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50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

HOLIDAY GREETINGS FROM RUTHFULLY YOURS

T’WAS THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS AND ALL THROUGH THE HOUSE

NOT A CREATURE WAS STIRRING, NOT EVEN A MOUSE.

I MUSED WITH REGRETS AND TREPIDATION

AT THE PARLOUS STATE OF OUR BELOVED NATION.

CORRUPTION STALKS THE BIDEN CLAN

BUT THE MEDIA PROTECTS THE FAILING MAN.

ISRAEL WAS ATTACKED WITH GENOCIDAL REFRAINS

IGNORED BY ANTI-SEMITES WITH FECAL BRAINS.

QATAR FUNDS THE HATRED STUDENTS UTTER

COGNOSCENTI PRONOUNCE THAT NATION AS “GUTTER.”

OUR BORDERS NO LONGER CONTAIN AN INVASION

OF UNDOCUMENTED MILLIONS WITH LEGAL EVASION.

OUR MILITARY INDULGES WOKE POLICIES WITHOUT SENSE

WHILE OUR ENEMIES PREPARE FOR A MAJOR OFFENSE.

 

SUDDENLY THERE AROSE SUCH A JOYFUL CLATTER

I RUSHED TO THE WINDOW TO SEE WHAT WAS THE MATTER.

IT WAS A BRIGADE OF CITIZENS SAYING “ENOUGH!”

TO PROGRESSIVE POLICIES THEY WOULD REBUFF.

ON ELECTION DAY THEY WILL PROCLAIM THEIR NOS

TO BETRAYING ALLIES AND KOW-TOWING TO FOES.

NO TO QUOTAS INSTEAD OF MERIT AND GRADES.

NO TO 1619 PROJECT, DEI AND WOKE CHARADES.

NO TO LOCKDOWNS AND CLOSING OF SCHOOLS.

NO TO HEALTH CZARS THAT TAKE US FOR FOOLS.

NO TO FOREIGN FUNDING IN HIGHER EDUCATION.

NO TO OPEN BORDERS AND UNFETTERED IMMIGRATION.

NO TO SURVEILLANCE AND DICTATS FROM CAPITOL HILL.

NO TO FOREIGN OIL FOR ENERGY- DRILL, BABY, DRILL.

THEY HOISTED A BANNER FOR ALL TO SEE.

SPORTING THE WORDS ‘DON’T TREAD ON ME.”

OFF THEY MARCHED INTO THE NIGHT

THEIR GPS PATH FROM LEFT TO RIGHT.

SO, WITH A DOLLOP OF OPTIMISM AND A TAD OF CHEER

I WISH YOU ALL HAPPY HOLIDAYS AND HAPPY NEW YEAR.

RUTH KING

Will Partisan Lawfare Destroy Trump? We have never seen anything like this before in American history By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2023/12/21/will-partisan-lawfare-destroy-trump/

Trump Derangement Syndrome became Orwellian with the recent ruling of the Colorado Supreme Court.

It approved the erasure of Trump from the Republican primary ballot in Colorado, by invoking Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.

That ossified clause was intended to bar any ante-bellum federal officials who joined the Confederacy from again holding federal offices after 1865.

In no way is Trump’s conduct on January 6 comparable to calling for secession, much less prompting a Civil War that cost the country 700,000 lives.

An “insurrectionist” president does not address unarmed protestors with qualifiers like, “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”

How also can one be guilty of insurrection without ever being indicted for such a supposed crime, much less convicted of it? 

And the more we learn about January 6, all the more it appears to have been a spontaneous riot, more buffoonish in nature than conspiratorial.

No one has explained the mysterious, politicized January 6 refusal of the Speaker of the House to order a reinforcement of the Capitol police.

Or the FBI stonewalling about its informants in the crowd.

Or the revealing admissions of New York Times reporter Matthew Rosenberg (“a ton of FBI informants among the people who attacked the Capitol”).

Are You Better Off Than You Were Four Christmases Ago? Probably Not

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/12/21/are-you-better-off-than-you-were-four-christmases-ago/

Jill Biden’s creepy video, featuring a troupe of tap dancers showing off the garish Christmas decorations in the White House, prompted one journalist to comment that they are “really going for the Hunger Games as this year’s Christmas theme.”

While they’re prancing around in the capital, out in the districts everyone else is struggling to pay the sky-high cost of this festive season.

Haven’t bought a Christmas tree yet? It will cost you about 10% more than last year, which is on top of the 10% increase the year before, and 10% the year before that.

The American Christmas Tree Association found that 78% of consumers are concerned about inflation this year.

Want to serve ham for family and friends this holiday? Ham prices are up 16% compared with Christmas 2020.

If you’re traveling, you’ll pay 18% more for airfare and 45% more for gasoline than you did in 2020.

Those Christmas lights decorating the house? Your electric bill will be 24% higher. If you’re sending Christmas cards, stationery costs are up 27% under Biden.

At least drowning your sorrows in alcohol is getting less expensive.

What Have They Done? Noah Rothman

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/what-have-they-done/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=hero&utm_content=related&utm_term=second

The only thing reassuring about the Colorado supreme court’s 4–3 decision disqualifying Donald Trump from appearing on the state’s presidential ballots is the horror it inspired. Trump fans, Trump critics, and Trump adversaries alike recoiled. Even if they didn’t look askance at the dubious legal rationale that prevailed in this court, the assault it represents on the civic compact proved too much for even some of Trump’s most indefatigable opponents to defend.

That’s a modest silver lining. It will prove no comfort as the decision’s political reverberations unfold. The sense that unelected functionaries and professional bureaucrats have dedicated themselves to the effort to steal from Republicans their agency by simply ruling Trump out of the political process isn’t exclusive only to the MAGA movement’s true believers. GOP voters across the Republican spectrum increasingly believe that, to one extent or another. They will expound on that concern to anyone willing to listen. Anyone would rebel against such an imperious intervention into affairs as intimate as their vote. Americans, in particular, are disinclined to just sit back and take that sort of peremptory imposition.

Even if this sentiment was just a heuristic that folks who don’t spend their free time reading charging documents used to navigate the criminal allegations against Trump, it’s an understandable (if wrong) cognitive shortcut. When it comes to the Colorado case, however, the allegation is well-founded. The logic to which Minnesota’s supreme court appealed when it rejected a similar effort to bar Trump from the ballot, citing the 14th Amendment’s restrictions on candidates who “engaged in” insurrection, is unassailable.

Colorado Undermines Democracy in the Name of Democracy I was one of ten House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump after January 6. I think the court’s decision is shameful. Peter Meijer

https://www.thefp.com/p/colorado-court-trump-2024-peter-meijer-democracy?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

For years, we’ve been told that Donald Trump is a worse-than-Hitler threat to democracy and that those who opposed him—leading Democrats, the courts, Noam Chomsky, Michael Avenatti, Rachel Maddow, the hosts of The View, even old Twitter—were just trying to protect it. It’s odd then to now be told that the best way to save democracy is by banning Trump from the ballot.

That’s what happened in Colorado yesterday, when the state’s Supreme Court ruled in a 4–3 decision that former president Donald Trump—currently the most popular presidential candidate—was disqualified from appearing on Colorado ballots for the 2024 presidential election. 

The decision—perhaps the most extra-constitutional act by a high court in my lifetime—is astonishing on every level. 

First, the reasoning:

The Colorado court did it by reinvigorating Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which reads in part that “no person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States” who has “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”

Those words were written in 1866, less than a year after the Civil War ended, a war in which over 300,000 Union soldiers died to keep America united, in order to bar many former Confederate officials from serving in government.

Lincoln Memorial steps vandalized with ‘Free Gaza’ graffiti, red paint

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/lincoln-memorial-steps-vandalized-with-free-gaza-graffiti-red-paint/ar-AA1lNZIn

“National Park Service conservators have begun the process of removing the paint this morning, though it may take multiple treatments over several days to remove all of it,” Park Police added. “The steps on the west side of the Reflecting Pool are closed to visitors while the conservation work takes place.” 

It is not immediately clear who was behind the incident.

Dozens of anti-Israel protesters were arrested on Tuesday after staging an illegal rally inside the Capitol Rotunda in Washington, D.C., an act led by activist Linda Sarsour, according to reports. 

Last Monday, a protest calling for a cease-fire led to over 40 arrests at the Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill, Fox5 DC reported. 

The pro-Palestinian protesters were illegally demonstrating inside the Congressional space, according to authorities. 

Just after 10 a.m., a Capitol spokesperson told Fox 5 that the demonstrators arrived, with one man even climbing a statue in the atrium, before being charged with resisting arrest. 

The New Ebonics Movement and the Elimination of Whiteness Mainstreaming mediocrity and demonizing excellence. by Jason D. Hill

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-new-ebonics-movement-and-the-elimination-of-whiteness/

The Back to Ebonics movement has been around for a couple of decades. It gained some traction in the seventies during the era when everything Black was pronounced as beautiful. Emerging from the ugliness of segregation and Jim Crow laws which did see the systemic evisceration of the dignity of Black individuals, the Black is Beautiful slogan was understandable from the standpoint of psychological preservation. Ebonics—the Black Vernacular that is believed to capture the unique and singular way many Blacks speak—was regarded by many as a means of also protecting the dignity of Black self-expression.

Few in academia, or in mainstream society for that matter, took the Ebonics movement very seriously. Everyone knew that if any Black person wanted—at minimum—a job as a hotel receptionist, a customer service agent in a call center, or a clerk in a retail store, he or she would need to speak standard English. The latter was the lingua franca of business and commerce, and that was not about to change. If Blacks aspired to achieve economic parity with their compatriots, then they would have to become bilingual.

Lately, the Back to Ebonics movement has morphed into a devoutly nasty and pernicious new form. It has transmogrified into a hegemonic call to replace standard English as the norm. It regards requiring Black students to use standard English as anti-Black linguistic racism. Blacks required to speak standard English are believed to experience violence, persecution, dehumanization, and marginalization. The leader of this movement, a Black professor at the University of Michigan by the name of April Baker-Bell, has sponsored a document to abolish what she calls “White Mainstream English.” She believes that Black students who are forced to write their papers in mainstream English are victims of Anti-Black Racism.

China’s “Unrestricted Warfare” Against the US by Lawrence A. Franklin

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20238/china-unrestricted-warfare
• The Chinese Communist Party, led by China’s President Xi Jinping, has, over the years, by espionage, intellectual property theft, hacking, spying and militarizing artificial islands, initiated a bitter conflict between China and the US.
• China appears determined to “neutralize” states that might challenge its claim to the South and East China Seas. If successful, China’s naval assets will dominate a large portion of the world’s commercial sea lanes, if the US is unable — or unwilling — to knit together a serious formal military alliance of democratic states in the Indo-Pacific.
• Rather than fight a war, China apparently is hoping to envelop the US in Latin America by establishing Chinese-controlled ports and numerous bilateral Belt and Road Initiative projects in Cuba, Panama, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Brazil and Argentina.
• Is the US ready?
China is fully engaged in a multi-front war against the United States. This “unrestricted warfare” against America has several dimensions: technological, space, military, political, economic, digital, psychological, informational and diplomatic. In fact, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) openly declared a “people’s war” against the US in a May 14, 2019 edition of the People’s Daily.
The CCP, led by Chinese President Xi Jinping, has, over the years, by espionage, intellectual property theft, hacking, spying and militarizing artificial islands, initiated a bitter conflict between China and the US.
CCP propaganda, however, claims that China is supposedly only responding to America’s instigation of a “new cold war” against the People’s Republic of China (PRC), depicted as a policy to “contain China’s rise.”
The two all-encompassing themes of the CCP’s offensive are China’s Global Security Initiative (GSI) and a Global Developmental Initiative (GDI).

Progressivism Forces Americans to Forget Their History America’s collective memory of its greatness is a formidable one for young Americans – and it must be restored By James E. Fanell and Bradley A. Thayer

https://amgreatness.com/2023/12/19/progressivism-forces-americans-to-forget-their-history/

The difficulties of the presidents of major American universities—Harvard, MIT, and UPenn—to denounce anti-Semitism is both appalling and a symptom of the larger ideological upheaval in the United States between traditional liberalism and progressivism. The consequence of the increasing strength of progressivism is the loss of the country’s ability to meet the challenges that it once possessed. The most important of these waning abilities is how to confront and defeat with great power enemies. Thus, the progressive movement is regressive by its very nature.

Like a dementia patient in gradual decline, the U.S. is regressing, gradually becoming enfeebled and infantilized, losing its knowledge, memory, coherence, and the ability, desire, and willingness to meet challenges. This is due in part to the ageing of the Baby Boomers (1946-1964) and Generation X (1965-1980) who possessed the direct experience of fight against the Soviet Union and its allies in the Cold War. People matter, as does their historical experiences and knowledge. As those fade, the nuts and bolts of American civil society and identity are lost.

But a more significant cause is the rise of progressivism and its deliberate consequence—the decline of political liberalism in the U.S. The advance of progressivism evinced in the shameful testimony of the university presidents entails the diminishment, rejection, or replacement of U.S. history, political ideology and culture, and the regressive transformation of political ideology, culture, and institutions. The U.S. population and leadership either willingly forget or are forced to forget. As a result, Americans are becoming disorientated and detached from America’s liberal foundations and institutions. They do so voluntarily if they are progressives.  If they do so with considerable resignation, they are political liberals, and people compelled to go with the progressive flow.

The forced memory loss is part of the “Great Forgetting” of the knowledge, behavior, culture, skills, practices, and abilities that led to victory in America’s wars, allowed the country to overcome economic difficulties to become the world’s greatest economic engine, the world’s leader in science and technology, possess peerless universities and professional schools, and a standard of living unmatched. American society provided untold benefits to its citizens and to the Free World. The “Great Forgetting” is intentional, not an accident or an artefact of history. Progressivism is destroying America’s memory so that they may advance their revolutionary agenda, while disarming Americans who know or would come to know their country’s history and who would be able to thwart them.

The American University, RIP Has the plague of illiberal ideologies become terminal?Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-american-university-rip/

Having spent more than half a century in universities, I wasn’t shocked or even surprised by the despicable display of craven obeisance to illiberal ideologies on the part of presidents of three of our most prestigious universities. Even their hypocritical rationalization for homicidal antisemitism using a defense of the First Amendment––which all three campuses for decades have violated when it comes to conservatives and other dissidents––didn’t raise an eyebrow.

After all, the predicates for this shameful spectacle have long been developing in our diseased groves of academe. Now the plague has become terminal, and the American university may never recover.

For at least a century, the obvious source of corruption of the university’s traditional mission to prepare young minds for ordered liberty, has come mainly from Marxism, these days mostly in its tactical guise of Cultural Marxism. Ethnonationalist passions like fascism and Nazism were other vectors of the virus, as French writer Julien Benda noted in his 1926 book The Treason of the Clerks.

All these political pathologies corrupted intellectuals and professors, Bend argues, who sacrificed their vocation to seek truth, in order to gain “practical advantages,” fulfill the “desire to abase the values of knowledge before the values of action,” and promote the idea that “politics decides morality”––nearly a century later, a succinct definition of today’s “woke” leftism and “critical race theory.”

In our times, this leftist politicization has been worsened by the rise of identity politics. The movements to remove illiberal restrictions on various Americans who had been denied their unalienable rights, especially black Americans, soon became tools of factional political power and leverage. A narrative of endemic white, male, heterosexual oppression and guilt arose, and demanded compensatory policies and programs for its victims. Discrimination, once the prime evil to be battled, became a political weapon codified in federal laws. The goal was to pursue the left’s program of establishing a technocracy of concentrated powers at the expense of the Constitution’s divided and balanced powers.

Universities, backed by the courts and government agencies, soon became a critical institution for achieving this goal by formulating and promulgating politicized curricula and discriminatory campus policies. A repressive orthodoxy of ideas took over universities through “diversity,” “multiculturalism,” “political correctness,” and now “woke” policies like Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and toxic ideas like “systemic racism” that teach discriminatory, politicized, intellectually incoherent and daft ideas.