Displaying posts published in

January 2021

Seattle Business Owners Fed Up With Officials for Not Condemning Antifa Violence By Rick Moran

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2021/01/22/seattle-business-owners-fed-up-with-officials-for-not-condemning-antifa-violence-n1405588

Downtown Seattle business owners have had all they can take from their local government’s inexplicable failure to condemn the riots and get them under control. The last straw was the night of the inauguration, when dozens of storefronts were vandalized by rampaging antifa members—and not a peep was heard from city leaders.

More than that, the city hasn’t lifted a finger to help struggling companies. Between the draconian lockdown rules set by the governor and the riots, 160 businesses in the city have closed, according to the Downtown Seattle Association. Many of them are barely hanging on.

KoMo News:

“It’s not clear what their message is,” said Gabby Cavalcanti of Bellevue. “You don’t know what to make of it.”

“They need to arrest these people,” said John Hummer in Seattle. “When they without any consequences, they’re going to keep doing it.”

Dorelea Gaffney owns the soap box in Pike Place Market.

She said she feels violated and defenseless because of the damage done to neighboring businesses by vandals.

“It’s not hurting anyone but us, small business owners,” Gaffney said.

Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan, even now, can’t bring herself to use the term “antifa.”

Trump could (…and Biden can’t) By Peter Skurkiss

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/01/trump_could_and_biden_cant.html

Donald Trump has often said that he achieved more in his first term than any other president. That is not exactly true, at least not without a qualifier. The fact is FDR and LBJ both accomplished more in their first terms with their New Deal and Great Society programs, respectively. These initiatives dramatically changed government’s relationship with the country in revolutionary ways. But the changes they birthed  were not for the better whereas Trump’s were. So it is more accurate to say that Trump accomplished more positive things in his first term than any other president. 

What makes what Trump’s accomplishments off-the-chart impressive is the resistance he faced. The Democrats were not just the loyal opposition but a collection of radical progressives who proved time and time again that they were more than willing to damage the country to hurt the president. The Democrats got away with their anti-America actions due to their symbiotic relationship with the mainstream media. Instead of examining the damage Democrats were doing to the country, the media poured out lies, distortions and ridicule nonstop against President Trump. The intended coup de grâce to MAGA was the sneaky and backhanded resistance to it by the Republican establishment. 

Yet through it all, Trump got things done for the American people. How did this happen? The answer is multifaceted, with a critical aspect being that Trump was an outsider. This was both a blessing and a curse. Let’s focus on the blessing part.

America Is (Not So) Slowly Turning Communist Red By Eileen F. Toplansky

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/01/america_is_not_so_slowly_turning_communist_red.html

Perhaps the most contemptible action of the Democrats, and there have been so many, is the desire to completely erase Trump and, by extension, his MAGA movement. 

So now “more than 250 authors, editors, agents, professors and others in the American literary community signed an open letter this week opposing any publisher who signs book deals with President Donald Trump or members of his administration.”  Such actions can only be described as emulating a dog gone mad.  It is rabies of the mind and soul.  Clearly, their politics supersede economics, and everything is upside-down in this madness. 

That people involved with ideas and  books would inveigh against the publishing of important thoughts is mind-boggling!  Even more disturbing is the ease with which they lie.  For the umpteenth time, Trump did not cage any children; Obama did, but why let the facts get in the way of left-wing censorship?

In addition, Texas Democrat Rep. Joaquin Castro announced “that he would be introducing legislation that would prevent any federal buildings or property from ever being named after President Trump.”  

In lockstep with tyrants, Castro displays the most hideous of instincts as he states, “President Trump incited an insurrection that damaged some of our nation’s most significant and sacred federal property.  Donald Trump should never become a future generation’s confederate symbol.”

How ironic that his last name is Castro, mastermind of communist Cuba and purveyor of the horrors that Cubans have endured for the past 60 years.  How stunning that he perverts history.  How very 1984. 

Then there is Ocasio-Cortez, who has decided that she and her allies will be the arbiters of what Americans will be able to access.  “We’re going to have to figure out how we rein in our media environment so that you can’t just spew disinformation and misinformation.  It’s one thing to have differing opinions, but it’s another thing entirely to just say things that are false.  And so that’s something that we’re looking into.”  This from a woman who in 2019 told Anderson Cooper on 60 Minutes that she was less worried about making factual statements and more focused on prioritizing morality.

What if the Department of Education Were Running Reeducation Camps Fri Jan 22, 2021 Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/01/what-if-department-education-were-running-daniel-greenfield/

How ambitious is this whole attempt to exploit the manufactured crisis with a massive government crackdown on political dissent?

Here’s an NPR interview with Cynthia Miller-Idriss an “expert” on “extremism”.

But we also know that that’s always a Band-Aid solution, that by the time you get to the need to infiltrate groups or deplatform people who are spreading mass amounts of disinformation, you’re already just so far down the pipeline that you’re now talking about deradicalization instead of actual prevention. So this has to be something that involves, you know, Health and Human Services. It has to involve the Department of Education. 

“The need to deplatform”.

We got past the point where we’re pretending otherwise. Now let’s talk about how the DOE and HHS can work on this.

It’s the kind of thing that we invest in as a country or through foundations and foreign ministries overseas in fragile democracies to help the public understand what manipulation looks like and how they could be persuaded by it, but we haven’t done it in our own country, and I think that’s going to have to change.

Trump and the Failure of the Expert Class They were right about his character, but his defects were obvious to almost everyone. They were wrong about virtually all else. By

Even so, the most salient theme of the past five years was not any challenge to democracy. The great theme of the Trump years, the one historians will note a century from now, was the failure of America’s expert class. The people who were supposed to know what they were talking about, didn’t. 

The failure began with the country’s top consultants and pollsters. Candidate Trump did almost everything lavishly paid political consultants would have told him, and did tell him, not to do—and he won. The most respected pollsters, meanwhile, predicted a landslide for Hillary Clinton. America’s best and brightest political adepts turned out to know very little about the elections they claim to understand.

Also during the 2016 campaign, an assemblage of top-tier academics, intellectuals and journalists warned that Mr. Trump’s candidacy signified a fascist threat. Timothy Snyder, a historian of Nazism at Yale, was among the most strident of these prophets. “Be calm when the unthinkable arrives,” he warned in a Facebook post shortly after the election. “When the terrorist attack comes, remember that all authorities at all times either await or plan such events in order to consolidate power. Think of the Reichstag fire.” Many experts stuck with the fascism theme after Mr. Trump’s election and throughout his presidency. That these cultured authorities couldn’t tell the difference between a populist protest against elite contempt and a coup carried out by powerful ideologues will go down as one of the great fiascoes of American intellectual history. 

The fascism charge was only the most acute form of the claim that Mr. Trump was carrying out an “assault on democracy.” Some semantic clarification is in order here. When intellectuals and journalists of the left use the word “democracy,” they typically are not referring to elections and decision-making by popularly elected officials. For the left, “democracy” is another word for progressive policy aims, especially the widening of special political rights and welfare-state provisions to new constituencies. By that definition any Republican president is carrying out an “assault on democracy.”

Joe Biden’s Inaugural Purge The firing of Peter Robb belies all the happy talk about unifying the country. By Kimberley Strassel

https://www.wsj.com/articles/joe-bidens-inaugural-purge-11611270791?m

The “unity” lasted all of a couple of minutes. Then, hours after President Biden pledged in his inaugural address to show “tolerance and humility,” the brass knuckles came out.

One duster was aimed at Peter Robb, general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board. Within minutes of Mr. Biden’s swearing-in, and as the new president told the nation it needed to “be better,” the new White House delivered Mr. Robb an ultimatum: resign by 5 p.m., or be fired.

The general-counsel position is a Senate-confirmed four-year appointment at an independent agency; Mr. Robb had 10 months left in his term. No NLRB general counsel had ever been fired, and the Biden White House provided no cause for the action. Mr. Robb pointed all this out in a return letter and respectfully declined to step down. So Mr. Biden (“we must end this uncivil war”) canned him.

For four years, the media and Democrats cast every action of the Trump administration as something law-breaking or verging on a constitutional crisis. This week’s headlines, by contrast, were a mass media celebration of the return to “normalcy.” Mr. Biden ran on, and won on, a promise to restore norms to Washington.

Rush Limbaugh :The Establishment Thinks They Have Their Power Back — But They Know It’s Tenuous****

https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2021/01/20/the-establishment-thinks-they-hav

RUSH: Greetings to you, music lovers, thrill-seekers, conversationalists all across the fruited plain. Man, oh, man. I have such a range of emotion flowing through my arteries and veins, going to my heart and away from my heart. I’m watching these people at the Biden inauguration. They think they got it all back. They think they finally have vanquished all of their opposition. And they haven’t the slightest idea.

You can hear it in the words they’re saying to each other. You can hear it in the way they’re singing their songs. You can see it in the people that showed up for this inauguration who didn’t show up four years ago for the Trump inauguration, and I have to tell you, ladies and gentlemen, I just — (crowd chanting “We love you! We love you!”) Wait a minute. What’s this? That was obviously audio from a Trump rally, one of the many that occurred before the election last November. “We love you.”

Anyway, greetings, folks. It is good to have you here. We’re gonna try to get through the day here as best we can. I’m looking for the words to most perfectly capture the range of emotion that I feel. And I’m watching these people as they have assembled on the stage for the inauguration of Plugs. And this inauguration looks like what you would expect from a one-party state. This inauguration looks like the Chinese Olympics with hundreds and hundreds of flags to replace people who were not allowed to show up.

Now, why do you think people weren’t allowed to show up? People are not allowed to show up because of COVID. People aren’t allowed to show up because the threats of the National Guard might open fire on everybody. That’s not why. The reason that they put up all these replacements for people is that I don’t think they were confident a bunch of people would show up for this because I think they know. I think they know that they are not — I gotta be very careful here in the words I choose.

I think they know that this is something that’s been arranged rather than legitimately sought and won. And you can see this in their attitudes, in their smiles. You can see it, hear it in the words that they are uttering. It’s like, I remember the 1984 Democrat convention was in San Francisco. I happened to be there, I was covering it. And one of the speakers on one of the nights was the mayor of Washington, D.C. His name was Marion Barry. And the sum total of his speech was, “Tonight we’re on the inside.” Meaning, finally the minorities that really are the Democrat Party have made it to the power base. We’re on the inside. We’re not on the outside looking in.

Who’s Attacking Our Democracy? January 21, 2021/ Jane Menton

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2021-1-21-whos-attacking-our-democracy

The breach of the Capitol on January 6 by pro-Trump demonstrators took Americans by surprise. There have been many reactions in the aftermath, but responses by the mainstream media completely miss — or intentionally misrepresent — the underlying issues. The Capitol breach felt like a turning point, but not because Trump supporters are particularly dangerous or violent as the media would like us to believe. If their demonstration attacked our democracy, it’s because we are living in a democracy so divided we no longer share any goals in common. As long as the party in power seizes opportunities to silence or oppress its opposition, that divide can only widen. 

Even while the January 6 events were still unfolding, the mainstream media started talking about the breach of the Capitol as a “violent siege,” conducted by a far-right mob. During the time that protestors were in the building, my iPhone was flooded with breaking news alerts from CNN, NBC, NPR all letting me know first that the Capitol had been breached, that Kamala Harris and Nancy Pelosi had been moved to a “secure location,” while those on the House floor were told to “shelter in place.” Rioters “vandalized” “occupied” and “ransacked” the building, and attempted to disrupt the certification of the Electoral College votes.

It took a few days for any counter-perspective to come out. Matt Keener, an opinion columnist who was in DC as a peaceful demonstrator, had a different experience. He wrote for American Spectator that: “the atmosphere outside [the Capitol] resembled an open air concert or festival more than a ‘riot.’” He also linked to a video of protestors being let into the building by police.  He believes “the true story [of the demonstration] is getting lost in the propaganda.” 

Were Pelosi, McConnell warned of potential violence before Capitol riot? Offices remain mum Representatives of the Speaker of the House and Senate Republican Leader are also silent on whether the leaders weighed in on having National Guard troops bolster security at the Capitol prior to the events of Jan. 6.

https://justthenews.com/government/congress/pelosis-office-wont-say-if-she-was-briefed-potential-violence-ahead-jan-6

The offices of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell won’t say whether the congressional leaders were briefed on potential violence ahead of the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol — or whether they weighed in on requesting help from the National Guard to bolster Capitol security.

Just the News reached out to representatives for Pelosi and asked if the speaker was briefed about threats of violence in advance of the rally. Her office was also asked if the speaker favored or opposed having National Guard troops help Capitol Police to protect the Capitol Building before the rally. Her office didn’t provide a response.

McConnell’s press office was asked the same questions, but they did not return a request for comment. 

Security sources told Just the News that Pelosi’s staff was briefed on threats of violence, but it is unclear if Pelosi herself was briefed directly or indirectly on the situation.

In a timeline of events from the Pentagon, defense officials wrote that U.S. Capitol Police twice said that they did not need help from the military. According to the timeline, Capitol Police confirmed that stance to Defense Department officials and to Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy. 

U.S. Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund reportedly asked House and Senate security officials if they wanted National Guard troops to assist the Capitol Police in protecting the Capitol complex in advance of the Jan. 6 rally. According to The Washington Post, House Sergeant at Arms Paul Irving said he was not in support of declaring an emergency ahead of the rally. Sund and Irving have since resigned. 

Mitch McConnell Needs To Go The Senate Minority Leader no longer represents conservative voters. By David Marcus

https://thefederalist.com/2021/01/22/mitch-mcconnell-needs-to-go/

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has done very good service for the American people. His Merrick Garland gambit was one of the riskiest and best political plays in congressional history. He has seated an enormous amount of conservative judges. He deserves our thanks for that.

But he also has to sit down now and let the conservative movement grow into its new form — a form he seems completely opposed to.

McConnell is playing a ridiculous game of footsie with the idea of convicting Donald Trump in his absurd impeachment. It’s a bridge too far and an obvious power play, and he lacks the power to pull it off.

American conservatives know that after Democrats all but cheered on violence and rioting for months, the idea that Trump incited an insurrection is pure nonsense. It’s a lie and McConnell’s parroting of it is disqualifying for leadership.

So why is McConnell playing along with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s charade of impeachment? He thinks he can get the conservative movement back on his and the Chamber of Commerce’s team.

He can’t. If he pushes this impeachment conviction, as he seems to be, he should have no place in Republican leadership. It is nothing short of a betrayal of Republican voters.

I don’t know who McConnell thinks he is appealing to here. It is obvious that conservative voters have not abandoned Trump, even if he has. He seems to think that we will just go back to the pro-war, pro-corporate party he came up in. We won’t. That party was destroyed by Trump and good riddance.

And why did Cocaine Mitch get the opportunity to fill all these judgeships? Why did his Garland gambit pay off? Only because of Trump. Maybe he forgot but Mitt Romney, his buddy in dragging Trump, lost his bid for the presidency in 2012. But luckily for conservatives, Trump won. And yeah, we have a lot of judges to show for it — because of Trump.