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http://Nothing could be more predictable than media coverage of the catastrophic building collapse in Surfside, Florida. Cable news will feature it because the story is both shocking and eye-catch

Nothing could be more predictable than media coverage of the catastrophic building collapse in Surfside, Florida. Cable news will feature it because the story is both shocking and eye-catching.

Their obvious problem is that the cable channels have hours of air-time to fill and precious little real information, beyond dreadful pictures and interviews with bereaved friends and family and others who escaped the tragedy.

To save hours of watching this low-information disaster footage, the best thing is to read the story on your favorite website and watch very little TV. That is true of every breaking-news news story where real information is scarce at first. Except for seeing what the building looked like and watching the interviews (if you like that sort of thing), the TV coverage is a waste of time.

Here is how the coverage will unfold.

The building-collapse story will lead every cable news hour for the next two days. Initially, it will fill most of the hour. The reporters’ basic message will be, ‘There is so much we still don’t know.’ Video of the building will play in the background. This commentary will be repeated endlessly, along with updated figures on the numbers of dead, hospitalized and missing. If anybody has cell phone video, we’ll see it. Footage from near street cameras is already being shown.

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/what-is-behind-gen-mark-milleys-righteous?token=e

The overarching ideology of Pentagon officials is larger military budgets and ongoing permanent war posture. Their new war target, explicitly, is domestic “white rage.”

For two hundred forty years, American generals have not exactly been defined by adamant public advocacy for left-wing cultural dogma. Yet there appeared to be a great awakening at the Pentagon on Wednesday when Gen. Mark Milley, the highest-ranking military officer in the U.S. as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified at a House hearing. The Chairman vehemently defended the teaching of critical race theory at West Point and, referencing the January 6 Capitol riot, said, “it is important that we train and we understand … and I want to understand white rage. And I’m white.”

In response to conservative criticisms that top military officials should not be weighing in on inflammatory and polarizing cultural debates, liberals were ecstatic to have found such an empathetic, racially aware, and humanitarian general sitting atop the U.S. imperial war machine. Overnight, Gen. Milley became a new hero for U.S. liberalism, a noble military leader which — like former FBI Director Robert Mueller before him — no patriotic, decent American would question let alone mock. Some prominent liberal commentators warned that conservatives are now anti-military and even seek to defund the Pentagon.

It is, of course, possible that the top brass of the U.S. military has suddenly become supremely enlightened on questions of racial strife and racial identity in the U.S., and thus genuinely embraced theories that, until very recently, were the exclusive province of left-wing scholars at elite academic institutions. Given that all U.S. wars in the post-World War II era have been directed at predominantly non-white countries, which — like all wars — required a sustained demonization campaign of those enemy populations, having top Pentagon officials become leading anti-racism warriors would be quite a remarkable transformation indeed. But stranger things have happened, I suppose.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/23/deprogramming-of-january-6-defendants-is-underway/

“My lawyer has given me names of books and movies to help me see what life is like for others in our country. I’ve learned that even though we live in a wonderful country things still need to improve. People of all colors should feel as safe as I do to walk down the street.”

That passage is part book report, part white privilege mea culpa submitted to a federal court this month by Anna Morgan-Lloyd, one of the more than 500 Americans arrested for her involvement in the events at the U.S. Capitol on January 6. The 49-year-old grandmother of five from southern Indiana was charged with four counts of trespassing and disorderly conduct even though she walked through an open door and was inside the building for about five minutes. She was ratted out to the FBI by a county worker who saw her January 6 posts on Facebook.

On Wednesday, Lloyd, who has a clean criminal record, pleaded guilty to one count of “parading, demonstrating, or picketing in a Capitol building”—but not before she consented to undergo a reeducation exercise at the urging of her court-appointed lawyer. (Like many January 6 defendants, Lloyd does not have the means to hire a private attorney.)

It’s safe to say Heather Shaner, a D.C.-based criminal defense attorney representing a handful of January 6 protesters, does not share the political beliefs of her Capitol clients, which is why she’s forcing them to read books and watch movies highlighting dark chapters in U.S. history.

In an interview with Huffington Post, Shaner explained her belief that “this is the most wonderful country in the world, it’s been great for all kinds of immigrant groups, except for the fact that it was born of genocide of the Native Americans and the enslavement of people.” 

Shaner’s legal captives are learning the hard way what the government will do when one resists their commands to comply. Not only have their personal lives been shattered, finances depleted, and reputations destroyed by an abusive Justice Department investigation, Shaner’s clients must be indoctrinated with leftist propaganda about America’s alleged systemic racism.

The purge of the populist mindset is underway, courtesy of the fetid Beltway judicial system and the Joe Biden regime. Judges routinely lecture January 6 defendants about the wrongthink of a “stolen election” while prosecutors openly mock their political beliefs, including home schooling and gun ownership.

“I have had many political and ethical discussions with Anna Lloyd,” Shaner wrote in her motion agreeing to the plea and probation for Lloyd. “I tendered a booklist to her. She has read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Just Mercy, and Schindler’s List to educate herself about ‘government policy’ toward Native Americans, African Americans and European Jews. We have discussed the books and also about the responsibility of an individual when confronting ‘wrong.’”

Shaner also told the court that Lloyd watched the “Burning Tulsa” documentary on the History Channel as well as “Mudbound,” a story of two families, one black and one white, living on the same property after World War II.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/23/why-are-they-woke/

There are lots of reasons why wokeism spread like wildfire once America lost its collective mind during the pandemic, quarantine, self-induced recession, and rioting of 2020. 

Wokeism was never really about racism, sexism, or other -isms. Instead, for some, it illustrated a psychological pathology of projection: fobbing one’s own concrete prejudices onto others in order to alleviate or mask them. 

So should we laugh or cry that Black Lives Matter’s self-described Marxist co-founder turns out to be a corporate grifter? Patrisse Cullors has accumulated several upscale homes and is under investigation by the IRS for allegations of the misuse of funds from one of her foundations.

Is it the case that the more Cullors professes Marxist ideology and damns toxic whiteness, so all the more she feels at home living in a $1.4 million Topanga Canyon home, in an almost exclusively ritzy white neighborhood?

Consider outspoken liberal icon Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.). He’s one of the Senate’s most woke. Yet Whitehouse turns out to be a mostly unapologetic member of a de facto all-white prestigious “beach club” of elites in Newport, Rhode Island. Is Whitehouse committed in the abstract to rooting out white privilege so he can concretely relax amid it with fellow bluebloods?

Barack and Michelle Obama occasionally venture out of either their multimillion-dollar Washington, D.C. mansion or their Martha’s Vineyard estate to lecture the country on its systemic racism. They express worry over the dangers that apparently white people pose to the very safety of their own daughters.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/06/its_outright_war_on_conservatives.html

Last November, the now-defunct Trump Accountability Project, linked to former Democratic National Committee press secretary Hari Sevugan, bruited its plan to blacklist those who worked for the Trump administration.  Sevugan tweeted, “Employers considering them should know that there are consequences for hiring anyone who helped Trump attack American values.  Find out how at the Trump Accountability Project.” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (Dem-NY) too called for devising lists of Trump supporters for punishment and ostracism. The rhetoric reeked of a witch-hunt to name and shame anyone linked to the former president.

Now that the Biden administration is securely ensconced in the White House, the blatant malice has been toned down with disingenuous calls for unity. But there’s persistent targeting of “unwoke” conservatives — in fact, of anyone not aligned with the hate America script of social justice warriors. In this the Biden administration has been active. There are several recent instances that highlight a hypocritical progressive agenda to enforce groupthink and extinguish critical and independent thinking.

In May, the IRS denied 501(c)(3) status to Christians Engaged, a Texas-based prayer group that encourages members to pray for the country and its elected officials, motivates citizens to vote for cultural impact, and campaigns for preserving our constitutional republic. The group endeavors to integrate civic involvement as part of religious practice but does not promote any party or candidate. However, in his official letter denying tax-exemption, Stephen A. Martin, the IRS’s director of exempt organizations, clearly implies that biblical values are exclusively Republican. He wrote: “While you educate voters on what the Bible says about issues, your educational activities are not neutral. The topics typically are affiliated with distinct candidates and specific political party [Republican] platforms.”

The First Liberty Institute, a Christian legal organization, is appealing the IRS decision as discriminatory. It argues that there is no requirement that organizations must be neutral on public policy issues, and that just because there is some overlap between the views of Christians Engaged and the Republican party, the IRS cannot conclude that the organization serves private interests. The IRS decision amounts to a violation of the free speech, free exercise, and free establishment clauses of the First Amendment. Declaring biblical teachings as exclusively Republican is the slippery slope that could lead to future discrimination against Christian organizations and even churches.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/06/chairman-milley-degrades-divides-and-politicizes-daniel-greenfield/

General Milley of the Joint Chiefs of Staff turned in a performance that was part gaslighting and part humiliating theater. 

It’s hard to imagine how his part in the hearing could have gone any worse than defending the imposition of critical race theory by arguing, “I’ve read Mao Zedong. I’ve read Karl Marx. I’ve read Lenin. That doesn’t make me a communist.”

The military does not, as of yet, conduct Communist indoctrination sessions. And while officers might have read Mao and Lenin, they weren’t being told to read it because it was “on the right side of history”.

As I said, yet. At the rate we’re going it may only be a matter of time.

Learning from the enemy is very different than becoming the enemy. Indoctrinating personnel with critical race theory is not studying the enemy. It’s trying to convince our men and women that America is the enemy.

Milley made that point quite well when he protested, “I want to understand white rage. And I’m white,”

Is Milley suffering from white rage? Does rage have a color? And is diving America around such cheap race-baiting tactics strengthening or weakening the military? Milley knows the answer, but he also knows, like so many other figures in this career space, that he has to parrot the party line if he wants to have a future. And national security is a small price to pay for his career.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/anti-trump-verbal-preemptive-cringe-b

Even conservative commentators who are not afflicted with terminal Trump Derangement Syndrome are compelled to drag Trump into their writing and criticize him in order to preempt any suspicion that their comments critical of progressives show support for the hated ex-president.

This verbal preemptive cringe is a way for members of the bipartisan political guild to signal their virtue and assure progressives that they’re not one of those knuckle-dragging “deplorable” Trump supporters. In doing so, they remind Trump voters why they supported him in the first place: He cut through all the class-signaling politesse and specious “norms” the cognitive elite use to advertise their superiority.

A good example can be found in a commentary from Lance Morrow in the Wall Street Journal. Much of the piece is a spot-on dissection of the progressive class-hatred of conservatives in general and Donald Trump’s supporters in particular. His portrait of these plutocrat progressives is worth quoting:

In their voices, you hear a throb of opulent hysteria—an ostentatious despair, the boutique self-pity of the privileged. Hating Mr. Trump and his followers dramatizes one’s own virtue. It makes elites feel good about themselves in the way, classically, that poor whites in the South were able to feel better about their own lot by despising and discriminating against black people. Progressives think that hating not only Mr. Trump but all conservatives settles their debts and cleanses them of sin. It gives them a certain moral luster.

But immediately there follows the preemptive cringe, the reflexive criticism of Trump lest Morrow’s fellow cognitive elites interpret those prior remarks as support for him:

Mr. Trump is to blame for much of this. Character is destiny, and Mr. Trump was quite a character. He gave his enemies the gift of Jan. 6. He played peek-a-boo with forbidden thoughts. He tossed cherry bombs at the Constitution to see if he could give it a scare. Whatever else one may say about Jan. 6, it was one of the stupidest afternoons in American history.