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July 2021

It can’t happen here? It is happening here! By Patricia McCarthy

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/07/it_cant_happen_here_it_emisem_happening_here.html

Sinclair Lewis’s novel of 1935, It Can’t Happen Here, was published amid the rise of fascism in Europe. The book is about the political career of fictional Buzz Windrip, who is elected President in 1936, defeating FDR with a campaign promising a return to traditional values, drastic social and economic reforms (he promises every American $5k).  Once elected, he becomes a totalitarian tyrant complete with his own paramilitary force called the Minute Men!  

Windrip is Lewis’s version of an American Hitler and/or Mussolini.  But consider the parallels with the current occupant of the Oval Office. Windrip outlaws dissent (consider the Biden administration’s partnership with big tech to censor opposing opinions). He, Windrip, imprisons his critics just as Biden has jailed anyone present at the Capitol on January 6. Biden has his own Minute Men, the FBI as well a couple of other paramilitary groups in service of his agenda – Antifa and BLM.  They are his shock troops that, like Windrip’s thugs, terrorize his opponents, freedom-loving, independent thinking Americans.  

Like Biden, Buzz Windrip abrogated the rights of civilians and divided the nation into “administrative sectors” to be managed by federal “Corpo” authorities and enforced by his Minute Men.  Pelosi is now installing branches of the Capitol Police throughout the country to seek out perceived threats to members of Congress.  The similarities to Lewis’s two-dimensional dictator and the Biden regime are chilling. 

As in the novel, opponents of the Obama/Biden regime have  been found guilty until proven innocent of un-committed crimes, from Gen. Michael Flynn to Roger Stone, to anyone who worked for Trump to the 1/6 protesters, by corrupt judges in kangaroo courts whipped up by a manic, historically ignorant media that loathe anyone or anything remotely conservative or constitutional.  Viciously opposed to Donald Trump, the mainstream media covered for the massive crimes against the nation that were occurring from the day Trump became the Republican presidential candidate.  The left invented the Russia collusion narrative out of thin air.  It was pursued as legitimate by the FBI, the DOJ, the CIA and our despicable journalist class.  All of them very likely knew it was false from the outset, but they all colluded to damage a President who actually meant to represent the people, not just the ruling elite.  The swamp, left and right, was threatened and fought back with the ferocity of a cornered animal. With the 2020 election, they think they’ve won, but have they?

This quote from Lewis’ book perfectly describes Joe Biden:  

“The Senator was vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and in his “ideas” almost idiotic, while his celebrated piety was that of a traveling salesman for church furniture, and his yet more celebrated humor the sly cynicism of a country store.  Certainly there was nothing exhilarating in the actual words of his speeches, nor anything convincing in his philosophy. His political platforms were only wings of a windmill.” 

Indeed.  Biden cannot utter a coherent sentence.  He is the face of a corrupt band of radicals who, along with Obama, vowed to “transform America.”  He was fraudulently installed and has little actual personal support.  The Trump presidency rendered the left well and truly deranged, without any moral compunctions going forward.  The man and his supporters had to be destroyed just like Lewis’s Buzz Windrip’s opponents had to be ruined.

The protagonist in Sinclair’s novel is a journalist, Doremous Jessup, who founds an organization to fight Windrip’s destructive policies.  He founds a newspaper and publishes accounts of Windrip’s abuses. Jessup’s counterparts in our alternative media are the champions of truth and there are more and more of them every day.  Big tech tries to silence them, but they are proliferating faster than they can censor them.   The massive, life-long corruption of the Biden family is now a known fact.  The depravity of Biden’s son Hunter has been revealed.  The corruption at the DOJ and FBI is being exposed.  It was the FBI that set up the fake kidnapping attempt of Gretchen Whitmer and perhaps even had a hand in orchestrating the event of January 6.  The truth will out. 

The radical Democrat media of today ignores the crimes and abuses of power by leftists but the Doremus Jessups of 2021 America do not.  The truth is out there despite the suppression tactics of this administration, its handmaidens in the media and big tech.  Like the villain of the novel, Biden has incarcerated hundreds of non-violent  people who were present at the Capitol on 1/6.  The DOJ calls them “enemies of the state,”  their protest an insurrection.  

But not one of them was armed; none have been charged with insurrection.  They are being held without bail while the hundreds of rioters/looters/arsonists of the summer of 2020 are free as birds.  This is the stuff of communist China, the Soviet Union, Venezuela and Castro’s Cuba.  Sinclair Lewis, like Orwell and Huxley, knew of what they wrote.  Tyrants are with us always and when they get power are lethal. “Tyranny is always better organized than freedom.”  – Charles Peguy

No One Can Disagree with Socialism The idea that religion must be expelled from all public places is a lie and a fraud—a Marxist trojan horse: The goal isn’t to expel all religion. The goal is to expel all competing religions. By Dan Gelernter

https://amgreatness.com/2021/07/27/no-one-can-disagree-with-socialism/

“Black Widow” star David Harbour says he doesn’t know “that there’s anyone who could disagree with socialist ideology.” So does this mean he’ll be returning the part of his multimillion-dollar salary that is beyond his “needs”? Of course not. There is no logic in ideology. He is a believer. That is enough. 

The French revolutionaries believed in reason so deeply that if you disagreed with them they’d cut off your head. 

The French Revolution began, as do all modern Communist revolutions, with the abolition of Christianity. Not the abolition of religion, or even state religion, but Christianity. The French fully intended to have a state religion, complete with “Temples of Reason” (Notre Dame was turned into one). The crucifix was replaced with a symbolic “torch of truth.” 

Fascism, which Winston Churchill called the “shadow, or ugly child of Communism,” was identical in this respect: Nazi Germany was to replace its cathedrals with Hitler Kirche, in which Mein Kampf took the place place of the Bible and the crucifix was again removed, this time in favor of a sword. 

Marxism is not and has never been an atheist philosophy. When a Marxist tells you he’s an atheist, he’s lying. Marxism is the most aggressively dogmatic religion in the world. Its struggle for ascendancy is a holy war in which Islam is the only serious competitor and all other religions seem resigned to a defensive posture (i.e., losing). 

To fight the Left effectively, we need to stop thinking of Marxism as a philosophical alternative to capitalism and instead think of it as a religious alternative to Christianity. 

Marxism is not anti-Christianity because belief in God is a crutch or an opiate of the masses. It simply recognizes that you cannot believe in two gods at once. Marxism and Christianity are rival religions, and it’s no more possible to believe in both than it is to believe simultaneously in Judaism and Islam. 

In the Marxist religious structure, the supreme leader—Stalin, Mao, Castro, Xi—is God. Leftist intellectuals are priests. Government bureaucrats are Levites, making sure the ceremony runs smoothly and the sanctuary is guarded. There is a caste (“class”) system in which some are holy by virtue of their birth and others are damned for the same reason. Ordinary citizens in this religion have no role except to believe and to do as they are told: “Believe the science!” 

Stop the Fearmongering: Johns Hopkins Doctor Shreds Latest COVID Madness Peddled by CDC and Fauci Matt Vespa

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2021/07/27/johns-hopkins-doctor-shreds-cdc-and-faucis-narrative-on-covid-again-n2593195

Fear is contagious. It’s almost as bad as the Delta variant. Again, is the new variant more transmissible? Yes. Is it deadlier? No. Does it make you sicker? No. Are those being impacted primarily the unvaccinated? Most definitely. So, when you want to increase vaccination rates, the government did what it did best: screw things up. Fully vaccinated people now must wear masks again in high-case areas. What constitutes a highly infectious area? Well, that’s not clear yet, but I’m sure the CDC and Dr. Anthony Fauci will make up some science fiction to justify this new mask mandate. The mandates are coming too. Not nationwide, Biden can’t do that yet due to the midterms, but federal agencies are one-by-one mandating it for workers who risk the loss of pay or their jobs if they refuse. 

Get vaccinated but also continue to live in fear. Yeah, no wonder why hesitancy is through the roof. All this move does is make the vaccine-hesitant dig in further and give anti-vaxxers all the ammunition they need to chip away at the credibility of the vaccines. You can’t be mad at the latter group when those who want us to get vaccinated offer all the ammunition to shoot that narrative down or at the very least question it—heavily.  

Well, take a break from being mad and read what Johns Hopkins doctor Dr. Marty Makary wrote about new studies about natural immunity which if ignored by Fauci and company. He also rehashed an old Fauci statistic that shreds the current push for new mask protocols and possible lockdowns (via WSJ) [emphasis mine]:

The news about the U.S. Covid pandemic is even better than you’ve heard. Some 80% to 85% of American adults are immune to the virus: More than 64% have received at least one vaccine dose and, of those who haven’t, roughly half have natural immunity from prior infection. There’s ample scientific evidence that natural immunity is effective and durable, and public-health leaders should pay it heed.

Only around 10% of Americans have had confirmed positive Covid tests, but four to six times as many have likely had the infection. A February study in Nature used antibody screenings in late summer 2020 to estimate there had been seven times as many actual cases as confirmed cases. A similar study, by the University of Albany and New York State Department of Health, revealed that by the end of March 2020—the first month of New York’s pandemic—23% of the city’s population had antibodies. That share necessarily increased as the pandemic spread.

[…]

Natural immunity is durable. Researchers from Washington University in St. Louis reported last month that 11 months after a mild infection immune cells were still capable of producing protective antibodies. The authors concluded that prior Covid infection induces a “robust” and “long-lived humoral immune response,” leading some scientists to suggest that natural immunity is probably lifelong. Because infection began months earlier than vaccination, we have more follow-up data on the duration of natural immunity than on vaccinated immunity.

‘Kamala, You’re Doing A Heckuva Job On The Border’

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/07/28/kamala-youre-doing-a-heckuva-job-on-the-border/

In the months since President Joe Biden tapped his vice president to run point on the border crisis, Kamala Harris’ poll numbers have plunged as the number of illegals crossing the border swells. Then again, her boss is the one who’s willing to spend $2 billion to stop building a border wall.

At his first press conference in March, a reporter asked Biden about the surge in illegal border crossings that just happened to coincide with his getting the keys to the White House.

“The truth of the matter is: Nothing has changed,” Biden said after he overturned numerous Trump administration border-control policies. “It happens every single, solitary year: There is a significant increase in the number of people coming to the border in the winter months of January, February, March.”

Biden even offered a weather-related causes why crossings jumped early in the year: “The reason they’re coming is that it’s the time they can travel with the least likelihood of dying on the way because of the heat in the desert, number one.”

Biden then put Harris in charge of the situation, saying that “I can think of nobody who is better qualified to do this.”

Since then, apprehensions of illegals at the border have climbed every month, even as the temperatures climbed. (See the nearby chart.)

I&I Chart

As the Albuquerque Journal notes:  “The number of migrant families they encountered at the border in June increased by 25% from the previous month even as summer temperatures rise in the deserts and mountain terrain of the southwestern borderlands.”

As of June, apprehensions had topped 1 million, with three months to go in the fiscal year. That’s more than double the number from all of FY 2020.

“It’s as bad as it’s been in memory,” the Center for Immigration Studies’ Todd Bensman told the Washington Times. “By every yardstick that exists, the border — and not just the border areas, but the interior areas now — are in crisis.”

Liel Leibovitz :It’s the Liberalism, Stupid To fix what’s wrong with America, we should first understand its defining civic faith

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/liberalism-stupid-liel-leibovitz

What exactly is wrong with America, and how do we fix it?

That, with slight variations, is the question constantly nipping at our heels these days, asked by friends and colleagues, entertained at dinner parties, floated around on podcasts and in opinion pages. Analyses of what precisely is broken vary, as do prescriptions for a cure, but a strong consensus remains solid among our best and brightest—the problem is that liberalism has come under attack, and the solution is to restore it to its old glory.

In this telling, the history of the past 30 or so years in America goes something like this: Once upon a time, back in the halcyon days of the 1990s, America was great, because Americans all observed a shared creed called liberalism. This relaxed civil religion nurtured our individual liberties and kept us honest, hardworking, and good. It gave us civil rights and gay marriage, Tom Hanks and Sesame Street, bipartisanship and Teach for America. And it would have bloomed eternal if the barbarians hadn’t shown up one day to sack our glittering Rome.

Who, exactly, are those modern-day wreckers of civilization? Again, many of our intellectual betters are certain they have the answer: The barbarians are Marxists, extreme leftist agitators here to replace our sacred liberal order with a pagan religion of their own, complete with a set of rituals (taking a knee) and articles of faith (gender is fluid). Our mission, therefore, is to resist these savages at every turn, and do whatever we can to turn the clock back and reinstall liberalism as our exclusive and infallible operating system

It’s a compelling story, complete with deliciously malicious bad guys and wonderfully virtuous sheriffs counting the minutes to High Noon. It’s also, alas, entirely wrong. Liberalism, to keep with the Hollywood imagery, isn’t the damsel in distress, hogtied and left on the train tracks; it’s the mustache-twirling villain whom we must defeat if we are to survive.

Take a moment and read that last sentence again. If you were raised in America and attended any school here in the last, say, 50 years, this sentence—liberalism is the source of our woes—makes about as much sense as saying that Mr. Rogers is a sadistic serial killer, or that bald eagles ought to be shot on sight. It sounds not only sacrilegious but outright stupid, a proposition so far-fetched and so far removed from everything we understand to be at America’s core as to merit not a second more of consideration.

Ruthie Blum: How do you say déjà vu in Farsi?

https://www.jns.org/opinion/how-do-you-say-deja-vu-in-farsi/

Protesters screaming “Death to the Dictator” began taking to the streets of Tehran on Monday, after rallies elsewhere in Iran erupted a earlier this month over severe water and electricity shortages in the drought-afflicted Islamic Republic.

The response to the very real plight of the Iranian people—whose latest rigged “election” ushered in President-elect Ebrahim (“The Butcher”) Raisi—was to send in militias to gun down the thirsty and disgruntled demonstrators.
Though the death toll is unclear, cellphone footage of security-force brutality has emerged on social media. It’s a familiar scenario.

The only wonder is that there are any citizens left in Iran who are brave enough to risk their lives in such an open fashion. Previous attempts at toppling the regime all have led to the same sorry result: the arrests, torture and murder of “dissidents,” and a subsequent enhanced crackdown on the public.

No surprise there.

Nor is the rejection by Iran’s Supreme National Security Council of the points of agreement reportedly reached in Vienna during the three months of negotiations towards a return to or improvement on the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. With Raisi slated to officially assume his role next month, and with the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden having been so transparent about its desire to re-enter the nuclear deal, Iran’s master puppeteer would be foolish not to keep up the pressure on the P5+1 signatories to the JCPOA to succumb to his demands.

Chief among these, of course, is a lifting of all international sanctions. But there are other conditions, as well, which have to do with the level of monitoring of nuclear facilities and allowances for the build-up of ballistic missiles.
According to multiple news analyses, if the talks in Vienna are postponed until after Raisi enters office, the whole process could be put on hold for months. Rather than applauding this development, however, the fantasists in America and Europe are worried.

Naturally.

Med Schools Are Now Denying Biological Sex Professors are apologizing for saying ‘male’ and ‘female.’ Students are policing teachers. This is what it looks like when activism takes over medicine.Katie Herzog

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/med-schools-are-now-denying-biological?token

Today we bring you another installment of Katie Herzog’s ongoing series about the spread of woke ideology in the field of medicine. Her first story focused on the ideological purge at the top medical schools and teaching hospitals in the country. “Wokeness,” as one doctor put it, “feels like an existential threat.”

Katie’s latest reporting illustrates some of the most urgent elements of that threat. It focuses on how biological sex is being denied by professors fearful of being smeared by their students as transphobic. And it shows how the true victims of that denial are not sensitive medical students but patients, perhaps most importantly, transgender ones. 

Some of you may find Katie’s story shocking and disconcerting and perhaps even maddening. You might also ask yourself: How has it come to this? How has this radical ideology gone from the relatively obscure academic fringe to the mainstream in such a short time?

Those are among the questions that motivate this newsletter. We feel obligated to chronicle in detail and in primary accounts the takeover of our institutions by this ideology — and the consequences of it. 

So far, it has taken root in some of our leading medical schools. Some. Not all. But I’m left thinking: What state will American medicine — or any other American institution —  find itself in after being routed by this ideology?  

If you think reporting like Katie Herzog’s is important I hope you’ll support us by subscribing here.

— BW

During a recent endocrinology course at a top medical school in the University of California system, a professor stopped mid-lecture to apologize for something he’d said at the beginning of class.

“I don’t want you to think that I am in any way trying to imply anything, and if you can summon some generosity to forgive me, I would really appreciate it,” the physician says in a recording provided by a student in the class (whom I’ll call Lauren). “Again, I’m very sorry for that. It was certainly not my intention to offend anyone. The worst thing that I can do as a human being is be offensive.” 

His offense: using the term “pregnant women.” 

“I said ‘when a woman is pregnant,’ which implies that only women can get pregnant and I most sincerely apologize to all of you.”

It wasn’t the first time Lauren had heard an instructor apologize for using language that, to most Americans, would seem utterly inoffensive. Words like “male” and “female.”

Why would medical school professors apologize for referring to a patient’s biological sex? Because, Lauren explains, in the context of her medical school “acknowledging biological sex can be considered transphobic.”

When sex is acknowledged by her instructors, it’s sometimes portrayed as a social construct, not a biological reality, she says. In a lecture on transgender health, an instructor declared: “Biological sex, sexual orientation, and gender are all constructs. These are all constructs that we have created.” 

Disband the FBI by Chris Farrell

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17602/disband-the-fbi

In the past few days alone, we have learned that the October 2020 Michigan governor kidnap plot was largely a creation of the FBI; a “senior FBI official” was on the take from media organizations; and another assistant director was in a “romantic relationship with a subordinate” and involved in “other misconduct.” The leadership failures documented by the Office of the Inspector General are now almost standard and part of a tiresome media drip-torture for the public to endure.

The FBI ran a coup against President Trump. It failed. The following got away: Comey, McCabe, Strzok, Page, Clinesmith, Pientka, Brower, Baker, et al. Any real consequences for attempting to overthrow the government of the United States? No.

Questions are now being raised as to whether the FBI had a role in the Capitol Hill protests of January 6, 2021. When one examines the FBI’s involvement in the Trump-Russia collusion hoax; Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) abuses; standing by idly while in possession of Hunter Biden’s Ukraine and Burisma-laden laptops, while President Trump endured a second phony impeachment; and the frame-up of Trump’s National Security Advisor, Lieutenant General Michael Flynn – it is not too difficult to imagine.

The FBI needs to go away. It should happen in an orderly and thoughtful process, over a period of months. Congress should authorize and create an investigative division in the U.S. Marshals Service and open applications for law enforcement officer seeking to be rigorously screened, vetted and then accessed into the new organization. Similar action was taken before in the very creation of the FBI. It is now time to clean house and restore the public’s trust in the “premier investigative agency” of federal law enforcement.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) continues its downward spiral into terminal corruption. Sadly, the scandals, criminality and ethical abuses of the organization are largely ignored by the American public and by the institutions of government charged with oversight and correction. Outrage after outrage is reported, hearings are held, Inspector General reports are issued — but the systemic corruption is never really tackled and dirty cops skate away virtually unscathed.

This situation is constitutionally unacceptable, corrosive to public trust in law enforcement, and a threat to the survival of the republic.

In the past few days alone, we have learned that the October 2020 Michigan governor kidnap plot was largely a creation of the FBI; a “senior FBI official” was on the take from media organizations; and another assistant director was in a “romantic relationship with a subordinate” and involved in “other misconduct.” The leadership failures documented by the Office of the Inspector General are now almost standard and part of a tiresome media drip-torture for the public to endure.

Meanwhile, the FBI had the audacity to issue a Stasi-like tweet urging “monitoring of ‘family members and peers’ for extremism.”

Remember: what we learn about the FBI in the press are only the stories that are SO outrageous that the FBI cannot keep a lid on them and is forced to make disclosures via a toothless Inspector General report — but never anything that results in a criminal indictment. Imagine what the ordinary day-to-day misconduct in FBI offices across the country could be. And these scandals don’t just amount to “bad press” – in several of these, federal courts scourge the FBI for lawbreaking. Additionally, Inspector General report after report details FBI abuses such as whistleblowers being retaliated against and ignoring “high-risk” employees who fail polygraph tests.

Iranian dissident delegation visits Israel in historic first, meets with Foreign Ministry David Isaac

https://www.jns.org/iranian-dissident-delegation-visits-israel-in-historic-first-meets-with-foreign-ministry/

The mission was organized by the Institute for Voices of Liberty, a U.S.-based nonprofit that seeks to “counter the false narratives propagated by the Islamic Republic and its apologists,” and to act as a voice for the “freedom-seeking people of Iran.”

It was billed as the first Iranian delegation to Israel since the fall of the Shah 42 years earlier. Six Iranian Muslim dissidents, forced to leave their homeland decades ago and who made their way to the United States, came on a three-day solidarity mission last week to show support for the Jewish state following the May clash between Israel and Palestinian terror groups in the Gaza Strip—namely, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad—that have long been backed by Iran.

Accompanying the group were four former Trump administration officials, including Ellie Cohanim, former U.S. deputy special envoy to monitor and combat anti-Semitism at the U.S. State Department, who described the visit as “historic.” Cohanim was born in Tehran and escaped with her family shortly after the Iranian Revolution in 1979.

“They know that Hamas, which rained down these rockets on Israel, is an Iranian proxy, and they know that Hezbollah on the Lebanese border is an Iranian proxy,” Cohanim told JNS. “And they wanted to show the Israeli people, but also the world, that they support Israel in its right to a country and its right to self-defense, and they really just stand against the Iranian regime.”

The mission was organized by the Institute for Voices of Liberty (IVOL), a U.S.-based nonprofit that seeks to “counter the false narratives propagated by the Islamic Republic and its apologists,” and to act as a voice for the “freedom-seeking people of Iran.”