RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/01/13/cold-civil-war-heats-up-social-media-bans-threaten-free-speech/

After last week’s Washington, D.C., protests, it didn’t take long for the Big Tech billionaires who own, control and run much of the internet and social media to reveal what they truly are: willing tools, a Fifth Column even, of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party and enemies of free speech. A reckoning is due.

In a scene reminiscent of “The Godfather,” the Big Tech companies moved aggressively last weekend to “settle all family business” by deplatforming President Donald Trump, his supporters, a swath of the conservative movement, and anyone else who dares to voice an “unWoke” opinion.

Triggered and emboldened by a direct request from former First Lady Michelle Obama, Twitter did as told, leading to a bizarre cascade of “me-too” social media activity. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat all blacklisted Trump and, in some cases, his followers.

“After close review of recent tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account and the context around them – specifically how they are being received and interpreted on and off Twitter – we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence,” Twitter said, via a statement.

Third-ranking GOP Rep. Liz Cheney said she will vote to impeach President Donald Trump for his role in a mob attack on the Capitol last week.
She joins Republican Rep. John Katko, who was the first Republican to say he would back impeachment, along with GOP Reps. Adam Kinzinger, Fred Upton and Jaime Herrera Beutler.
The New York Times separately reported that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell believes Trump committed impeachable offenses.
NATIONAL REVIEW HEADLINES:
Impeach, Convict, RemoveBy Kevin D. Williamson

And if there isn’t time for removal, he should still be impeached and convicted, anyway.
The End of the GOP

By Kevin D. Williamson

A dog in this condition would be put to sleep. It would be a piece of mercy.
House GOP Leaders Won’t Lobby Caucus to Oppose Impeachment

By Zachary Evans 
The decision comes after Trump incited a mob of his supporters to demonstrate outside the U.S. Capitol on January 6.
Twitter Deranged Our Politics

By Rich Lowry 
Trump was the foremost offender, but Twitter hasn’t done us any favors in this period of our national life.

….”Stuart Stevens, a senior advisor to the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, tweeted Saturday that “we are constructing a database of Trump officials & staff that will detail their roles in the Trump administration & track where they are now.” He added: “No personal info, only professional. But they will be held accountable & not allowed to pretend they were not involved.”

The Lincoln Project is a well-funded political action group, run mostly by former GOP consultants, that made ads for Democrats in the 2020 election cycle. We often disagreed, especially with the group’s effort to unseat principled GOP Senators, but never begrudged donors exercising their First Amendment right to influence the political process.

It’s something else to turn fire on former public servants in private life. Mr. Stevens tells us in an email that he’s doing nothing more than Wikipedia does with its pages listing past Administration alumni. But then why broadcast his stigmatizing intentions?

The only reason for an anti-Trump group to publicize the employment information of former officials is to deter employers from hiring them. If they are hired, progressive employees could scour the list and create petitions for them to be fired or doxed. This will deepen America’s civic strife.

https://pjmedia.com/spengler/2021/01/11/heres-how-we-flatten-the-democratic-part

Trump made a colossal tactical blunder by telling his supporters to fight vote fraud in the streets. That led to last week’s excesses, and the biggest crackdown on conservatives in American history. David Horowitz likes to say, inside every progressive is a totalitarian screaming to get out. Is he ever right!

The suspension of President Trump’s Twitter account (denounced by Germany’s Angela Merkel and top French officials as a violation of basic rights) is an affront to democracy: Whatever Trump did or didn’t do, he is the elected president of the United States, convicted in no court of law, and the people have the right to hear from him. The suspension of the free-speech social media platform Parler is another totalitarian outrage by what France’s Finance Minister calls “the digital oligarchy.” And now CNN demands that cable companies drop Fox News and Newsmax.

The Trump campaign’s vote fraud lawsuits crashed and burned because the standard of proof required by a court to overturn an election is extremely high. Proof of some fraud, or a statistical proof that the outcome was highly improbable, do not meet that standard. It must be proven that sufficient votes were stolen or invented to change the outcome. No one can collect that kind of information in a few weeks. But it can be collected in months or years, and that’s what it will take.

Either we are in this for the duration, or we’ve lost. But we have not lost yet. There was massive fraud. Whether there was sufficient fraud to determine the outcome is beside the point. Large parts of the Democratic Party are criminal organizations and have to be held accountable. Take a cold shower and a deep breath, and prepare for a long war. Ask yourself if you want to win, or just let off steam.

I believe that I speak for many Americans who would want to affirm the letter that I recently wrote to President Trump.  We need to stick together against the overwhelming evil that has been dealt our country.

Dear Mr. President:

With a very heavy heart, I am writing this letter to you.  You have been an inspiration to all patriotic Americans and what has been done to you and, ultimately to us is unconscionable. The proof of the election steal is obvious to any sentient individual.  That all venues of recourse have been shut down is terrifying as I see my country being taken over by a totalitarian mindset.

I cannot imagine the stress that you and your loved ones have been under.  Yet, you never waver in your belief in Making America Great Again.  The people who voted for your opponent have no idea what they have ushered in.  And, of course, the Red-Green Alliance of communist Leftists and jihadists gloat as they see our country split apart.

As one of the few conservative instructors in a college, I daily see the indoctrination of malleable minds.  It is child abuse of the highest form and with Biden and, ultimately, Harris controlling the reins of office, critical race theory will become the dominant theory. Thus, another generation of young Americans will be exposed to this dangerous drivel.

I am scared for my young grandsons.  I want them to experience the freedom that America stands for.  I don’t want them to be taught by those who despise our country.  These babies look to us for guidance.  We cannot let them down.

When Cuomo’s initial limited vaccine roll out proved disastrous—vaccines were being thrown out because of the difficulty of finding patients who exactly matched strict guidelines while huge penalties loomed if anyone else was vaccinated—the governor decided that as of January 11, New York State would also vaccinate people who fell into the next priority class, including teachers and those over 75 years old. 

My husband and I live in Westchester County, are both over 75, and decided to register for vaccination.  So, on Jan. 11, we went to the state web site (Covid19vaccine.healthny.gov/what you should know) and discovered what we should know was that we should call a local Rite Aid for an appointment, with the phone number given for various Rite Aids.  As any five year old could have foreseen  (but not apparently the “experts” employed by the governor), all you got by phoning was a busy signal.  (A Northwell Hospital web address was given as an alternative.  I hit that and was informed there were no slots available.)

Given the permanent busy signal, today (Monday) I went into one of the Rite Aids listed on the web site. I spoke to the pharmacist who said they had no vaccines and had never had any vaccines and to the best of his knowledge no Rite Aid had received any vaccines.  

If you go to the health/gov website now there has been a change.  In a slight bow to reality, the Rite Aids are still listed but unlike yesterday, the viewer is cautioned to wait  a few days before trying to make contact.  There are assorted other individual pharmacies listed with their phone numbers suggesting the state is claiming they  have the vaccine.  Of course if you try to phone any of them all you get is the inevitable busy signal.

Our son is computer savvy and managed to get the email of the NY state government communications officer.  I sent an email to him reporting that we were not able to schedule an appointment through the website and in reply he said we could schedule an appointment by calling 1-833-NYS-4-VAX.  We have called that number innumerable times with the same result—a recorded message saying the call cannot be completed at this time.

In other words,  the vaccine roll out that was supposed to start Jan. 11 is a complete sham.  Apparently determined to escalate the chaos even more, Cuomo has now asserted he is expanding eligibility of the vaccine—which no one over 75 can get–to those over 65.   

Today’s (Jan. 12) New York Post  complains of glitches in the city’s roll out of the vaccine, but at least the city is vaccinating people in the group on whom Cuomo has perpetrated a hoax worthy of the tailors in the Emperor’s new clothes. The applauding audience in this case, apart from Cuomo himself, is the media.  (I can’t wait to hear Cuomo congratulate himself before an ecstatic media for his achievement in making the vaccine available to all,  never forgetting the demands of social justice.)  Cuomo  is definitely due for another Emmy—all show and zero substance.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/01/cuomo-fiddles-with-vaccine-while-new-york-burns/

Unused vaccines go into the garbage as Cuomo’s horrific mismanagement continues.

 A ndrew Cuomo forced vaccine doses to be thrown away. It can’t be stated often enough or loudly enough: After the miraculous and heroic efforts of great pharmaceutical companies to develop vaccines before the first American had even been infected, and after the usual testing and regulatory hurdles consumed nearly eleven months, and after the first New Yorker accepted her jab on December 14 in an event Cuomo celebrated and streamed on his official channel, the governor of New York has been preventing people from getting the vaccine. “Bedlam” and “chaos” are two of the more polite words being used by administrators on the ground as they tiptoe their way through the regulatory minefield Cuomo quickly engineered between health-care professionals and the people of New York.

As the vaccine started being distributed to states, Cuomo continued, utterly predictably, to engage with the catastrophe in his oblivious I’m-the-king style. Micromanaging the vaccine, he issued one diktat after another determining what sorts of people should receive the vaccine first, with a close and obsessive eye on the perceived value of varying groups. He decreed via executive order that million-dollar fines and other penalties would be meted out to those who failed to follow to the letter the Byzantine rules he threw together on the fly and made official policy via executive order. New York City’s comptroller noted on Sunday that the sign-up process involves completing a tricky 51-point survey and uploading an insurance card, two significant barriers to seniors. Would-be users reported spending three hours trying to log on to the state site without getting through. Meanwhile, Israel, whose population is comparable to New York City’s, has vaccinated nearly ten times as many people as Gotham.

As of last Friday, half of the miraculous doses New York State had received, and two-thirds of those delivered to New York City, were sitting unused on shelves like a cruel bureaucratic parody of the Island of Misfit Toys. Some unknown number of doses simply expired unused, and had to be tossed in the garbage.

Andrew Cuomo forced vaccine doses to be thrown away.

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/a-disaster-and-a-tragedy-for-america

Even before the transfer of power in America due on January 20, it’s already horribly clear that fears for the future of freedom and justice under a Democrat administration, with the broader forces of the left now unconstrained, are justified.

Most attention is understandably being directed at the clampdown on free speech by big tech after last week’s Capitol riot, and on the determination of Speaker Nancy Pelosi et al to impeach President Trump for a second time over his behaviour on that awful day.

We can already see that it’s not just Trump who is in the sights of the Democrats and the oligarchs of the left. It is also conservatives in general, the police, the US constitution and the indivisible principles of freedom, justice and equality.

President-elect Joe Biden’s statement after the storming of the Capitol was a shocking indication of how this is going to play out. With a police officer having been killed in the riot, and with graphic evidence of the onslaught on the wholly outnumbered and inadequate police force (another story), Biden actually accused the police of being soft on the rioters and, quite incredibly, accused them of racial discrimination. 

Referring to a text conversation he’d had with his grand-daughter, comparing how law enforcement officers were treating the Capitol rioters with the way in which Black Lives Matters activists had been treated during last year’s demonstrations over the death of George Floyd, Biden said:

She sent me a photo of military people in full military gear. Scores of them lining the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Because of protests by Black Lives Matter. She said, “Pop. This isn’t fair.”

No one can tell me that if it had been a group of Black Lives Matter protesting yesterday, they wouldn’t have been treated very, very differently from the mob of thugs that stormed the Capitol. We all know that’s true. And it’s unacceptable. Totally unacceptable.