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August 2022

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Where Is Steven D’Antuono? The head of the FBI’s field office in Washington, D.C., has a lot of explaining to do. By Julie Kelly

By on August 23rd, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/08/22/where-is-steven-dantuono/

A few days after the Capitol protest on January 6, 2021, a tough-talking FBI chief with a Boston accent promised the American people that the bureau would spare no resource in hunting down everyone and anyone involved in the four-hour disturbance that day. 

Steven M. D’Antuono, the newly appointed head of the Washington, D.C. FBI field office, gave the public a stern warning. “The FBI will leave no stone unturned. This is a 24/7, full bore, extensive operation,” D’Antuono explained during a January 12, 2021 press conference at the Department of Justice. “As Director Wray says, the FBI does not do easy.”

His agency, D’Antuono bragged, has a “long memory and a broad reach.” Agents from 56 FBI field offices across the country “will be knocking on your door if we find out you were part of the criminal activity at the Capitol.” He urged people to turn in their co-workers, neighbors, and relatives if they had information that could help the FBI in its dragnet.

Turns out, his comments weren’t just Beantown-style braggadocio. More than 850 Americans since then have been investigated, arrested, and charged for mostly nonviolent offenses related to the January 6 protest. Armed FBI agents have conducted early morning raids at homes across the country, using military style vehicles to batter in front doors while traumatizing families, children, and neighbors in the process. It is a crusade of fear and terror meant to reinforce D’Antuono’s threats that those who dared to demonstrate against the fraudulent election of Joe Biden that day will pay a hefty price. 

Nearly 20 months later, D’Antuono’s office continues to announce new arrests.

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The Rushdie Stabbing and the World’s Leading Terror State The real point of the Islamic Republic’s fatwa. David Harsanyi

By on August 23rd, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/rushdie-stabbing-reminds-us-iran-still-worlds-david-harsanyi/

Last week, a man stormed the stage at the Chautauqua Institution and stabbed British author Salman Rushdie in the neck as he was being introduced. The topic under discussion was “the United States as asylum for writers and other artists in exile and as a home for freedom of creative expression.” Chances are exceptionally high that this was the work of a jihadi.

The story attracted shamefully fleeting attention. For those too young to remember, “The Satanic Verses” was published back in September 1988. And because of the book’s purportedly impertinent treatment of the prophet Muhammad, it was banned in Rushdie’s native India and dozens of other nations — including virtually every Muslim-majority country in the world. Though Rushdie would later become a powerful advocate of free expression, he initially turned on his own book, apologizing numerous times for its contents. “I profoundly regret the distress that publication has occasioned to sincere followers of Islam,” he said in one statement, asking his publisher to hold back release of the paperback edition of the book. As a matter of self-preservation, his position was understandable.

And, still, it was all to no avail. Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against Rushdie, contending that even if the author “became the most pious man of all time” it was the duty of every Muslim to “employ everything he has got” to murder the writer.

For the first time in postwar history, terrorism was aimed at suppressing free expression in the liberal Western world. In the United States, two bookstores in Berkeley, California, were attacked. The Riverdale Press in New York was firebombed after publishing an editorial defending the right to read the novel and criticizing the bookstores that pulled it from their shelves. Rushdie’s Japanese translator Hitoshi Igarashi was fatally stabbed. In Europe, the Italian translator of “The Satanic Verses,” Ettore Capriolo, was also stabbed in his apartment in Milan, and the Norwegian publisher of Rushdie’s book, William Nygaard, was shot three times, but both survived. In Belgium, an imam and his aide were murdered after expressing moderate positions on the affair. Big booksellers in London were firebombed in April 1989, and there were two more explosions connected to the selling of the book and a handful of unexploded devices in other bookstores. Rushdie, author of the masterpiece “Midnight’s Children” among many other fantastic works, was forced to employ round-the-clock protection by bodyguards, compelled to spend the next decade in hiding.

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Fauci flees his office, fearing Republicans taking control in Congress and holding him to account By Thomas Lifson

By on August 23rd, 2022

Yesterday, in a statement posted on the website of the federal agency he runs, Dr. Anthony Fauci announced his retirement in December, one month before Republicans are expected to take control of the House of Representatives and maybe the Senate.

I am announcing today that I will be stepping down from the positions of Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and Chief of the NIAID Laboratory of Immunoregulation, as well as the position of Chief Medical Advisor to President Joe Biden. I will be leaving these positions in December of this year to pursue the next chapter of my career.

As Sister Toldjah notes at RedState:

Apparently, the “next phase” of Fauci’s career will include collecting a sweet pension and possibly avoiding having to answer before Congress under oath as to what he knew about the origins of COVID-19 and U.S. gain of research funding:

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Cataloging Biden’s Lies About The Border

By on August 23rd, 2022

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/08/23/cataloging-bidens-lies-about-the-border/

“Sources for statements in the chart:

March 17, 2021: “The border is secure, and the border is not open.” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
June 15, 2021: “The administration has made significant progress at establishing a well-managed and secure border while also treating people fairly and humanely. The American people support this approach.” White House statement.
Sept. 22, 2021: “The border is secure. We’re executing our plan.” Mayorkas.
March 1, 2022: “And if we are to advance liberty and justice, we need to secure the border and fix the immigration system.” Joe Biden

July 20, 2022: “Look, the border is secure. We are working to make the border more secure. That has been a historic challenge.” Mayorkas.

As soon as President Biden took office, the number of foreigners crossing the southern U.S. border illegally exploded. When asked about it in his first press conference in March 2021, Biden brushed it off, saying “this happens every year” and “nothing has changed.”

Later that same month, Biden claimed that “this new surge we’re dealing with now started with the last administration, but it’s our responsibility to deal with it humanely and to — and to stop what’s happening.”

At his State of the Union address this year, he said that “if we are to advance liberty and justice, we need to secure the border and fix the immigration system.”

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Who Is Joe Pinion? He could be the candidate to topple Senator Schumer. Ira Stoll

By on August 23rd, 2022

He could be the candidate to topple Senator Schumer.

Who is Joe Pinion?

When a colleague called with that question last week, I was stumped. It turns out that he is the Republican Party’s candidate for U.S. Senate in 2022 in New York, running against the Senate majority leader, Charles Schumer. 

The Schumer-Pinion race is a study in contrasts, and not only when it comes to name recognition. Mr. Schumer’s campaign has raised a lot more money: Federal Election Commission data through June 30, 2022, show that Mr. Schumer had raised $39 million to Mr. Pinion’s $254,397, and that Mr. Schumer had $37.9 million in cash on hand, while Mr. Pinion had $25,150. 

Mr. Schumer, 71, was elected to Congress in 1980 and to the New York State assembly in 1974; Mr. Pinion just turned 39 and has not yet been elected to political office.

Mr. Pinion himself says in a phone interview that people thought he was “crazy” to try to beat Mr. Schumer. He says, though, that he’s in a “great position” to take on the majority leader. Two polls taken in late July show Mr. Schumer with support at 53 percent or 56 percent, down from the 70 percent of the vote Mr. Schumer won when he was re-elected in 2016. A McLaughlin poll taken in August found 42 percent of New Yorkers would re-elect Mr. Schumer, while 48 percent want someone else.

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Mike Pence Is Wrong. DOJ And FBI Rot Spreads Way Deeper Than Garland By: Jonathan S. Tobin

By on August 23rd, 2022

https://thefederalist.com/2022/08/22/mike-pence-is-wrong-doj-and-fbi-rot-spreads-way-deeper-than-garland/

The former veep is still trying to sound reasonable by saying the GOP shouldn’t criticize the FBI — but the bureau is saturated with political bias that must be expunged.

When it comes to the way the deep state regime is at war with Republicans, former Vice President Mike Pence’s No. 1 priority is showing that his main concern is to keep playing the “good cop” to the “bad cop” of former President Donald Trump. 

Speaking in New Hampshire last week, Pence characteristically tried to have it both ways over this unprecedented attack on norms that the incident represented. After vaguely calling for transparency, Pence said:

I also want to remind my fellow Republicans that we can hold the Attorney General accountable for the decision that he made without attacking the rank and file law enforcement personnel at the FBI. The Republican Party is the party of law and order. Our party stands with the men and women who serve on the thin blue line at the federal, state, and local levels. These attacks on the FBI must stop. Calls to defund the FBI are just as wrong as calls to defund the police. The truth of the matter is we need to get to the bottom of the matter and let the facts play out, but more than anything else, the American people need to be reassured of the integrity of our justice system.

Conservatives are justifiably venting outrage over the banana republic-style raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home by FBI agents acting on the orders of Attorney General Merrick Garland. But the soft-spoken Pence thinks the priority is to reassure the administrative state that Republicans won’t be unreasonable in their pushback against attempts to delegitimize opposition to the Biden administration. 

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China Is Weaponizing Chinese Worldwide to Support the CCP by Gordon G. Chang

By on August 23rd, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18819/china-chinese-support

To make matters worse, the Chinese state has been open about its hostility to the United States. Among other things, in May 2019 People’s Daily, the Party’s self-described “mouthpiece” and therefore most authoritative publication in China, declared a “people’s war” on America.

Many of those “different social systems”—especially the United States—are squeamish when it comes to singling people out because of their race. Yet American policymakers cannot ignore the fact that the Communist Party’s appeal to overseas Chinese is overtly race-based.

In February… the Justice Department ended its Trump-era “China Initiative,” which concentrated law enforcement efforts on Chinese espionage. Yet given Xi Jinping’s call on overseas Chinese to work for the Chinese Communist Party, it is time to reinstitute that program and devote more resources to it.

Can Americans of Chinese descent be loyal to both America and China?

No. China’s Communist Party has made itself an existential threat to America and every other society…. The promotion of tianxia [ruling “All under Heaven”] means, among other things, that the Party views the U.S. government as illegitimate and America as nothing more a tributary society or colony.

Although we [“Chinese-Americans”] technically do not have an obligation to prove our loyalty to America, we must, as a group, understand that a hostile power is trying to weaponize us. Xi Jinping has openly called on us to become a subversive force, to help him destroy the country we now call home.

It is time, therefore, for us to begin cleaning our own ranks…. Moreover, it means not shouting “racism” every time law enforcement arrests someone of Chinese descent.

We may think it unfair, but we now have to make a choice.

After all, our country—the United States of America—is in peril because a foreign state—the People’s Republic of China—is attacking it and hoping to use us to take it down.

The Communist Party of China refers to us as “overseas patriotic forces.” People in our communities will want to know to which country we feel patriotic.

“Promoting the great unity of the Chinese people is the historic responsibility of China’s patriotic united front work in the new era,” said Chinese ruler Xi Jinping at the end of last month to Communist Party cadres in Beijing. “To do the job well, we must… truly unite all Chinese people in different parties, nationalities, classes, groups, and with different beliefs, and those who are living under different social systems.”

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When the American Dream is a ‘dog whistle’Oliver Wiseman

By on August 23rd, 2022

https://spectatorworld.com/newsletter/american-dream-dog-whistle-dc-diary-08-22-22/?utm_source=

When the American Dream is a ‘dog whistle’

High on the list of reasons why American politics feels so bad-blooded, chaotic and dysfunctional is the determination of many members of the media to paint the normal and harmless as unprecedented and dangerous.

For the latest example of this pathology, look no further than the front page of yesterday’s New York Times, where prime real estate was afforded to an article explaining that “In US politics, even the phrase ‘The American Dream’ divides.”

The starting point for the story, by national politics reporter Jazmine Ulloa, is the large number of unorthodox Republican candidates for office this cycle, many of them Latinos and many of them, as the story puts it, with “powerful come-from-behind stories.”

As you might expect, the likes of Juan Ciscomani, a Republican running for Congress in Arizona who “washed cars to help his Mexican immigrant father pay the bills”, and Winsome Earle-Sears, the Jamaican-born former Marine who was elected lieutenant governor of Virginia last year, are fond of invoking the American Dream. An entirely benign development, you might think. Not according to the Times, which reports that “historians and other scholars warn that some Republicans are distorting a defining American idea and turning it into an exclusionary political message.” The story then approvingly quotes a Fordham University professor’s claim that the American Dream is being used by Republicans as a “dog whistle.”

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The real motivation for the FBI raid It wasn’t to collect classified documents Roger Kimball

By on August 23rd, 2022

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/real-motivation-fbi-raid-mar-a-lago/?utm_source=Spectator+World+Signup&utm_campaign=

I write  after the FBI, without warning, raided Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s home in Palm Beach. According to Trump, agents even broke into his safe and made off with who-knows-what documents. They also rifled through Melania Trump’s wardrobe. Maybe they were looking for classified lingerie. Who knows?

As many commentators pointed out immediately, this assault on a former president of the United States by what amounts to the Democratic Party’s secret police was unprecedented. Never before in our history has a former president been subject to the mafia-busting, terrorist-crushing might of state police power directed by the opposing party.

That’s just in our history, though. Elsewhere the story is not so cheery. In many countries, using the power of the state to persecute and harass one’s political opponents is business as usual. Trump got it right when he noted that such “weaponization of the Justice System” and “prosecutorial misconduct” had hitherto been the province of “broken, Third-World countries,” not America.

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Trump Derangement Won’t End with Trump Already, progressives are branding the GOP’s next generation as “a threat to democracy”—sound familiar? Steven Malanga

By on August 23rd, 2022

https://www.city-journal.org/trump-derangement-wont-end-trump

Several days before the 2016 presidential election, the comedian-cum political commentator Bill Maher made an extraordinary admission to his audience. In the past, he said, he’d heaped derision on Republican candidates and officeholders like George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney, portraying them as extremists. “We attacked your boy Bush as if he was the end of the world,” he told former presidential speechwriter David Frum, “and he wasn’t.” Maher spoke of giving President Obama $1 million to defeat Romney because he feared him so much. But “Mitt Romney wouldn’t have changed my life that much,” he admitted in 2016. For years, Maher said, liberals like himself had been “crying wolf” about Republicans, including “honorable men” like Bush and McCain. But the 2016 election, and Donald Trump, were different. “Once fascists get power, they don’t give it up,” Maher said, as he pleaded for votes against Trump.

It’s not clear how much of Maher’s audience was persuaded by his confession, but we know that far more people voted for Trump than the political establishment imagined possible—so that many voters must have discounted the same kinds of claims made against Trump as just more “crying wolf.” Six years later, Trump is a defeated ex-president, but still very much on the minds of liberals. If Trump is a fascist, he’s been an ineffective one, given that he claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him—not what you’d expect a dangerous autocrat to let happen. His own behavior in the wake of that loss, and especially his words and actions around the events of January 6, were unpresidential, to say the least, and even the partisan congressional hearings that have often seemed more like a show trial than a serious inquiry have reminded the country how disturbing Trump’s behavior was, and how serious his character flaws remain. But the political establishment has itself in the ensuing years often acted as autocratic as they accuse Trump of being—most recently, in the FBI raid on Trump’s Florida home.

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