, the more government is necessary to combat debauchery in society.  The government grows to control those who refuse to control themselves freely.  And thus, it has more power over all its citizens.

There is no true freedom without virtue.  There is only growing government, growing tyranny, and a growing temptation among a self-absorbed elite to move into government so that they can maneuver the levers of power—over you.  They don’t want virtue in society.  There is no power over people if the people are virtuous, self-controlled, and elect leaders like themselves.

4.  Thus, the issue is whether we will govern ourselves “...or be ruled by a small elite.”  I find it interesting that Jefferson used the term “elite.”  We use that word often today because there is indeed this group of despots in the Democratic Party, World Economic Forum, the United Nations, the World Health Organization, etc., who want the power to direct and dictate how we live.  They want to tell us what kind of car we can drive, what kind of food we can eat, how we can grow and cook that food, what we can or cannot do during a “crisis” (that they probably created).  They booted God out of the system because they knew that if people followed God, they would be virtuous, they would govern themselves and be free, and they wouldn’t need the elite that lusts for despotism.  Why do you think all dictators hate religion?  So, God must go.  And, as noted, the more God has been removed from our society, the greater the government has grown, the more tyranny we suffer.  “Communism begins where atheism begins” (Karl Marx).  Do you think Barack Obama and our “elite” Democrats don’t know that?

If we want to “govern ourselves,” if we want to be “free,” we need to follow the advice of our Founders and practice the virtue that flows from the God who gave us our freedoms.  Otherwise, we will be “ruled by a small elite.”  That’s the lesson of history.  Thomas Jefferson told us that 200 years ago. 

And frankly, that is the issue mankind has faced all through history and will until the end of time.  

The Association of Mature American Citizens Has Quietly Become A Conservative Powerhouse

Move over, AARP. A conservative competitor that rejects the AARP’s liberal political agenda for seniors has 2.2 million members and growing.

Mark Hemingway reporting for The Federalist

For decades now, AARP, which once stood for the American Association of Retired Persons and has been subsequently rebranded as just a set of initials that stand for nothing, has been one of the most influential lobby groups in Washington, D.C. Though AARP was supposed to represent a large and politically diverse cross-section of older Americans, its transformation into an overtly partisan Democrat organization is hard to deny.

Recently, AARP lobbied heavily for the Biden administration’s disastrous and ironically named “Inflation Reduction Act.” AARP’s biggest congressional critic, Sen. Rand Paul, recently noted that of AARP’s 94 congressional lobbying events during debate over the Inflation Reduction Act, only one was held in support of a Republican officeholder. The rest were for Democrats.

As if AARP’s partisan turn weren’t bad enough, the organization has also become a complete sellout. Over half of AARP’s $2 billion in annual revenue no longer comes from dues, but instead comes from corporate royalties, including lucrative arrangements selling insurance to members.

“UnitedHealth pays AARP a significant portion of every monthly premium received from its AARP-branded Medicare plans, amounting to approximately $800 million per year. … This reveals a growing tendency for AARP to prioritize its association with UnitedHealth over the interests of senior citizens,” notes Paul.

If there is a silver lining to the corruption of the AARP, it’s that it is no longer the only interest group representing politically influential seniors. In 2007, Dan Weber founded the Association of Mature American Citizens (AMAC). Though Weber had himself been a member of the AARP, he was frustrated with the politically liberal direction of the organization, which was far more radical than most members realized. Though initially the organization existed only in Florida and New York, in 2009 AMAC went national and began recruiting members as a conservative alternative to AARP.

AMAC’s national membership appeal was boosted by a couple of major missteps by AARP in 2009. That same year, AARP gave Harry Belafonte a humanitarian award despite the fact that Belafonte was last in the news for saying President George W. Bush was the “greatest terrorist in the world” while speaking out in support of socialist Hugo Chavez’s murderous regime in Venezuela. (A few years later, Belafonte, who does not have a firm grasp on the obvious, would regret that Chavez had used his support as “a cynical ploy to embarrass the United States.”)

Later in 2009, AARP ignored fierce opposition from seniors and publicly came out in support of passing the Obamacare legislation, which raided $700 billion from Medicare to pay for failed health care reform. For many seniors, opposing AARP started to look like something more important than expressing their political preferences — AARP was failing at its core mission of preserving Medicare and the other benefits seniors depend on.

AMAC’s success since then has been remarkable. Sixteen years later, AMAC is thriving under the leadership of Weber’s daughter, Rebecca Weber. (Dan Weber died in 2020.) Today, AMAC has a dues-paying membership of 2.2 million members and growing. While that’s still dwarfed by AARP’s claimed membership of 38 million people, about the only other American organization that exceeds that is the Roman Catholic Church. Still, as an advocacy group that has millions of dues-paying members, that puts AMAC in elite company in terms of political influence. For comparison, the National Rifle Association claims just over 4 million dues-paying members.

AMAC has also attracted millions of members by taking a very different approach than AARP: It doesn’t hide its politics and does its best to respond to the priorities of its members.

“We take our marching orders from our membership, and we publish and post right on the home page of our site, any calls to action, who we are, what we do, and what we stand for. We’re looking to advance policies that are going to, of course, empower people and help our members live long lives, keep more of their hard earned money in their pocket,” says Rebecca Weber. “At the core, we believe in individual freedoms, we believe in smaller government. We believe that a lot of work needs to be done to defend our constitutional freedoms. And those types of statements I’m making here, it really comes from our … membership, we’re regularly engaged with them and polling them.”

By contrast, Weber notes that “AARP is either ignoring the voice of their of their AARP membership, or just simply not asking [what they want].” Saying that AARP doesn’t care about the political priorities of its membership isn’t in any way an exaggeration, either. Recent ads by AARP began by saying, “I may not always agree with AARP but” before going on to make a pitch about the organization’s effectiveness at fighting cuts to Social Security. It’s a remarkably arrogant concession — essentially AARP is saying that if you want to preserve Social Security you also have to support the rest of its liberal agenda.

AMAC, on the other hand, is upfront about using the clout of its members to support explicitly conservative priorities, and it’s flexing real organizing capabilities to do it. AMAC’s political arm, AMAC Action, coordinates with AMAC members to help push conservative legislation.

“In just the first half of 2023, AMAC Action advocates, of which there are over 350,000, sent some 644,000 messages to members of Congress, state legislatures, corporate executives, the White House, and those efforts helped do several things,” observes Weber.

AMAC Action helped push legislation for social conservatives this year, notably the Protection of Women and Girls In Sports Act as well as the pro-life Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, both of which passed in the House of Representatives before being stymied by the Democrat control of the Senate. At the state level, it’s been even more successful. AMAC Action supported successful voter-integrity legislation in North Carolina, which contains provisions to ban the private funding of elections and remove noncitizens from voter rolls. AMAC Action also played a crucial role in stopping ranked-choice voting schemes for presidential primaries in four states: Illinois, Utah, North Dakota, and Montana.

“We’ve been very much focused on the election integrity, restoring constitutional freedoms, protecting parental rights, insurance, Postal Service, Social Security solvency, finding ways to deliver better and lower cost health care, and of course, protecting every human life from conception to natural death,” says Weber. “Those initiatives were priorities. We got those priorities right from our membership, and we’re extremely engaged with them.”

And despite being a conservative organization, Weber notes that many parts of AMAC’s legislative agenda do entail reaching across the political aisle. “The left [is] just going so far and [we’re working with] anybody who looks at common sense solutions to face some of the issues that we’re dealing with, and we are very proud to call ourselves bipartisan,” she says.

AMAC isn’t all politics, either. Like AARP, AMAC offers dozens of member benefits that include everything from life insurance to cell phone discounts. However, Weber says it makes efforts to separate business partnerships from the advocacy of the organization, and important member services such as helping members with their Social Security and Medicare plans are free of corporate influence.

“We offer Medicare advisory services, where we don’t sell anything, we’re really providing people with information as they age into Medicare,” says Weber. “If there are 15 plans in your area, we tell you about the 15 plans in your area.” With a single insurance company providing 40 percent of AARP’s annual revenue, it’s much harder to argue it is always acting in its members’ best interests, to say nothing of the political disconnect with AARP members. “When I look at the polls and I see how people are feeling in this country, I think AARP to be doing a heck of a lot more to support the vision and the dreams of their membership,” Weber notes.

The good news is that AARP’s failings represent opportunities that, even 16 years in, AMAC is just beginning to capitalize on. “The advocacy work really has resulted in significant victories, and I do think that they’ve been underreported,” says Weber.

Biden Regime Grossly Overreported Jobs Numbers in 2023, and There's More Bad News

Bonchie reporting for RedState 

Has the Biden administration been purposely misleading Americans about the nation's jobs numbers? That's a fair question to ask after the final tally of "revisions" became clear after the New Year. 

Per a new report, the total number of jobs overreported clocked in at a whopping 439,000 for the year 2023, and there's more bad news involved. 

The government quietly erased 439,000 jobs through November 2023, a closer look at the numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows. 

That means its initial jobs results were inflated by 439,000 positions, and the job market is not as healthy as the government suggests. 

That's an average of about 40,000 jobs per month being erroneously claimed as "created." A couple of mistakes would be understandable, but this is clearly a systemic issue with how the numbers are gathered, and it cannot be assumed to be accidental at this point. 

Entire markets shift based on the jobs numbers put out by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Retirements go up and down, investments rise or fall, and companies sink or swim with the understanding that what is released is accurate. The numbers are not accurate, though, and that could severely complicate matters going forward. Never mind that this is yet another example of the Biden administration appearing to play politics with functions that aren't supposed to be political.

The other bad news is that because reporting on government job growth is more direct, the wiping out of 439,000 jobs from the numbers means a higher percentage of total job growth came from taxpayers shoveling out more cash for overpaid federal positions. Much of the nation's current GDP growth is bolstered by government spending as well. 

I don't think anyone with a brain would suggest that's sustainable. You can't tax and spend your way to prosperity because you eventually run out of other peoples' money to pay those salaries, and a jobs market propped up by government work is destined to falter.

Further, as noted in the above report, the labor participation rate is at a record low of 62.5 percent, meaning more and more people are simply not looking for jobs anymore. That helps bolster the unemployment rate because those people are then not considered in the calculations. 

The Biden administration has created a room full of smoke and mirrors. Everyone in the real world can look around and see that things largely stagnate. It's only in the bowels of Washington that the economy is supposedly booming. These massive revisions to the jobs numbers are just more evidence of how false that narrative is.

🥳 GAF to launch it's 1st Original Series next month!

 

Source: https://deadline.com/2024/01/great-american-family-launches-first-original-series-county-rescue-1235699287/

EXCLUSIVE: After setting the stage with its robust line-up of holiday programming, Great American Family is ready to get into the scripted series business.

The channel is launching County Rescue, an action-adventure medical drama starring Julia Reilly (Stranger Things) as an EMT in training who is vying for one of three openings on the team. It also stars Stacey Patino (Keeping Up With the Joneses), Percy Bell (Devotion), Tim Perez-Ross (The Vampire Diaries), Riley Hough (The Resident), Keller Fornes (The Secrets She Keeps), Angel Luis (Law & Order), Kristin Wollett (Random Tropical Paradise), and Brett Varvel (American Underdog).

The five-episode first season will premiere on Great American Pure Flix beginning February 16 and on Great American Family beginning February 17. Great American Pure Flix is the company’s streaming service that was rebranded in September 2023.

Great American Family is also planning a Q1 launch of mystery franchises — original movies centered on the lighter side of mysteries and whodunnits and starring fan favorites from the network’s family of talent. The first installment in the mystery wheel will be announced later this week.

“We are continuing to build on the phenomenal growth of our media brand and are excited to now fully capitalize on the synergies now available with Sony and Great American Pure Flix. Our portfolio of content is a trusted source of family friendly and faith-based entertainment, and our 2023 results greatly exceeded our expectations,” said Bill Abbott, President & CEO, Great American Media. “We are looking forward to having a positive impact on viewers and the entertainment business by creating quality content that can be enjoyed by the entire family.”

New original series set to premiere on Great American Pure Flix include Destination Heaven and Shadrach, as well as the season two return of Going Home, which premiered January 5.

Great American Media also announced it will produce a record number of original movies across the company’s services in 2024. This follows the company’s record in 2023, when it produced 21 original holiday movies for Great American Christmas while launching the franchise’s continuous Christmas programming earlier than any other network. It continued through New Year’s Day with the exclusive cable television broadcast of the 135th Tournament of Roses Parade.

The company will continue to develop and produce specials that promote emotional connections, such as Great American Rescue Bowl with its mission to save pet lives through adoption, premiering Super Bowl Sunday, February 11.

Busting the Fact-Checkers, or Why Fact-Checkers Stink

posted by Bob Hoge at RedStateVIP 

If you’re a news junkie like me, eventually you’ll come across a link to a fact-check article. The link will read something like, “Little green men found on the moon, true or false?”

Once in a while I’ll take a gander because sometimes there are fake quotes and photographs floating around the interwebs, and some of them are good enough to fool even smart people, and I never want to be that guy who got suckered. One of the few ways fact-checkers are actually useful is in calling out this kind of misinformation.

Most of the fact-checkers are notoriously biased, however, and you can guess which side of the political spectrum they routinely favor, seeing as many of them are part of the corporate media complex. On Saturday, January 6, one link caught my eye: “Claim: In a speech on Jan. 6, 2021, Donald Trump told supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol to delay the constitutional process that would affirm Joe Biden’s presidency.”

I clicked on it on the naive assumption that the fact-checkers, this time from Snopes.com, would be forced to explain the truth: that former President Donald Trump said no such thing.

Of course, I should have known better – there was no chance they would be fair. In fact, in their own analysis, they write on several occasions that Trump did not in fact direct anyone or anything to “storm the Capitol” – and yet their conclusion is that the claim is a “mixture” of truth and falsehood.

What a joke. 

How did they squirm their way into such a tortured logic pretzel? By claiming it was a “subjective call” whether some people interpreted his words as a call to “insurrection.” We didn't ask for "subjective calls," Snopes, we asked for cold hard facts. 

In short, the president called on supporters to "peacefully and patriotically" march or walk to the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to urge members of the senate to defy the Electoral College vote in a constitutionally mandated procedure to affirm Biden's win, without using the words "storm" or "breach" or "break into" the federal building.

Put another way, the president encouraged supporters to descend on the Capitol grounds and "cheer" on senators who would break laws governing U.S. elections, but he did not explicitly tell people to commit crimes themselves. [Emphases mine.]

That's it right there, fact-check over. He didn't say it, end of sentence, time to continue my day.

Except noooo, not for these folks. Instead of a fact check, they decided to conduct a “maybe some people might have thought” check.

Furthermore, it was a subjective call on whether the phrases "you have to show strength" and "demand that Congress do the right thing" were actually messages condoning crimes and violence among extremists, without outright encouraging it. Such a rhetorical strategy is known to scholars of white nationalist and extremist groups, including the Proud Boys.

In sum, while Trump did not say the words "storm" or "break into" the White House, Trump indeed told supporters to gather at the U.S. Capitol and try to convince members of Congress to delay the constitutional process that would affirm Biden's presidency. For those reasons, and the ones outlined above, we rate this claim a "Mixture."

"You have to show strength" is now a call to arms? If so, about three-quarters of what politicians say would be considered prompts for violent action.

This is such hot garbage that it isn’t fit to print (even on the internet). They say quite conclusively that he did not utter the words that were the subject of the fact check, yet then immediately go into progressive la-la land where, well, ok, it’s a fact, but it’s not really a fact, because we’re liberal and we don’t like it. 

Unfortunately, this is hardly an outlier, and you can find many similar examples at Snopes, factcheck.org, The Washington Post’s Fact Checker, which is edited by the almost comically inept and misinformed Glenn Kessler, and the left-wing censorship machine, Media Matters, among others.

It's a scary time when most of our media is so in the tank for the Democrats that even fact-checkers, when faced with an indisputable fact, attempt to tell you that it’s “nuanced,” a “mixture,” or needs “to be taken into context.” The question was, did Donald Trump say those words? It’s a yes or no question, and it doesn’t need nuance, context, or anything else – either he said it or he didn’t. The answer, even for Snopes, was no. 

Yet they’re so corrupt they turn what should be an easy fact check into an op-ed. Shameful.

Donald J. Trump, Jan. 6, 2021:

I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard today.

A Case Study in Stage 4 Trump Derangement Syndrome

posted by John Green at American Thinker 

Our epidemic of Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) does not appear to be abating, and Big Pharma hasn’t developed an mRNA vaccine for it yet.  Those employed in government, academia, media, and medicine seem to be at highest risk.

Robert Reich is a case in point.  He was Bill Clinton’s secretary of labor, and he’s currently a professor of public policy at Berkeley — giving him two TDS risk factors.  He recently published an article in The Guardian entitled “Here are 10 new year resolutions for saving American democracy.”  It illustrates the devastating effects of TDS.  Without getting into the whole “we’re a republic, not a democracy” debate, let’s examine what Reich considers the most critical actions for Americans to take — followed by my humble commentary.

1. “Become a political activist to ensure Trump is not elected.”

Because we will not be a self-governed country if we choose the wrong person.  Consult the Colorado Supreme Court for a list of democratically approved candidates.

2. “Do not succumb to the tempting anesthesia of complacency or cynicism.  The stakes are too high.”

See number 1 above, and note that Donald Trump is up in the polls.  Don’t sit out the next election no matter how depressing it is to vote for the incompetent, demented old guy in the Oval Office.

3. “Counter lies with truth.”

If you’re confused about which is which, anything said by a person in a red hat is a lie, and anything said by Adam Schiff is the truth.  When in doubt, check your DNC talking points pamphlet.

4. “Do not tolerate bigotry and hate.”

The only DNC-approved targets of hate are Donald Trump, his followers, pro-life activists, supporters of Israel, and those insisting that man/woman is a science thing.

5. “Do not resort to name-calling, bullying, intimidation, violence or any of the other tactics that Trump followers may be using.”

The only poll-tested and approved pejorative is semi-fascist MAGA Republican extremist.  If you insist on doing violence, be smart, and do it in a blue jurisdiction, where a Soros prosecutor can run interference.

6. “Be compassionate toward hardcore followers of Trump, but be firm in your opposition.”

Reich suggests that rational Americans not waste their time on the closed-minded masses of MAGA.  Unlike himself, we’re terminally stupid.  He suggests that everyone have a fulfilling debate of competing ideas in the liberal echo chamber.

7. “Don’t waste your time and energy commiserating with people who already agree with you.”

It’s a waste of time and energy complaining about constants in the universe.  Yes, he tells his readers, Trump is awful, but he’ll still be awful tomorrow.  Similarly, don’t waste time complaining that Biden has failed to live up to expectations.  If Biden’s failures give you a sour stomach, you’re going to have acid reflux for the next year.  Take some Pepto and deal with it.

8. “Don’t decide to sit this election out or to vote for a third-party candidate, because you don’t especially like Biden and you’re tired of voting for the ‘lesser of two evils.’”

Then Reich really said this: “Biden may not be perfect, but he’s not the lesser of two evils.”  I had to read it three times, but that’s what he really said.  Robert Reich is giving the useful idiots of the left permission to vote for the greater of two evils, to prevent Trump from slowing our dash toward socialist nirvana.

9. “Demonstrate, but don’t mistake demonstrating for political action.”

Organize and mobilize to get the vote out (i.e., collect all the cemetery ballots) and save democracy by defeating Trump.  After the election, you can organize and mobilize to burn the cities down “mostly peacefully.”

10. “Don’t get distracted by the latest sensationalist post or story by or about Trump.”

Don’t be distracted by facts, no matter how eye-opening they are.  The next election is critical to America’s transition from the “land of the free” to Northern Cuba.  Keep your eyes closed, ignore reality, and stay laser-focused on your mission: to defeat Trump.

So, with

• the world approaching WWIII;
• political polarization tearing America apart;
• fiscal policies making economic collapse inevitable;
• institutions charged with protecting our Constitution instead destroying it;
• crime turning our cities into a year-round rerun of The Purge;
• a president taking bribes from China, Ukraine, and Russia;
• Congress stuffing its pockets via insider trading;
• homelessness and drug addiction making our sidewalks look like a scene from The Walking Dead; and
• South America trying to move into North America for the free housing and medical care,

Robert Reich considers our biggest threat...Donald Trump.

TDS is quite real.  The Donald has caused otherwise intelligent people to go bat-crap crazy.  The syndrome is a weird mash-up of obsessive-compulsive disorder and delusional paranoia.  The afflicted have a warped perception of reality in which Donald Trump is a supernatural being — visiting calamity on the Earth with mean tweets and a stern gaze.  I can imagine Reich sitting in his office at Berkeley writing his article, while twirling a couple of ball bearings in his hand, and mumbling about Trump stealing the strawberries.

Let’s compare Reich’s ten suggestions to mine.  You can judge who’s saner.

1. Veto any bill raising the national debt — to stop economic suicide before it’s too late.
2. Finish the border wall — because there’s nothing compassionate about facilitating human-trafficking.
3. Push legislation empowering the states and individuals to hold the federal government accountable — since the feds won’t police themselves.
4. Pull all funding to sponsors of international conflict — which shouldn’t even need to be stated.
5. Make congressional insider trading illegal — remind them that they work for us.
6. Deny bailouts to private companies and local governments — accountability counters bad decision-making.
7. Drill, baby, drill — for economic prosperity and national security.
8. Outlaw public employee unions — to stop them from funding politicians who give them sweetheart contracts with our money.
9. Pass legislation requiring that strategic products be manufactured domestically — because they’re currently made in countries that would like to colonize us.
10. Cancel all government subsidies of technology and research — because the picking of winners and losers has created only losers and bigger losers.

Which a saner recommendations to preserve our “democracy”: my “stop committing national suicide,” or Reich’s “stop Donald Trump”?

After reading Reich’s article, I was left with the impression that TDS destroys imagination.  As the world approaches 21st-century Armageddon, his primary concern is the orange boogeyman that visits him in his nightmares.  That it creates such a blindness to the threats facing America illustrates the danger of TDS.