RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2022/09/03/biden-puts-the-total-in-totalitarianism/

Joe Biden certainly set the punditocracy abuzz with his neo-totalitarian performance piece at Independence Hall in Philadelphia on Thursday. The significance of that speech can be broken down into three parts, two of which have already received abundant commentary. 

The first has to do with the theater of the piece, its optics or stagecraft. As many commentators (myself included) noted, the feel of the event was distinctly, and distinctively, bombastic. The melodramatic red lighting, the presence of armed Marines flanking the president, and Biden’s hectoring, gesticulating delivery made the event seem eerily reminiscent of a speech by Stalin, Mao, or—the closest parallel—that diminutive former house painter who, for a few short years, mesmerized the world with his elaborately staged rallies before pushing ahead with more kinetic activities. 

To those who object that I am flirting with Godwin’s Law by invoking old AH, I reply that the flirtation was not mine but the doing of Biden’s producers and puppeteers. The visual similarity between Joe Biden’s event and some nighttime events at Nuremberg are just too striking to be coincidental. Leni Riefenstahl, as someone noted, would have been proud. Those who point out that Biden’s speech took place on September 1, a fraught day on the Polish border anno domini 1939, may be too ingenious for this historically illiterate age, but who knows? Often these things are, as our Marxists friends like to say, no accident. There are wheels within wheels. 

Which brings me to the question of the intent behind the theatrics. Was this exercise in garish, totalitarian kitsch a “gaffe,” as some are saying—an aesthetic miscalculation for which that blinking inarticulate muppet who is Biden’s press secretary will have to apologize? Apparently not, since she just said that the speech was “not political.” 

The entertainment committee never sleeps. 

https://www.jns.org/opinion/joe-bidens-four-d-speech/

 In the fall 2004 issue of the Jewish Political Studies Review, published by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Natan Sharanksy outlined what he called the “new anti-Semitism”—a resurgence in democratic countries of Jew-hatred aimed at the State of Israel.

In his piece, the author of Fear No Evil and The Case for Democracy presented a “three-D” test (demonization, double standards and delegitimization) that he had devised to distinguish this worrisome phenomenon from acceptable criticism of Israeli policies.

Little did he know at the time that, nearly two decades later, the word “new” could be removed from the description. Indeed, the dastardly triplet not only continues to be applied to the Jewish state by its sworn enemies, but has become mainstream even in the halls of power in Washington.

Rather than being eradicated through exposure, however, the three-D vilification technique has proven so effective that the left began to adapt it to discredit any figure or movement that doesn’t toe its line. The practice is especially blatant during political campaigns, such as the one being conducted in Israel ahead of the Nov. 1 Knesset elections and those surrounding the midterms in the U.S. Congress.

Here, a fourth “D” can be added to the arsenal: disingenuousness. As is the case with the “new-old” anti-Semites who pretend only to be targeting certain policies, the above detractors claim merely to be protesting against a particular politician. In Israel, it’s opposition leader and former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In the U.S., it’s former President Donald Trump. That the supporters of each, who constitute half of their countries’ populations, are also treated to hefty doses of the first three Ds is where the last comes in.

Nothing better illustrates this demonization, imposing of double standards, delegitimization and disingenuousness than U.S. President Joe Biden’s prime-time speech to the nation on Thursday in front of Philadelphia’s Independence Hall.

https://spectatorworld.com/newsletter/bidens-infantile-self-aggrandizing-democracy-speech/?utm_source=

“Even if you buy Biden’s infantile, self-aggrandizing Harry-versus-Voldemort account of the current moment, the president offers you no solutions other than “vote for me.” Which, of course, was the whole point of the speech.”

Democracy for dummies 

Allow me to indulge in a quick thought experiment. Let’s assume that Biden is exactly right when he says, as he did in his primetime address last night, that the extremism of “MAGA Republicans… threatens the very foundations of our republic.”

In this experiment, the dark diagnosis is the truth and Biden knows it to be the truth. What should a responsible president do under such circumstances? The answer, as my colleague Matt Purple put it in his must-read reaction to the speech, is to seek to vanquish election denialism and ugly conspiracy theories by “working to bring [Trump supporters] back into the national fold” rather than “treating them like the enemy — which will drive them deeper into the MAGA maw.”

Look at what Biden has done in office and you will struggle to find instances of such action. Examples of exactly what a responsible president should not do, however, are easier to come by. To list a few, briefly: recommend the effective abolition of the filibuster; vilify Supreme Court judges; look on as your party spends tens of millions of dollars boosting the most extreme voices in Republican midterms; slander anyone who refuses to support your voting legislation as no better than a segregationist; describe modest changes to the rules that govern elections as “Jim Crow on steroids”; indulge in economic policymaking by executive edict in a way that you know is unconstitutional.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2022/09/marines-are-not-props-biden-fascist-theatrics-daniel-greenfield/

Biden’s people decided to stage his campaign speech denouncing half the country with a sense of crisis with red lighting against dark shadows and had two Marines standing in the shadows against a brick wall. There was a real sense of crisis in making Biden look like the villain in a movie about a fascist dystopia, but not the one they wanted.

The Biden regime claimed that having them there was about showing the “deep and abiding respect the president has for these service members.”

Showing them respect would mean handing out medals or delivering a speech praising them. Not using them as props in his fascist theatrics.

And even Democrats and the media are questioning using Marines as props.

An Iraq War veteran and former Democratic Party official on Friday criticized the presence of US Marines in the backdrop of President Joe Biden’s speech in Philadelphia, during which he issued stinging political criticism of Republicans.

“We need to make sure that our military is as removed from politics as possible and it’s not right if a Democrat uses the military as a political pawn and it’s not right if the Republican Party does it as well. None of our politicians or elected leaders should do that,” Allison Jaslow, a former executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, told CNN’s Brianna Keilar on “New Day.”

https://amgreatness.com/2022/09/02/the-biden-regime-collapses-the-public-private-distinction/

On Thursday, Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, who is also the Show Me State’s candidate for U.S. Senate this November, unveiled some very interesting documents that his office, along with the office of Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, have received since the two states jointly filed a potentially pathbreaking lawsuit in May. Their lawsuit alleges that various high-ranking Biden administration officials have been colluding, in censorious fashion, with the purportedly “private” oligarchs of Big Tech. The straightforward aim of this collusion is the suppression of the dissident “wrongthink”—viz., conservative speech—that threatens the Biden regime’s tenuous grasp on power.

The documents Schmitt and Landry have received, pursuant to their serving of discovery requests and issuing of third-party subpoenas, shine a spotlight on the depths to which the Biden regime has fallen to collapse any putative distinction between the “public” sector and the “private” sector. Their findings thus far in this still-pending litigation reveal to all, as if we needed more evidence but a week after Mark Zuckerberg’s podcast confession heard ’round the world with popular host Joe Rogan, the extent to which Big Tech platforms such as Facebook and Twitter no longer qualify as meaningfully “private” and have instead simply become appendages of the state.

According to Schmitt, the Biden Department of Justice has, since Missouri and Louisiana’s lawsuit was filed, identified 45 federal officials who have “interacted with social media companies on misinformation.” What’s more, Meta (Facebook’s parent company) pinpointed 32 additional Biden functionaries with whom it communicated, and YouTube (a Google product) identified 11 such flunkies with whom it communicated.