DECEMBER 16, 2016-FROM JAMES FREEMAN

https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-will-we-do-without-trump-11608073543?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

EXCERPT:

This Day in Political History

Four years may seem like a long time ago, and perhaps it was given the changes since then in American politics. By mid-December of 2016 Hillary Clinton and her supporters had accepted the results of the November presidential election and were treating America’s president-elect with graciousness and respect.

Just kidding. On this day in 2016, the FBI secretly recorded a conversation between a bureau source and Trump associate Carter Page. Two months earlier, the FBI had used a bogus Clinton-funded dossier of Russian collusion claims and misled the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court into approving the first of several warrant applications focusing on Mr. Page.

Mrs. Clinton would continue for years promoting fact-free Russia conspiracy theories about her political rivals. And back on Dec. 15, 2016, many of her supporters were still seeking to prevent the winner of the November election from taking office. Calvin Woodward and Rachel La Corte of the Associated Press reported on an effort among Democrats to derail Donald Trump’s victory at the Electoral College. According to the AP report:

Republican electors are being swamped with pleas to buck tradition and cast ballots for someone else at meetings across the country Monday that are on course to ratify Trump as the winner. AP interviews with more than 330 electors from both parties found little appetite for a revolt…

The interviews found widespread Democratic aggravation with the electoral process but little expectation that the rush of anti-Trump maneuvering can stop him. For that to happen, Republican-appointed electors would have to stage an unprecedented defection.

The Embarrassing Russian Disinformation Canard By Rich Lowry

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/12/the-embarrassing-russian-disinformation-canard/

To help Biden win, former top intelligence officials, aided by a derelict media, deliberately misled the public.

If there’s one thing that the Hunter Biden laptop episode has proven, it is that former directors of the Central Intelligence Agency aren’t as adept at evaluating evidence as advertised.

Five former directors or acting directors of the CIA signed a letter asserting that the laptop, first reported by the New York Post in the weeks before the election, “has all the classic hallmarks of a Russian information operation.”

More than 50 former senior intelligence officials, including former director of national intelligence James Clapper, endorsed the letter, which was used by the Biden campaign and the press to discredit the damning emails about Hunter Biden’s business dealings.

The signatories should have thought better of their missive when they felt compelled to include the line, “We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails, provided to the New York Post by President Trump’s personal attorney, are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement.”

That also should have tipped reporters off to the fact that the letter was rank speculation masquerading as informed analysis. But true to form, they happily ran with it instead.

Where Did the New Mad Left Come From? By Victor Davis Hanson

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/12/where-did-the-new-mad-left-come-from/

Utopianism is age-old, as are its tragic consequences — and we haven’t seen the worst yet.

B outs of extreme leftism are frequent in history. Plato’s Apology, Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, and Vladimir Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? — all offer us insight into the mind and methods of the hard Left.

America has experienced surges of mainstream anarchism, socialism, and communism, most profoundly during the late 19th century, amid the Great Depression, during the Soviet-American alliance of World War II and afterward, and in the 1960s. But rarely have these radical movements openly and without apologies made such inroads into and inside government and the establishment as during the past decade.We had earlier seen massive rioting, looting, and iconoclasm, similar to the chaos of summer 2020. But seldom did they continue with the de facto approval of mayors who restrained the police and turned their downtowns over to virtual occupiers setting up “autonomous” zones. Nor had we see seen city councils defund police operations. New York’s mayor Bill de Blasio and Seattle’s mayor Jenny Durkan were not so much hard-Left Democrats or socialists as they were anarchists who ceded control of parts of American cities to other anarchists.

We cannot recall any district attorney in memory who simply declared that an entire array of crimes no longer existed, and that those convicted of them would be let loose on the public. Yet Los Angeles County district attorney George Gascón recently announced that his office will not be charging anyone arrested for making criminal threats, possessing drugs and drug paraphernalia possession, being publicly intoxicated or under the influence of a controlled substance, loitering to commit prostitution, resisting arrest, or a host of other crimes.

In essence, Gascón simply overrode the California legislature and his own county statutes. He has made up his own laws in his own private fiefdom of Los Angeles County — a jurisdiction of over 10 million, larger than 40 states.

Protect Election Integrity – Censor Anyone Who Questions the Election The threat to election integrity is coming from inside the system. Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/12/protect-election-integrity-censor-anyone-who-daniel-greenfield/

Last week, Google’s YouTube announced that “supporting the integrity” of the election required it to censor anyone alleging that “widespread fraud or errors changed the outcome of a historical U.S. Presidential election”.

By historical presidential election, Google meant this one. Democrats are still free to allege that they would have won in 2000 or 2016, if it hadn’t been for the chads or the Russians.

A huge tech monopoly closely tied to the Democrats, which was sued by the Trump administration over its illegal abuses, censoring critics of the Democrat election fraud is protecting and supporting something alright, but that thing is very definitely not integrity.

Election integrity, like fact checking, is one of those curious terms whose meaning was ‘Orwellianized’ in the last decade. Fact checking used to mean media organizations checking their facts before they published a story. Now the media has mostly done away with internal fact checking and uses fact checking to describe its efforts to censor conservative media.

Election integrity traditionally meant verifying the integrity of the process, but is now being used to mean silencing anyone who questions the integrity of the election. In both cases a term that meant protecting the integrity of an internal process has been turned inside out to mean covering up for the corruption of the internal process by censoring its outside critics.

That’s the new integrity.

Is the whole government in on this fraudulent election? By Robert Arvay

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

Every once in a while, most of us wind up in situations where we are completely baffled.  It may be a simple situation, such as having looked literally everywhere for our reading glasses, and not having found them.  Did they violate the laws of physics and just vanish?  One knows that that cannot be true, and yet, as the old saying goes, once one has ruled out every logical possibility, only the illogical remains, no matter how unlikely it is.  

Another situation is the one we are in now.  Any informed person, with a modicum of sense, can see that the presidential election results, at best, are not to be trusted and at worst are rampantly fraudulent.  Yet it seems that court after court, and investigative agencies one after the other, are turning a blind eye.  Are they violating the laws of physics?  

It turns out that the reading glasses did not disappear; they were in place, but pushed up, on one’s forehead all along.  There was a logical explanation after all.  

And sadly, it turns out that the courts and government agencies were not turning a blind eye.  They have been, all along, part of the fraud.  No matter how unlikely that seems, it is the only answer remaining.  

The Fraudulent 2020 Election Is History Unfolding before Our Eyes By Vince Coyner

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/12/the_fraudulent_2020_election_is_history_unfolding_before_our_eyes.html

History is usually written long after historical events play themselves out in real life.  It’s rare to understand the gravity of historical events as they are actually happening.

For example, I was in the Army and stationed in West Germany when the Berlin Wall came down in November of 1989.  It was news where we were, but I don’t think many of us in Rheinberg really understood that the epochal event of our generation was playing itself out only a few hundred miles away.  We look back at it today as the touchstone that it is — the death knell of the Soviet Union.  But at the time, most of us didn’t recognize it as such.

That’s likely because for all of my life, and most of my parents’ lives, the Soviet Union was the grand villain, the ubiquitous enemy, a fount of evil that simply was.  It was the perpetual enemy to be feared above all else, and it was the reason I and hundreds of thousands of others spent weeks, months, or years training to counter attacks coming from Poland or East Germany or the Soviet Union itself.

In an environment where the Soviets being enemies was as natural as gravity, it was hard to see the fall of the Wall changing the world.  But it did.  September 11 was something different altogether.  Most of the country was going about its normal business that morning, another mundane Tuesday.  Then the first plane hit.  It was a stunning event, but for a moment, we thought it was a tragedy of an accident.  The kind of bad thing that sometimes happens.  The moment the second plane hit, everyone in America knew that something was going on.  When those two buildings, those two signs of American strength and prosperity, came down, we knew that the world had changed.

And now we sit here, two decades later, and we are at a point in history no less important than the fall of the Berlin Wall or the attack on the Twin Towers.  When the Soviets or the Islamic terrorists were the enemy, we understood exactly what was at stake: our nation and our culture.  Today, both of those things are in peril, but in a far more pernicious way.

The Abraham Accords and the Intransigence of the Palestinian-Arabs in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza Alex Grobman

https://thejewishvoiceandopinion.com/the-abraham-accords-and-the-intransigence-of-the-palestinian-arabs-in-judea-samaria-and-gaza/

 The Abraham Accords, the term given to the series of agreements reached last summer allowing normal relations between Israel and several of her Arab-Muslim neighbors, including the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and now Morocco, were greeted with optimism and approval by the Trump administration.

“Everybody who joined the Abraham Accords will see the benefits for their own people,” declared US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who said he was “highly confident that many, many more nations will ultimately choose to do the right thing and recognize Israel as the rightful homeland of the Jewish people.”

In stark contrast to Pompeo’s confidence in other Arab nations’ ultimate decision to recognize the Jewish people’s return to their ancestral homeland, are the expressions emanating from the Palestinian Authority and its counterpart in Gaza, Hamas. These Palestinian groups have been brutal in their condemnation of the accords and those countries that have signed them.

Exploiting Children

Before his death this past November, Saeb Erekat, the Palestinian politician and negotiator, called the accords “a poisoned stab in the back of the Palestinian people and an attempt to try and get around international legitimacy.”

Statements such as these have an effect on the Palestinian-Arabs as well as the Arab-Muslim populations in the countries that are making peace with Israel.

For example, a report from Palestinian Media Watch, a non-profit research institute that studies Palestinian society by monitoring and analyzing its media and schoolbooks, illustrates the opposition to normalizing relations with Israel. Posted on the official Facebook page of the PA faction, Fatah, headed by PA President Mahmoud Abbas, is a video clip of Bahraini children conveying their enmity towards the Abraham Accords.

A Republican NeverTrump Postmortem How history will view these self-proclaimed conservatives and protectors of principle. Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/12/republican-nevertrump-postmortem

Of all the bizarrerie over the last four years, the Republican NeverTrump (RNT) phenomenon is the strangest. Pundits, commentators, and writers who self-identified as Republican and conservative did not see Donald Trump’s historic upset victory as a cause for celebration. Instead, they saw it as a disaster to be mourned and attacked with more vitriol than they ever expended on Barack Obama, not just one of the most progressive presidents ever elected, but a failure both at home and abroad.

Many factors explain this mystery, but one stands out: the revelation that there is indeed a bipartisan political guild that cares more about maintaining its own power, prestige, and perks than instituting policies that keep America safe, prosperous, and free.

It’s understandable that many establishment Republicans would be put off by Trump. He didn’t come from the world of government, universities, and think-tanks, which is unaccountable to the market and so can fail forever. He owned businesses where concrete results are more important than abstract theorizing or rhetorical cleverness. A world where common sense and practical wisdom are more useful than institutional “paradigms,” “grand narratives,” and received wisdom. It galled the intellectual clerisy to think that such a boor and Philistine could achieve the highest office in the most powerful nation in human history.

But once the primaries were over and Trump had won the nomination, these complaints over style and personality were beside the point, and reflected distaste for one particular kind of American identity shared by a critical mass of the over 60 million voters who put him in office. More important was one simple fact: Trump’s victory meant that Hillary Clinton, a deep-swamp creature likely to continue the disastrous polices of Barack Obama––a tax-and-spend, hyper-regulatory, civil society-intruding degradation of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights––would leave our political stage, taking her unpleasant personality, sordid ambition, mediocre achievements, and history of felonious behavior with her.

The Disunited State of America Hardworking mainstream American taxpayers are subsidizing the revolution in America’s schools. It’s time to stand up and say, “Enough.” by Larry Sand

https://amgreatness.com/2020/12/15/the-disunited-state-of-america/

“We acknowledge that we meet on stolen land.”

The above quote kicks off a contemptible “White Privilege” PowerPoint presentation that the San Diego Unified School District is forcing its teachers to watch. Authored by Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi, two high-profile race hustlers, all the usual victimology blather is in full bloom—you know, whites by virtue of their skin color are advantaged, white fragility is a real problem, etc., ad nauseam.

Unacknowledged, of course, is that this is being subsidized by taxpayers—fragile white ones and otherwise. As if the above were not despicable enough, because too many black students are failing in San Diego schools, the district will no longer let late work or bad behavior affect a child’s grade. Yes, the soft bigotry of low expectations is in full bloom in “America’s Finest City.”

It is far more than a San Diego problem, however; much education throughout the country has gone “woke.” But just how far have we gone?

The EdWeek Research Center finds that 81 percent of the nation’s teachers, principals, and district leaders support the Marxist Black Lives Matter movement. Many of America’s miseducated children are now going through an anti-American indoctrination that would have Mao Zedong beaming.

In Los Angeles, a middle school math coach created a map of police shootings for “a lesson on proportionality and graphing.”

Courage vs. Covid 2020: The Age of UnReason, the Year of Fear. Jack Kerwick

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/12/courage-vs-covid-jack-kerwick/

The present year is the Year of Fear. It is the year of raw, wildly irrational fear. 

For sure, the inexhaustible fear-mongering on the part of opportunistic political partisans in the Government-Media-Industrial-Complex has exacerbated, exponentially exacerbated, the fears of tens and tens of millions of Americans. Yet the elites have not, strictly speaking, caused this fear.

They have only revealed it for all of the world to see.

To put this in terms with which most of us have long been familiar, the transformation of a cold virus into an existential crisis legitimizing the indefinite revocation of the United States Constitution and the reduction of the Land of the Free to an internment camp—and one in which its prisoners seem only all too happy to observe “Social Distancing” protocols while cowering behind their masks—has proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that most people really are ridden with fear.    

Fear is universal. It is at once necessary and desirable—as long as it is oriented toward objects that warrant its attention. 

In other words, when the fear is reasonable, when it is proportionate to the danger posed, it is fulfilling its natural function.