RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/12/bidens-travel-restrictions-dont-follow-the-science/

The rules should apply to everyone, regardless of citizenship or residency status, and use all the scientific tools available.

 J oe Biden never tires of saying his COVID-19 policies follow “the science.” He recently pontificated that he would battle the emerging Omicron coronavirus variant “with science and speed, not chaos and confusion.” So why is he relying on policies that he earlier criticized as xenophobic and ineffective and that are being condemned around the world as racist?

Back in January 2020, little was known about the emerging disease COVID-19 and the virus that causes it, SARS-CoV-2. Tests, vaccines, and treatments were unavailable. All that anyone knew for sure was that the disease seemed to have started in Wuhan, China, and that is where nearly all the known cases were. The Trump administration announced on January 31, 2020, that the United States would temporarily suspend the entry of foreign nationals who had been in China during the prior 14-day period.

Later that day, Biden accused Trump of “xenophobia” and “fear mongering.” So-called “fact checkers” labored mightily to claim that Biden wasn’t specifically referring to the China travel ban when he made his remarks because he might not have been aware of the travel restrictions. But he certainly was aware of the ban when he tweeted the next day, “We are in the midst of a crisis with the coronavirus. We need to lead the way with science — not Donald Trump’s record of hysteria, xenophobia, and fear-mongering.” On March 12, 2020, after Trump expanded the travel ban to include Europe, Biden tweeted, “Banning all travel from Europe — or any other part of the world — will not stop it.”

Biden campaign adviser and now White House chief of staff Ron Klain was certainly aware of the travel restrictions when he testified to Congress on February 5, five days after they were announced. Klain labeled the restrictions an ineffective “Band-Aid” because they did not cover American citizens traveling from China and were based on “the color of the passport someone carries.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/12/flash_mobs_.html

“We need to be shocked by a generation’s bold descent into anomy. When absence of conscience becomes commonplace, when sociopaths loiter around every corner and patrol every sidewalk, and when the fruits of a liberal society fall largely to those who least appreciate the origins and purposes of our freedoms, then promises of life, liberty, and happiness for all are in jeopardy, and democracy itself is at stake.”

The facile assembly of large mobs of miscreants to raid retailers in San Francisco, Oakland, and Los Angeles is even more alarming than it seems.

The events are novel and even a bit entertaining, posing only a minor challenge to law enforcement if police are permitted to intercede.

More important than the incidents per se, however, is what they may reveal about the participants.

Lootings have been widely reported, mainly on the West Coast.  At Union Square in the heart of San Francisco:

“At least 40 thieves allegedly broke into a Louis Vuitton store on Friday [November 26], grabbing whatever they could before loading it into a series of cars parked curbside out front. The shoplifting caravan cut a swath through San Francisco’s high-end boutiques, creating a scene of chaos while stealing more than $1 million in merchandise.”

The New York Post described the another event, in Oakland, California:

“Hey, look — here are 80 people engaged in a large-scale smash-and-grab robbery of a Nordstrom in Walnut Creek outside San Francisco last weekend, one of a series of jaw-dropping thefts over the last several days, including an operation that cleared out a Louis Vuitton on San Francisco’s Union Square.”

Another Oakland location had  two similar lootings:

 “Prime 365 says more than 30 burglars ran through their store.

“In [a] video, you can see a long line of people rushing in, and in one instance, even pushing each other out of the way to grab hats off a shelf.”

Although the signature of these attacks is the large number of offenders, several robberies have involved, in each instance, only a handful of perpetrators (perps). Press accounts do not distinguish assaults with dozens of offenders from those with only a few, using the same terms – “flash mobs” and “smash and grab,”” for both.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/12/buttigiegs-ambitions-have-always-been-detached-his-daniel-greenfield/

Everyone knows someone who was touted as bright, an achiever, and most likely to succeed… not because they actually ever did anything, but because that was their image.

That’s Buttigieg in a nutshell.

Some politicians build cults of personality around them. Buttigieg is one of those honor students who makes his ambition seem like aspiration, entirely apart from anything they’ve actually accomplished. You weren’t supposed to ask what Obama had actually done to deserve the Senate and the White House. Likewise, you’re not supposed to look at Buttigieg’s actual record.

Buttigieg is currently being touted as the Dem candidate in 2024 even while the supply chain crisis that he’s supposed to be addressing is wrecking the economy.

It’s a strange mismatch between the headlines that could have been written by his PAC and the reporting on the actual consequences of the DOT’s inaction and incompetence on his watch.

But that was always the case. 

When I visited South Bend, it was a disaster, but the media’s one story about the place was how Buttigieg had brought “hope” to it. His presidential run was accompanied by virtually no scrutiny about his time there, aside from a police shooting of a black man.

Buttigieg’s disastrous mismanagement of South Bend and now the DOT has never impeded his political ambitions. Like Obama, he insists that he should be judged by his aspirations, not by his accomplishments.

Americans, like the residents of South Bend, are already paying the price for Buttigieg’s ambition and incompetence. 

https://blacklivesmatter.com/black-xmas/

Black Xmas

As we prepare ourselves for the holiday season, we are bombarded with ads that seek to whip us up into a consumerist frenzy. Black Friday sales are being rolled out weeks in advance of Thanksgiving and, at every turn, white-supremacist-capitalism is telling us to spend our money on things that we don’t need, to reap profits for corporations.

As BLMLA organizer, Jan Williams, reminds us, “Capitalism doesn’t love Black people.” In fact, white-supremacist-capitalism invented policing, initially as chattel-slavery-era “paddy rollers,” in order to protect its interests and put targets on the backs of Black people. Under modern-day policing, those targets have been affixed to the backs of Black people like, #JohnCrawford and #StevenTaylor, who were murdered by police inside Walmart stores; like #YuvetteHenderson and #RedelJones, Black mothers who were accused of petty thefts before their lives were stolen by police; and like #AlbertRamonDorsey and #DennisToddRogers, who were gunned down when 24-Hour-Fitness locations called in police on Black male patrons…twice.

Beginning in 2014, in response to John Crawford’s murder by police in Beavercreek, Ohio, Black Lives Matter has been challenging people to “dream of a #BlackXmas,” to intentionally use our economic resources to disrupt white-supremacist-capitalism and build Black community:

#BuildBlack: Invest in Black-led, Black-serving organizations by making donations in the names of your loved ones as holiday gifts.
#BuyBlack: When buying items, spend exclusively with Black-owned businesses from Black Friday through New Year.
#BankBlack: Move your money from white corporate banks (that finance gentrification, prisons, and environmental degradation) to Black-owned ones.

Wondering where to start? Resources are available at blackxmas.org.

We’re also taking your suggestions! Have a Black organization, business, or bank we should profile? Let us know! You can also demonstrate your support by changing your social media profile picture to the #BlackXmas graphic:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-spreads-faster-than-covid-19-vaccination-distribution-breakthrough-infection-omicron-11638570230?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

It deserves a wow. Some 57% of the human population has received at least one dose of the Covid-19 vaccine, and 45% are fully vaccinated, in less than a year.

This means the vaccine has spread approximately twice as fast as the virus, never mind that the virus itself is an exceptionally fast spreader that organizes its own distribution without help from trained administrators and sub-zero storage.

Add that infection also offers a kind of vaccination, so now two kinds of resistance to Covid-19 have been spreading with unprecedented rapidity through the human population.

Numerous were the complaints about how Delta spoiled the summer even for vaccinated people, but it’s not clear why this was so. Vaccination takes away Covid’s deadliest property, its novelty to the human immune system, turning it into the equivalent of a cold or flu. Nobody lets the prospect of a cold or flu spoil their holiday (though perhaps they should for the sake of their elderly in-laws).

The point is not frivolous. It suggests why, rather than a dark new chapter, the Omicron variant may be our last big wallow in hysteria, from which we will awake slightly red-faced in the morning.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/john-eastman-right-resist-january-6-committee/

The name of the game Congress is playing with its partisan inquisition is intimidation. John Eastman is right to resist. Every American who cares about our Constitutional rights should support him.

John Eastman, a former member of Donald Trump’s legal team, has just declined, through his attorney, to cooperate with the congressional inquiry into the events of January 6, 2021 at the Capitol.

I think he was right to do so, for several reasons.

In the first place, the congressional inquiry would be better named a congressional vendetta. Its composition is heavily weighted towards Democrats. The committee includes no “ranking members” of the opposition as the rules stipulate, hence the frequent invocation of the “Star Chamber” in descriptions of the inquiry. It is less an investigation than an inquisition.

Given the frankly biased structure of the congressional panel, Eastman, like Steve Bannon before him, was right to decline to testify or provide documents to aid in his own prosecution.

For readers who are a little fuzzy about just who John Eastman is, the relevant fact is that (apart from being a brilliant constitutional lawyer at the storied Claremont Institute), Eastman wrote the now infamous memo, originally a two-pager, later expanded to six pages, in December 2020 outlining various strategies that team Trump might consider in response to the 2020 election.

It is not, as widely reported, a scheme to “overturn” the election. It is an effort to layout various ways in which an election that was widely seen to be corrupt could be lawfully challenged.

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/womens-tennis-has-balls-does-wall

China is ruled by an increasingly totalitarian regime that uses technology to spy on its citizens. It is, at this moment, carrying out a genocide against its Uyghur Muslim population. It regularly vanishes people who dare to dissent. And it wants to control the terms of debate, politics and business worldwide.

Having disappeared doctors and scientists who tried to blow the whistle on Covid-19, the Chinese Communist Party has now targeted Peng Shuai, a tennis star who accused a former top Chinese government official of sexual assault. “Even if it is like an egg hitting a rock, or if I am like a moth drawn to the flame, inviting self-destruction, I will tell the truth about you,” she wrote on the social media platform Weibo. Then her message disappeared. And so did she.

These are facts discoverable to any American with an internet connection, which the hedge fund investor Ray Dalio surely has in his Greenwich, Connecticut, mansion.

Smart guy, one imagines, to be trusted with managing $150 billion of other people’s money, as his company Bridgewater does. But when Dalio was asked yesterday on CNBC about China’s human rights record, and how he thinks about it with regard to his investments, he feigned ignorance.

“I can’t be an expert in those types of things,” he told interviewer Andrew Ross Sorkin. “I really have no idea.” He went on to compare China’s government to that of a strict parent, and offered some mush of moral relativism about how the United States does bad things, too. This from a man who wrote a book called “Principles.”

You really should watch the whole thing:

https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/02/biden-suggests-he-played-a-part-in-negotiations-between-israel-and-egypt-during-the-six-day-war/

Either Joe Biden’s faulty memory or his lifelong habit of padding his resume was on display Wednesday during a menorah lighting at the White House in celebration of Hanukkah.

During his remarks before the lighting, Biden bragged about “the many times” he’d been to Israel, and then decided to alter history and insert himself as an important player in the Six-Day War.

“I have known every — every prime minister well since Golda Meir, including Golda Meir,” Biden said to applause. “And during the Six-Day War, I had an opportunity to — she invited me to come over because I was going to be the liaison between she and the Egyptians about the Suez, and so on and so forth.”

This would be an impressive story, except Meir wasn’t Israel’s prime minister during the Six Day War of 1967 (she was PM from March 17, 1969 to June 3, 1974), and Biden was still in law school at the time, (where he ranked a dismal 76th in his class of 85).

National Review’s Jim Geraghty reports that Biden “did indeed meet Golda Meir in 1973—six years after the Six Day War,” but according to a contemporaneous classified Israeli memo, he spent his time trying to convince the prime minister to unilaterally withdrawal from areas in the region, rather than acting as an important liaison between Israel and the Egyptians.

Biden warned that Israel’s actions in the territories it had captured during the Six Day War, including the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, were leading to “creeping annexation.”

Since he believed Israel was militarily dominant in the region, he suggested the Jewish state might initiate a first step for peace through unilateral withdrawals from areas with no strategic importance.

The official said Biden criticized the Nixon administration for being “dragged by Israel,” complaining that it was impossible to have a real debate in the Senate about the Middle East as senators were fearful of saying things unpopular with Jewish voters.

Meir rejected Biden’s call for unilateral steps, launching into a speech about the region and its problems (possibly the spiel Biden alluded to in his own comments years later).

The official added his own personal impressions regarding the young senator at the bottom of the document, saying Biden was full of respect toward the Israeli leader and repeatedly said he had come to learn, “and yet while speaking displayed a fervor and made comments that signaled his lack of diplomatic experience.”

There was no indication in the Israeli memo that Meir saw Biden as her liaison.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/12/03/bidens-pandemic-death-toll-its-our-own-fault/

With the Omicron variant of the novel coronavirus now the latest fashion accessory among the mask-lockdown-vaccine mandate crowd, President Joe Biden unveiled on Thursday his latest plan to keep us healthy. But we’ve seen this before. While running against President Donald Trump, he promised to “shut down the virus.” He failed.

But that’s not his fault, says the Whites House press secretary. We have only ourselves to blame. We haven’t been the pliant subjects Biden was relying on us to be. We’ve disappointed our Dear Leader.

Multiple times during the 2020 campaign Biden swore that if the country would elect him, he would end the pandemic. Yet it remains. Through Jan. 20 of this year, there were 425,000 deaths attributed to COVID-19, according to Centers for Disease Control data. The total now stands at 783,000 deaths, meaning that 358,000 have lost their lives to the disease under Biden.

Yes, more died while Trump was in office, each passing a sad occasion. But vaccinations didn’t begin until there was a little more than a month left of his presidency. Biden was the beneficiary of coming into office with a vaccination campaign already underway. And still death comes.

We won’t blame Biden for the fatalities. We understand that no one man or institution can shut down the coronavirus. But he should be dinged for his outright lie when he promised the country he’d end the pandemic. Either he knew he couldn’t do it, and intentionally misled voters, or he is dense enough to have believed his own words.

Neither possibilities reflect well on him.

On Monday, responding to the Omicron variant of the COVID virus, Biden said: “A year ago America was floundering against the first variant of Covid,” implying once again that he was responsible for America’s rapid response to the pandemic, including the rollout of the vaccines.

This, of course, is utterly false.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/02/will-the-public-finally-see-what-happened-in-the-capitol-tunnel/

For months, Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice has tried every trick in the law books to conceal from Americans a massive trove of video evidence that captured all the activity at the Capitol complex on January 6. Federal judges have played along, approving hundreds of protective orders to keep video clips—particularly footage recorded by the Capitol Police’s extensive closed-circuit television system—out of the public eye.

Time, however, is running out for the government.

Despite numerous discovery delays, Garland’s prosecutors are gradually turning over video evidence to defense attorneys as they prepare for trial. All surveillance video from the Capitol’s security system is designated “highly sensitive” government material; strict rules apply to the handling of every slice of footage.

There’s a reason why. As we have reported at American Greatness for months, one of the most scandalous untold stories about January 6 is egregious police misconduct that, in some instances, amounted to brutality by D.C. Metro and U.S. Capitol police. Had these attacks by law enforcement occured in any other public or private setting against leftist protesters, the national outrage would have resulted in mass firings and immediate calls for criminal investigations.

For example, the House of Representatives held two hearings last year related to its investigation into allegations of excessive force by members of the U.S. Park Police in LaFayette Square, located across the street from the White House, on June 1, 2020. Rioters protesting the death of George Floyd occupied the federal park for days, attacked law enforcement, set fires, and looted nearby property, which prompted the Secret Service to move President Trump to a safe location. An inspector general report later confirmed rioters assaulted federal officers with “bricks, rocks, caustic liquids, frozen water bottles, glass bottles, lit flares, rental scooters, and fireworks.” 

But LaFayette Square rioters were portrayed as victims rather than perpetrators of the violence. One activist, Kishon McDonald, a 39-year-old Navy veteran, testified to the House Natural Resources Committee in June 2020 that “police started throwing tear gas and flash-bang grenades at us for no reason . . . We were retreating. Using weapons on us was ridiculous. It just made the situation dangerous.” Officers also were accused of hitting protesters with riot shields and batons.

A similar yet more violent situation played out on Capitol Hill on January 6. Open-source video and testimonial evidence show Capitol and D.C. Metro police officers using flashbangs, “sting balls” filled with rubber projectiles, and excessive amounts of tear gas against peaceful protesters assembled outside the building an hour before the building even was breached. Other first-hand accounts describe physical assaults by police; one clip circulated on Twitter in late November shows several D.C. Metro police officers taking down and beating a protester who apparently breached a security line.

At least one protester, Ashli Babbitt, was shot and killed by Capitol Police Officer Michael Byrd, although she was unarmed and posed no lethal threat.

Hearing from the Defense 

Democrats, most Republicans, and the entire corporate news media not only have ignored provable instances of police brutality on January 6 but suggest “insurrectionists,” including Babbitt, deserved their fate. The same news organizations that for years have covered every angle of alleged police misconduct are selectively quiet when it comes to the egregious behavior by law enforcement during the Capitol protest.