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Ruth King

U.S. Truckers Gear Up for Cross-Country Anti-Vaccine Protest Convoy By Scott Norvell

https://www.nysun.com/national/us-truckers-gear-up-for-cross-country-anti/92089/

Just as the three-week trucker protest in Canada looks to be fizzling, drivers across the border in America are beginning to ramp up their own demonstration against vaccination requirements and other Covid-related restrictions.

Calling themselves the “People’s Convoy,” the group of U.S. truckers now say they plan to depart Adelanto, California, on February 22 and make their way to the nation’s capital before President Biden’s State of the Union address on March 1.

The organizers have set up a web page and various social media accounts in an effort to raise funds on behalf of the effort, including a Facebook page that has 110,000 followers. An earlier version of the page was removed by the platform for what the company said was violations of its terms of service.

A statement posted Friday to Facebook listed some high-profile supporters, including the anti-vaccine activist Robert Kennedy Jr. and his group Children’s Health Defense, and a former Trump national security adviser, Michael Flynn.

In a video posted on the group’s website, truck driver Mike Landis says the group is hoping to convince the Biden administration to rescind a national state of emergency related to Covid that was extended on February 24, 2021, and is in effect through March 1.

The State of Our Union Is Sorry Lea Barkoukis

https://townhall.com/columnists/leahbarkoukis/2022/02/19/the-state-of-our-union-is-sorry-n2603498

My son Cameron and I can hardly wait for President Biden’s upcoming State of the Union address.

“What do you think he’s going to say on March 1, Dad?” he asked me earlier this week during our phone call.

“That the State of the Union is …. very sad? Screwed? You finish the sentence.”

“Seriously,” Cameron said. “The State of the Union is supposed to be upbeat – positive – or at least hopeful, right?”

“Yeah,” I said. “His speechwriters must be working overtime. The list of big things he’s messed up in a single year is long and getting longer.”

“So what’s he going to brag about to the country?” Cameron asked.

“Well,” I said, “he did a terrible job with Afghanistan, so he can’t bring that up.”

“The economy is also a no-no.

“Inflation is running at 7 percent, interest rates are headed up and millions of workers have still not gone back to work, thanks to the government’s generous and never-ending pandemic help.”

“He sure can’t mention crime,” Cameron said.

“It’s spiking in every big city and his Justice Department is more interested in eliminating cash bail than catching criminals and putting them in jail.”

“And forget the war on COVID,” I said.

“It’s been a disaster.

Why Are Registered Democrats Hiding Their Affiliation? Ann Henry,

https://www.restoreamericanglory.com/politics/why-are-registered-democrats-hiding-their-affiliation/

Registered Democrats in rural areas are starting to hide their party affiliation for fear of pushback from neighbors, the Associated Press (AP) recently reported. The Democratic Party’s plummeting popularity, spurred by calls to defund the police, rampant rioting, and the Biden administration’s mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic has caused many typically Democratic areas to flip and leave the remaining Democrats in the local partisan minority.

Democratic Representative Jim Cooper of Tennessee warned that the party could potentially disappear altogether in small towns across America.

“It’s hard to sink lower than we are right now. You’re almost automatically a pariah in rural areas if you have a D after your name,” he told the AP.

“The hatred for Democrats is just unbelievable,” Tim Holohan told the AP. He is an accountant in rural Pennsylvania. “I feel like we’re on the run.”

To help ensure her safety, he encouraged his daughter to remove her pro-Joe Biden bumper sticker. Other rural citizens remove their pro-Democrat yard signs at night to prevent theft and vandalism.

End Merit As We Know It The ousting of President Biden’s science advisor shows that sensitivity increasingly trumps expertise. Nicholas Wade

https://www.city-journal.org/eric-lander-ousting-shows-sensitivity-increasingly-trumps-expertise

The best way to understand a society, social anthropologists say, is to start by studying its most bizarre, irrational, and self-defeating practice. If you can figure that out, everything else in the culture begins to make more sense.

In that light, consider President Biden’s firing of his top science advisor, Eric Lander. Lander was engaged in launching a $7.5 billion research agency to apply novel genomic methods to the treatment and reversal of cancer. At a White House press conference on February 2, the president called the agency “a central effort of the Biden-Harris administration.” Its aim, he said, was “to cut the cancer death rate in half in the next 25 years” and with this and other steps “to end cancer as we know it.”

In Lander, the president had an unusually well-qualified executive. Though trained as a mathematician, not a biologist, Lander has built the Broad Institute in Cambridge into a leading research group that has pioneered advanced genomic techniques. He had the special knowledge and managerial competence required to execute Biden’s ambitious anti-cancer program. Yet on February 7, a mere five days after Biden called for halving cancer deaths, Lander was forced to resign over a second-order management issue: that he had treated some of his female staff harshly.

Given all that Lander might have accomplished toward defeating cancer, why would Biden fire him over something so trivial in comparison? The reason has to do with the increasingly vicious tribalization of American politics. When people start to think of themselves as embattled groups, any member of the opposing group is seen as a fair target for assassination. Lander, to the manifest detriment of cancer research, was a victim of tribal warfare prosecuted by radical feminists, a lobby that Biden lacked the courage to challenge.

American celebrity culture has become exhausting There are simply too many stars demanding our attention Matt Purple

https://spectatorworld.com/book-and-art/american-celebrity-culture-has-become-exhausting/

How was your Super Bowl party? I spent mine investing all my money in crypto and then blowing it on Peacock subscriptions.

For once it was the commercials that were the most memorable part of the game — not Matthew Stafford’s lightning arm, not even 50 Cent entering the halftime show upside-down like a bat. And that was because every ad was a broadside of celebrities. Not a fan of Bud Light Seltzer? Wait until it’s pitched to you by Guy Fieri and a race of Eloi-like doppelgangers (spoiler: you still won’t be a fan of Bud Light Seltzer). And how can I not order Uber Eats after watching Gwyneth Paltrow smell her own vagina candle while Trevor Noah eats deodorant?

I’m old enough to remember when movie stars starred in movies; now they’re hawking Doritos and cheap flights to Istanbul. Welcome to the most annoying feature of modern American life: everyone is a celebrity now. Well, not everyone. Maybe just half the country — 165 million out of 330 million sounds about right. Either way, the days when we quaintly referred to “celebrity culture” are past; it’s just “culture” now.

The United States has always had an appreciation for fame. George Washington was arguably our first real celebrity, the beloved hero of the Revolution, the man who could have been king if he’d wanted. Before him, Benjamin Franklin had achieved fame of a sort thanks to his epigrammatic Poor Richard’s Almanack, one of the most popular books in the American colonies. Afterward came Andrew Jackson, who rode into the White House on his reputation as the hero of the Battle of New Orleans.

To The Biden Admin: To Eradicate Iran’s Terrorism, Confront the Ruling Mullahs by Majid Rafizadeh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18245/iran-terrorism-mullahs

The administration, however, then made an astonishing announcement: that it is unfreezing $29 billion to the Iranian regime, despite that Iran is still, according to the State Department, an officially designated state sponsor of terrorism.

The move is apparently part of a US effort to appease the mullahs into redoing the 2015 nuclear deal that gives Iran a glide path to having nuclear weapons. Three American negotiators have already resigned and the US is not even welcome in the room.

A recent report by the United Nations, based on the last six months of 2021, acknowledged that in Iran, “terrorist groups enjoy greater freedom there than at any time in recent history.”

Even Iran’s leaders have pointed to their ties with terror groups. A former general of the IRGC, Saeed Ghasemi, shared a surprising revelation in 2019 when he pointed out that the Iranian government sent agents to Bosnia to train Al Qaeda members, and that those operatives hid their identity by posing as humanitarian workers for Iran’s Red Crescent Society.

One only need look into the Iranian regime’s relationship with Al Qaeda to understand what a catastrophe it is to give billions of dollars to Iran’s regime. Iran has reportedly had ties to Al Qaeda for nearly three decades.

Appeasing the ruling of mullahs of Iran and unfreezing billions of dollars to give them will only further empower them, increase their terrorist activities and accelerate their destabilization of the Middle East – another legacy of failure for which the Biden administration will be able to claim credit, along with the worst inflation in 40 years; the skyrocketing price of gasoline and heating oil from shutting down America’s historic energy independence; more than 100,000 U.S. deaths in 2021 from fentanyl and other drugs; enriching and empowering Russia as well as Mexico’s drug cartels; failing to give Ukraine adequate materiel to deter a Russian offensive or to protect itself from one, and the crowning $83 billion surrender to the Taliban terrorists of Afghanistan.

As long as the Biden administration is surrendering to the Iranian regime and pursuing appeasement policies with the ruling mullahs, the administration’s counterterrorism strategy will be ineffective and counterproductive.

The Biden administration, to its credit, recently reported the death of Islamic State leader Abu Ibrahim al-Hashemi al-Quraishi as a national security win and a sign of success of its counterterrorism strategy.

The View From Budapest American statesmen and legislators can still find much to admire and possibly emulate in Hungary, at least at the level of principle. By Josh Hammer

https://amgreatness.com/2022/02/18/the-view-from-budapest/

I’m writing from Budapest, the beautiful, Danube-bestriding Hungarian capital. Hungary, though a faraway land and modest in both size and population, has played an outsize role in the American conservative conscience for the past half-decade or so. After just a few days, it is not difficult to understand why. Hungary, under Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his ruling Fidesz party, is a real-life experiment in government under a framework of “national conservatism.” Lessons for American conservatives are clear and legion.

Western media typically covers Orban in hysterical fashion, accusing him of autocracy, crypto-fascism, or outright thuggery. It is difficult to believe that any of these left-wing keyboard warriors have ever met Orban, much less spent any time with him. I spent a couple of hours standing directly next to him earlier this week, when he met with a small group of visiting media, think-tankers, and other public figure types. That meeting was illuminating.

From firsthand experience, I can attest that the prime minister is nothing like the caricature the media portrays him as. He is personally quite funny, gregarious, and engaging, and he handled even critical questions with aplomb.

Perhaps most surprising for blue-checked Twitterati types who view him as a power-hungry, barbaric European dictator, he is also a genuine conservative intellectual. Orban spent time at Oxford, and he dedicates one day every week to reading up and immersing himself in substantive political reading material. To borrow a popular online phrase, he has “done the reading.”

At our meeting, Balazs Orban (no relation), the prime minister’s political director, expressly referred to the Hungarian government’s philosophical lodestar as national conservatism, even name-checking one of national conservatism’s chief intellectual architects, Yoram Hazony (full disclosure: my Edmund Burke Foundation colleague). In the past, Orban has also embraced the mantle of “illiberal democracy.” That may sound rhetorically jarring to overly sensitized Western ears, but it amounts to the same criticism of the liberal order as that which is aired by American national conservatives and “postliberals.”

The false claim that Trump was in wrongful possession of confidential documents By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/02/the_false_claim_that_trump_was_in_wrongful_possession_of_confidential_documents.html

The National Archives, which is controlled by a hard leftist cadre, very excitedly announced that President Donald Trump took classified information with him when he left the White House. The problem—which the AP reluctantly concedes—is that, as President, he had the final say over what’s classified. That means that there’s no hypocrisy in his reaming Hillary Clinton for her conduct.

As a predicate, the National Archives management has turned that government office into a purely leftist entity determined to advance all leftist causes, including destroying Donald Trump. Recently, it was caught stating that the U.S. Constitution and all of America’s other founding documents contain “harmful content.” Why? Because they have “racist, sexist, misogynistic, and xenophobic opinions.”

Additionally, the National Archives management has concluded that the entire institution of the National Archives itself is structurally racist because it’s concerned with lauding the work of the White men who created our nation. You can read more about that insanity here.

Most recently, the leftist, impermissibly partisan National Archives management’s vendetta against Trump has management claiming that Trump was found to be illegally in possession of classified information:

Classified information was found in the 15 boxes of White House records that were stored at former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence, the National Archives and Records Administration said Friday in a letter that confirmed the matter has been sent to the Justice Department.

The letter from the agency follows numerous reports around Trump’s handling of sensitive and even classified information during his time as president and after he left the White House. The revelation could also interest federal investigators responsible for policing the handling of government secrets, though the Justice Department and FBI have not indicated they will pursue.

Schadenfreude: Eileen Gu learns the hard way about what comes of shilling for China By Monica Showalter

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/02/schadenfreude_eileen_gu_learns_the_hard_way_about_what_comes_of_shilling_for_china.html

So things are not all bonbons and shark’s fin soup for Eileen Gu, the 18-year-old skiing sensation trotted forth as a propaganda gal at the 2022 Olympics by the red Chinese government, following her decision to ski for China instead of America.

Seems the Chinese themselves on their meager internet outlets are questioning why this San Francisco–born and bred golden girl is being shoved in front of them as a role model, given that she had so many more opportunities than they had as Chinese people still stuck in China.  And the whole thing is giving the Chicoms the perfect excuse for censoring their posts, if not rounding them up into jails.  Way to go, Eileen — hope you’re proud of yourself.

According to the Wall Street Journal, here’s how bad it is:

No sooner had Gu won her first medal, a surprise gold in the freestyle skiing big air event, than one viral online article posed a pointed question in its headline — “What does Eileen Gu’s success have to do with ordinary people?”  — that appeared to strike a chord with readers, and to have unnerved government censors.

The article, published on China’s ubiquitous WeChat messaging app by an education-focused blog widely followed by elite Chinese parents called Nuli Shehui — loosely translated as “Slave Society” — pointed out the lack of any concrete evidence to show that Gu had in fact renounced her U.S. citizenship, and attributed Gu’s success to her unique upbringing, which combined the freedom and well-rounded education offered by the U.S. with the rigors of China’s examination-oriented system.

The Beginning of the End for the Ottawa Convoy? By Nate Hochman

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-beginning-of-the-end-for-the-ottawa-convoy/#slide-1

Ottawa – Tensions are running high in Ottawa as hundreds of police officers in riot gear make a coordinated push to dismantle the trucker convoy that arrived in the city in late January. Police arrested at least two leading organizers of the convoy, Tamara Lich and Chris Barber, on Thursday night. But today, law-enforcement officers are engaged in a much larger-scale action, surrounding the encampments and methodically moving in to make arrests and disperse protesters, and even positioning armed officers on nearby roofs. It’s by far the most aggressive show of state force against the convoy to date.

This morning, large numbers of police officers — arriving on foot, on horseback, and in armored cars — began amassing around the convoy. By 11 a.m., lines of police officers on multiple sides of the encampments had begun to push inward, cutting off the main entrances and shrinking the reach of the convoy. They were met with loud and angry shouts of indignation from the truckers, who assembled to meet them on the other side of the line. But with some exceptions — at certain junctures, the officers’ advances pushed into a crowd of protesters who refused to move, leading to a sort of pushing match between the convoy crowd and the line of police — there were few physical altercations. Those who did resist police advances were promptly arrested and hauled out.