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December 2020

Time’s Person Of The Year Reveals The West’s Stunning Weakness Under China’s Deadly Threat By Christopher Bedford

https://thefederalist.com/2020/12/14/times-person-of-the-year-revels-the-wests-stunning-weakness-under-chinas-deadly-threat/

Xi Jinping took a disaster and, through calculated lies and dictatorial cruelty, accomplished what seemed nearly impossible just last year.

Time Magazine’s Person of the Year is an embarrassment. Designed to acknowledge and document men, women and groups who’ve changed the world, historically it never promised to fill readers with warm and fuzzy feelings: Impact didn’t require good intentions, and didn’t necessitate good results.

Over much of its 93-year history, world-changers like Winston Churchill, Mahatma Gandhi, Soong Mei-ling, and Adolf Hitler held the title. Aside from being very different people with different codes and different legacies, these people didn’t win simply by virtue of not being the other guy; and for the lion’s share of their lives, for good or evil they interacted with the world outside the comforts of their own homes.

In modern years, however, winners have moved away from the sometimes uncomfortable toward feel-gooders, like Greta Thunberg, a child whose accomplishments peak at getting adults to applaud her tantrums.

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, hardly world-shaping visionaries, fit comfortably into this trend. “Defeating the Minotaur was one thing; finding the way out of the labyrinth is another,” read the cringeworthy prose accompanying Time’s puff piece. “A dark winter has descended, and there will be no rest for the victors.”

So, who should have earned the title this year? Who changed the world in ways that just a short while ago we would have struggled to imagine? There’s only one person, and he isn’t included in runner-ups Donald Trump, Anthony Fauci, or “the movement for racial justice.” He is China’s brutal dictator, Xi Jinping.

Consider the evidence. At the dawn of 2020, Xi had a massive problem on his hands. For the third time in 23 years, China had lost control of a deadly disease, and this time evidence placed its origin in suspiciously close proximity to a secretive Chinese government bio laboratory.

After Examining Antrim County Voting Machines, ASOG Concludes Dominion ‘Intentionally Designed’ to ‘Create Systemic Fraud’ By Debra Heine

https://amgreatness.com/2020/12/14/after-examining-antrim-county-voting-machines-asog-concludes-dominion-intentionally-designed-to-create-systemic-fraud/

The cyber-security firm that conducted a forensic examination of 22 Dominion Voting tabulators in Michigan has determined that “Dominion Voting System is intentionally and purposefully designed” to “create systemic fraud,” and that election results of Antrim County should not have been certified. Allied Security Operations Group (ASOG) said in a report published Monday morning that it observed an error rate of 68.05 percent in the fatally flawed machines.

Earlier Monday morning, Michigan state judge Kevin Elensheimer ordered the release of the the Dominion voting machines audit in Antrim County, where thousands of votes for President Trump were flipped to Joe Biden.

Last week, Judge Elensheimer issued a protective order allowing Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel and Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson to temporarily block the results of the audit.

During a hearing conducted by ZOOM and streamed live on YouTube, Elensheimer this morning  removed that order, clearing the way for the results to go public with some redactions.

Elensheimer issued an order on Dec. 6 granting a local man, William Baily, permission to have the county’s 22 Dominion tabulators examined. A team of seven forensic investigators from Allied Security Operations Group examined the voting machines for about eight hours on Dec. 6.  ASOG is a cyber security firm from Texas.

Baily’s attorney Matthew DePerno posted ASOG’s conclusions online.

We conclude that the Dominion Voting System is intentionally and purposefully designed with inherent errors to create systemic fraud and influence election
results.

Espionage Emergency: China ‘Floods’ America with Spies by Gordon G. Chang

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16853/espionage-china-spying-us

Given the emergency, Washington should immediately close down all of China’s bases of operation in the U.S., including its four remaining consulates — Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco — and substantially reducing the staff of the embassy. The embassy, in reality, needs only the ambassador, immediate family, and personal staff, not the hundreds currently assigned there.

China’s New York consulate is also an espionage hub. James Olson, a former CIA counterintelligence chief, “conservatively” estimated that China, in the words of the New York Post, “has more than 100 intelligence officers operating in the city at any given time.” New York City, he said, is “under assault like never before.”

Will Beijing merely transfer spies to Chinese banks and businesses operating in the U.S.? Probably, but that will take time and, in any event, Washington can order the closure of non-diplomatic outposts as well.

Others will say American businesses in China need consular support. Of course they do. My reply is that it is in America’s interest to get its companies out of that country, for moral as well as other reasons. The loss of consular support will be one more reason for them to pack their bags in a hurry.

Revelations this month about U.S. Rep. Eric Swalwell, a California Democrat, highlight Beijing’s complete penetration of American society.

China’s influence, intelligence and infiltration attempts are overwhelming America. Given the emergency, Washington should immediately close down all of China’s bases of operation in the U.S., including its four remaining consulates.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the news about Swalwell is that Fang Fang, a suspected Chinese Ministry of State Security agent also known as “Christine,” first contacted him not while he was sitting on the House Intelligence Committee but when he was a councilmember in Dublin City, California.

Will America’s Politically Disenfranchised Unite? The corporate elites that did everything they could to destroy Bernie Sanders in the primaries and Donald Trump in the general election have installed a president who is a transparent sham. By Edward Ring

https://amgreatness.com/2020/12/13/will-americas-politically-disenfranchised-unite/

By now most America First conservatives have recognized the common agenda of libertarians and progressives. These two groups have significant differences, of course. For example, progressives are pro-union while libertarians prefer employee choice. But on most of the biggest issues, their agendas now align.

The alliance is a mismatch, however, for two reasons. First, because progressives have far more money and institutional power, and second, because progressives are serious, whereas libertarians tend to favor symbolic gestures.

The result of this is a one-sided alliance where the only time libertarians see elements of their policy agenda move from theory to reality is when it also serves the interests of progressives. For example, libertarians:

Support “free movement of peoples” but can’t prevent expensive welfare programs that attract economic migrants.
Support “free trade” but are indifferent to the impact that cheap foreign labor and foreign subsidies have on eliminating manufacturing jobs for Americans.
Support the right to be a homeless drug addict, but can’t prevent government hand-outs that attract more homeless drug addicts, or taxpayer-subsidized developments to give them free housing.
Support “upzoning” residential neighborhoods but don’t prevent developer subsidies or greenbelts that strangle the growth of cities.
Oppose government-funded infrastructure, which stops new freeway construction or projects to increase the water supply, but can’t prevent subsidized rail transit projects or water rationing.
Support the right of big tech platforms to censor free speech, with no apparent recognition that these companies have built monopolies and are manipulating public opinion.

The common thread in all these examples is that libertarians are unable to recognize that when governments only adopt half of a principle they support, it only makes matters worse. The other half of the principle of open borders is no welfare state. The other half of the principle of free trade is fair trade. The other half of the principle of personal freedom is personal responsibility. The principle of reducing zoning restrictions inside cities also requires us to reduce them outside of cities. And so on. Libertarians support the progressives where their principles supposedly align, but progressives take part one and ignore part two.

John Eastman, the Man Who Deserved to Win Denying this meaning of the rule of law and its dependence on fundamental, natural rights turns federalism and the meaning of the Supremacy Clause on their head. By Ken Masugi

https://amgreatness.com/2020/12/13/john-eastman-the-man-who-deserved-to-win/

After completing the article below on Friday, I heard the news that the Supreme Court denied Texas’s lawsuit against four states alleging a violation of Texas voters’ constitutional rights in the November election. Against the denial of standing, Justice Samuel Alio, together with Justice Clarence Thomas, argued the court had no discretion to refuse such an original jurisdiction case between two or more states, but did not comment on the case’s merits. 

Chapman University law professor John C. Eastman on Wednesday moved to intervene on behalf of President Trump in the Texas suit against Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Immediately, Eastman was assailed as the man who raised the “racist birther” charge against Kamala Harris. 

Having known Eastman for decades, I can attest that he is among America’s great intellectual and moral anti-racist scholars and attorneys. I have raised different issues about Harris than Eastman, but his questions about her eligibility had nothing to do with racism but instead raised fundamental questions about Article II’s eligibility requirements. 

As an attorney and law professor, and in government service at the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Eastman has presented principled conservative arguments which are based on the Declaration of Independence and its interpretation by Abraham Lincoln. 

In addition to his University of Chicago law degree, a clerkship with Clarence Thomas, and a doctorate in politics and government from Claremont Graduate University, he has had electoral forays, last contending in 2010 for the Republican nomination for attorney general in California. He came in second in that race, and Kamala Harris won her primary and narrowly became the attorney general in the November election.

As director of the Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence of the Claremont Institute, Eastman exhibited tireless energy speaking and writing, serving on boards of conservative groups and filing amicus briefs, often with former Reagan Administration Attorney General Edwin Meese.

An Eastman brief goes well beyond the ordinary competence of an amicus brief, and that is true of this brief filed on behalf of the president as well. His argument is short and, if followed, would be revolutionary, since his arguments question precedents. But this is an unprecedented situation. 

Eastman summarizes the controversies involved in the four states in question, which have received much publicity—statistical anomalies in voting patterns, irregularities or even illegalities in distributing mail-in ballot applications and in securing and counting ballots, and numerous other instances of fraud and violations of election law. 

Courts to Voters: Democrat Election Fraud Is ‘Too Big to Fail’ We will not have another fair election in our country. There is no “next time.” By Karin McQuillan

https://amgreatness.com/2020/12/13/courts-to-voters-democrat-election-fraud-is-too-big-to-fail/

The courts have spoken, one after another. Some 74 million Americans have been denied our day in court.  The Democrats’ crime of stealing a presidential election is too big to fail.

Our play-it-safe judges don’t want to venture into these enormous seas, full of sharks, without precedent. They want to say in the safe spaces of the familiar. Stealing an election for city council is familiar enough to be overturned by law. Stealing a presidential election by wholesale fraud is above the law.

One might think that somehow our laws are written too narrowly to catch the whale of Democrat fraud in the election, but for one thing: the declarations from the bench that it is unthinkable to “upend an election.” Our judges tell us that ruling fraudulent ballots invalid would “disenfranchise” millions of voters. These are political statements. They are pusillanimous statements. They are not legal statements.

Upending an election has no precedent, we are told. But stealing a presidential election on this scale has no precedent, either.  The courts are saying that if election crimes are so consequential, they require a politically consequential act to be redressed, then no redress is allowed. 

That doesn’t even make sense. 

We are told there is no redress because the problem is political.

Yes, stealing an election is political. It is also illegal. It is also unconstitutional. 

The judges’ angry rebukes of the Republican plaintiffs are bogus by the very terms they use. If our judges are not willing to “disenfranchise” fraudulent and illegal votes, then they are disenfranchising the entire country. 

We are not getting the candidate who won the election. But the Supreme Court tells us our state attorneys have no standing to protect our votes. 

The evidence will not be heard in court. We cannot see the evidence formally submitted, discovery allowed, or 500 sworn testimonies of wrongdoing examined. Because none of us have the legal right to protest this heinous crime. Because we should have gone to court before the crime was committed, not after. Now is too late.

This is a failure of our justice system on a massive scale.

‘Collusion’ vs. Collusion One can lie about “collusion” with impunity. But to speak the truth about collusion is to be smeared as “xenophobic,” “racist,” and “nativist.” By Victor Davis Hanson *****

https://amgreatness.com/2020/12/13/collusion-vs-collusion/

Historians will dissect the origins and spread of the mass hysteria of Russian “collusion.”

The farce infected the media. It discredited the Democratic Party. And it warped the popular culture between 2015 and 2020.

“Collusion” destroyed what was left of respect for the Washington FBI, the CIA, and the liberal news media. When 50 former “intelligence” officers can attest, right before the election, that the Hunter Biden scandal emails are likely Russian disinformation designed to help Trump, then there is nothing much left of the reputation of our once best and brightest.

There are many theories of the origins of “collusion.” Some believe that Hillary Clinton, and her firewalls of the Democratic National Committee, Perkins Coie, and Fusion GPS that hired Christopher Steele, simply sought a cover counter-narrative to hide her own illegally transmitted and received State Department emails and spin-off scandals.

At the time “collusion” took off, Loretta Lynch and Bill Clinton were on the tarmac in Phoenix, sexual deviate Anthony Weiner’s wife was emailing with Hillary Clinton, and copies ended up on Anthony’s lurid laptop. The hacked DNC computers and all proof of supposed Russian “collusion” culprits had been mysteriously turned over by the FBI to the Clinton-friendly firm, Crowdstrike, for recovery of lost files.

There were other catalysts for the “collusion” mythology. By 2015, Democrats were embarrassed their Russian “reset” love fest had blown up in its face. Finger-wagging about human rights to a thug like Vladimir Putin—while being terrified of selling offensive weapons to beleaguered Ukraine—was a “talk-loudly-while-carrying-a-twig” prescription for disastrous humiliation.

The left-wing architects of reset, in their arrogance, went from “We can push the weak-hand of Putin” to “Putin is an omnipotent monster” in less than a year. In 2012, they acted as if they were Alger Hiss. By 2016 they were in full Joe McCarthy-mode, hunting for a Russian under every bed.

Putin, in his Mafioso-style thinking, had kept his part of the reset bargain. He had stayed inert in 2011, as promised in Seoul, South Korea, to aid Barack Obama’s reelection campaign. And in collusionary return, as also promised, Putin got missile defense in Eastern Europe scrapped and, as a bonus, a free hand in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.

Collusion Delusion

“Collusion” then had allowed befuddled Russian appeasers and naïfs to cover up, and recalibrate themselves as our new version of Cold War hawks. It was as if a supposedly geriatric, and anemic Russia suddenly had transmogrified back into the huge, and global-menacing Soviet Union—or as if the resetters’ own ridiculous placation could be erased by uncovering someone else’s sinister mollification.

But the chief catalyst for the “collusion” hoax was always hatred of the campaign, and then the election, of Donald Trump.

“Collusion” was, as the debased FBI agent Peter Strzok had texted, the “insurance policy” of the administrative state to keep the “smelly,” the “ugly folk,” and “dregs” where they belonged—far, far from power. The cartoonish Steele dossier was reinvented by a corrupt media to be some kind of George Kennan-like policy paper to destroy the Trump campaign, his transition, and his presidency.

Sidney Powell: Trump Could Trigger 2018 Executive Order on Foreign Election Interference

https://www.theepochtimes.com/sidney-powell-trump-could-trigger-2018-executive-order-on-foreign-interference_3616680.html?utm_source=morningbrief&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=mb-2020-12-14

BY JACK PHILLIPS AND JAN JEKIELEK

Lawyer Sidney Powell asserted that due to alleged foreign interference in the Nov. 3 election, “it’s more than sufficient to trigger” President Donald Trump’s executive order on foreign interference issued in 2018.

In September 2018, Trump signed an executive order that says “not later than 45 days after the conclusion of a United States election, the Director of National Intelligence, in consultation with the heads of any other appropriate executive departments and agencies (agencies), shall conduct an assessment of any information indicating that a foreign government, or any person acting as an agent of or on behalf of a foreign government, has acted with the intent or purpose of interfering in that election.”

Powell told The Epoch Times she believes that due to that executive order, it can give Trump “all kinds of power … to do everything from seize assets to freeze things, demand the impoundment of the machines,” referring to voting machines.

“Under the emergency powers, he could even appoint a special prosecutor to look into this, which is exactly what needs to happen,” Powell said. “Every machine, every voting machine in the country should be impounded right now. There’s frankly more than enough criminal probable cause to justify that, for anybody who’s willing to address the law and the facts purely on the basis of truth and not politics, or corporate greed, or global wealth.”

For the past month, some, including Arizona’s Maricopa County GOP Chairwoman Linda Brickman, as well as Powell, have alleged that Dominion Voting Systems’ machines allowed for votes to be switched from Trump to Democrat candidate Joe Biden. Dominion has pushed back, saying that it’s not possible to change votes, while asserting it has no ties to foreign governments and doesn’t allow its employees to engage in vote-tabulation efforts.

Powell noted that Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe has only a few days left until he is to prepare his report to the president, according to the September 2018 executive order. It’s not clear when—or if—Ratcliffe will issue the report, as no public confirmation has been given so far. Little mention has been made of the executive order since it was issued more than two years ago.

China: Great Britain’s Biggest Long-Term Threat by Judith Bergman

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16794/china-britain-threat

The UK’s new MI5 director, Ken McCallum, said that countries such as China and Russia were no longer focused just on traditional espionage activities, such as stealing government secrets, but also on targeting Britain’s economy, infrastructure, and academic research, while seeking to undermine its democracy.

China’s ambassador to the UK, Liu Xiaoming, later denied threatening the UK by making still another threat: “We make no threats, we threaten nobody. We just let you know the consequences. If you do not want to be our partners and our friends, you want to treat China as a hostile country, you will pay the price. That means you will lose the benefits of treating China as a friend.”

Meanwhile, Huawei’s plans to build a research center in Cambridgeshire are going ahead.

“[China’s] implementation strategy is to target elites in the West so that they either welcome China’s dominance or accede to its inevitability, rendering resistance futile”. — Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg, Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World.

In the UK, according to Hamilton and Ohlberg, the CCP has managed to “groom” British power elites to support Chinese interests, especially through the networking group the “48 Group Club”…. The group features members such as former ministers, including former Prime Minister Tony Blair and former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, five former British ambassadors to China, leading business people, directors of large cultural institutions and professors, as well as a number of highly ranked CCP officials, including several former Chinese ambassadors to the UK.

Much of Chinese influence on British campuses is done through the CCP’s Confucius Institutes, of which there are at least 29 in the UK, according to a February 2019 report on the topic by the Conservative Party Human Rights Commission.

“If the question is which state will be shaping our world across the next decade providing big opportunities and big challenges for the UK, the answer is China,” Britain’s new MI5 Director Ken McCallum recently told journalists. He added that Russia is currently “providing bursts of bad weather, while China is changing the climate”. McCallum said that countries such as China and Russia were no longer focused just on traditional espionage activities, such as stealing government secrets, but also on targeting Britain’s economy, infrastructure and academic research, while seeking to undermine its democracy.

Two wrongs By Donald Finley

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/12/two_wrongs.html

Donald N. Finley is a retired U.S. Air Force Colonel.

Much has already been written about the Supreme Court’s refusal to hear the Texas suit.  The sharpest legal minds in the country can’t agree on whether Texas has ‘standing,’ which isn’t much of a surprise since disagreement seems to be what we now do best.  I say it’s a very good thing because it shows where everyone stands, and rather than wondering who’s on your side and who’s opposed, disagreement shines light on everyone, so you know what you’re up against.

Perhaps we laypeople don’t understand the legal jargon about ‘standing,’ or why Texas and eighteen other states and the President of the United States aren’t allowed to show their collective injury inflicted by the four cheating states.  Perhaps the Supreme Court Justices didn’t understand the interest Texas had in other states’ election conduct was not its own; it was all of our interests.  Perhaps the legal precedents just didn’t fit right, and this case would have taken some courage, creativity, and consequences.  Perhaps it was just too much hard work for an upcoming holiday season. 

I’m not a lawyer, but I’m not blind, either.  “Judicially cognizable interest”?  That means about as much to me as talk about the internet would have meant to Thomas Jefferson.  Why does a ‘first ever’ event have to be judicially cognizable? 

Throughout our history, and perhaps all of world history, there has never before been as massive a fraud perpetrated on a free people as this.  Despite what Fox News says, these are not unfounded accusations.  In fact, that fraudulent acts changed the outcome of the election is indisputable.  Oh, it’s disputed, but it’s still indisputable in any factual or logically cognizable way.  If that seems cognitively dissonant, welcome to our world, where the MSM and the Democrat party say there’s no evidence of election fraud, and the Trump campaign’s allegations are baseless and unfounded.