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The Byzantines never awakened in time to understand what they had become. Will Americans?

The Byzantines never awakened in time to understand what they had become. Will Americans?

By: Victor Davis Hanson

American Greatness

March 15, 2023

When Constantinople finally fell to the Ottomans on Tuesday, May 29, 1453, the Byzantine Empire and its capital had survived for 1,000 years beyond the fall of the Western Empire at Rome.

Always outnumbered in a sea of enemies, the Byzantines’ survival had depended on its realist diplomacy of dividing its enemies, avoiding military quagmires, and ensuring constant deterrence.

Generations of self-sacrifice ensured ample investment in infrastructure. Each generation inherited and improved on singular aqueducts and cisterns, sewer systems, and the most complex and formidable city fortifications in the world.

Brilliant scientific advancement and engineering gave the empire advantages like swift galleys and flame throwers—an ancient precursor to napalm.

The law reigned supreme for nearly a millennium after the emperor Justinian codified a prior thousand years of Roman jurisprudence.

Yet this millennium-old crown jewel of the ancient world that once was home to 800,000 citizens had only 50,000 inhabitants left when it fell.

There were only 7,000 defenders on the walls to hold back a huge Turkish army of over 150,000 attackers.

The Islamic winners took over the once magical city of Constantine and renamed it Istanbul. It had been the home of the renowned Santa Sophia, the largest Christian church in the world for over 900 years. Almost immediately, this “Church of the Holy Wisdom” was converted into the then-largest mosque in the Islamic world, with minarets to follow.

So what happened to the once indomitable city fortress and its empire?

Christendom had cannibalized itself. Western Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy fought endlessly. Westerners often hated each other more than they did their common enemy.

In the final days of Constantinople, almost no help was sent from Western Europe to the besieged city.

250 years earlier, the Western Franks of the Fourth Crusade had detoured from the Holy Land to storm the supposedly allied Christian City of Constantinople.

Then they ransacked the city and hijacked the Byzantine Empire for a half-century. Constantinople never quite recovered.

The 14th-century Black Plague killed tens of thousands of Byzantines and scared thousands more into moving out of the cramped city.

But the aging and dying empire battled more than the challenges of internal divisions, or an unforeseen but deadly pandemic and the empire’s disastrous responses to it.

The last generations of Byzantines had inherited a global reputation and standard of living that they no longer earned.

They neglected their former civic values and fought endless battles over obscure religious texts, doctrines, and vocabulary.

They did not expand their anemic army and navy. They did not reunite their scattered Greek-speaking empire. They did not properly maintain their once life-giving walls.

Instead of earning money through their accustomed nonstop trade, they inflated their currency and were forced to melt down the city’s inherited gold and silver fixtures.

The once canny and shrewd Byzantines grew smug and naïve. Childlessness became common. Most now preferred to live outside of what had become a half-empty, often dirty, and poorly maintained city.

Meanwhile, they underestimated the growing power of the Ottomans who systematically pruned away their empire. By the mid-15th century, Islamic armies were ready to exploit fatal Byzantine weaknesses.

Sultan Mehmed II grandly announced the Ottomans were now the real, the only world power. Ascendant Ottoman armies would eventually move on to the very gates of Vienna in an effort to rule all the lands of the ancient Roman empire.

We should take heed from the last generations of the Byzantines.

Nowhere is it foreordained that America has a birthright to remain the world’s preeminent civilization.

An ascendant China seems eerily similar to the Ottomans. Beijing believes that the United States is decadent, undeserving of its affluence, living beyond its means on the fumes of the past—and very soon vulnerable enough to challenge openly.

Left and Right seem to hate each other more than they do their common enemies.

Like the Byzantines, Americans gave up defending their own borders, and simply shrugged as millions overran them as they pleased.

Our once iconic downtowns, like end-stage Constantinople before the fall, are now dirty, half-deserted, dangerous, and dysfunctional.

America prints rather than makes money, as its banks totter near bankruptcy.

Americans similarly believe they are invincible without ensuring in reality that they are. Our military is more worried about being woke than deadly.

Like Byzantines, Americans have become snarky iconoclasts, more eager to tear down art and sculpture that they no longer have the talent to create.

Current woke dogma, obscure word fights, and sanctimonious cancel culture are as antithetical to the past generations of World War II as the last generation of Constantinople was to the former great eras of the emperors Constantine, Justinian, Heraclius, and Leo.

The Byzantines never woke up in time to understand what they had become.

So far neither have Americans.

More classified docs found- what’s the difference

How About a Little Context for Pence’s Classified Docs?

The former vice president is the latest to discover classified material that was handled inappropriately.

By: Nate Jackson

The Patriot Post

January 25, 2023

Mike Pence is a truly unique politician because he places great value on honor and integrity. He’s the same guy, after all, who makes a point to avoid being alone with a woman who’s not his wife. Left-media personalities mocked him for that, just as they’re now mocking him for discovering classified documents at his Indiana home.

This does seem to be a rather disconcerting fad among members of the last three administrations, but there are some key differences.

Before we get to those differences, the gist of Pence’s story is that after multiple batches of classified documents were found in Joe Biden’s garage and think tank (chuckle, snicker), Pence ordered a search of his own home. Lawyers found “a small number of documents bearing classified markings that were inadvertently boxed and transported.” They added that Pence was “unaware” of their existence, and they alerted the National Archives. The FBI retrieved the documents a day later.

The actual material in those documents remains unknown, though we suspect a good bit of the problem here is what constitutes “classified” material in the first place. In other words, these aren’t the nuclear codes or valuable intel that jeopardizes national security or personnel. The documents are probably low-level briefings or some hand-scribbled notes. That goes for Biden and Donald Trump, too. Heck, with Hillary Clinton it was just wedding plans and yoga routines, right?

Then again, anyone in government who handles classified material must be cringing right now. Every last one of them knows they’d be in a jail cell already.

That said, “I don’t believe for a minute that Mike Pence is trying to intentionally compromise national security. Same thing about Biden and Trump,” said Senator Lindsey Graham. “But clearly, we’ve got a problem here.”

Does that problem mean Merrick Garland will appoint another special counsel? He did for Trump, which backed him into a corner for Biden.

Trump came to Pence’s defense. “Mike Pence is an innocent man,” he declared. “He never did anything knowingly dishonest in his life. Leave him alone!!!”

Now, let’s talk about what’s different here.

First of all, again, everyone knows Pence is not a corrupt political thug like Joe Biden, who used the vice presidency to cash in on a pay-to-play scheme involving his lout of a son, Hunter. Second, Pence immediately came forward with the discovery as opposed to covering it up until after a major national election like Biden did.

Biden is also cognitively impaired, and he haphazardly kept documents in a box in his garage next to his Corvette. He insisted the garage was “locked” and the docs weren’t “sitting out on the street,” but Hunter was also living in the house and driving the car at the time. Which ChiCom visitor got a peak?

It would also help to consider the cases of Trump and Clinton. Trump actively resisted attempts by the National Archives to retrieve the documents in question, while claiming publicly that presidents can declassify documents “by thinking about it.” Presidents can indeed declassify material, but it’s a bit more complicated than Trump acknowledged. Vice presidents do not have the same authority. Moreover, Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home is protected by the Secret Service, though that didn’t stop the FBI from raiding it.

Trump’s case seems to be entirely about his typical bravado. Of course, I did it, he openly admitted, because I had the authority as president. And no one was going to tell him otherwise.

As for Hillary Clinton, as secretary of state, she deliberately set up an unsecured email server in her home specifically to avoid scrutiny of her own pay-to-play corruption scheme with the State Department and the Clinton Foundation. She emailed classified material from that server, which had been compromised by foreign intelligence hackers. That’s a whole different level than secured papers.

As Mark Alexander put it, “Let’s be clear: Maintaining hard copies of some documents in a secured area of a former president’s house, which is protected by the Secret Service among other law enforcement personnel, is a minuscule national security risk compared to unsecured transmitting and storing of highly classified information electronically.”

Clinton also methodically destroyed evidence to conceal her crimes. She smashed a Blackberry with a hammer, deleted tens of thousands of emails with high-tech software to ensure recovery was impossible and wiped her servers — you know, “with a cloth or something.” She also lied her pantsuit off about it.

Pence has never been accused of profiting from his position as vice president, and the classified material he is guilty of having in his possession is highly unlikely to be compromising in any way. Trump has certainly been accused of all manner of nefarious schemes, though his deranged critics generally fall woefully short of even a shred of proof.

By contrast, Biden and Clinton both were running lucrative operations based on their names and positions high in the federal government. Clinton took extraordinary measures to cover that up. Biden merely delayed confession until after it would have mattered to his party’s election prospects, and he has worked overtime to dismiss the seriousness of the crime — largely because of the blatant hypocrisy of the way his Justice Department treated Trump.

Carelessness is inexcusable, as is belligerent defiance of the law. What’s worse, however, is double standards and outright criminal corruption.

Rip’s Newsletter January 2023

The January 6th  “Insurrection”

By: Victor Davis Hanson, January 12, 2023 | First appeared on Review Journal

Here is what we do not understand about the January 6th Committee—if it truly was intended to appear as a disinterested investigatory body.

  1. Why for the first time in memory did Speaker Pelosi forbid the House Minority Leader’s pro forma nominees to a special House committee? Fairly or not, the result was that the only two Republicans who did serve shared two embarrassing requisites: they would likely be out of office, and not by their own volition, in January 2023; and two, they despised Donald Trump and voted for the second Trump impeachment.

So, what were the Democrats afraid of to make them break all precedents with past hearings? Pelosi, in other words, ensured that there would be no cross-examinations of any witnesses, no disagreements about witness lists, no contrasting interviews to the media about the work of the committee, and no diversity in staff interrogatories.

  1. Why did the Committee not investigate whether the FBI had numerous agents and informants present on January 6th? Michael Rosenberg, the New York Times assigned a reporter to the demonstration, claimed they were ubiquitous. Were they?
  2. Why did the Committee not review the circumstances in detail of the deaths of Officer Brian Sicknick and the fatal shooting of Ashli Babbitt? These were the two most high-profile and controversial deaths on January 6th, and Babbitt’s perhaps was the only violent death at the direct hand of a known other.
  3. Why did the Committee not investigate and release all the communications between the House leadership and the Capitol police to learn why the Capitol was virtually open and unsecured on a day that everyone knew would be the scene of mass protests there?
  4. Why did the Committee not investigate all incendiary speech by major elected officials at iconic Washington buildings, deemed inflammatory and allegedly resulting in violence at a subsequent time? For example, in 2020 then Senator Minority Leader Chuck Schumer screamed to a large demonstration massed at the doors of the Supreme Court:

“I want to tell you Gorsuch, I want to tell you Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.”

“You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price”? “Hit you”? Did Trump say to supporting demonstrators on January 6th anything like, “Pelosi and Biden, you released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.”

Had Trump said that, would he now be in jail?

Note that not too long after Schumer’s threats, protestors appeared to swarm the homes of conservative Supreme Court justices, including a would-be assassin.

  1. Why did the Committee not investigate all organized rioting by activist groups that also damaged federal properties, such as in 2020 a federal courthouse that was torched and attempts to storm the White House grounds to endanger a president?
  2. Why did the Committee not release all the full transcripts of all those it interrogated, and why not all the arrangements and conditions with witnesses it finalized to make them appear?

Destroying American Democracy – An Inside Job

By: Pete Hoekstra, Gatestone Institute, January 15, 2023 | First appeared on Gatestone Institute

Over the last few years, there has been much written about the destruction of American democracy. Frequently the threat has been of alleged interference in U.S. elections by Russia, China, or other state actors. Government agencies, by the name of election integrity, were assigned to identify and disrupt these foreign intrusions. As more and more information is revealed about these agencies, it seems that America’s Intelligence Community participated in these activities domestically, and in a way that poses a grave threat to both election integrity and American democracy.

Just last week it was revealed that the FBI again withheld pertinent information from the American public, for the past two months, until after the November 8, 2022 federal election. As with the Bureau’s reported cover-up of evidence influence-peddling reportedly found on Hunter Biden’s laptop, agents knew, since November 2, 2022, about at least some of the three sets of classified material that illegally found their way into the garage and library of President Joe Biden and into the Penn Biden Center think tank at the University of Pennsylvania — to which anonymous members of the Chinese Communist Party have donated $54.6 million.

Their existence only became known this week, after the newly elected Republican-majority House of Representatives announced that it would hold hearings on “how the [Justice] department handled investigations into classified materials found at former President Donald Trump’s Florida home and those found at President Joe Biden’s office in a Washington think tank bearing his name and his Delaware home…”

In addition, the recent release of the “Twitter Files” has raised at least two major concerns regarding actions by the Intelligence Community. The first is that the wall of separation between the Intelligence Community and the U.S. media has not only sprung a leak, it has totally collapsed. The report that officials from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) met weekly with Twitter executives to coordinate information is totally inappropriate. Would officials from the ODNI review, affirm, or label certain sets of information as false? When ODNI was created, no one intended its officials to have a role in these types of discussions.

It also appears that intelligence officials in recent years have politically weaponized intelligence. The combination of a politically weaponized Intelligence Community, operating hand-in-hand with organizations that are the main gateways for information to millions of Americans, poses a serious threat to American democracy and the integrity of our elections.

Let us just briefly look at the steep slope of lying, deceit, and corruption that has seeped into the leadership of the U.S. Intelligence Community.

First, there are not enough words to praise our Intelligence Community and the men and women who risk their lives to keep America safe. These are the rank-and-file professionals that form the core of the Intelligence Community. Most are dedicated to the mission of gathering the necessary information to protect our nation. Their leaders have a responsibility to serve these individuals. Too often, however, as the current array of whistleblowers indicates, those leaders have let these individuals down.

Imagine their reaction in 2013 when, in response to a question from Senator Ron Wyden to then-Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper about whether the National Security Agency (NSA) collects “any type of data on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans,”Clapper answered, “No sir, not wittingly.” Clapper, who had been given the question the previous day, was asked after the hearing if he wanted to amend the answer and declined. It was shortly thereafter that a massive NSA program containing millions of pieces of Americans’ data was revealed. Clapper was caught in a huge lie — to U.S. Senator Wyden and the American people.

On January 12, 2017, CNN reported that President-elect Donald Trump had been briefed by DNI Clapper, FBI Director James Comey, CIA Director John Brennan, and NSA Director Michael Rogers. The topic: “Russian operatives claim to have compromising personal and financial information about Donald Trump.” It was intended to inform the President-elect that these allegations “are circulating among intelligence agencies, senior members of Congress, and other government officials in Washington.” The briefing also touched on other major allegations they claimed were “circulating.”

Having this false information — some of which the FBI actually altered — in the public domain was evidently intended to damage Trump. The Russian “hoax” allegations would haunt and damage the Trump presidency for almost two years. Clapper himself stated:

“I express my profound dismay at the leaks that have been appearing in the press … they are extremely corrosive and damaging to our national security.”

Clapper also released a statement that neither he nor anyone else in the Intelligence Community was responsible for the leaks. How did this highly classified information, then, get into the public domain?

A House Republican investigation provides the answer. Clapper denied leaking the dossier but admitted to discussing the dossier with CNN correspondent Jake Tapper and perhaps other journalists in early January 2017. Later in 2017, Clapper would go on to join CNN as a “national security” contributor and CNN would receive an award for its reporting at the White House Correspondents’ dinner.

Today we know that the “Russia hoax” was a lie. After a 22-month investigation, no evidence of collusion between any element of the Trump campaign and Russia was uncovered. The supposedly compromising evidence had never existed; the information in the “Steele dossier” was false — and the FBI had known it was from the start. The entire fabrication had been an attempt to attack and politically weaken Trump.

In October 2020, shortly before the elections, 51 former intelligence professionals had even signed a joint letter stating that the Hunter Biden laptop had “…has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” They stated that their national security experience made them “deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.” They went on:

“If we are right, this is Russia trying to influence how Americans vote in this election, and we strongly believe that Americans need to be aware of this.”

The New York Times raised questions about the authenticity of the materials found on the laptop. Bill Evanina, the National Counterintelligence and Security Center Director, had indicated in August that Russia was trying to denigrate the Biden campaign. All these manufactured “facts” were apparently intended to create circumstances where reasonable people would have to conclude that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation.

Signatories of the 2020 letter included Clapper, Brennan, Michael Hayden, Jeremy Bash, and David Buckley. Clapper and Brennan are familiar names. They were involved in the January 2017 briefing to President Donald Trump on the fake Steele dossier. Jeremy Bash and David Buckley are worth mentioning because they continue to play significant roles in domestic and national security areas in the U.S. government. Buckley was the majority staff director on the House Select Committee investigating January 6th. Bash has been named to co-chair a government commission to review the war in Afghanistan.

The fraudulent efforts by the U.S. government, Clapper, Brennan, and the 49 others — along with Hillary Clinton, her campaign committee, the Democratic National Committee, and the suppression of the media and social media (here and here) — to influence the public, unfortunately, met with some success. For almost two years, the authenticity of the material found on Hunter Biden’s laptop was questioned. Today, its authenticity has been verified; the information is real and damning. As summarized by the New York Post:

“Yes, that letter from the Dirty 51 had all the classic earmarks of a disinformation operation, all right – one designed to ensure Joe Biden won the presidency. And it was essentially a CIA operation, considering 43 of the 51 signatories were former CIA.”

One final example of the Intelligence Community involving itself in domestic politics comes from the recent release of the “Twitter Files.” According to tweet #20 of the third tranche released:

“This post about the Hunter Biden laptop situation shows that Roth not only met weekly with the FBI and DHS but with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.”

Tweet #17 states: “executives were also clearly liaising with federal enforcement and intelligence agencies about moderation of election-related content.”

Finally, the FBI paid Twitter $3.5 million reportedly to “handle requests from the bureau.”

We now know what happened. Twitter suppressed discussion of the Hunter Biden laptop story and suppressed conservative messaging, while at the same time, it appears the FBI, DHS and the ODNI had literally set up shop at Twitter.

The American people should be outraged. This level of collaboration between federal law enforcement and a private sector company on controlling speech is terrifying. Having our Intelligence Community, which is supposed to be focused on foreign intelligence collection, involved is even more terrifying.

DNI James Clapper lying to the American people in 2013 about government surveillance of them, the promoting of the Russian hoax theory in 2017 by CIA Director Brennan, DNI Clapper, FBI Director Comey, and others, the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story by 51 former intelligence professionals, and the close working arrangement between the FBI, DHS and the ODNI in 2020-2022 raises a staggering series of questions:

  •  Can our government, law enforcement, and the Intelligence Community still be trusted?
  • Have those federal government agencies literally weaponized law enforcement and intelligence against political opponents in the U.S.?
  • Has more than one solitary person — former FBI attorney Kevin Clinemith, for altering an email — been held accountable for these egregious abuses of power?
  • Why wasn’t there a more powerful response from the Intelligence Community and the law enforcement community about the disinformation from the 51 former intelligence professionals?
  • Who authorized the cozy relationship between law enforcement, and the intelligence community with Twitter?
  • Who in these government agencies reviewed and approved of the output and decisions coming from these joint efforts?
  • Were political appointees in the review loop?
  • Who has the records, notes, and decisions that emanated from these groups?

It is clear that our law enforcement community needs to be investigated, but most importantly we need to investigate how our Intelligence Community has evolved from having literally a non-existent relationship with speech in America to being inside the room determining what speech is allowed.

There also needs to be a significant investigation by an outside, non-government group to understand how far this massive government overreach into free speech and election manipulation went. Clearly, the government has been influencing what we get to see and hear. It needs to stop — now — before our democracy is destroyed.

Peter Hoekstra was US Ambassador to the Netherlands during the Trump administration. He served 18 years in the U.S. House of Representatives representing the second district of Michigan and served as Chairman and Ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee. He is currently a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Gatestone Institute.

McCarthy Learns His Three Rs: Reset, Revelation, Retribution

The hard nudge from his hard right appears to have instilled some useful forgetting and learning in Kevin McCarthy.

By: Bob Maistros, American Greatness, January 14, 2023 | First appeared on American Greatness

The restored Bourbon dynasty is said to have “learnt nothing and forgotten nothing.” But Louis XVIII’s posse had nothing on Republican “moderates” in the recently (barely) restored House majority.

Check out this choice tidbit, in the wake of Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s (R-Calif.) bruising, begrudging battle for the speakership, from Representative Nancy Mace (R-S.C.):

I am concerned that common-sense legislation will not get through to get a vote on the floor . . . [F]or example, we have 12 bills that we’re supposedly going to be voting on in our first week in office . . . [Three pro-life bills] are not legislation . . . that can pass the Senate and get onto the desk for the president to sign into law.

Puh-leeze.

Pummeling by progressive radicals. Outright embarrassment in November voting. Five days, 15 ballots, and hours of nonstop, no-holds-barred negotiations and concession-coaxing to elect a Speaker.

And Mace—likely reflecting the views of many equally clueless colleagues in the Stupid Party—still thinks the GOP’s Job One is “legislation that can pass the Senate and get onto the desk of the president”?

Does the gentlelady mean legislation like the amnesty con a feckless faction of Senate Republicans tried to foist on America? The federal codification of make-believe matrimony 12 of them waved through? The $1.7 trillion lame-duck appropriations leviathan that trampled the incoming House majority’s prerogatives in instilling fiscal discipline?

One supposedly unpassable bill to which she definitely referred would require lifesaving care for aborted children born alive. Perhaps Mace prefers chloroform?

And does the Charlestonian believe that the usurper in the Oval Office gave one thought to her party’s priorities in affixing the John Hancock she covets to a typhoon of “pen-and-phone” executive orders trashing major Trump accomplishments?

The good news: in contrast to Mace and her fellow travelers on the Good Ship GOP’s port side, the hard nudge from his hard-right appears to have instilled some useful forgetting and learning in Kevin McCarthy.

He’s taking, temporarily at least, a mental Bleach Bit to the old ways of go-along, get-along, tax-along, spend-along in an age when the scorched-earth opposition—and some on his side of the aisle—have put aside Sleepy Joe’s treasured “norms” and think nothing of:

  • aiding, abetting, and institutionalizing election fraud;
  • solitary confinement for non-violent protesters and congressional show trials to advance a fictitious Big Lie narrative inoculating against future such fraud;
  • abusing power to perpetuate the Russian collusion whopper, entrap a sitting national security advisor, and sic the feds on concerned, anti-woke parents;
  • canceling ideological adversaries as irredeemably racist, transphobic, or climate deniers; and
  • raiding a former president’s home and releasing his private records.

Moreover, the speaker has seemingly absorbed the three Rs that must shape the Republican agenda for this Congress:

Reset. As previously maintained here, mimic the Green New Deal’s success in “staking out territory beyond rational hopes of capturing in the current environment—aspiring, ultimately, to re-reshape the battlefield.”

Revelation. Use every available platform—including the appropriations process, hearings, events, and a 24/7/365 “tweet storm”—to lay bare not just Bidenite corruption, incompetence, and coverups, but also every dollar of misspent and misappropriated funds in the omnibus(t) bill forced down the new majority’s throats.

Retribution. Not “score-settling,” as Democrats charge. Rather, make malicious malfeasants pay a political price for skyrocketing spending and prices; ceding hard-won energy independence; surrendering the southern border; freedom-sapping COVID mandates; promoting sexual perversion and child mutilation; emboldening America’s enemies, and most of all, weaponizing the government against political rivals and the very people it ostensibly serves.

Thus far, the Californian has wildly exceeded this commentators’ expectations to earn solid “As” across the board:

  • Advancing bills not only to defund the Democrats’ new army of nearly 90,000 tax harassers, but, incredibly, to pull the plug on the entire IRS and the income tax itself.
  • Establishing a select committee to investigate the wide-ranging misdeeds of America’s arch-foe, China—as a precursor to keeping the speaker’s pledge to move against the Middle Kingdom’s economic, trade, and human rights violations, military aggression, and “theft of Americans’ personal information, intellectual property, and jobs.”
  • Setting up a subcommittee to investigate and demand accountability for the “weaponization of the federal government” against political foes and private citizens alike.
  • Releasing 14,000 hours of January 6 security videos to undercut the “insurrection” deception.
  • Further pledging to investigate “Biden’s border crisis, pandemic relief fraud, (the) Afghanistan withdrawal, (the) energy crisis, COVID origins, (and) Biden family’s influence peddling.”
  • Promising votes on separate appropriations bills instead of opaque annual funding monsters.
  • Best of all, booting perpetual Pinocchio Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and compromised China boy-toy Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) from the intelligence committee and terrorist-touter-cum immigration-fraudster Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) from the Foreign Affairs Committee.

Yes, it’s just a start and largely symbolic. But all in all, plaudits for McCarthy’s interim report card.

Now, to reinforce his gains in learning—and forgetting—as a recharged majority forges forward, this commentator suggests one additional exercise for the lower chamber leader: write on the office whiteboard 100 times, “Nancy Mace is not the base.”

Taking on ‘The Weaponization of Government’ Led by Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, the House GOP wasted no time in targeting the deep state.

By: Douglas Andrews, The Patriot Post , January 13, 2023 | First appeared on The Patriot Post

This week was a good one for limited-government constitutional conservatives — especially those who are fed up with the deep state, fed up with the Democrats’ use of the federal government as a cudgel against its political enemies within Washington and across the country.

House Republicans passed a resolution Tuesday to establish the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, which will investigate, among other things, the FBI’s effort to censor and ban conservative Twitter users, and the Justice Department’s probe of “threats” from parents who’ve had the temerity to speak out at local school board meetings against wokeness and rampant leftism.

To no one’s surprise, the vote was party-line, 221 to 211, in favor of examining the behavior of the FBI and DOJ, which followed revelations in a series of “Twitter Files” that the FBI paid the company $3 million to suppress mostly conservative voices on the social media site.

The committee will be housed under the House Judiciary Committee and will “fully investigate the Biden administration’s efforts to ‘collect information on or otherwise investigate citizens of the United States,’ examine how federal agencies collect or work with the private sector to collect information on U.S. citizens, and probe other issues ‘related to the violation of the civil liberties’ of U.S. citizens.”

The resolution, from Ohio Congressman and Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, is what House Speaker Kevin McCarthy says is part of the GOP’s mission to “hold the Swamp accountable.”

During his remarks on the floor, Chairman Jordan responded to Democrat charges that the resolution was merely a ploy:

A ploy? It’s not a ploy when the Department of Justice treats parents as terrorists, moms, and dads who are simply showing up at a school board meeting to advocate for their son or daughter.

A ploy? It’s not a ploy when the FBI pays Twitter $3 million, not one, not two, but $3 million to censor American citizens.

It’s not a ploy when the Department of Homeland Security tries to set up a disinformation governance board because we all know that the Department of Homeland Security can tell what’s good speech and what is bad speech.

Writing for the opposition, The New York Times casts a jaundiced eye at the enterprise, reporting that Massachusetts Congressman Jim McGovern likened the panel to the House Un-American Activities Committee of the 1950s, “which demonized Americans suspected of being sympathetic to communism.”

And your point is?

“I call it the McCarthy committee,” McGovern continued, “and I’m not talking about Kevin; I’m talking about Joe. This committee is nothing more than a deranged ploy by the MAGA extremists who have hijacked the Republican Party and now want to use taxpayer money to push their far-right conspiracy nonsense.”

Here, a bit of a history lesson for the Times and McGovern: Joe McCarthy was right about everything and everyone, and the McCarthy period itself, which Ann Coulter has dubbed “The Rosetta Stone of all liberal lies,” was a period marked by the Democrats’ sustained efforts to shout down and demonize the truth-tellers and rewrite history about the very real and widespread infiltration of commies and commie sympathizers within the U.S. government, especially the State Department, from 1938 to 1946. Anyone who doubts this should read M. Stanton Evans’s 672-page Blacklisted by History, which is the definitive post-Soviet volume on the McCarthy era.

Likewise, let’s hope that history looks back on the period from 2009 to 2023 as a period of widespread weaponization of government agencies against the citizenry, and the period immediately thereafter as one of significant reform and a return of the federal apparatus to its rightful role.

Suffice it to say, honest and decent Democrats have nothing to fear from a Republican committee meant to unravel and undo the political weaponization of our federal government.

Those Democrats who are neither honest nor decent, though, they have plenty to fear.

“Americans are sick and tired of it,” said Jordan. “And we don’t want to go after anyone. We just want it to stop, and we want to respect the First Amendment to the Constitution that the greatest country in the world has. That’s what this committee is all about.”

If you do not take an interest in the affairs of your government, then you are doomed to live under the rule of fools.Plato

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How did we get here?!

What Will the FBI Not Do?
By: Victor Davis Hanson
December 26, 2022

The FBI on Wednesday finally broke its silence and responded to the revelations on Twitter of close ties between the bureau and the social media giant—ties that included efforts to suppress information and censor political speech.

“The correspondence between the FBI and Twitter show nothing more than examples of our traditional, longstanding, and ongoing federal government and private sector engagements, which involve numerous companies over multiple sectors and industries,” the bureau said in a statement. “As evidenced in the correspondence, the FBI provides critical information to the private sector to allow them to protect themselves and their customers. The men and women of the FBI work every day to protect the American public. Unfortunately, conspiracy theorists and others are feeding the American public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency.”

Almost all of the FBI communique is untrue, except the phrase about the bureau’s “engagements which involve numerous companies over multiple sectors and industries.”

Future disclosures will no doubt reveal similar FBI subcontracting with other social media concerns of Silicon Valley to stifle free expression and news deemed problematic to the FBI’s agenda.

The FBI did not merely engage in “correspondence” with Twitter to protect the company and its “customers.” Instead, it effectively hired Twitter to suppress the free expression of some of its users, as well as news stories deemed unhelpful to the Biden campaign and administration—to the degree that the bureau’s requests sometimes even exceeded those of Twitter’s own left-wing censors.

The FBI did not wish to help Twitter “to protect themselves [sic],” given the bureau’s Twitter liaisons were often surprised at the FBI’s bold requests to suppress the expression of those who had not violated Twitter’s own admittedly biased “terms of service” and “community standards.”

The FBI and its helpers on the Left now reboot the same boilerplate about “conspiracy theorists” and“misinformation” smears used against anyone who rejected the FBI-fed Russian collusion hoax and the bureau’s peddling of the “Russian disinformation” lie to suppress accurate pre-election news about the authenticity of Hunter Biden’s laptop.

The FBI is now, tragically, in freefall. The public is at the point, first, of asking what improper or illegal behavior will the bureau not pursue, and what, if anything, must be done to reform or save a once great but now discredited agency.

Consider the last four directors, the public faces of the FBI for the last 22 years. Ex-director Robert Mueller testified before Congress that he simply would not or could not talk about the fraudulent Steele dossier. He claimed that it was not the catalyst for his special counsel investigation of Donald Trump’s alleged ties with the Russians when, of course, it was.

Mueller also testified that he was “not familiar” with Fusion GPS, although Glenn Simpson’s opposition research firm subsidized the dossier through various cutouts that led back to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. And the skullduggery in the FBI-subsidized dossier helped force the appointment of Mueller himself.

While under congressional oath, Mueller’s successor James Comey on some 245 occasions claimed that he “could not remember,” “could not recall,” or “did not know” when asked simple questions fundamental to his involvement with the Russian collusion hoax.

Comey, remember, memorialized a confidential conversation with President Trump on an FBI device and then used a third party to leak it to the New York Times. In his own words, the purpose was to force a special counsel appointment. The gambit worked, and his friend and predecessor Robert Mueller got the job. Twenty months and $40 million later, Mueller’s investigation tore the country apart but could find no evidence that Trump, as Steele alleged, colluded with the Russians to throw the 2016 election.

Comey also seems to have reassured the president that he was not the target of an ongoing FBI investigation, when in fact, Trump was.

Comey was never indicted for either misleading or lying to a congressional committee or leaking a document variously considered either confidential or classified.

While under oath, his interim successor, Andrew McCabe, on several occasions flat-out lied to federal investigators. Or as the office of the inspector general put it:
As detailed in this report, the OIG found that then-Deputy Director Andrew McCabe lacked candor, including under oath, on multiple occasions in connection with describing his role in connection with a disclosure to the WSJ and that this conduct violated FBI Offense Codes 2.5 and 2.6. The OIG also concluded that McCabe’s disclosure of the existence of an ongoing investigation in the manner described in this report violated the FBI’s and the Department’s media policy and constituted misconduct.

McCabe purportedly believed Trump was working with the Russians as a veritable spy—a false accusation based entirely on the FBI’s paid, incoherent prevaricator Christopher Steele. And so, McCabe discussed with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein methods to have the president’s conversations wiretapped via a Rosenstein-worn stealthy recording device, presumably without a warrant.

Note the FBI ruined the lives of General Michael Flynn and Carter Page with false allegations of criminal conduct or untruthful testimonies. Under current director Christopher Wray, the FBI has surveilled parents at school boards meetings—on the prompt of the National School Boards Association, whose president wrote Attorney General Merrick Garland alleging that bothersome parents upset over critical race indoctrination groups were supposedly violence-prone and veritable terrorists.

Under Wray, the FBI staged the psychodramatic Mar-a-Lago raid on an ex-president’s home. The FBI likely leaked the post facto myths that the seized documents contained “nuclear codes” or “nuclear secrets.”

Under Wray, the FBI perfected the performance-art, humiliating public arrests of former White House officials or Biden Administration opponents, whether it was the nocturnal rousting of Project Veritas muckraker James O’Keefe in his underwear or the arrest—with leg restraints—of former White House advisor Peter Navarro at Reagan National Airport for misdemeanor contempt of Congress charge or the detention of Trump election lawyer John Eastman at a restaurant with his family and the confiscation of his phone. Neither O’Keefe nor Eastman has yet been charged with any serious crimes.

The FBI arguably interfered in two presidential elections, and a presidential transition, and possibly determinatively so. In 2016, James Comey announced that his investigation had found that Hillary Clinton had improperly if not illegally used her private email server to conduct official State Department business, some of it confidential and classified, and likely intercepted by foreign governments. All that was a clear violation of federal statutes. Comey next, quite improperly as a combined FBI investigator and a de facto federal prosecutor, deduced that such violations did not merit prosecution.

Around the same time, the FBI had hired as a source the foreign national and political opposition hitman Christopher Steele. It helped Steele to spread among the media his fraudulent dossier and used its unverified and false contents to win FISA warrants against U.S. citizens on the bogus charges of colluding with the Russians to throw the election to Donald Trump. By the FBI’s admission, it would not have obtained warrants to surveil Trump campaign associates without the use of Steele’s dossier, which it also admittedly either knew was a fraud or could not corroborate.

Again, such allegations in the dossier were false and, apparently, the FBI soon knew they were bogus since one of its own lawyers—the now-convicted felon Kevin Clinesmith—found it necessary also to alter a court-submitted document to feign incriminatory information.

The FBI, on the prompt of lame-duck members of the Obama Justice Department, during a presidential transition, set up an entrapment ambush of National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. It was an effort to lure Flynn into admitting to a violation of the Logan Act, a 223-year-old law that has led to only two indictments and zero convictions.

During the 2020 election, the FBI suppressed knowledge of its possession of Hunter Biden’s laptop. Early on, the bureau knew that the computer and its contents were authentic and yet kept its contents suppressed.

Moreover, the FBI sought to contract out Twitter (at roughly $3.5 million) as a veritable subsidiarity to suppress social media traffic about the laptop and speech the bureau deemed improper.

Again, although the FBI knew the laptop in its possession was likely genuine, it still sought to use Twitter employees to suppress pre-election mention of that reality. At the same time, bureau officials remained mum when 51 former “intelligence officials” misled the country by claiming that the laptop had all the hallmarks of “Russian disinformation.” Polls later revealed that had the public known the truth about the laptop, a significant number likely would have voted differently—perhaps enough to change the outcome of the election.

The media, Twitter, Facebook, and former intelligence operatives were all following the FBI’s preliminary warning bulletin that “Foreign Actors and Cybercriminals Likely to Spread Disinformation Regarding 2020 Election Results”—even as the bureau knew the laptop in its possession was most certainly not Russian disinformation. And, of course, the FBI had helped spread the Russian collusion hoax in 2016.

In addition, the FBI-issued phones of agent Peter Strzok and attorney Lisa Page, along with members of Robert Mueller’s special counsel “dream team”—all under subpoena—had their data mysteriously wiped clean, purportedly “by accident.”

Apparently, the paramours Strzok and Page, in particular, had much more to hide, given how earlier they had frequently expressed their venom toward candidate Donald Trump. Strzok boasted to Page that the FBI in general, and Andrew McCabe in particular, had an “insurance policy”means of denying Trump the presidency:

I want to believe the path you threw out in Andy’s office—that there’s no way he gets elected—but I’m afraid we can’t take the risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40.

When some of their embarrassing texts emerged, both were dismissed by the special counsel. But Mueller carefully did so by staggering Strozk and Pages’ departures, and not immediately releasing the reasons for their firings or reassignments.

To this day, the public has no idea what the FBI was doing on January 6, how many FBI informants and agents were among the rioters, and to what degree they knew in advance of the protests. The New York Times reporter most acquainted with the January 6 riot, Matthew Rosenberg, dismissed the buffoonish violence as “no big deal” and scoffed, “They were making this an organized thing that it wasn’t.”

“There were a ton of FBI informants among the people who attacked the Capitol,” Rosenberg noted. We have never been told anything about that “ton”—a topic of zero interest to the January 6 select committee.

What are the people to do about a federal law enforcement agency whose directors either repeatedly lie under oath, mislead, or do not cooperate with congressional overseers? What should we do with a bureau that alters court documents, deceives the court with information the FBI had good reason to know was false, and leaks records of confidential presidential conversations to the media to prompt the appointment of a special prosecutor? What should be done with a government agency that pays social media corporations to warp the dissemination of the news and suppress free expression and communications? Or an agency that hires a foreign national to gather dirt on a presidential candidate and plots to ensure that there is “no way” a presidential candidate “gets elected” and destroys subpoenaed evidence?

What, if anything, should the people do about a once-respected law enforcement agency that repeatedly smears its critics, most recently as “conspiracy theorists”?

The current FBI leadership under Christopher Wray, in the tradition of recent FBI directors, has stonewalled congressional overseers about FBI activity during the Trump and Biden administrations. In “Après moi, le déluge” fashion, the bureau acts as if it assumes the next Republican administration in office will remove the current hierarchy. And thus, it assumes, for now, not cooperating with Republican investigations while Democrats hold control of the Senate and White House for a brief while longer ensures exemption.

Wray, most recently, cut short his Senate testimony on the pretext of an unspecified engagement, which turned out to be flying out on the FBI Gulfstream jet to his vacation home.

Yet the bureau’s lack of candor, contrition, and cooperation has only further alienated the public, especially traditional and conservative America, characteristically the chief source of support for the FBI.

There have been all sorts of remedies proposed for the bureau.

The three reforms most commonly suggested include:
1) simply dissolve the FBI in the belief that its concentration of power in Washington has become uncontrollable and is increasingly put to partisan service, including but not limited to the warping of U.S. presidential elections;
2) move the FBI headquarters out of the Washington D.C. nexus, preferably in the age of Zoom to a more convenient and central location in the United States, perhaps an urban site such as Salt Lake City, Denver, Kansas City, or Oklahoma City; or
3) break up and decentralize the FBI and redistribute its various divisions to different departments to ensure that the power of its $11 billion budget and 35,000 employees are no longer aggregated and put in service of particular political agendas.

The next two years are dangerous times for the FBI—and the country. The House will soon likely begin investigations of the agency’s improper behavior. Yet, simultaneously, the Biden Justice Department will escalate its use of the bureau as a partisan investigative service for political purposes.

The FBI’s former embattled, high-ranking administrators who have been fired or forced to leave the agency—Andrew McCabe, James Comey, Peter Strzok, James Baker, Lisa Page, and others—will continue to appear on the cable news stations and social media to inveigh against critics of the FBI, despite being all deeply involved in the Russia-collusion hoax.

Merrick Garland will continue to order the FBI to hound perceived enemies through surveillance and performance art arrests. And the people will only grow more convinced the bureau has become Stasi-like and cannot be reformed but must be broken up—even as in extremis a defiant and unapologetic FBI will, as its latest communique shows, attack its critics.

We are left with the dilemma of Quis custodiet Ipsos custodes. Who watches the watchers?

THROWING THE AMERICAN PEOPLE
UNDER THE BUS!!

By: Dr. Virginia Merchant, PhD
December 24, 2022

Well, if you watched as the House passed the Omnibus Bill today by Proxy Vote, which Nancy Pelosi instituted, the Bill is containing $1.7 billion of “PORK”. First off, you can only vote for legislation in the House and Senate to pass legislation if you are present in person. Most in the House were not present and this legislation is the same as Pelosi did on Obamacare— “you have to pass it and then read what it contains.” Two things, you should note, that our tax dollars are going for in this Bill is to build Nancy Pelosi a building in San Francisco which will be called “Pelosi Tower.” Do you want your tax dollars to go for that? Next is a “hiking trail”named after Michele Obama in Georgia, do you want to pay for that? Again, this is in the Omnibus Bill—the Obamas could pay for a hiking trail themselves; I am sure!

Who voted for his bill to be passed? Well in the House only Democrats, but in the Senate where it began, the following Republicans joined the Democrats to pass this mega legislation. They were:
Roy Blunt (Missouri),
John Boozman (Arkansas),
Shelley Capito (West Virginia),
Susan Collins (Maine),
John Cornyn (Texas),
Tom Cotton (Arkansas),
Lindsey Graham (South Carolina),
Jim Inhofe (Oklahoma),
Mitch McConnell (Kentucky),
Jerry Moran (Kansas),
Lisa Murkowski (Alaska),
Rob Portman (Ohio),
Mitt Romney (Utah),
Mike Rounds (South Dakota)
Richard Shelby (Alabama),
John Thune (South Dakota),
Roger Wicker (Mississippi)
Todd Young (Indiana).
From my standpoint, I believe none of these individuals should be in the Senate or run again. How dare they throw the American taxpayers under the bus with this bill and ask that we must pay higher taxes for it.

If you watched the joint House of Congress when the leader from Ukraine spoke you would have seen a very smart man getting mega funds from a group that was “enthralled” by his coming to speak to them. By smart I mean he knew they would give him what he wanted in mega bucks to fight Putin. This is in the Omnibus Bill just passed but nothing to protect our sovereign border—which is a mess. I watched Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky give Nancy Pelosi and Kamala Harris (who is in charge of the border but has never been there) a Ukrainian Flag—I thought the two women were going to collapse or “wet their pants”. Of course, the Omnibus Bill has mega bucks for him to fight Putin.

Wake up America and “start yelling” at our leaders! I know this Omnibus Bill will only cause more inflation and a larger recession come 2023. We need to get younger leaders that are not willing to throw faithful Americans under the bus. The group of Republicans that voted for this “pork” should not be reelected. We need new younger politicians that are willing to fight for our 1st Amendment rights, The Constitution, and no censorship or “Shadow Banning”! Thanks to Elon Musk he is putting documents and censorship in front of the world since buying Twitter.

Actually, the GOP needs to get rid of Mitch McConnell, I know our Florida Senators made a try at that and were defeated. Republican voters are desperately concerned about the country and are looking for bold and persuasive leadership instead of comfort with a few small intermittent successes. Personally, I happen to like Florida Governor DeSantis. Look what he did to send illegals to Martha’s Vineyard—lasted about 12 hours, unfortunately. I did a bio on his background not too long ago if you happened to read it.

We all must start fighting back in some way and start taking a very serious interest in what is going on around us, especially our leaders and government. Between you and me and the fence post, I’m not sure we need Trump running again. He did a fine job for 4 years, but the end seems to be a disaster, and I am not sure most Americans want an older President. We need vitality and “real smarts” to fight the far left.

Here’s to 2023 and may we all have a Healthy, Happy New Year! Please be determined to help change the course of “ruining” the United States of America. May all voices be heard!
God Bless America.
Ginny

I Am Fortunate
By: Bill Schoettler
December 26, 2022

I consider myself fortunate to have lived during the epitome of American civilization, brief that it has been. I was born in 1936, a time when America and the rest of the world was going through the tail end of the Great Depression. It was around this time that we can trace the beginning of World War Two, that great and universal war that involved all of the world’s great powers and many of the not-so-great powers. Millions died, cities were leveled, populations were decimated and the world was laid to waste.

Except this was the time for American victory. The United States of America, that sleeping giant of economic and political, and intellectual power awoke, scourged the world of the forces of evil that had been destroying it, and, single-handedly healed the world’s wounds and made everything work better.

From 1945 when the Great War ended to roughly 2000 the USA was the global light that shone brightly over the planet earth, staunched the wounds of the world, led the way to prosperity and democracy, and, with technological achievements in virtually all fields of science and industry, set an example for all nations to achieve and emulate.

Then things began to crumble. The homeland of this great nation was attacked for the first time in almost 200 years. The country began a series of skirmishes with small enemies that drained our energies and began the slow disintegration of our greatness. New generations that hadn’t lived through the growth struggles were blessed with the rewards earned by their predecessors. These new generations developed their own philosophies based on the leisure of security and complacency of previous accomplishments. No longer were there any wars to be fought or principles to be established. Now it was possible to revel in the luxury of inherited accomplishments which allowed freedom of thought and imagination that was not earned but inherited – without struggle.

Universities began teaching bizarre history courses that changed the meaning of what I had learned. Contemporary people were to be held responsible for the sins of their fathers, ancient heroes were not only shown to have feet of clay, but they were also to be destroyed in the interests of some sort of reconciliation with the past.

Principles of economics were distorted to account for present payment for allegedly past sins and concepts of “free speech” were re-defined to allow the burning of the American Flag but not the desecration of an LBGTQ flag, the prohibition of words like “American citizen” in exchange for “US citizen” and [and this is really curious] the elimination of any words used by so-called “white supremacists” that might be imagined offensive to any grouping of non-white persons.

Can this social [and emotional] revolution be sustained? Will it lead to a complete desecration of former American ideals, all to be replaced by re-thought, woke, principles, and re-defined wordings of diversity, equity, and inclusion?

What this country has now witnessed is a mid-term election the results of which can honestly be said to have endorsed the direction which I now criticize and rejected the solutions offered by such political stalwarts as Victor Davis Hanson and Tucker Carlson.

Celebrities and political figures and man-in-the-street interviews show our current President getting not only supporting but actual rave reviews of his performance in office.

Universities basking in former reputations have replaced the more traditional subjects with progressive topics designed to alter the former thinking that produced John Wayne and Clint Eastwood. Advertising on television and in magazines would have been unrecognizable just 25 years ago.

Generations have been raised without the exposure of us “old-timers” to the “dirty Nazis”, the “dirty Japs”, the“blasted injuns” and other traditional enemies of America. Yes, those things were an integral part of my upbringing and it was left up to me to accept or reject, to learn or ignore the ever-changing political and emotional realities of daily life in this country.

The Nazis became good West Germans and bad East Germans, and the dirty Japs became our hosts in a country we helped industrialize after having first virtually destroyed its entire manufacturing ability. We financed and supported most governments of the world for roughly the first 50 years after WWII and then relaxed our vigilance as the world’s forces of evil seemed to dwindle.

With the leisure of peace and prosperity came the insidious tentacles of socialism and other experimental philosophies, alarmists over the health of the planet, and conspiracy theories about how the world’s populations should be managed and directed “for their own good and betterment”.

Those who fought against such pressures were themselves pilloried with lies and calumnies, their families attacked and their reputations sullied with deliberate and manufactured disinformation. And what’s even worse, what is absolutely inexcusable and itself deplorable to the highest degree is that once such lies and deceits have been disclosed, the disclosures themselves are completely ignored and the old lies continually regurgitated.

My days are shorter now, and I can look back upon a life of personal successes and reasonable accomplishments. I will leave behind some family, a passing reputation and will take to my grave personal memories of having lived through an historically memorable time of American greatness and personal satisfaction. I would wish that my generation’s estate, such as it is, would sustain this country for many more generations. But at this time in my sunset years, I am saddened by what I see and hear about me.

I sincerely hope I am wrong in my diagnosis.

THEY JUST DON’T CARE
By: E. P. Unum
December 25, 2022

I believe with all my heart and soul that we are witnessing the perverse undoing of everything we hold dear. Our Founding Fathers who pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to give us a Constitutional Republic must be turning in their graves.

Remember when President Obama told us about his plans for “The Fundamental Transformation of America”, that he was going to bring forth like a Messiah, “Change you can believe in”?

What he really meant is that his plans were for the fundamental destruction of America by changing what we believed, and this intentional destruction is being carried forward by Susan Rice and the rest of the Obama cabal who are working the strings of their puppet Joe Biden behind the scenes in the White House. That is not conjecture on my part. It is a fact. If you are looking for evidence to support this charge, all you need do is look at the actions taken by the Biden Administration since he took office almost two years go on January 20, 2021. Absolutely nothing he has implemented has benefitted our nation and its citizens. And if you were devising a plan for the destruction of the United States economically, spiritually, morally, and militarily you could not have fashioned a better blueprint than the one orchestrated by this band of corrupt, incompetent, wet-behind-the-ears crew called the Biden Administration.

Let me be absolutely clear. What we are witnessing on a daily basis is the planned, intentional, and corrupt dismantling of our Constitutional Republic including our belief in God, our Constitution, and our Flag. Moreover, the path those we entrusted to represent us in the hallowed hall of Congress is not what our Founders envisioned. It is an insane path based on a deep, pervasive hatred for America and contempt for working-class Americans.

It is time for the Republican Party and the Media in our nation to begin to recognize the true nature of the crises facing America today.

Planned Chaos…
The people making up the Biden Administration from the West Wing of the White House, to the Pentagon, to the Biden Cabinet are not foolish or misguided people. They are in a word, pure evil. There is no way to sugar-coat this. They are motivated by one thing and one thing only – power. They covet it, and they do not care how they obtain it. And they will trample anyone who gets in their way. Think about it. There is not a single day that goes by that Democrats are not laser-focused on President Donald Trump, and he has been out of office for two years! Their hatred of the man and anyone who supports him is palpable. Why? It is because they fear him. They know that he knows how corrupt the Biden Administration, the Biden Family, and even Barack Obama have been and they will do anything to stop his getting the nomination of his party and being re-elected President in 2024. They know he will win against any democratic candidate, including Joe Biden, they put forth in 2024.

Consider this maxim from an American farmer. If you leave the gate open, the cows will wander off. So if you intentionally leave the gate open, you want the cows to wander off. You can’t blame stupidity or laziness. You wanted it to happen.

The same holds true for other basic common sense principles. If you cut police budgets, you will get more crime on the streets. So if you intentionally cut police budgets, you want more crime on the streets. If you choose not to prosecute criminals, you will almost certainly end up with more criminals on the street. If you opt for cashless bail, then you are clearly signaling that you believe criminals should be free, and therefore more crime will result including theft, robberies, murder, shootings, rapes, etc. It’s not an accident. This is what you planned to happen. And it has.

If you cut back the supply of oil, gas prices at the pump will go up. So if you intentionally cut back the supply of oil by banning oil exploration in areas where we have proven oil reserves enough to sustain our energy needs here in the United States for the next 500 years, then you wanted gas prices to go up. It is not an accident nor is it related to Putin’s war in Ukraine, the recent solar eclipse of the sun or the mathematical equation used to calculate the distance between Mars and Venus at the Vernal Equinox. It’s because you planned for a shortage of gasoline, jet fuel, and heating oil and increased prices on over 6,000 products besides gasoline, all of which are based on petroleum. The people be damned!

If you print trillions of dollars without increasing the supply of goods, inflation will hit hard. So if you intentionally print trillions of dollars without producing more goods you want inflation to hit hard. It is not an accident nor is it related to “Putin’s war in Ukraine”. You violated a principle of sound economics, and you wanted to increase inflation.

If you leave the U.S. southern border wide open and invite immigrants to come in illegally, you will get more drug and human trafficking. So if you intentionally leave the border wide open, it is because you want more drug and human trafficking. It also means that by continuing to allow deadly drugs to come into our country like fentanyl, you want to allow the unchecked killing of Americans. Americans suffer from this blatant disregard for the security of our nation while the drug cartels in Mexico flourish making billions of dollars. They laugh at our insanity. And you wanted it to happen….and it is!

If you shut down 40% of the supply of baby formula in February, you’ll get a huge shortage. When you know a huge baby formula shortage is coming because of the FDA’s actions, and you purposefully do nothing to prevent it, month after month, until the crisis finally hits hard, you intended for this crisis to happen. It was not an accident nor a mistake in judgment. You planned for this to happen. If you are looking for someone to blame, look in the mirror.

Have you ever questioned why we have had no thorough investigation into the cause of Covid-19 and how it came to be? Would it really surprise you to learn that China has been shoveling millions to the Biden family for years? And maybe we just might find out that the U.S. has had a hand in the evolution of Covid-19 inasmuch as Dr. Anthony Fauci and the National Institutes of Health were actually funding gain of function research at the Wuhan, China Infectious Disease Lab. That news would then leak into the media about how corrupt the Biden family has been and that our President is compromised and in China’s pocket. Hell, it might even stretch back to the Obama Administration. And that just would not do!

Do you still believe President Biden when he emphatically stated on several occasions that he had never spoken to his son Hunter Biden about any of his business dealings in China, Ukraine, Russia, or Kazachstan despite pictures showing Joe Biden when he was Vice President with Hunter and his business partners playing golf or having dinner? Are we to believe that Hunter Biden accompanied his father on Air Force 2 on a trip to China, met with Chinese Communist Investment Bankers, and walked away with $1.5 Billion in investment into Hunter’s Company, and none of this was discussed with Joe Biden? Are you still comfortable knowing that all of this was kept under wraps prior to the election of Joe Biden as President? I’m not.

Are you tired of all the lies told by our President? I am.

When you appropriate billions to help foreign nations like Pakistan shore up their borders but don’t provide a penny to secure our southern border, it is not because you are stupid or inexperienced. It is because it was intentional. You want our country overrun by illegal immigrants, many of them on terrorist watch lists. You want chaos and hardship.

When you encourage elementary and secondary school teachers to tell our children that it is OK to seek gender modification surgery if they are uncomfortable with their own sex and feel they want to be a man or a woman without seeking the approval of their parents, you have abandoned all sensibilities of reason and moral behavior. When you condone teaching that America is a racist country founded on racist ideology, and embrace the principles set forth in the NY Times endorsed “1619 Project”, you have relinquished all historical principles, disciplines, and perspectives. You are infusing our youth with false narratives and denying them the knowledge that America, for all its faults, has been the single greatest force for good in the entire history of mankind on this planet. You are no longer educating our young, you are indoctrinating them. Worse, you are teaching them what to think not how to think, and doing them and our nation a terrible disservice.

When you attempt to install woke ideology into our military, especially at West Point, Annapolis, and the Air Force Academy by forcing Critical Race Theory into their curricula, you are insuring that our future leaders will be more concerned with the use of pronouns than with leadership principles and winning wars.

When you wait until the eleventh hour – literally just before Christmas 2022 – to vote on a budget to keep the government and our military going, and then stuff that budget with wasteful, unnecessary spending and call it an Omnibus Bill consisting of 4,155 pages totaling $1.7 Trillion (money we don’t have by the way), that is not just irresponsible, it is intentional malfeasance and dereliction of your sworn duty to protect our nation and its citizens. It is also certain to create more chaos, inflation, and hardship for American citizens.

It is time to recognize the evil people behind that sad old creature in the White House. They want crisis. They want chaos. They want riots. They want conflicts in your town and, I am sad to say, they are pushing us deeper and deeper into global conflict because in war their powers will be enhanced not curtailed.

Recall the stated purpose years ago when Obama declared his approach was to “take the US down a few notches on the world stage.” Imagine a U.S. President making that statement on the world stage!

Today, I can feel the quality of my life going down with the country I love, and I want all the corruption, ridiculous rules, and regulations to stop. Our nation has serious problems. We need serious people to tackle these problems, not corrupt politicians with their hands in the till.

And above all remember this:
These are not foolish or misguided people. They are the personification of pure evil, and they just do not care about the American people.

They are headed somewhere you don’t want to go.

It’s time to take our country back.

©2022 Rip McIntosh Enterprises. All rights reserved.

How Democracy Dies in Darkness

September 1, 2022

Special Victor Davis Hanson Edition
How Democracy Dies in Darkness

in Five Easy Steps.

*

Part 1

August 26, 2022

What if you believed that the U.S. was in mortal danger because its elections continually led to the wrong results and policy choices?

What if the “people” were just too ignorant of what was good for them and continually displayed such dangerous cluelessness in how they voted? How could you even work with such chumps, dregs, crazies, clingers, deplorables, and irredeemables?

What if you still gave them lots of chances to reform and become enlightened on climate change, transgenderism, and race relations? And yet still they never appreciated your efforts on their behalf. Instead, they continued to buy AR-15s, or watch NASCAR or buy a RAM 2500 with a 700hp engine.

What if you worked hard to instruct these idiots through the media, social media, the arts, entertainment, foundations, academia, public schools, professional sports, Hollywood, Wall Street, and even the corporate board room—and yet still despite your control of the nation’s messaging and influencing, the dumb electorate voted for ignoramuses and unqualified buffoons?

What then would you be willing to do to save the country?

In a word, you would say “democracy dies in darkness” (darkness as in ignorance). And then you would scream “FORWARD!” And rally, with “YES, WE CAN!”

Then, as the saints you are, you would have to “intervene” extra-legally to save America. There would be no other choice. That is, you would have to destroy democracy to save it.

So, what you would do?

STEP ONE. Go after the wrong-minded Supreme Court. Discredit it. Have senators declare it “illegitimate.” Talk openly of ways the Pentagon or National Parks could avoid or weaken the Court’s rulings by creating sanctuary areas immune from federal jurisdiction.

Have the senate majority leader lead a mob to the court’s very doors and openly threaten conservative justices by name. Threaten their persons by warning that because they sowed the “wind” they would soon reap the “whirlwind” and thus had no idea what would “hit” them. Have mobs surround their houses and violate—with impunity—all federal laws prohibiting such intimidation of justices. In fact, ignore the law entirely and let anyone scream 24/7 outside the incorrect justice’s home.

Ferret justices out at restaurants. Swarm their dinner stables. Get in their faces. Have the president go abroad and openly attack the court in front of his foreign hosts. Serially scream in Congress that the court must be packed, enlarged by six more justices immediately, good men and women who would be properly sober and judicious progressives picked by legal-eagle President Joe Biden.

Talk of impeaching an illiberal justice. Talk even of subpoenaing his wife before a congressional committee. Protest, demonstrate, and obstruct any justice at campus lectures or public forums. Make clear the price for his harmful bad thought.

STEP TWO. Turn the FBI into a proper state police, an enlightened American Stasi. Sic the FBI on political opponents: confiscate the phones of elected House members in public. Raid the homes of journalists in the predawn hours. March them out in their underwear. Stage SWAT raids against an opposition president’s ally. Hell, raid the ex-president’s house itself. And tip off CNN to film the entire spectacle. Leak to the Washington Post that “nuclear secrets” for two years have been in Trump’s possession! Surprise the president’s lawyer at his office. Seize his files. Arrest a sexagenarian presidential advisor for not showing up for Congressional testimony—and put him publicly in leg irons.

Divert the FBI from silly things like investigating terrorists and cartels and traffickers swarming across the southern border or investigating bribery of officials by foreign governments. Instead, put FBI undercover agents at school board meetings, secretly to learn about and intimidate counter-revolutionary loudmouth parents who endanger the work of idealistic teacher unions and woke school board members.

The Secret Service is too ossified to protect progressive presidents from right-wing interference. The new FBI would become a presidential retrieval service. If dark elements may possess the first daughter’s lurid lost diary, replete with confessions of showering underage with the Commander-in-Chief, then hunt it down, and raid journalists’ homes. If a crack-addicted son of the president lost his laptop incriminating the president, then find it. Sit on it. Stonewall it and keep it out of the pre-ballot-day news.

Appoint FBI directors who are true-blue believers and are willing to stonewall and mislead Congress. Ensure they can lie to federal investigators, leak confidential and classified FBI documents to the media, falsify federal warrant applications, and plead amnesia when called out by the media or congressional investigative committees. And if you complain, then you are unpatriotic and likely a “domestic terrorist.”

Work with the Left in crafting pseudo-opposition research to destroy a wrong-headed presidential campaign. Hire a foreign ex-spy as a source. Spread his phony dossier to the media. Name the entire hit operation, “Operation Crossfire,”and set entrapment ambushes to get opposition foot soldiers to lie. Leak to cable news the narratives of “Russian collusion.”

Part Two
August 30, 2022

STEP THREE. Change voting and government rules when they are no longer useful. Claim any customs and traditions that are no longer advantageous are mere racist relics or the baleful legacy of old white men.

When in the majority, demand the end of the racist filibuster. When in the minority save it as a roadblock to fascism.

Damn the Electoral College as undemocratic and racist—unless the blue wall returns and the sure leftwing electoral votes of California, Illinois, and New York reassume dominance.

Let in two more states and with them four more progressive senators.
Pass a national voting law that supersedes state balloting and bans once and for all any requirement to show a valid ID to vote in person.

Insist that any effort to check mail-in ballots against registration lists, or to require full signatures and accurate addresses are racist and must be banned nationwide. The goal is to have 65 percent of the voters not vote on Election Day.

Expand court packing to the district and circuit courts to increase the number of enlightened jurists.

STEP FOUR. Remake the U.S. Congress. Insist that your Speaker of the House can bar any opposition member from a committee, despite the nomination of the minority leader.

When in the minority, insist that any such neutering of the House minority leader is racist and sexist. Arrest and indict any former opposition figure who refuses to obey a congressional committee summons; however, if the majority is lost and the right people are subpoenaed by the wrong people of the opposition party, claim such subpoena power is tyrannical, Nazi-like, racist, and bigoted.

Have your House speaker publicly tear up the State of the Union address, the moment the opposition president hands it over on national television. If in the minority, vote to censure any such Speaker who would destroy the hallowed protocols of the House and so cheaply attempt to embarrass an enlightened president.

The moment you take over a majority in the House, preferably in the opposition president’s first term, impeach him. Impeach him again a second time, when he rebounds. Impeach him when he leaves office.

Impeachment now, impeachment tomorrow, impeachment forever!
When in the majority, create and pack select committees. Call no hostile witnesses. Allow no cross-examinations. Pressure witnesses to flip testimonies to avoid possible criminal referrals. Send out dozens of subpoenas. Veto all minority party committee nominations—unless these members will not be reelected and have at least once voted to impeach the president of their own party.

STEP FIVE. Create border chaos. Destroy immigration law. Open the border. Call racist and xenophobic any who oppose three million illegal aliens pouring into the country. Defame your border patrol as medieval whippers, who harm the innocent. Stop all border wall construction. Send illegal entrants to purple states most prone to be flipped to correct thinking.

Insist newcomers do not need to be tested or vaccinated for Covid. Demand that background checks or prior certification of refugee status are racist constructs—and no longer necessary.

Be selective. Turn away Venezuelans and Cubans, Eastern Europeans, or Taiwanese as counterrevolutionaries. Favor those from the poorest and most leftist homelands. Give all illegal aliens phones, money, IDs, and flights to whatever cities they wish. Claim that citizenship is a racist obstruction to voting rights, which are universal and have nothing to do with being a legal citizen.

* Submitted by special permission of Dr. Hanson from his private website :

For subscription options, please visit: https://victorhanson.com/subscription-plan/

If you do not take an interest
in the affairs of your government,
then you are doomed to live under
the rule of fools.
Plato

January 6, 2021- another unnecessary death …..of an innocent

Videos Shed Light on Death of Rosanne Boyland at US Capitol on Jan. 6
Georgia Trump supporter, 34, was trampled, struck by police as she lay dying

BY JOSEPH M. HANNEMAN January 7, 2022 Updated: January 8, 2022
Epoch Times

Newly released video from the West Terrace tunnel of the U.S. Capitol provides more details on the collapse, beating, and death of Rosanne Boyland on Jan. 6, 2021.

A three-hour video unsealed in late December in a Jan. 6 federal criminal case shows the 34-year-old President Donald Trump supporter entered the tunnel, was pushed back out, fell, and was struck by police before her lifeless body was dragged into the Capitol.

Boyland’s sister and a New York attorney question the District of Columbia medical examiner’s finding that Boyland died of an overdose of a prescription medication she took for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Boyland, from Kennesaw, Ga., traveled to Washington D.C. for the Save America rally at the Ellipse on Jan. 6. She is seen on video entering the Capitol tunnel, walking next to conservative activist Philip Anderson. Bystanders continue filing in toward the double doors leading into the Capitol.

About 2 1/2 minutes later, police begin pushing the crowd backwards. Boyland is seen at one point looking down at her feet as the mass of humanity flows back toward the entrance. Less than two minutes after that, she disappears from view after falling. Police continue to push the crowd out of the tunnel, causing bodies to pile up on the stairs.

A man in a blue cap and fur-trimmed jacket hood points at the ground and pleads with police to stop pushing. Others in the crowd try to hold off the police, desperately signaling that people are down on the sidewalk. Despite the pleas, police make another push against the crowd, sending more bystanders down the stairs.

Men trying to pull people off the pile are doused with pepper spray. About seven minutes after Boyland was pushed out of the tunnel, a man steps right in front of police and shouts, “Stop!” He grabs an aluminum medical crutch off the ground and holds it out in a blocking motion.

At the lower right edge of the tunnel arch, the video shows a Metropolitan Police Department officer repeatedly striking someone at ground level with a baton or a large stick.

Bodycam footage released in 2021 by the U.S. Department of Justice, and cell-phone videos posted to social media, show that Boyland was hit by a police officer numerous times with what appears to be a small tree branch or walking stick.

Epoch Times Photo
A man points down to where Rosanne Boyland and others tumbled after being pushed from the Capitol West Terrace tunnel on Jan. 6, 2021. (Screen Capture/via The Epoch Times)
Shortly after, a group of men carries Boyland to a spot on the sidewalk directly in front of the police line at the center of the tunnel entrance.

Other videos show a bystander frantically performing CPR on Boyland, whose lips had turned purple. Another man, wearing body armor with a patch that read “Sheriff” on the front, takes over the CPR for a short time, but is then pulled away from Boyland. Police then grab the apparently deceased woman by the feet and drag her into the Capitol.

“She’s dying! She’s dying!” one man cries out to the line of police. “That’s on you, mother [expletive].”

The crowd outside the tunnel then erupts into a rage, charging at police and throwing objects, including flag poles, a riot shield and what appears to be a stereo speaker.

The new video confirms the limited bodycam footage and eyewitness accounts from Jan. 6 that Boyland was crushed and trampled when the crowd was pushed out of the tunnel, then repeatedly struck by police as she lay unconscious.

The New York attorney who released the three-hour surveillance video repeated his call for a special prosecutor to investigate what went on in the Capitol tunnel.

Epoch Times Photo
A police officer holds up a stick just before striking Rosanne Boyland at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. (Screen Capture/via The Epoch Times)
“My assessment is that yes, she was killed by the police,” Joseph McBride told The Epoch Times.

McBride originally called for a special prosecutor after the three-hour video showed his client, Victoria C. White, was beaten by police in the West Terrace tunnel over a four-minute period on Jan. 6. The violence against White occurred just a few minutes before Boyland entered the tunnel.

“Our relentless pursuit of truth and justice requires a special prosecutor to investigate the brutal beating of Victoria White and killing of Rosanne Boyland, who were both victims of police brutality on January 6th,” McBride said.

Witnesses have given dramatic accounts of Boyland’s last minutes of life.

“Many people were screaming that a woman was being trampled by the police. I responded as fast as I could,” witness Jonathan Mellis told investigative journalist Cara Castronuova in August 2021. “I saw her lifeless body being crushed under the officers and hit with their batons. They were kicking her viciously. I acted to get them off her. I was maced.”

Lonna Cave, Boyland’s sister, said the family is looking for answers — and to see that the officer who struck Rosanne is held to account.

“We just want to know what happened to Rosanne. There are so many questions,” Cave said in a December interview with Castronuova. “There’s video of her being beaten by a police officer after she’s already down on the ground. And then she is seen on video again shortly thereafter and the police drag her. The guys who are out there with her are doing CPR, and one of the police officers like picks up her leg and starts dragging her down the tunnel.”

A man vents his rage at police after they dragged away the dead body of Rosanne Boyland, 34, in the West Terrace tunnel at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. (Screen Capture/via The Epoch Times)
Conservative activist Anderson, who was pulled unconscious from the pile of bodies, said he held onto Boyland’s hand while more and more people fell on top of them. Anderson was pulled from the pile by Jake Lang.

“After I tried saving Rosanne for about 2-3 minutes, I just couldn’t budge her. She was under too many people and she lost her life,” Lang said in a podcast interview with Jim Hoft of the news site Gateway Pundit. “She couldn’t be saved. So I moved over. I spotted Philip with his tongue hanging out the side of his mouth, completely unconscious. He was in a little bit better of a position for me to get underneath him.”

Philip Anderson is pulled unconscious from a pile of people that toppled when police pushed them from a Capitol tunnel on Jan. 6, 2021. Anderson was next to Rosanne Boyland and held her hand as she lost consciousness. (Screen Capture/U.S. Department of Justice)
Congressman Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) questioned Attorney General Merrick Garland about Boyland’s death at an October hearing on Capitol Hill. “Was a determination ever made as to who repeatedly struck Rosanne Boyland in the head with a rod before she died?” Gohmert asked.

“Again, I think this was a matter that was investigated by the U.S. Attorney’s office,” Garland said.

Cave said she wants to know why the police officer who beat her sister isn’t under investigation. “Why in this case is this policewoman not being held accountable? Why is nobody investigating her?” Cave said. “Why isn’t anybody talking about it? It’s mind boggling.”

The Epoch Times asked both the U.S. Department of Justice and the Metropolitan Police Department for comments on the circumstances of Boyland’s death, but did not receive a reply by press time.

Cave said she noticed on the videos that it wasn’t the police who came to her sister’s aid.

“It doesn’t show the police officers helping my sister whatsoever. The only people who are helping her are the guys who are sitting in jail right now.”

Joseph M. Hanneman

Follow
Joseph Hanneman is a reporter for The Epoch Times who covers the State of Wisconsin. His work over a nearly 40-year career has appeared in Catholic World Report, the Racine Journal Times, the Wisconsin State Journal and the Chicago Tribune. Reach him at: joseph.hanneman@epochtimes.us

9/11 style commission necessary for January 6 incident?

https://townhall.com/columnists/byronyork/2021/02/17/should-a-911style-commission-investigate-the-capitol-riot-n2584833?utm_source=thdailyvip&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&newsletterad=02/17/2021&bcid=551cbf8791dc14ec523b42d3e4630a2b&recip=19722098

Should a ‘9/11-style’ Commission Investigate the Capitol Riot?
Townhall Columnists Byron York
OPINION
Should a ‘9/11-style’ Commission Investigate the Capitol Riot?
Byron YorkByron York|Posted: Feb 17, 2021 12:01 AM
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.
Should a ‘9/11-style’ Commission Investigate the Capitol Riot?
Source: AP Photo/John Minchillo

Speaker Nancy Pelosi says the House will vote to create an independent commission to investigate the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. There’s no doubt there needs to be an extensive investigation of the events surrounding the riot. But what is striking is that, even as Pelosi calls for an investigation, a number of government agencies are stonewalling the public on some of the most basic information about the events of Jan. 6.

The public should not have to wait for an investigation to learn how many police officers were injured in the riot, and the severity of their injuries. It should not have to wait to find out the cause of death of Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick. It should not have to wait to find out if authorities confiscated firearms from rioters, and, if so, how many and what type. It should not have to wait to learn details of the shooting of Ashli Babbitt.

The public should not have to wait to learn what officials knew about the possibility of violence before the riot. What did the Capitol Police know? What did the House and Senate sergeants-at-arms know? What did Speaker Pelosi and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy know? Senate leaders Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell? The White House? National Guard officials?

Americans could, and should, know more about these topics right now. But significant parts of the Capitol riot are now shrouded in official secrecy. And the existence of multiple investigations will only make that worse, giving officials an excuse not to speak publicly because there is an active investigation going on. So before the big commission is formed and begins its work, how about Americans learn some of those basic facts about the riot?

Now, a number of top House Republicans — Rodney Davis, ranking minority member on the House Administration Committee, Jim Jordan, ranking member on the Judiciary Committee; James Comer, ranking member on the Government Oversight and Reform Committee; and Devin Nunes, ranking member on the Intelligence Committee, have sent a letter to Pelosi asking for answers for some key questions about security preparations in the days before Jan. 6. The questions have a partisan edge — nothing unusual for Capitol Hill — but they cover things Americans need to know.

For example, the lawmakers want to know about discussions in the days before the riot about using the National Guard to increase security. What did law enforcement agencies tell Capitol Hill leaders about the possibility of violence? And what did those leaders do about it?

Obviously, there are questions about President Trump’s actions before and during the riot. Many of those were touched upon during the recently ended impeachment trial. There is no danger those questions will be ignored, either by a commission or by the media. On the other hand, the questions that House Republicans have posed need answers, too.

Finally, one last word on the description of the still-unformed commission. It is universally referred to as a “9/11-style” commission. Pelosi undoubtedly likes that because it helps cement in the public’s mind an equivalence between the riot and the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history. In both, Democrats say terrorists attacked America. But be reasonable. There is simply no comparison in scale, motivation or anything else between Sept. 11 and Jan. 6.

In case anyone has forgotten, the 9/11 al-Qaida attacks killed roughly 3,000 people, brought down New York’s tallest skyscrapers, destroyed part of the Pentagon, crashed four passenger jetliners and changed U.S. foreign policy for decades. The Jan. 6 riot led to the so-far unexplained death of one Capitol Police officer, the death of one rioter at the hands of police, the stampeding death of another rioter and the natural causes deaths of two more. Parts of the Capitol were ransacked, but not seriously enough that Congress could not meet and finish its work on the night of the riot. It was appalling, but nothing like Sept. 11. (To visualize the difference, imagine that, on the night of the 9/11 attacks, there was a convention that went on as scheduled at the World Trade Center.)

So bring on the investigations. They should be exhaustive. And that will take time. But there are things Americans need to know right now, too.

Byron York is chief political correspondent for The Washington Examiner.

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“……Know we are Christians by our hate”

https://townhall.com/columnists/michaelbrown/2021/02/17/and-they-will-know-we-are-christians-by-our-hate-n2584840?utm_source=thdailyvip&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&newsletterad=02/17/2021&bcid=551cbf8791dc14ec523b42d3e4630a2b&recip=19722098Townhall Columnists Michael Brown

OPINION
And They Will Know We Are Christians By Our Hate
Michael BrownMichael Brown|Posted: Feb 17, 2021 12:01 AM
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.
And They Will Know We Are Christians By Our Hate
Source: AP Photo/Mohammed Hakim

Did you ever hear the song that begins with the words, “We are one in the Spirit, we are one in the Lord”? The lyrics are very simple, with the repeated refrain, “And they’ll know we are Christians by our love, by our love, Yeah they’ll know we are Christians by our love.” Today, we might want to change that refrain to “they’ll know we are Christians by our hate, by our hate.” We have become terribly disfigured in recent years, in many ways, the opposite of God’s intent. How on earth did this happen?

If you don’t believe me, visit some of our personal, Bible-affirming, Jesus-believing, social media pages, where we savage each other and attack each other and spread hearsay and even lies about one another with reckless abandon. They are hate-filled pages, pages filled with venom and poison, yet pages that ultimately reflect what is in our own hearts. I ask again: how on earth did this happen?

To give one recent, case in point, when my younger colleague Jeremiah Johnson publicly apologized for wrongly prophesying Trump’s reelection, he received a torrent of hate mail of the basest sort, almost all of it from professing Christians.

This is the fruit of the Spirit? This is the result of our fellowship with God? This is what happens when we are changed into the likeness of Jesus? Obviously not.

Yet I see this every day. We are vile. We are vicious. We are mean-spirited. We treat each other with disrespect and disdain. There is little honor. Little humility. Little grace.

Perhaps worse still, we have been taught to hate and we have found justification for our hatred. After all, the Democrats (or Republicans or whatever people have our ire at the moment) are downright demons. They are Satan incarnate. They are pure evil. They deserve nothing but damnation. They are worthy of our ridicule.

To treat them with even a modicum of decency is beneath our high Christian calling, a calling we now demonstrate by our condescending, cruel, mocking, and merciless attitudes. Oh, how holy we have become!

The truth is that we can hate sin without becoming hateful. We can stand against corruption and evil without becoming vile. We can even be righteously indignant without becoming venomous.

Yet we get in the flesh and violate hundreds of scriptural exhortations, all while puffing out our self-righteous chests. This is a stench in God’s nostrils.

At all points, God calls us to speak the truth in love.

At all points, God calls us to exercise self-restraint.

At all points, God calls us to follow the example of Jesus.

Some will say, “I agree. We should follow the example of Jesus – the Jesus who overturned the tables of the money changers in the Temple and the Jesus who rebuked the Pharisees in the strongest possible terms. That’s the Jesus I emulate.”

Sorry friend, but you’re barking up the wrong tree.

First, you’re not the unique Son of God, and neither am I. Yet when He overturned the tables in the Temple, He did so as the Son of God, taking action on behalf of His heavenly Father. Where, in Scripture, did He ever tell us to go and do the same? Where, in the Bible, is it recorded that the apostles followed His lead and repeated His acts?

Second, it was the perfect, sinless Messiah who rebuked the Pharisees, men who were highly respected religious leaders of their day. Today, He might be rebuking some of us. Not only so, but He did more than simply rebuke them for their hypocrisy. He also died for their salvation.

When we have that kind of love, the love that is ready and willing to die for those we rebuke, then our words will sound and feel a lot different. That is the kind of love that weeps in secret before it rebukes in public.

Third, Jesus explicitly told us how we are to conduct ourselves, saying this: “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.

“If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” (Matthew 5:43-48)

Listen to those words again: “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven.”

Are we living as children of our heavenly Father? Whose image and likeness do we bear?

Paul wrote, “the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law” (Galatians 5:22-24). What kind of fruit are we bearing?

We should analyze everything we post or text or say against this grid. Is it in harmony with the fruit of the Spirit? Do our words and attitudes reflect true love? Or do they reflect the works of the flesh, which include “hatreds, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish ambitions, dissensions, factions (Galatians 5:20, CSB)?

According to Paul, “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails” (1 Corinthians 13:4-8a).

One of my colleagues, the leader of a major, international media ministry, said that everywhere he has traveled in the United States, he has seen Christians angry and divided over politics.

Is that what has infected us? Have we become so consumed with partisan politics to the point that our Christian identity is now completely intertwined with a fleshly, angry, divisive, and accusative spirit – the very spirit of worldly politics?

Or does the problem run deeper still? Could it also be that we have drifted from our first love with the Lord, drifted from intimacy with Him, drifted from the beauty and wonder of the cross, drifted from fellowship with the Spirit, drifted from being transformed by the Word?

Peter exhorted, “Having purified your souls by your obedience to the truth for a sincere brotherly love, love one another earnestly from a pure heart” (1 Peter 1:22).

John wrote, “We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brothers. Whoever does not love abides in death. Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him” (1 John 3:14-15).

Are we getting the message?

Jacob (James) added this: “Those who consider themselves religious and yet do not keep a tight rein on their tongues deceive themselves, and their religion is worthless.”

Does that describe us?

Shortly before His crucifixion, Jesus said, “By this everyone will know that you are My disciples, if you love one another” (John 13:35).

Today, we are better known for our hate than for our love.

It is high time – no, it is way past time – for some deep, serious soul-searching and repentance. It is time for radical change. May we learn to love again.

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4 year long campaign against President Trump: The Epoch Times:


https://www.theepochtimes.com/infographic-the-4-year-long-campaign-against-trump_3582789.html

The Epoch Times: November 25, 2020

The post-election push to pressure President Donald Trump to concede, despite numerous credible allegations of voter fraud and ongoing legal challenges, is not an isolated incident.

It is the culmination of a four-year-long campaign against him, which started during his first run for president in 2016 when the FBI launched a politically motivated investigation of his campaign. During his subsequent four years in office, there have been consistent efforts to remove him from office, first through the Russia-collusion narrative and then through impeachment.

The Epoch Times here provides an overview of some of the main efforts made against the sitting president of the United States.

This is an issue that transcends party lines, as it is not only an assault on Trump, but an assault on the office of the presidency, and with it, an assault on the foundation of America.

The FBI under the Obama administration in 2016 launched a politically motivated investigation of the Trump campaign. Based on publicly available information, we know the investigation was initiated based on the thinnest of evidence: remarks made by a junior Trump campaign adviser to the Australian ambassador in London. In reality, the investigation primarily relied on the discredited “Steele dossier,” produced by former MI6 agent Christopher Steele on behalf of the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC).

The Trump–Russia Shadow
While the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation itself would not find any evidence of Trump–Russia collusion, the ongoing investigations, including selective leaks to the media, would create the public narrative that Trump had colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election. This cast a shadow over the first few years of his presidency and constrained his actions both domestically and internationally. Some members of Congress had gone so far as to call for Trump’s impeachment over the false allegations.

Former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation James Comey, speaks via a TV monitor during a hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington on Sept. 30, 2020. (Stefani Reynolds/Pool/Getty Images)
FBI Under Comey and McCabe
The FBI under Director James Comey and Deputy Director Andrew McCabe pro-actively worked against Trump. McCabe was directly involved in the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, working with FBI agent Peter Strzok and FBI attorney Lisa Page. After Comey was fired by Trump in May 2017, McCabe actively pushed the agency to further investigate Trump. McCabe’s FBI went as far as suggesting Department of Justice official Bruce Ohr reach back out to Steele, despite that many of the claims in his dossier had been disproven by that time and the FBI had cut ties with him over his leaks to the media.

Perhaps one of the most powerful forces working against Trump during his presidency has been the news media. Over the past five years, they have relentlessly published skewed and inaccurate information about Trump while minimizing or ignoring his accomplishments, seeking to portray him publicly as an illegitimate president. This type of reporting has created a climate of anger, hate, and instability in America. It has resulted in threats made to the president’s life and acts of violence against his supporters.

The House of Representatives on Dec. 18, 2019, impeached Trump along partisan lines. Though the Senate would later dismiss the charge, it left a mark on his presidency and dragged the country through months of public attacks in the media. At the center of the impeachment was a phone call Trump made on July 25, 2019, to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, during which Trump expressed his hope that allegations of potential corruption involving former Vice President Joe Biden would be investigated. Given even the publicly available information at the time, there were legitimate concerns that American political influence and taxpayers’ funds were misused in Ukraine. At the time, it was publicly known that Biden’s son Hunter had received tens of thousands of dollars a month from a Ukrainian energy giant, while then-Vice President Biden—in his own words—had pressured the Ukrainian president to fire a prosecutor as a prerequisite for receiving $1 billion in foreign aid. That same prosecutor had been investigating the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, as well its board, which included Hunter Biden.

Trump’s opponents have accused the president of mishandling the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, commonly referred to as the novel coronavirus, by acting too late. This, however, is contrary to the events of early 2020. The Trump administration on Feb. 2, 2020, banned all foreign travel from China, the source of the CCP virus. This decision was made by the president against the advice of some of his top advisers and exceeded actions taken by most other nations at the time. Meanwhile, his opponents in politics and media described it as xenophobic and an overreaction. In hindsight, the decision proved immensely valuable in helping to slow the spread of the virus. As the virus spread in the United States, the Trump administration increased testing capacity, coordinated with state governments to provide them with the federal assistance they needed, used the defense production act to compel companies to produce critical health equipment such as ventilators, and provided billions in federal funding and eased federal regulations for major drug companies to push for the development of a vaccine.

Foreign Interference
It would be accurate to say that Trump is communist China’s biggest adversary. The president broke a decades-long U.S. policy toward China that was based on the belief that, through engagement and economic development, the People’s Republic would evolve from a totalitarian regime toward a more democratic country. In reality, this strategy of appeasement merely resulted in trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of U.S. jobs going to China. And instead of becoming more democratic, the Chinese regime used this wealth to advance its dictatorship, creating the most technologically advanced tyranny the world has ever witnessed. The CCP has consistently worked against Trump during his presidency, both publicly and behind the scenes. Beijing has used its domestic and overseas propaganda channels—often by relying on the United States’ own media—to vilify Trump, going as far as to suggest that the outbreak of the CCP virus in Wuhan was because of the American military.

Black Lives Matter
Black Lives Matter (BLM) has been behind the riots that have plagued American cities for much of this year. The group has hijacked the concerns people have over racism and used them to justify its advance of a Marxist agenda. In a 2015 video, BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors described herself and her fellow founders as “trained Marxists.” Just like in Russia, China, Cuba, and Venezuela, trained Marxists have hijacked righteous causes to advance the communist agenda. Many of those who lived through the Cultural Revolution in China in the 1960s have commented that the riots in the United States over the summer, which included the toppling of historical statues, were eerily similar. The result is a climate of chaos and insecurity that affects the entire country.

Antifa
Dressed in full black gear including armor, helmets, and masks, and trained in agitation and basic combat, Antifa extremists have been involved in numerous acts of violence during Trump’s presidency. In many cases, these acts of violence, which include the use of weapons, rocks, and Molotov cocktails, were directed at law enforcement and government property. But Antifa members have also directly targeted unarmed common citizens for simply supporting Trump. We saw this happen twice in Washington, where those who had gathered to support Trump were later attacked when alone in the city at night. Antifa’s use of a militia-style force to intimidate and physically attack citizens for their political beliefs creates a powerful climate of fear and stands against the most basic American values.

The Permanent Government
Though Trump as president is the leader of the executive branch, when he came to office he inherited a federal government staffed with hundreds of thousands of employees. It’s no secret that many career officials in the U.S. government have actively sought to undermine or even openly work against Trump. Many in government have been led by false information published by media organizations to believe that they are doing the right thing, and that by working against Trump, they are putting the interests of the country first. In fact, they have done the country a disservice by blocking a rightfully elected president from executing the will of the people.

Mueller Special Counsel Investigation
Following the firing of FBI Director Comey, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein assigned former FBI Director Robert Mueller to continue the FBI’s investigation of alleged Trump–Russia collusion. Mueller would conclude in a final report that there was no evidence of such collusion. But this only came after a nearly two-year-long investigation, giving the media and Trump’s political opponents leeway to portray Trump as an illegitimate president because of his supposed affiliation with Russia.

Illegal Leaks
Throughout the past four years, the Trump administration has been plagued by selective leaks aimed at damaging Trump’s presidency. Some of these leaks have been criminal in nature, such as the leak of the transcripts of Trump’s conversations with foreign leaders—a felony offense. Treasury official Natalie Edwards was found guilty of illegally leaking suspicious activity reports (SARs) on financial transactions by former Trump campaign associate Paul Manafort, among others.

2020 Election Fraud
Following the Nov. 3 elections, dozens of credible allegations of voter fraud or other illegal acts connected to the counting of ballots have emerged. Dozens of poll workers across multiple states have given testimony in sworn statements—under penalty of perjury—detailing irregularities in how ballots were counted, as well as how the workers were instructed to make otherwise illegal changes to ballots, how they were unable to properly observe ballot counting, and how they witnessed new ballots mysteriously appear out of nowhere. The Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee launched a number of lawsuits to challenge the process. They’ve argued that in Pennsylvania alone, 600,000 ballots should be invalidated, as Republican election observers weren’t allowed to witness the ballot processing.

Manufactured Narratives
The use of manufactured narratives to attack Trump has been pervasive since he assumed the presidency. Perhaps the most notable is the claim that he defended neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia, when in fact he said that that there were “very fine people on both sides,” referring to people who “were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name.” Trump specifically added, “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally—but you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists.” Yet despite this being on public record, Trump would continue to be asked throughout his presidency, especially during the election season, whether he was ready to “denounce white supremacy,” despite having done so on many occasions, even before becoming president

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President Trump’s Response to yet again another Acquittal

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2021/02/13/president-trump-responds-to-aquittle-n2584703

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BREAKING|President Trump Acquitted for Second Time

President Trump Responds to Impeachment Acquittal
Townhall Tipsheet Katie Pavlich
President Trump Responds to Impeachment Acquittal
Katie PavlichKatie Pavlich| @KatiePavlich|Posted: Feb 13, 2021 4:25 PM
President Trump Responds to Impeachment Acquittal
Source: (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

President Donald Trump is responding after the U.S. Senate voted 57-43 to acquit him on a single impeachment article of “incitement” Saturday afternoon.

His full statement:

I want to first thank my team of dedicated lawyers and others for their tireless work upholding justice and defending truth.

My deepest thanks as well to all of the United States Senators and Members of Congress who stood proudly for the Constitution we all revere and for the sacred legal principles at the heart of our country.

Our cherished Constitutional Republic was founded on the impartial rule of law, the indispensable safeguard for our liberties, our rights and our freedoms.

It is a sad commentary on our times that one political party in America is given a free pass to denigrate the rule of law, defame law enforcement, cheer mobs, excuse rioters, and transform justice into a tool of political vengeance, and persecute, blacklist, cancel and suppress all people and viewpoints with whom or which they disagree. I always have, and always will, be a champion for the unwavering rule of law, the heroes of law enforcement, and the right of Americans to peacefully and honorably debate the issues of the day without malice and without hate.

This has been yet another phase of the greatest witch hunt in the history of our Country. No president has ever gone through anything like it, and it continues because our opponents cannot forget the almost 75 million people, the highest number ever for a sitting president, who voted for us just a few short months ago.

I also want to convey my gratitude to the millions of decent, hardworking, law-abiding, God-and-Country loving citizens who have bravely supported these important principles in these very difficult and challenging times.

Our historic, patriotic and beautiful movement to Make America Great Again has only just begun. In the months ahead I have much to share with you, and I look forward to continuing our incredible journey together to achieve American greatness for all of our people. There has never been anything like it!

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We have so much work ahead of us, and soon we will emerge with a vision for a bright, radiant, and limitless American future.

Together there is nothing we cannot accomplish.

We remain one People, one family, and one glorious nation under God, and it’s our responsibility to preserve this magnificent inheritance for our children and for generations of Americans to come.

May God bless all of you, and may God forever bless the United States of America.