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July 2020

Trump at Mount Rushmore Progressives deride his defense of America’s founding principles. *****

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-at-mount-rushmore-11593978913?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

At Mt. Rushmore, Trump uses Fourth of July celebration to stoke a culture war

—Los Angeles Times

Trump Uses Mount Rushmore Speech to Deliver Divisive Culture War Message

— New York Times

Trump pushes racial division, flouts virus rules at Rushmore

—Associated Press

At Mount Rushmore, Trump exploits social divisions, warns of ‘left-wing cultural revolution’ in dark speech ahead of Independence Day

—Washington Post

President Trump delivered one of the best speeches of his Presidency Friday evening at Mount Rushmore, and for evidence consider the echo-chamber headlines above. The chorus of independent media voices understands that Mr. Trump is trying to rally the country in defense of traditional American principles that are now under radical and unprecedented assault.

Do Never-Trump Republicans Know How Liberal Joe Biden Has Become?

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/07/06/do-never-trump-republicans-know-how-liberal-joe-biden-has-become/

President Donald Trump causes people to do the strangest things, but none is as strange as the growing determination by some Republicans to get Joe Biden elected in November, even as Biden moves further and further leftward.

We aren’t the only ones who’ve noticed that, while the country is fixated on the coronavirus panic-demic and race riots, Biden’s agenda has shifted sharply to the socialist side of the spectrum.

FiveThirtyEight noted a few weeks ago that “The Pandemic Has Pushed Biden To The Left. How Far Will He Go?”

Around the same time, New York magazine reported that “Biden Is Planning an FDR-Size Presidency.”

One Democratic consultant told The Hill that Biden has moved to the left on issues such as bankruptcy policy and college affordability, and that a Biden win, along with Democrats regaining control of the Senate, “could lead to a New Deal era of progressive policies.”

MarketWatch recently said Biden is proposing a “radical tax plan” that “goes after the indolent rich.”

Then there is Biden’s joining up with Sen. Bernie Sanders to create “task forces” on various issues.

The Left’s Soviet Insane Asylum for Non-Mask Wearers Progressives’ faithful devotion to socialist-style “psychiatric” disposal of political dissidents. Jamie Glazov

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/lefts-soviet-insane-asylum-non-mask-wearers-jamie-glazov/

EXCERPT:

The former Soviet Union possessed many imaginative mechanisms to deal with the problem of enemies of the people who obstructed the path to socialist utopia – now known as “social justice.” One of those mechanisms was the practice of confining individuals who were thinking the wrong thoughts to insane asylums. Indeed, if you caused any trouble for the commissars, a good inoculation of neuroleptics (powerful drugs used to “quiet” the symptoms of schizophrenia), forcibly administered through a tube in the nose, could do wonders in bringing your politically incorrect behavior to a halt.

Dissidents such as Valeriya Novodvorskaya, Natalya Gorbanevskaya, Pyotr Grigorenko, Vladimir Bukovsky, Alexander Esenin-Volpin and Joseph Brodsky were all among the brave freedom-fighters who bore the brunt of the Soviet practice of institutionalizing dissidents in mental hospitals and force-feeding them mind-shattering drugs. Novodvorskaya was confined in the prison psychiatric hospital in Kazan for her dissident activites – and she described her harrowing experience in this hospital in her collection of writings, Po Tu Storonu Otchayaniya (Beyond Despair). Gorbanevskaya was committed to a psychiatric hospital for attending the 1968 Red Square demonstration against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Grigorenko suffered the same fate for criticizing the Khrushchev regime. Bukovsky was confined to a psychiatric hospital for “anti-Soviet agitation.” Brodksy was sent to mental hospitals for not writing the right kind of poetry; his treatments involved “tranquilizing” injections, sleep deprivation and forced freezing baths. Esenin-Volpin was institutionalized in the Leningrad Special Psychiatric Hospital for his anti-Soviet thoughts.

Today’s progressive Democrats are also faithfully journeying on an uplifting odyssey. Horrified by Trump’s opposition to Obama’s “fundamental transformations,” they have found their own neuroleptics in the form of the 25th Amendment and a bill seeking to impeach the president for being mentally unsound. Indeed, Trump has to be mentally deranged and unfit for office, because what other reason could possibly explain his frightening disagreement with the Left’s un-American creed of identity politics – race and gender uber alles? What other factor could possibly be at play in his embrace of individual freedom and responsibility – and in his rejection of group privileges and racial/gender hierarchies that, as David Horowitz has noted, can only be manifested after America’s Constitution is null and void?

The Battle for America’s Soul Biden is on the wrong side. Joseph Klein

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/battle-americas-soul-joseph-klein/

Joe Biden has often said during his presidential campaign that we are in a “battle for America’s soul.” A nice soundbite, but Biden is already conceding this battle to globalists who disdain American sovereignty. Indeed, Biden is an extreme globalist himself. And Biden has for the most part been AWOL in the battle being waged for America’s soul over the founding ideals of our nation, which are under attack by the far-left progressive base of the Democratic Party. After weeks of silence, Biden finally spoke out on June 30th in favor of protecting the statues and monuments of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. But Biden’s political correctness prevents him from standing up strongly for American exceptionalism against the mobs in the streets and the mainstream media.

As we honor our nation’s independence on July 4th, we should reflect on the timeless words in the Declaration of Independence penned by Thomas Jefferson: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”

Joe Biden garbled these words in one of his typical gaffes, declaring instead: “We hold these truths to be self-evident. All men and women are created, by the, you know, you know the thing.” However, even when Biden was more articulate in restating America’s founding ideals in his 2017 New York Times op-ed article, he (or his ghost writer) went off the rails by trying to characterize President Trump’s America First policies as antithetical to those ideals.

BLM’s Violence & the Death of America’s Cities The corpses are already piling up. John Perazzo

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/blms-violence-death-americas-cities-john-perazzo/

The police-hating rhetoric of the openly and proudly Marxist “Black Lives Matter” (BLM) movement is doing exactly what it did five years ago – creating a massive increase in violent crime and homicide throughout urban America. You may recall that back in 2015-16, BLM’s anti-police protests and riots – particularly in the aftermath of the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri – intimidated officers nationwide into becoming much less proactive in dealing with criminal suspects. A Pew Research Center report titled “Behind the Badge” – which tabulated the results of a questionnaire that was sent to thousands of officers – confirmed that 85 to 95 percent of law-enforcement officers in large police departments became highly reluctant to engage criminals except where absolutely necessary.

The consequences of the new timidity of law-enforcement were monumental:
 

In 2015, America’s 56 largest cities experienced a 17% rise in homicides.
Twelve cities with large black populations saw their murder totals spike even more dramatically – e.g., by 54% in D.C., 60% in Newark, 72% in Milwaukee, 83% in Nashville, and 90% in Cleveland.
Robberies surged in America’s 81 largest cities during the 12 months that followed the shooting of Michael Brown.
During the first quarter of 2016, homicides in America’s 63 largest cities increased by 9%, while nonfatal shootings were up 21%.
 

Lies, Damn Lies and COVID-19 Statistics By Stacey Lennox

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/stacey-lennox/2020/07/03/lies-damn-lies-and-covid-19-statistics-n603433

As beaches are closed for the 4th of July and even Texas starts to roll back towards COVID-19 lockdown, it sure seems like the goalposts have shifted. The purpose of public health policy went from slow the spread, to flatten the curve, and now seems to stop the spread altogether. Dr. Scott Atlas, a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, says the idea of preventing infection is not just unnecessary; it is irrational.

As much as Democrats and the media want to keep us locked down and scared, the current situation does not warrant any of this. According to Dr. Atlas, political leaders and policymakers need to take a much closer look at the data. He is quite optimistic about how state reopenings have progressed to date.

In an interview with Larry O’Connor, Dr. Atlas gives a detailed assessment of the data and provides a great perspective on what data we should use to hold leaders accountable. It isn’t rising case numbers. With more mingling and more testing, rising cases were inevitable.

O’Connor and Dr. Atlas got into a discussion about how misleading the case metric is. It merely means a positive test. In the context of COVID-19, where approximately half of the cases are asymptomatic, it is a meaningless statistic. Further, as testing has become proactive, or required in some cases, and more widely available, saying there is a new case doesn’t denote illness.

Multiple rockets fired from Gaza into Israeli territory

Hamas has publicly threatened the Jewish state in the run up to Israel’s extension of sovereignty over communities in Judea and Samaria.

By Associated Press

The Israeli military on Sunday said three rockets were fired by Palestinian terrorists in the Gaza Strip toward southern Israel.

The barrage set off air-raid sirens in southern Israel.

Israel’s Channel 12 TV said two rockets landed in open areas, causing no damage or injuries.A third projectile was intercepted by Israeli air defenses.

There was no immediate Israeli reaction, although the military usually responds to rocket fire with airstrikes on Hamas terror targets in Gaza.

Protesters tear down statue of Christopher Columbus in Baltimore By Brooke Seipel

https://thehill.com/homenews/news/505896-protesters-tear-down-statue-of-christopher-columbus-in-baltimore?

PRESIDENT TRUMP: ‘“To destroy a monument is to desecrate our common inheritance. In recent weeks, in the midst of protests across America, many monuments have been vandalized or destroyed. Some local governments have responded by taking their monuments down,” Trump’s order reads. “These statues are not ours alone, to be discarded at the whim of those inflamed by fashionable political passions; they belong to generations that have come before us and to generations yet unborn.” 

A group of protesters in Baltimore tore down a statue of Christopher Columbus on Saturday then threw it into the city’s Inner Harbor, The Baltimore Sun Reports.

Video shows protesters tearing down the statue near Baltimore’s Little Italy neighborhood as Fourth of July fireworks explode in the distance. The monument was torn down using rope and then protesters rolled it into the water.

The Worrisome Decline of Patriotism in America By Dave Seminara

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/the-worrisome-decline-of-patriotism-in-america/

As the nation celebrates its 244th birthday, those of us who still love it must redouble our efforts to convert those who don’t to our side.

Independence Day is a time to celebrate our country, but with patriotic sentiment at perhaps an all-time low, this year’s holiday is also an opportunity for us to remember how excruciatingly lucky we are to be American citizens. With nothing but bad news filling our screens in recent months, love of country has become anything but an article of faith. When Gallup first started asking Americans how proud they were of their country months before the 9/11 attacks, 87 percent claimed to be “extremely” or “very” proud and only 2 percent said they were only “a little proud” or “not at all” proud. Gallup recently released this year’s American-pride poll, and the results are concerning to say the least: The extremely/very proud cohort has fallen to an all-time low of 63 percent, while the only a little proud/not all proud group has swelled from 12 percent to 21 percent in the last year.

The media seized on the poll to — you guessed it — blame President Trump. The Washington Post ran an opinion piece with the headline, “Trump Promised National Pride. A New Poll Proves He’s Delivered National Shame.” CNN ran an analysis piece under the headline, “Proud to be an American? Not so much anymore.” The common thread in these and other pieces was that they sounded more triumphal than sad, as though the decline in patriotic sentiment was good because it reflected poorly on Trump. President Trump has undoubtedly caused many Americans to feel less patriotic, but the truth is that patriotism has been waning for years.

Love of country shouldn’t be a partisan issue, but the Gallup poll revealed that 88 percent of Republicans said they were very or extremely proud to be American, compared to just 42 percent of Democrats. College graduates, people of color, and young people were the least proud to be American, according to the survey. In March 2017, 43 percent of respondents in their twenties said they were extremely proud to be American. Today, that figure stands at just 20 percent.

How Trump — not Biden — has helped make black lives better Gianno Caldwell

https://nypost.com/2020/07/04/trump-not-biden-has-helped-make-black-lives-better/

When it comes to the black community, Trump hasn’t always said the right thing, but his policies are better than Biden’s, as student activist and Trump supporter Kearyn Bolin (here at the White House in 2019) likely understands.

I celebrated this New Year’s Eve in Ghana, Africa. I’d grown up poor with a mom addicted to drugs but started this decade far from the South Side of Chicago and amongst some of the most “elite” black people in the world. With me was one of my best friends, Nate, an executive for one of the largest technology companies in the world and a former Obama administration attorney; his brother-in-law, a neurosurgeon who graduated from Harvard; a billionaire whose house party we all attended to ring in 2020; and many Hollywood celebrities, including Boris Kodjoe and Nicole Ari Parker. This was to be the start of the best year of our lives.

Back home in the US, African Americans were experiencing the best economy we have ever seen: Unemployment for our racial group was the lowest in recorded history, black wages were rapidly increasing for the first time in decades, and people who’d been out of work long-term were being hired and suddenly able to take their families on vacations for the first time in years.

The Trump policies made it possible. Tax cuts and rocketing GDP growth meant companies were feeling financially stable for the first time in a decade and public confidence in our economy had never been higher. Trump’s re-election was on cruise control. Even Democrats were willing to admit that the chances of Trump losing were slim.

No one could have predicted what would happen next.