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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION

50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

Interrogated By Cruz, Diplomat Gives False Testimony About Biden’s Billion Dollar Bribe James D. Agresti

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/12/02/interrogated-by-cruz-diplomat-gives-false-testimony-about-bidens-billion-dollar-bribe/

During a November 30th hearing of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a senior State Department official gave false testimony about a billion-dollar bribery scandal involving Joe Biden. The official, George Kent, is Joe Biden’s appointee to be the next U.S. ambassador to Estonia.

At Kent’s nomination hearing, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, questioned him about Biden’s actions in Ukraine that occurred while Kent was overseeing anti-corruption efforts in Europe and working in Ukraine. At the time, Biden was the vice president and serving as President Obama’s point man for Ukraine.

This affair began in March 2014 when Biden gave a speech before the Ukrainian parliament in which he promised that the U.S. would help Ukraine increase its gas production. That same month, a corrupt Ukrainian oligarch placed Biden’s son Hunter on the board of his gas company and began paying Hunter $83,333 per month.

Cruz directly asked Kent, “Did Joe Biden do anything that benefited the corrupt oligarch who was paying his son a million dollars a year?” Kent attempted to dodge the question, but Cruz pressed him, and Kent replied, “He did not.”

THE TWITTER FILES: MATT TAIBBI *****

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1598822959866683394.html

1. Thread: THE TWITTER FILES
2. What you’re about to read is the first installment in a series, based upon thousands of internal documents obtained by sources at Twitter.
3. The “Twitter Files” tell an incredible story from inside one of the world’s largest and most influential social media platforms. It is a Frankensteinian tale of a human-built mechanism grown out the control of its designer.
4. Twitter in its conception was a brilliant tool for enabling instant mass communication, making a true real-time global conversation possible for the first time.
5. In an early conception, Twitter more than lived up to its mission statement, giving people “the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.”
6. As time progressed, however, the company was slowly forced to add those barriers. Some of the first tools for controlling speech were designed to combat the likes of spam and financial fraudsters.
7. Slowly, over time, Twitter staff and executives began to find more and more uses for these tools. Outsiders began petitioning the company to manipulate speech as well: first a little, then more often, then constantly.
8. By 2020, requests from connected actors to delete tweets were routine. One executive would write to another: “More to review from the Biden team.” The reply would come back: “Handled.”

Communism’s hundred-year war on humanity We need to connect the pieces to see the big picture: By Don Feder

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/dec/2/communisms-hundred-year-war-on-humanity/

When Bolsheviks stormed the Winter Palace in 1917, it wasn’t just the start of the Russian Revolution, but the beginning of communism’s century-long war on humanity.

The global conflict has included civil wars and culture wars, gulags and killing fields, indoctrination and subversion, planned starvation and ethnic cleansing.

It’s the forever war, fought on five continents, for a system that has failed miserably wherever it’s been imposed, but still never lacks true believers willing to kill for its utopian vision. And (bitter irony) they commit unspeakable crimes in the name of humanity.

We fought communism directly in Korea and Vietnam and covertly throughout the 20th century. It created the sexual revolution and the terrorist war on the West. Critical race theory is its brainchild, wokeism its handmaiden.

The storm unleashed by Lenin and his gang still rages, from China to Caracas, and from Ukraine to American cities.

In China, protests against the regime’s draconian lockdowns (which include the bolting shut the doors of apartments) have quickly spread across the country. COVID-19 controls were the spark, but the protests quickly became demands for democracy and the ouster of Chinese ruler Xi Jinping.

At one demonstration, a local communist party boss warned protesters against being manipulated by “foreign influences.” A man in the crowd shot back: “Do you mean Marx and Engels?”

The Chinese Communist Party has presided over the bloodiest regime in history. Since 1949, it has killed as many as 50 million in the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and all of the other attempts to remake mankind.

Oath Keepers Verdict: A Dangerous Escalation in Criminalizing Dissent New ground is set with every egregious indictment and conviction with dire consequences for the future of political speech and activity.  By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2022/12/01/oath-keepers-verdict-a-dangerous-escalation-in-criminalizing-dissent/

One year after the events of January 6—despite their best efforts—federal prosecutors still hadn’t filed a single criminal charge that came anything close to resembling “insurrection” or domestic terrorism. Democrats and regime media were agitated: How could they continue promoting the four-hour disturbance as an attempted coup if the most prevalent offense charged by the Department of Justice a year later was the petty misdemeanor of “parading” in the Capitol? Even the chief judge for the D.C. district court overseeing each January 6 case had publicly expressed her frustration that the government wasn’t producing harsher indictments against Trump supporters.

So Matthew Graves, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, swooped in to save face. Eleven members of the Oath Keepers, an alleged militia group, were charged on January 12, 2022 with seditious conspiracy for their involvement in the Capitol protest. Elmer “Stewart” Rhodes and 10 others were accused of conspiring “to oppose by force the authority of the Government of the United States, and by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States.” The law the Oath Keepers attempted to stop, Graves claimed, was the “peaceful transfer of power” vested in both the 12th and 20th amendments.

The indictment was preposterous on its face, something only a grand jury seated in the most Democratic city in the country could countenance. None faced a weapons charge, raising the natural question of how a group of military veterans, most suffering various degrees of service-related disabilities, planned to overtake the government “by force” without a single firearm or explosive device. Despite constant talk in the media about the Oath Keepers’ quick reaction force, individuals who brought weapons with them on the drive to Washington left them behind in a Virginia hotel—legally—so as to not violate the city’s strict gun control laws.

Some militia.

Prof. Jason Hill at the Freedom Center’s Restoration Weekend Shillman Fellow outlines the legacy we must leave to future generations. VIDEO AND TRANSCRIPT

https://www.frontpagemag.com/prof-jason-hill-at-the-freedom-centers-restoration-weekend/

Jason Hill:

I often start my talks with an epigraph and it goes something like this. The barbarians are not at the gates and the jungles are not approaching the cities. The barbarians are inside the cities and the jungles are our cities. The barbarians move openly among us like sinister ghouls, dressed in suits and ties, dresses, and stilettos that can hurt and do hurt the pavements. They are wicked men and nefarious she-devils. But America, the most exceptional and unprecedented phenomenon in history, is in an age of moral crisis, an age of nihilism in which values and the good are destroyed for the sake of destruction and because America is good. Our culture today is unfortunately bankrupt, destitute, intellectually bankrupt, morally bankrupt and spiritually bankrupt.

Now whether we believe in the great reset, the council of stakeholders, the financial cartel, the stakeholders of global capitalists, the machinations of the World Economic Forum, ESG logic, the climate catastrophists, the open board of globalists who, with full forethought of malice, aid and abet the genocide of our young people through the importation of drugs, including fentanyl, and the infiltration of gang cartels and the crime and the civic destabilization that come with them, in order to place a republic on the verge of a nervous breakdown is irrelevant.

A GOP With Backbone Would Support Elon Musk, Punish Apple, And Fight For Free Speech On Twitter By: John Daniel Davidson

https://thefederalist.com/2022/12/01/a-gop-with-backbone-would-support-elon-musk-punish-apple-and-fight-for-free-speech-on-twitter/

Instead of speaking out against Apple, Republicans have been disturbingly silent, which means they still have no idea what time it is.

Apple’s threat to remove Twitter from its App store for the crime of being a slightly more open forum for free speech under Elon Musk has been met with a chorus of outrage and substantive threats of congressional action by Republican leaders.

Just kidding. Republicans have barely said anything about it, and establishment Republicans have said nothing at all. With the exception of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who offered his opinion on a matter outside his purview as a governor, Apple’s threat to crush Twitter has been met more or less with silence, even from members of the GOP who consider themselves conservative. (Sen. Mike Lee, to his credit, tossed out a tweet saying Apple’s threat makes the case for the Open Apps Markets Act. But he’s the exception to the rule.) And though Apple leaders apparently smoothed over the “misunderstanding” with Musk on Wednesday afternoon, we have all seen this pattern: Big Tech’s anti-speech aggression always turns out to be a “mistake” or “misunderstanding” as soon as enough people notice.

What American Conservatism Exists to Conserve by Christopher DeMuth

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2022/11/what-american-conservatism-exists-to-conserve/

EXCERPT

Have you noticed that almost every progressive initiative subverts the American nation, as if by design? Explicitly so in opening national borders, disabling immigration controls and transferring sovereignty to international bureaucracies. But it also works from within—elevating group identity above citizenship; fomenting racial, ethnic and religious divisions; disparaging common culture and the common man; throwing away energy independence; defaming our national history as a story of unmitigated injustice; hobbling our national future with gargantuan debts that will constrain our capacity for action.

But my program would also address causes of national political disorder in which recent conservative politicians have been fully complicit. This would include returning to a balanced federal budget outside of wars and other emergencies; redirecting federal spending from personal entitlements and income transfers to public goods such as national defence and infrastructure; withdrawing the collective-bargaining privileges of public-employee unions; and instituting a stable currency—not 10 per cent or 5 per cent inflation, nor even the current goal of 2 per cent inflation that quintuples prices in a single lifetime, but 0 per cent.

And my nationalist program would include not only measures that reinstitute the historical tried-and-true but also thoroughly modern innovations. These include universal school choice, which would give all parents the wherewithal to direct resources to the schools they think best for their children, and initiatives to mobilise science and enterprise to dominate China in advanced computation, communications and weaponry and to repatriate production of national essentials such as pharmaceuticals.

The Elites’ War On Food

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/12/02/the-elites-war-on-food/

A few months back, stories of “suspicious” fires at food-production plants raged across the media. The narrative said the sites were being sabotaged to disrupt the food supply. And it was most likely wrong. But that doesn’t mean there is no effort on the part of Western elites to put the peasants on a strict diet.

Most by now have seen reports that Dutch officials are closing as many as 3,000 farms in the Netherlands, the world’s second-largest exporter of agricultural products by value even though it’s only slightly larger than Maryland, to comply with crackpot European Union carbon dioxide emissions rules. It’s possible that eventually more than 11,000 farms will be shut down, and 17,600 forced to sharply cut their livestock numbers.

On our side of the Atlantic, the malefactors are also busy. Just the News is reporting that the Environmental Protection Agency is quietly quadrupling the regulatory cost of carbon emissions in a new war on fossil fuels, which is, of course, also a war on the food supply.

“If you think about the fact that they would impose this damage factor, let’s say on farmers, because it applies to fertilizer,” Louisiana Solicitor General Liz Murill said on the John Solomon Reports podcast. “Fertilizer emits nitrous oxide. So fertilizer is a big contributor. If every family farmer now is going to have to pay more to obtain fertilizer to fertilize crops that feed us, well, what’s that going to do to the price of food?”

Are these mere coincidences, entirely unrelated, isolated events?

If You Really Wanted to Destroy the United States, Then . . . It would be hard to imagine any planned agenda to destroy America that would have been as injurious as what we already suffered the last two years.  By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2022/11/30/if-you-really-wanted-to-destroy-the-united-states-then/

First, you would surrender our prior energy independence. 

Reduce new gas and oil leases on federal lands to the lowest levels of any president in history. Cut back production at precisely the time the world is emerging from a two-year lockdown with pent-up consumer demand. 

Make war on coal and nuclear power. Drain the strategic petroleum reserve to make the pain for consumers more bearable for midterm election advantage.

Cancel the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge oil and gas field. Block pipelines like the Keystone oil pipeline and the Constitution natural gas line.

Overregulate and demonize frackers and horizontal drillers. Ensure there is less investment for their exploration and production. 

Make use of internal combustible engines or fossil fuel power generation prohibitively expensive. Achieve a green oil-dependency along the lines of contemporary Europe.

Second, print trillions of dollars in new currency as the lockdowns end, demand rises, and consumers are already saturated with COVID-19 subsidies. Keep interest rates low, well below the rate of inflation, as you print more money. Ensure that passbook holders earn no interest at the very time prices skyrocket to the highest per annum level in 40 years. 

“Spread the wealth” by sending money to those who already have enough, while making it less valuable for those deemed to have too much. Ensure runaway high prices to wean the middle class off its consumerism and supposedly to inspire them to buy less junk they don’t need. Damn the rich in the open and in the abstract, court them in the concrete and secret of darkness.

Third, end America’s physical boundaries. Render it an amorphous people and anywhere space. End any vestigial difference between a citizen and resident. Up the current nearly 50 million who were not born in the United States —27 percent of California’s population—to 100 million and more by allowing 3 million illegal aliens to enter per year. 

Fourth, destroy the public trust in its elections. Render Election Day irrelevant. Make proper auditing of 110 million mail-in/early ballots impossible. Normalize ballot harvesting and curing. 

Americans Are Losing Trust in the Military The rise of woke politics has undermined public confidence in the brass.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/americans-are-losing-trust-in-the-military-reagan-institute-survey-11669848047?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

The current era is marked by fading trust in U.S. institutions, but confidence in one pillar has held up: the military. But now even that is eroding, and the question is whether the brass will get the message.

The Reagan Institute releases an annual survey of public attitudes on national defense, and this year only 48% reported having “a great deal of confidence” in the U.S. military in results first detailed here. That’s down from 70% in 2018, and within the margin error of last year’s 45%.

This is consistent with other surveys. Pew Research this year noted a 14-point drop since 2020 in Americans who said they had a great deal of confidence in the military to act in the public’s interest.

The Reagan poll asked Americans what is driving the decline. It isn’t the ability to carry out missions or win in a fight. It is “things going on outside the core competencies of the military,” says Reagan’s Roger Zakheim. “Call it politicization, call it wokeness,” but that’s where “you can connect the dots.”