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Ruth King

The Democrats’ dark campaign master by Byron York,

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/byron-yorks-daily-memo-the-democrats-dark-campaign-master

THE DEMOCRATS’ DARK CAMPAIGN MASTER. Mollie Hemingway’s important new book, Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections , goes on sale tomorrow. In it, she covers the ways Democratic activists took advantage of the Covid pandemic to push long-sought changes in the ways people vote. They were enormously successful in some key states and left Republicans desperately playing catch-up.

For some Democrats, the effort was the culmination of a drive to bring down Donald Trump that began well before he took office. And for no Democrat was that more true than Washington lawyer Marc Elias.

What is really extraordinary, as Hemingway points out, is that one man, Elias, was responsible for both the Steele dossier, which was the covert Democratic disinformation operation designed to bring down Trump during the 2016 campaign, and those wide-ranging changes in state election procedures, designed to make sure he did not win reelection in 2020.

The dossier was one of the most successful dirty tricks ever. Elias, working on behalf of the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, paid the oppo/attack firm Fusion GPS to enlist former British spy Christopher Steele to compile a list of false and slanderous allegations about then-candidate Trump.

There was the Michael-Cohen-in-Prague allegation. The Carter-Page-in-Moscow allegation. The “pee tape.” The Manafort fiction. The dossier was done in what looked like official intelligence-report style, relying on Steele’s credibility as a former British agent and FBI informant. Elias hit a home run when the FBI picked up Steele’s false reporting. Then the whole world found out about it when insiders leaked to CNN that then-FBI Director James Comey had briefed President-elect Trump about it. It was an extraordinarily damaging moment for the new president — all choreographed by Elias.

Revolt of the masses: The left has overplayed its hand By Robert Knight

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/oct/10/revolt-of-the-masses-the-left-has-overplayed-its-h/

I think the left is realizing it has a tiger by the tail. The people are getting uppity.

Parents are assailing school boards over critical race theory and transgender madness. So much so that the Biden Justice Department is sending out the FBI to investigate whether, as the National School Boards Association bombastically charges, some parents are guilty of “domestic terrorism and hate crimes.”

Boy, it’s lucky for those BLM/Antifa rioters in 2020 that they refrained from badmouthing teachers and school officials while torching the cities. Their “peaceful protests” might have been investigated.

Meanwhile, former Democratic Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, the Clinton bag man who is running again for his old job, stated, “I’m not going to let parents come into schools and actually take books out and make their own decisions.” He added, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”

This stuff ticks off parents, and GOP candidate Glenn Youngkin is taking full advantage. He is running ads accurately depicting Mr. McAuliffe as an authoritarian, anti-parent elitist.

Republicans are looking to take back Virginia in November and Congress in 2022. Democrats in districts carried by former President Trump are as nervous as a hockey goalie playing without a face mask.

Cancel culture is no laughing matter Ruthie Blum

https://www.jns.org/opinion/cancel-culture-is-no-laughing-matter/

 Comedian Dave Chappell’s latest Netflix special, “The Closer,” is making the rounds but not for its hilarity. No, its high ratings can be attributed to the venom that it has elicited from the mainstream press and social media.

Nothing piques curiosity more than public outrage, after all. There’s no doubt, then, that a huge portion of viewers tuned in just to see what all the fuss was about.
As a longtime fan of the irreverent performer’s, I would have watched the show anyway. But many of my peers hadn’t paid the slightest attention to Chappelle until the scandal erupted. Once it did, they rushed to join in the conversation by seeing the program for themselves.

Chappelle was already Enemy No. 1 in LBGTQ circles for his “transphobia.” He’s been raked over the coals by feminists for his ostensible disdain for women. Some whites, as well, don’t take kindly to the veteran black comic’s persistent mockery of them.

But this time, his jokes about Jews have aroused serious ire. The anger stems from two main passages of the hour-and-a-quarter-long act.
He leads in to the first anti-Semitic sequence by talking about the COVID-19 pandemic by insulting other groups.
“I don’t want you to worry about me,” he begins. “I’m vaccinated; I got the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. I’ve got to admit, that’s probably the most n**gerish decision I’ve made in a long time. … I walk in to the doc like, ‘Give me the third best option; I’ll have what the homeless people are having.’”
He goes on to say that he actually contracted the virus, which made him feel “gross.”
“I haven’t felt dirty like that in a long time,” he says. “Last time I can remember feeling dirty like that, man, I must have been a little boy … being molested by a preacher. But don’t feel bad for me; I liked it.”
He then recounts having had to quarantine for 10 days. Left alone in his room, he says, he watched videos, many of which, “sadly, were of black people beating up Asians for no reason.”

What Does Joe Biden’s Health Have to Do with the Future of Taiwan? by Pete Hoekstra

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17844/taiwan-biden-health

The Chinese communists very much want to gain control of Taiwan, and the current intelligence assessment that the Chinese leadership is probably looking at is one that spells opportunity—a weak President, wary of foreign military entanglements, whose political fortunes are crashing, and in their analysis the real possibility of a transfer of power to an even weaker and less popular vice president in Kamala Harris, who has little foreign policy chops.

The bottom line—the next year will be a high-risk period between China and the United States where serious miscalculations could take place. And that is why… the Biden Administration must send a clear signal of support now for Taiwan.

What is China planning? More than 150 air incursions into Taiwan’s Air Defense Identification Zone, testing Taiwanese response capabilities, strategies, timing and other military capabilities. Are these just Chinese war games or is China getting close to invading Taiwan? These are just some of the many questions that U.S. and other world leaders are grappling with as they try to determine the plans and intentions of China’s President Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party.

Understanding “leadership intent” is one of the key priorities for intelligence collection and analysis. It is safe to assume America’s intelligence agencies are doing this with China and the Chinese are doing the same with the U.S. So, what does that have to do with U.S. President Joe Biden’s health and communist China’s intentions when it comes to Taiwan?

The Chinese are making serious assessments about what they can expect from the U.S. and the Biden Administration if they invade Taiwan. What are the plans and intentions of the Biden administration in regard to China and standing alongside the government of Taiwan? And while many here may not be thinking about it, they are also assessing Biden’s health and how that may impact U.S. response and timing.

In my experience as a member of the House Intelligence Committee, I can say we did focus on the health and wellbeing of key foreign leaders. My committee was briefed multiple times on the likely death of Cuba’s Fidel Castro in the 10 years I served on the Committee. Highlighting how difficult this task was, let’s just say they were wrong multiple times before they eventually got the assessment right.

Sympathy for the Devil: Columbus Day and Why it Matters Joseph Bowman

https://townhall.com/columnists/josephbowman/2021/10/11/sympathy-for-the-devil-columbus-day-and-why-it-matters-n2597185

Today is the second Monday of October and thus is Columbus Day. For many of us, this is little more than a three-day weekend. However, it is seen as an unjust celebration of “whiteness” and imperialism for an increasing number of Americans and signifies how uniquely evil America is. This hatred for Columbus and the misunderstanding of what it is he did is nothing new. In fact, the earliest criticisms of Columbus were made about a century ago by the old Democratic party institution, The Ku Klux Klan. The Klan did not want Americans celebrating a southern European Catholic like Columbus. They argued America was a protestant country founded by Northern Europeans. Anti-Columbus sentiment has festered and grown because of the broader apathy of many Americans who see today as a mere excuse for a three-day weekend. Even Columbus himself did not quite understand the magnitude of his voyages. He went to his grave thinking he had discovered the West Indies and not an entirely new pair of continents. Columbus and his explorations matter, though, and not just for people from the United States.

One of the common dismissals of Columbus is that he never even set foot in America. Instead, he landed in the Bahamas. So why should we care about him? What sense does it make for Americans to celebrate an Italian explorer in the employ of Spain, landing in the Bahamas while searching for the Indies?

Czech Voters Oust Communists From Parliament for First Time Since 1948 By Katabella Roberts

https://www.theepochtimes.com/czech-voters-oust-communists-from-parliament-for-first-time-since-1948_4041689.html

On Saturday, Czech voters booted the communists out of parliament for the first time since the end of World War II, voting out a party whose Soviet-backed predecessors ruled the central European nation with an iron fist from 1948 until 1989’s Velvet Revolution that ushered in democracy.

The Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia (KSČM) failed to retain enough seats to enter the Czech parliament for the first time since the formation of the Czech Republic in 1993 after Czechoslovakia was peacefully dissolved into two with the other state becoming Slovakia.

The KSČM took 3.62 percent of the vote, failing to meet the five percent mark needed to retain seats in both the house and the Chamber of Deputies.

Meanwhile, in a stunning upset, the SPOLU alliance, a liberal-conservative three-party coalition, captured 27.8 percent of the vote, beating Prime Minister Andrej Babis’ Action for Dissatisfied Citizens (ANO) 2011 party, which won 27.1 percent.

Another center-left-liberal coalition of the Pirate Party (PIR) and the Mayors and Independents party (STAN) received 15.6 percent of the vote, finishing in third place, as per the statistics office.

Ahead of the election, the SPOLU alliance vowed to form a coalition government with the Pirate/Stan coalition. Over the weekend, the alliance signed a memorandum on their intent to create a majority Czech government with the Pirate/STAN coalition.

The failure to secure enough votes comes amid waning support for the communist party who during their reign, jailed tens of thousands of people in forced labor camps in the 1950s and brutally repressed dissidents, including playwright-turned-president Vaclav Havel.

The Left Got What It Wanted—So Now What? There is no schadenfreude in seeing the Left destroy everything it touches—because its claws tear all of us as well. By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/10/the-left-got-what-it-wanted-so-now-what/

What was the purpose for the insane opposition of the Left between 2017 and 2021? To usher in a planned nihilism, an incompetent chaos, a honed anarchy to wreck the country in less than a year?

Then

No sooner had Donald Trump entered office than scores of House Democrats filed motions for impeachment, apparently for thought crimes that he might, some day, in theory, could possibly commit.

Foreign Policy published an article by a liberal Obama Administration lawyer outlining all the ways to remove an elected president as soon as possible—including consideration of a military coup. 

The FBI and the entrenched bureaucrats at the Justice Department continued their prior failed efforts during the campaign to seed the lies of the fabricated Steele dossier and Fusion GPS. A 22-month-long and $40 million hoax ended with the special counsel himself, a doddering Robert Mueller, swearing under oath that he essentially knew nothing about the dossier or Fusion GPS—the twin catalysts that had prompted his very own investigation. 

Fired FBI Director James Comey—a lion on Twitter, and a lamb when under oath—on over 240 occasions testified to the Congress that he either did not know or could not remember, when asked details about the collusion fraud that the philosopher G-man had helped perpetuate. 

No one worried about the weaponization of government. So, we went right from the nefarious legacy of John Brennan (who lied under oath to Congress twice), James Clapper (who lied under oath to Congress once), James Comey (who leaked confidential presidential memos), Andrew McCabe (who gave false testimony to federal investigators), Lisa Page (who was fired from the special counsel’s legal team for various unprofessional conduct), Peter Strzok (about whom there is not enough space to detail his transgressions), and the now convicted felon Kevin Clinesmith onto the next round of impeachments. 

Two of them followed. Neither was conducted by a special counsel. There was no array of witnesses, no prosecutorial report. Much less were there formal charges of a specific high crime or misdemeanor, or bribery or treason, as specified by the Constitution. 

In the end, both farces ended in trials—but not before the Left had established lots of baleful precedents. Impeachment is now simply a tool to embarrass a president in his first term when he has lost the House. A Senate trial could hound an innocent president, even as a private citizen out of office. And a chief justice need not preside over the Senate trial. If and when Joe Biden loses the House, the Left should applaud any attempt to impeach him—given it established the new model of opposition.

Of the January 6 debacle, we were not told that it was a riot involving lawbreakers who would be punished. Instead, we were lied to that it was an “armed insurrection,” a “coup,” and “a rebellion” of massive proportions. 

Our esteemed retired military and civil libertarians who had damned the mere thought of using federal troops to quell the prior four summer months of continuous rioting were suddenly happy to see 25,000 federal soldiers patrol Washington to hound out fantasy second-wave insurrectionists. In Animal Farm fashion, there were now to be good federal troops deterring mythical violent domestic extremists, but bad federal troops who should never stop real, ongoing mayhem in the streets.

It mattered nothing that “armed” in the case of January 6 meant that no firearms were used or even found among the protestors. No one was charged with conspiracy, insurrection, or racketeering. But many were placed in solitary confinement without specific charges being filed—to the utter delight of liberal groups like the ACLU and human rights organizations.

Pakistan: Lahore School Principal Becomes Latest Victim of Blasphemy Laws, Given Death Sentence And now joins the other 80 on death row. Ashlyn Davis

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/10/pakistan-lahore-school-principal-becomes-latest-ashlyn-davis/

A Muslim school principal in Lahore, Salma Tanveer, has become the latest victim of the dreaded and stringent blasphemy laws of Pakistan, and has been given the death sentence after a long trial, reports the Pakistani daily Dawn.

Salma is not only the principal, but also the owner of a private school in Lahore. She was booked under the Pakistan Penal Code’s Section 295C in September 2013, on a complaint by Qari Iftikhar Raza, a local prayer leader, also referred to as a Khateeb. Raza, in his complaint, alleged that Tanveer had published and distributed pamphlets of her writings in the Lahore area of her residence. In the pamphlets, Salma had allegedly “denied khatam-e-nubuwat” (the finality of Muhammad’s prophethood), had used disparaging remarks, and also “claimed her own nubuwat,” that is, claimed that she herself was a prophet.

Reportedly, the woman’s counsel, Mian Muhammad Ramzan, had emphasized that the magistrate concerned had ordered an examination of the accused: the main argument presented by Tanveer’s advocate was that she was of unsound mental state at the time of the incident, and pleaded with the court not to prosecute her. The defense further argued that the comparison of content from the photocopies of her pamphlets was impossible, alluding to possible alterations in the content of the alleged documents.

The state prosecutors, Sadia Arif and Advocate Ghulam Mustafa Chaudhry, however, held that Salma’s defense had been unsuccessful in establishing his client’s inability to understand the nature of her actions at the time she wrote, printed and handed out the “blasphemous” material, and claimed before the court that the accusations against Salma has been corroborated with oral and documentary evidence.

The judge observed that a report provided by the Punjab Institute of Mental Health had confirmed that the accused was fit to stand trial. After considering the statements made by the witnesses, the judge sentenced Tanveer to the death penalty, along with a fine of 50,000 Pakistani rupees ($292 US).

A British Journalist Calls Biden’s Election Victory ‘Rigged’ A look at his case – and at American silence. Joseph Hippolito

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/10/what-if-fix-was-joseph-hippolito/

A British journalist, writing in one of the world’s most respected newspapers, recently declared something that almost none of his American colleagues dare to utter: Last year’s presidential election was rigged for Joe Biden.

Rod Liddle, associate editor of The Spectator, made that assertion in The Times of London on Sept. 26. In doing so, he also blistered Biden’s incompetence and physical problems, which the leftist U.S. Establishment Media also largely ignores.

“The American public is slowly waking up to the fact that they are being led by an ineffectually devious, senile halfwit,” Liddle wrote. “Soon the public will wake up to something even more unpleasant and sinister: that the last presidential election was a fraud, rigged by big business, the labor unions and, more than anything, the media and the tech companies.

“If that election had taken place in any other country, it would have been called ‘unfree.'”

FrontPage Magazine has previously discussed the possibility of foreign and domestic 2020 election interference in “Beijing is Called For Biden,” “Why Trump Will Win” and “The Serbian Connection.”

But Liddle — who edits a publication with nearly 200 years of credibility as the world’s oldest weekly magazine — ventures beyond possibility. He states his charge as categorical fact.

So far, no American commentator has rebutted his accusation, which attacks the fiber of American political legitimacy.

Liddle made his assertions while Arizona’s Maricopa County was conducting a forensic audit of the November election’s votes. That audit found numerous discrepancies.

For example, 3,432 more ballots were cast than there were people who voted. Nearly 300 dead people voted. There were more than 17,000 duplicate votes. More than 23,000 voters who mailed their ballots did so after the mail-in deadline. Of those, more than 9,000 returned more ballots than they received.

Biden won Arizona by 10,457 votes but the audit showed problems with more than 50,000 ballots in Maricopa County. Other states are considering similar audits.

Liddle’s criticism, however, excludes support for President Donald Trump. He displayed his contempt for Biden’s predecessor when mentioning Trump’s lead in opinion polls. “Imagine how awful a president must be if people would rather that sack of meat with mittens were back in charge,” Liddle wrote.

Yet contempt for Trump, in Liddle’s view, fails to justify what the columnist calls “a grotesque manipulation of democracy,” even if Trump was “unhinged,” with Liddle quoting one of the favorite phrases Trump’s detractors used.

“Was he?” Liddle asked. “I don’t know. He didn’t seem terribly hinged to me, but then Americans rarely do. But more unhinged than your average American — or Joe Biden?

Red China Tried To Go Green, Now It’s Going Dark China went from dominating green energy to begging Americans for coal. Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/10/red-china-tried-go-green-now-its-going-dark-daniel-greenfield/

Last year, President Xi Jinping announced that Communist China was going to go carbon neutral by 2060. Like every Communist 5-year-plan, it began with lies and ended in disaster.

The 14th Renewable Energy Development Five Year Plan would have China dominate the green energy industry and increase its share of non-fossil fuel energy from 15% to 20%.

That was last year. This year, China is importing American coal to keep the lights on in its cities. 

China’s desperate buying spree has sent the price of lignite coal, the dirtiest coal, up from $20 to $120. While Democrats are trying to destroy coal in America, our shipments of coal have increased 30 times making China our second biggest coal market.

And we have the “green energy” of the reds to thank for it.

Red China made no grand commitments to green energy, but even its 5% shift may have proven disastrous. So-called renewables are dangerously unreliable because they shift with the natural cycles of wind, sunshine, and tide. The same phenomenon leading to power outages in California has brought China, which has a much bigger population and industry, to its knees.

Going green in China is less likely to mean wind and solar than hydroelectric. That’s a wise decision because hydroelectric power is more reliable and efficient than wind and solar, but as a water empire, the Communist regime should have reckoned with China’s history of droughts. 

China’s green strategy depended on hydropower and the droughts have left it powerless. And its hydropower is anything but environmentally friendly. Mao used dams to revive the water empire strategy of the ancient emperors allowing the Communist regime to starve entire regions of the country and to undermine neighbors like India. The massive number of dams in China, a totalitarian program to enable mass murder, were environmentally devastating before being revamped as “green energy” hydropower. Green energy, as usual, has its roots in genocide.