RUTHFULLY YOURS

Even so, the most salient theme of the past five years was not any challenge to democracy. The great theme of the Trump years, the one historians will note a century from now, was the failure of America’s expert class. The people who were supposed to know what they were talking about, didn’t. 

The failure began with the country’s top consultants and pollsters. Candidate Trump did almost everything lavishly paid political consultants would have told him, and did tell him, not to do—and he won. The most respected pollsters, meanwhile, predicted a landslide for Hillary Clinton. America’s best and brightest political adepts turned out to know very little about the elections they claim to understand.

Also during the 2016 campaign, an assemblage of top-tier academics, intellectuals and journalists warned that Mr. Trump’s candidacy signified a fascist threat. Timothy Snyder, a historian of Nazism at Yale, was among the most strident of these prophets. “Be calm when the unthinkable arrives,” he warned in a Facebook post shortly after the election. “When the terrorist attack comes, remember that all authorities at all times either await or plan such events in order to consolidate power. Think of the Reichstag fire.” Many experts stuck with the fascism theme after Mr. Trump’s election and throughout his presidency. That these cultured authorities couldn’t tell the difference between a populist protest against elite contempt and a coup carried out by powerful ideologues will go down as one of the great fiascoes of American intellectual history. 

The fascism charge was only the most acute form of the claim that Mr. Trump was carrying out an “assault on democracy.” Some semantic clarification is in order here. When intellectuals and journalists of the left use the word “democracy,” they typically are not referring to elections and decision-making by popularly elected officials. For the left, “democracy” is another word for progressive policy aims, especially the widening of special political rights and welfare-state provisions to new constituencies. By that definition any Republican president is carrying out an “assault on democracy.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/joe-bidens-inaugural-purge-11611270791?m

The “unity” lasted all of a couple of minutes. Then, hours after President Biden pledged in his inaugural address to show “tolerance and humility,” the brass knuckles came out.

One duster was aimed at Peter Robb, general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board. Within minutes of Mr. Biden’s swearing-in, and as the new president told the nation it needed to “be better,” the new White House delivered Mr. Robb an ultimatum: resign by 5 p.m., or be fired.

The general-counsel position is a Senate-confirmed four-year appointment at an independent agency; Mr. Robb had 10 months left in his term. No NLRB general counsel had ever been fired, and the Biden White House provided no cause for the action. Mr. Robb pointed all this out in a return letter and respectfully declined to step down. So Mr. Biden (“we must end this uncivil war”) canned him.

For four years, the media and Democrats cast every action of the Trump administration as something law-breaking or verging on a constitutional crisis. This week’s headlines, by contrast, were a mass media celebration of the return to “normalcy.” Mr. Biden ran on, and won on, a promise to restore norms to Washington.

https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2021/01/20/the-establishment-thinks-they-hav

RUSH: Greetings to you, music lovers, thrill-seekers, conversationalists all across the fruited plain. Man, oh, man. I have such a range of emotion flowing through my arteries and veins, going to my heart and away from my heart. I’m watching these people at the Biden inauguration. They think they got it all back. They think they finally have vanquished all of their opposition. And they haven’t the slightest idea.

You can hear it in the words they’re saying to each other. You can hear it in the way they’re singing their songs. You can see it in the people that showed up for this inauguration who didn’t show up four years ago for the Trump inauguration, and I have to tell you, ladies and gentlemen, I just — (crowd chanting “We love you! We love you!”) Wait a minute. What’s this? That was obviously audio from a Trump rally, one of the many that occurred before the election last November. “We love you.”

Anyway, greetings, folks. It is good to have you here. We’re gonna try to get through the day here as best we can. I’m looking for the words to most perfectly capture the range of emotion that I feel. And I’m watching these people as they have assembled on the stage for the inauguration of Plugs. And this inauguration looks like what you would expect from a one-party state. This inauguration looks like the Chinese Olympics with hundreds and hundreds of flags to replace people who were not allowed to show up.

Now, why do you think people weren’t allowed to show up? People are not allowed to show up because of COVID. People aren’t allowed to show up because the threats of the National Guard might open fire on everybody. That’s not why. The reason that they put up all these replacements for people is that I don’t think they were confident a bunch of people would show up for this because I think they know. I think they know that they are not — I gotta be very careful here in the words I choose.

I think they know that this is something that’s been arranged rather than legitimately sought and won. And you can see this in their attitudes, in their smiles. You can see it, hear it in the words that they are uttering. It’s like, I remember the 1984 Democrat convention was in San Francisco. I happened to be there, I was covering it. And one of the speakers on one of the nights was the mayor of Washington, D.C. His name was Marion Barry. And the sum total of his speech was, “Tonight we’re on the inside.” Meaning, finally the minorities that really are the Democrat Party have made it to the power base. We’re on the inside. We’re not on the outside looking in.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2021-1-21-whos-attacking-our-democracy

The breach of the Capitol on January 6 by pro-Trump demonstrators took Americans by surprise. There have been many reactions in the aftermath, but responses by the mainstream media completely miss — or intentionally misrepresent — the underlying issues. The Capitol breach felt like a turning point, but not because Trump supporters are particularly dangerous or violent as the media would like us to believe. If their demonstration attacked our democracy, it’s because we are living in a democracy so divided we no longer share any goals in common. As long as the party in power seizes opportunities to silence or oppress its opposition, that divide can only widen. 

Even while the January 6 events were still unfolding, the mainstream media started talking about the breach of the Capitol as a “violent siege,” conducted by a far-right mob. During the time that protestors were in the building, my iPhone was flooded with breaking news alerts from CNN, NBC, NPR all letting me know first that the Capitol had been breached, that Kamala Harris and Nancy Pelosi had been moved to a “secure location,” while those on the House floor were told to “shelter in place.” Rioters “vandalized” “occupied” and “ransacked” the building, and attempted to disrupt the certification of the Electoral College votes.

It took a few days for any counter-perspective to come out. Matt Keener, an opinion columnist who was in DC as a peaceful demonstrator, had a different experience. He wrote for American Spectator that: “the atmosphere outside [the Capitol] resembled an open air concert or festival more than a ‘riot.’” He also linked to a video of protestors being let into the building by police.  He believes “the true story [of the demonstration] is getting lost in the propaganda.” 

https://justthenews.com/government/congress/pelosis-office-wont-say-if-she-was-briefed-potential-violence-ahead-jan-6

The offices of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell won’t say whether the congressional leaders were briefed on potential violence ahead of the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol — or whether they weighed in on requesting help from the National Guard to bolster Capitol security.

Just the News reached out to representatives for Pelosi and asked if the speaker was briefed about threats of violence in advance of the rally. Her office was also asked if the speaker favored or opposed having National Guard troops help Capitol Police to protect the Capitol Building before the rally. Her office didn’t provide a response.

McConnell’s press office was asked the same questions, but they did not return a request for comment. 

Security sources told Just the News that Pelosi’s staff was briefed on threats of violence, but it is unclear if Pelosi herself was briefed directly or indirectly on the situation.

In a timeline of events from the Pentagon, defense officials wrote that U.S. Capitol Police twice said that they did not need help from the military. According to the timeline, Capitol Police confirmed that stance to Defense Department officials and to Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy. 

U.S. Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund reportedly asked House and Senate security officials if they wanted National Guard troops to assist the Capitol Police in protecting the Capitol complex in advance of the Jan. 6 rally. According to The Washington Post, House Sergeant at Arms Paul Irving said he was not in support of declaring an emergency ahead of the rally. Sund and Irving have since resigned. 

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2021/01/21/republican-files-articles-of-impeachment-against-joe-biden-on-his-second-day-in-office-n1403692

A House Republican officially filed articles of impeachment against President Joe Biden on his second day in office. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) — infamous for supporting the QAnon conspiracy theory on a blog before running for Congress — launched a Quixotic attempt to impeach Biden over the Hunter Biden-Burisma scandal.

“President Joe Biden is unfit to hold the office of the Presidency. His pattern of abuse of power as President Obama’s Vice President is lengthy and disturbing. President Biden has demonstrated that he will do whatever it takes to bail out his son, Hunter, and line his family’s pockets with cash from corrupt foreign energy companies,” Greene said in a statement on Thursday after filing the articles.

“President Biden is even on tape admitting to a quid pro quo with the Ukrainian government threatening to withhold $1,000,000,000 in foreign aid if they did not do his bidding. President Biden residing in the White House is a threat to national security and he must be immediately impeached,” the congresswoman insisted.

Greene’s impeachment effort is unlikely to gain any traction, but it does once again point out the notorious Burisma scandal.