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August 2021

Moment of Truth for the Biden Doctrine

https://www.nysun.com/editorials/moment-of-truth-for-the-biden-doctrine/91615/

Only a month ago President Biden stood in the East Room of the White House and assured the American people that “there is going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy of the United States from Afghanistan.” Today, the State Department announced that several thousand additional military personnel will be sent to Kabul to provide security as we airlift our civilians from our embassy.

That’s because President Biden’s strategy for withdrawal of our GIs from Afghanistan has become a debacle. We are not saying that Mr. Biden is to blame for this war. That blame attaches to the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Yet in his first major war decision — to refuse, as our enemies are on the march, to adjust his plan of appeasement but rather to insist on withdrawing our troops — he has proven himself to be a catastrophe as a war leader.

And one who can’t give his own countrymen straight talk. The news today is that Mr. Biden is rushing something like 3,000 troops to Afghanistan to “help,” as NBC reported it, “secure the withdrawal of most staff from the U.S. Embassy in Kabul” amid “growing alarm over a Taliban military offensive.” NBC cited “officials.” The NBC quoted the Pentagon press secretary as saying one Army battalion and two Marine battalions will head to the airport at Kabul.

The State Department spokesman, Ned Price, is quoted as telling reporters: “We are further reducing our civilian footprint in Kabul in light of the evolving security situation.” What diplomatic malarky. The State Department cited the Taliban’s advances and rising violence, NBC reported. That’s been plain to Democrats and Republicans for weeks, as Mr. Biden insists on getting our GIs out of Afghanistan whatever enemy advances are occuring.

Questions About Feds’ Involvement in January 6 Demand Answers Our system of government is built on trust. It is our duty to safeguard that trust.  By Joe Kent

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/12/questions-about-feds-involvement-in-january-6-demand-answers/

By now it’s clear that federal law enforcement had some degree of infiltration among the crowds gathered at the Capitol on January 6. Intelligence reports released publicly days before the incident indicated “militias” and loosely organized groups of individuals intended to act violently that day. It’s unlikely those reports were based solely on Parler posts. 

Based on the available camera footage, it appears that key individuals were leading the assaults on protected points of entry. One prominent militia leader, Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, appears to have actively planned and directed individuals both on the day of the incident and in the days leading up to it. Yet he remains a free man. This is in drastic contrast to the dozens of Americans currently being denied due process in a Justice Department prison in our nation’s capital. 

Our law enforcement and intelligence community officials need to answer some basic questions—questions that can be answered without “exposing sources or methods” or resorting to excuses about classification.

Normally, the FBI oversees domestic human intelligence operations that pertain to terrorism. This helps keep conflicts between law enforcement and intelligence agencies at a minimum. Human intelligence operations are very sensitive in nature, which in turn has given rise to extensive documentation and oversight. 

Congress should subpoena the director of the FBI’s Washington, D.C. field office, the chief of station for the CIA’s national resources office in D.C., the director of the D.C. Joint Terrorism Task Force, the chief of the U.S. Capitol Police and the D.C. Metropolitan Police and ask them the following questions under oath: 

1) How many confidential human sources (CHS), intelligence sources, agents, informants, or undercover law enforcement officers were present at the Capitol on January 6? 

2) What role did these sources/agents/undercovers (SAUs) play during the events of the day? 

3) How and what did the SAUs report to their controlling officers on January 6 and prior to that day?

4) How many SAUs were in direct contact with individuals currently detained or charged by the Justice Department?

5) How much involvement were SAUs allowed to have in illegal activity on January 6 or prior to that day?

6) Were the SAUs instructed to report threats of imminent danger? How many reported any plans to attack prior to January 6 or attacks in progress that day? 

7) Prior to January 6, how many SAUs had infiltrated or were reporting on groups or individuals planning violence against the Capitol? 

The Justice Department’s ‘Troubling’ Discovery Delays January 6 defendants appear to have practically no shot at a fair trial in Washington, D.C. Some judges are finally pushing back. By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/12/the-justice-departments-troubling-discovery-delays/

It’s been almost seven months since the FBI conducted a pre-dawn raid at the Virginia farm of Thomas and Sharon Caldwell. Dozens of armed agents broke down their front door, ransacked their home, and arrested Tom Caldwell on January 19. A week later, a grand jury indicted Caldwell and two other alleged Oath Keepers for various crimes related to their participation in the Capitol protest on January 6.

Despite the fact Caldwell never entered the building, carried no weapon, and assaulted no one, the Justice Department sought to keep the 66-year-old former Navy lieutenant with service-related disabilities in jail awaiting trial. Caldwell, a decorated military veteran, has no criminal record.

Nonetheless, on February 12, Judge Amit Mehta ordered Caldwell to remain behind bars: “What Mr. Caldwell is accused of is conspiring with others to plot an insurrection against the government of the United States, particularly the Congress of the United States, while it was attempting to certify the Electoral College vote,” Mehta said during Caldwell’s detention hearing. 

“So the concern with Mr. Caldwell is less what he specifically did on January 6th, like others,” Mehta continued. “It doesn’t look like he actually entered the Capitol building, didn’t assault any police officers. But what he did prior to January the 6th is clearly engage in planning and preparation for conduct that others were engaged in and that others participated in, in the incursion that took place at the Capitol and the violence that followed.” 

Caldwell interrupted the hearing to plead for mercy. “I beg your indulgence, sir. But my life hangs in the balance.”

Caldwell spent 50 days in jail before Mehta reversed himself on March 12 and released Caldwell to very limited home detention.

It now appears Mehta is having additional second thoughts about the Justice Department’s handling of the Capitol breach probe. In dozens of pre-trial detention motions filed by Joe Biden’s Justice Department, the evidence against January 6 defendants rests solely in the hands of the government. Detention hearings act instead almost as ex-parte criminal trials where federal judges in Washington, D.C. declare guilt or innocence based largely on what federal prosecutors present in court, occasionally sending defendants to jail for months before a trial can begin.

Caldwell was one of more than 100 Americans ensnared in what the top prosecutor managing the first stage of the January 6 investigation called a “shock and awe” campaign to intimidate Americans out of coming to the nation’s capital to protest Joe Biden’s inauguration. But that short-term political goal doesn’t seem to be working as a long-term legal strategy for the Justice Department.

Getting rid of the CDC would be a great start By Robert Curry

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/08/getting_rid_of_the_cdc_would_be_a_great_start.html

Believe it or not, we owe the evil Dr. Fauci a debt of gratitude.  He has demonstrated for all time the costs and folly of allowing ourselves to be ruled by government experts.  In addition, he has even given us the perfect name for rule by government experts: fauciism.

Fauciism is fascism with a difference.  Fascist rulers favored military uniforms and attacked opposition to their rule as treason against the nation; Fauci wears the garb of the government bureaucrat and declares that opposition to his rule is an attack on science.  

Fauci and his minions were wrong on AIDS — Fauci caused an earlier panic when he told the American people and Congress that we could catch AIDS from casual, merely social contact with the infected — and he and his minions have been wrong so many ways on the Wuhan flu that it has been difficult to keep an accurate count.

The Germans and the Italians paid a terrible price for letting the fascists take over.  We can hope that the terrible price they paid inoculated them from trying that form of rule again, at least for a while.  May the terrible price we have paid for allowing Fauci to have his way with America and with the American economy awaken us to what must be done before it is too late.

What’s to be done?  Let’s begin to find our way to the answer by asking how we got here. 

How we got here is no mystery.  Putting government experts in charge has been the goal of the Progressives all along.  From the beginning, they understood that transforming America into a country ruled by experts would be an enormous undertaking.  Consequently, their plan was to do it step by step, progressively.  For over a century, the Progressives have been replacing rule by the people through their elected representatives with rule by government experts.  They created an ever-expanding administrative state composed of agencies like the CDC, and put credentialed experts in charge.  These experts were Progressives who immediately set to work expanding the reach of the agencies they were put in charge of.  This is known as government overreach.

We owe Fauci.  He has shown us how far America has traveled on the Progressive path. 

The Agenda for Serfdom in the Land of the Free By Janet Levy

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/08/the_agenda_for_serfdom_in_the_land_of_the_free.html

Conservative commentator Glenn Beck’s dystopic novel Agenda 21 opens with the chilling line: They took Mother away today.  Written in collaboration with Harriet Parke, the novel creates a regimented world in which people are relocated from the countryside to cities, where, under constant surveillance and threat of punishment, they can do nothing but what the authorities decide.  The aged mother is taken away because for two days she failed to generate her quota of electricity by walking her energy board.  The adult daughter has tried to make up the quota and get food for two but has apparently been found out.  It’s a world where animals, plants, and the wilderness take primacy over humans.  And there are no property rights — or any rights, for that matter.  The Authority, drawing on a law called Agenda 21, takes care of everything.

It’s no coincidence that the frightening novel — which could well become a reality should the leftist global strategy succeed — is named after the U.N.’s Agenda 21.  Here’s how Rosa Koire, a land use and development expert, described the U.N. document: “an inventory and control plan of all land, all water, all minerals, all plants, all animals, all construction, all means of production all food, all energy, all information, and all human beings in the world.”  Even from that brief description of the opening of the novel, it’s easy to visualize the parallels with Koire’s fears: a seemingly innocuous plan of “sustainable development” for the 21st century is in fact a social engineering program to achieve global governance.  With surveillance, individual liberties will go, and with individual liberties gone, representative governments will perish.  The erosion of government as we know it has already begun — with the slow strangling of local government.

Agenda 21 was introduced at the U.N. Earth Summit in 1992, along with the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), as the “comprehensive blueprint for the reorganization of human society.”  Together, they toll the death knell for wealth creation and economic and personal liberty, based on the fallacious assumption that development will lead to the extinction of life on Earth.  With top-down controls, they aim to end local power and vest it in a global governance system.  Environment protection is the excuse and weapon for this draconian program to fundamentally transform human lives, force citizens to surrender their liberties, and enforce socialist global control.  The agenda is political.

The Convention on Biological Diversity was created under the pretense of restoring biodiversity in the U.S.  It was a proposal to set aside land in North America for “rewilding” — to protect biodiversity from human influence and reintroduce animals into areas of human habitation.  Anti–property rights directives that implemented a Wildlands agenda called for the eventual elimination of private property to use it for the “common good.”

Iran Fantasizes That It Has Israel On The Run The Mullahs’ delusions. Hugh Fitzgerald

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/08/iran-fantasizes-it-has-israel-run-hugh-fitzgerald/

Iranian leaders have a rich fantasy life. Possibly It has something to do with their deep belief in the Return of the Hidden Imam. Twelver Shi’ism may have its points, but a grasp of reality is not one of them. Iran has recently become convinced, despite all the evidence, that it has been outplaying Israel ever since its drone attack on the MV Mercer Street in the Gulf of Oman.

The report on this development is here: “Iran believes it has Israel on the run,” by Seth J. Frantzman, Jerusalem Post, August 7, 2021:

When tensions rose with the US, UK and Israel after the attack, Iran shifted the frontline to Lebanon and Gaza, targeting Israel with rockets last week. When Israel responded, Iranian-backed Hezbollah fired more than 10 rockets from southern Lebanon at Israel on Friday.

Was the Iranian attack on the MV Mercer Street a success? It turned out that the vessel was Japanese-owned, and had been for some months; Israel’s only connection was that it managed the ship for its owners. Iranian naval intelligence had not kept abreast of that recent change in ownership. Now Iran, embarrassed at its mistake, has denied that it was behind the attack, but the intelligence seen by Israel, the U.S., and the U.K. have convinced all three that Tehran is lying. It is the U.K., one of whose citizens was killed in the attack, that has introduced a resolution at the UN Security Council condemning Iran for the attack. Iran’s denial of responsibility has convinced no one, but made it look even more foolish than if it had simply remained silent. The attack on the MV Mercer Street, any way you look at it, has become for Iran a public relations fiasco.

In an attempt to deflect attention away from the MV Mercer Street, Iran instructed Hezbollah to launch rockets into Israel, a response, so it was claimed, to Israeli artillery fire on Hezbollah targets. In its largest attack, Hezbollah launched 19 rockets toward Israel. Not one did any damage to Israel. Ten of the rockets were intercepted by the Iron Dome missile defense system. Six were not intercepted because the Israelis, having calculated from their trajectories that they would fall harmlessly in open fields, didn’t need to shoot them down. The remaining three fell short, landing in Lebanon itself; the damage they may have done to Lebanese civilians is not known. This attack, like that on the MV Mercer Street, did no discernible damage to Israel or Israeli interests; the successful interceptions of all ten Hezbollah rockets that potentially could have caused harm showed how accurate are Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile defenses.

Biden Sends 3,000 Troops, Offers Taliban Bribes, As Afghanistan Disaster Looms Biden tried to negotiate with Islamic terrorists. He’s shocked they didn’t keep their word. Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/08/biden-sends-3000-troops-offers-taliban-bribes-daniel-greenfield/

“The likelihood that there’s going to be a Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely,” Joe Biden claimed in July.

He denied an intelligence assessment that the Afghan government would fall in six months.

The current intelligence assessment is that the Taliban may take Afghanistan by September 11.

Biden has been reduced to bribing the Taliban with foreign aid in exchange for a promise not to attack the United States embassy in Kabul. The proposal to fund terrorists is criminally treasonous and since the ranks of the Taliban include any number of Jihadis, and their old Al Qaeda allies have a presence in Afghanistan, that’s setting up our diplomats to be killed.

Obama had his Benghazi, Biden is trying to have his own Saigon in dusty old Kabul.

After Biden announced the withdrawal, the Taliban swiftly began sweeping up territory, first the rural areas and then provincial capitals. There is no point in listing the numbers because by the time you read this the Taliban will hold more territory than they did when this was written.

When Biden announced with great fanfare that the United States was withdrawing, there were 2,500 American soldiers in Afghanistan. Despite falsely claiming that there was a complete withdrawal, he left behind 650 soldiers to provide security for American diplomats in Kabul.

Now 3,000 soldiers are heading back to Afghanistan to help evacuate Americans.

Another 3,500 soldiers will be on standby in case the situation continues to worsen.

Leverage Lost: U.S. Dangles Aid to Prevent Taliban Attack on Embassy in Kabul By Jimmy Quinn

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/u-s-will-withhold-aid-if-the-taliban-attacks-embassy-in-kabul/

The Biden administration is dangling the possibility of U.S. aid to a potential future Taliban-controlled government of Afghanistan, in a last-ditch bid to prevent an assault on its embassy in Kabul.

The situation in the country is in free fall. Since the start of a blitz last week, Taliban fighters have now taken eleven provincial capitals, as U.S. efforts to negotiate a political solution and a desperate plea to the group to negotiate a power-sharing agreement founder. The deadline for the completion of the U.S. withdrawal is August 31, and the White House and Pentagon have demonstrated little interest in significantly higher levels of air strikes to stop the Taliban’s advance.

Washington is now placing its hopes in a diplomatic push, one feature of which is to convince the Taliban not to attack the U.S. embassy in Kabul, if the Afghan capital falls, the New York Times reported today.

As the Times reports, part of this push includes preventing a Taliban assault on the U.S. embassy by saying that keeping it open is the only way a government the group runs can possibly receive future financial assistance from Washington.

Zalmay Khalilzad, Washington’s Afghanistan envoy and a veteran of the Bush and Trump administrations, has spearheaded the U.S. diplomatic effort.

Earlier this week, as Khalilzad traveled to Doha to meet Taliban negotiators, he and other administration officials faced criticism for saying that the Taliban would fail to gain international legitimacy if it came to power by force.

Border Patrol Encountered 212,000 Migrants in July, Breaking 21-Year Record By Caroline Downey

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/number-of-migrant-encounters-at-border-surpasses-200000-for-first-time-in-21-years/

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced Thursday that border patrol agents apprehended over 212,000 undocumented migrants in July, breaking the 200,000 threshold for the first time in 21 years, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data.

During a stop at the border in Texas, Mayorkas commented that 212,672 migrants were encountered in July, a 13 percent increase over the influx of 188,000 migrants encountered in June. He acknowledged that the rapidly deteriorating situation at the border constitutes a crisis, calling it “one of the toughest challenges we face.”

He added that 95,788 of those detainees, mostly single adults rather than families, were expelled under Trump-era Title 42 authorizing border officials to deport migrants suspected of positive COVID infection who could pose a public health risk. This, however, represented a 10,000 person decrease in the number of migrants who removed under that measure in June.

While conceding that the statistics are daunting, Mayorkas offered that the border emergency is not a black and white issue, adding, “It is complicated, changing and involves vulnerable people at a time of a global pandemic.”

The administration previously predicted that the number of migrant encounters would drop off during the hot summer months, as is typical.

The secretary confirmed that the crisis has particularly escalated in recent months, with skyrocketing border apprehensions over the summer. While he suggested that the upticks in border crossings originated under former President Trump’s leadership, starting in April 2020, he recognized that “the increase is most certainly sharper over the last several months and greater than in June.”

Mayorkas’ statement lends credence to the assertions of many Republican lawmakers  that Biden’s negligence on border enforcement and revocation of rules implemented under Trump have created an unprecedented border disaster.

Do Masks Work? A review of the evidence

https://www.city-journal.org/do-masks-work-a-review-of-the-evidence

“Seriously people—STOP BUYING MASKS!” So tweeted then–surgeon general Jerome Adams on February 29, 2020, adding, “They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus.” Two days later, Adams said, “Folks who don’t know how to wear them properly tend to touch their faces a lot and actually can increase the spread of coronavirus.” Less than a week earlier, on February 25, public-health authorities in the United Kingdom had published guidance that masks were unnecessary even for those providing community or residential care: “During normal day-to-day activities facemasks do not provide protection from respiratory viruses, such as COVID-19 and do not need to be worn by staff.” About a month later, on March 30, World Health Organization (WHO) Health Emergencies Program executive director Mike Ryan said that “there is no specific evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any particular benefit.” He added, “In fact there’s some evidence to suggest the opposite” because of the possibility of not “wearing a mask properly or fitting it properly” and of “taking it off and all the other risks that are otherwise associated with that.”

Surgical masks were designed to keep medical personnel from inadvertently infecting patients’ wounds, not to prevent the spread of viruses. Public-health officials’ advice in the early days of Covid-19 was consistent with that understanding. Then, on April 3, 2020, Adams announced that the CDC was changing its guidance and that the general public should hereafter wear masks whenever sufficient social distancing could not be maintained.

Fast-forward 15 months. Rand Paul has been suspended from YouTube for a week for saying, “Most of the masks you get over the counter don’t work.” Many cities across the country, following new CDC guidance handed down amid a spike in cases nationally caused by the Delta variant, are once again mandating indoor mask-wearing for everyone, regardless of inoculation status. The CDC further recommends that all schoolchildren and teachers, even those who have had Covid-19 or have been vaccinated, should wear masks.

The CDC asserts this even though its own statistics show that Covid-19 is not much of a threat to schoolchildren. Its numbers show that more people under the age of 18 died of influenza during the 2018–19 flu season—a season of “moderate severity” that lasted eight months—than have died of Covid-19 across more than 18 months. What’s more, the CDC says that out of every 1,738 Covid-19-related deaths in the U.S. in 2020 and 2021, just one has involved someone under 18 years of age; and out of every 150 deaths of someone under 18 years of age, just one has been Covid-related. Yet the CDC declares that schoolchildren, who learn in part from communication conveyed through facial expressions, should nevertheless hide their faces—and so should their teachers.

How did mask guidance change so profoundly? Did the medical research on the effectiveness of masks change—and in a remarkably short period of time—or just the guidance on wearing them?