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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION

50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

This Is Not the America We Were Promised Molding us into disarmed, disenfranchised serfs who obey in silence. by Kurt Schlichter

https://www.frontpagemag.com/this-is-not-the-america-we-were-promised/

The events of the last few years have confirmed that we are no longer a democracy in the sense that we once thought we were – and I know we’re a republic, but follow along with me. The premise of a democracy is that individual citizens can participate in the political process by making their positions known and voting for representatives who they understand will support their views. But those components are under attack here and throughout the West. They are under attack because our garbage elite considers our participation in our own governance to be both morally illegitimate and a practical nuisance. As a result, the elite is doing everything it can to prevent us from participating in our own governance. It’s intent to make us into serfs, disarmed, disenfranchised serfs who obey in silence.

After all, when citizens participate in their own governance, they may choose policies that the elite dislikes. And the elite doesn’t like the policies normal people prefer. Part of it is profit and power, and part of it is the elite’s moral grandstanding – don’t underestimate the power of politics to make spiritually empty people such as our trash ruling class feel good about themselves. The elite don’t like competition from the peasants. It cuts into their action and is generally inconvenient.

What does the elite want? Power. It wants unquestioned power over us that is not subject to any limitations by dissent or appeals to the law. Why do you think they hate the Supreme Court so much? SCOTUS gets in their way when it enforces our rights. Why do you think they hate the Electoral College so much? Because it makes it harder for them to leverage their kept constituencies to take the presidency.

The elite wants what we’re now getting: an administrative state where experts who just happen to share all the priorities and prejudices of the elite make all the decisions. Do you wonder why the left is so concerned about controlling academia? Because that’s where experts are made, and you don’t get expert certification unless you embrace the elite’s ideology. Do you think it’s a coincidence that they’re demanding DEI loyalty oaths from graduate students and professors? You must listen to experts, they tell us, and by the way, we get to decide who the experts are. Check out conservative stalwart Ned Ryun’s new book, “American Leviathan: The Birth of the Administrative State and Progressive Authoritarianism,” which I read and gave him notes on in an early draft. Ned details exactly what’s going on here – the creation of an extra-constitutional fourth branch of government that effectively disintermediates citizens from any decision-making and controls every aspect of their lives without being subjected to any sort of accountability. That is the exact opposite of democracy, but it is part and parcel of Our Democracy that the ironically named Democrats embrace. Remember that when they say “Our Democracy,” they mean “ours,” as in “theirs.”

State Dept Officials Colluded to Protect Iran Envoy Under FBI Investigation “The State Department never reported Malley’s suspension to the OIG, in violation of federal law” by Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/state-dept-officials-colluded-to-protect-iran-envoy-under-fbi-investigation/

Classified information is a very serious matter. Except 99% of the time when it’s not. About the only time that classified information is really a serious issue is when it can be used to raid a certain Florida venue.

The rest of the time it just doesn’t matter. Just ask Rob Malley and an entire administration that covered for him.

The Harris-Biden administration’s suspended Iran envoy Robert Malley may have taken part in a “classified White House-organized” call after his top secret security clearance was frozen over allegations of misconduct, according to the State Department’s internal watchdog.

The watchdog report politely describes this as deviating from normal standards. Much like Al Capone was deviating from normal negotiating procedures.

An official at the heart of the Iran outreach program had multiple State Department officials cover for him, lie on his behalf to Congress and to foreign governments to cover up the fact that he was under FBI investigation.

And it got worse from there.

On April 22, 2023, the State Department notified Malley of his clearance suspension and barred him from accessing the department’s “Sensitive But Unclassified [SBU] information system.”

However, days later, under pressure from senior officials, Malley’s access to sensitive information was restored, as was his access to his State Department email account.

The Lilliputian Dems Still Struggling to Keep Trump Bound You can’t beat something with nothing. by Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-lilliputian-dems-still-struggling-to-keep-trump-bound/

Ganging up with the debate moderators, Kamala Harris still hasn’t immobilized Donald Trump. The Dems thought their fellow Lilliputian press agents masquerading as “journalists” and “moderators,” along with some mean-girl snark from Harris, could bait Trump enough to make him hang himself, and so distract millions of voters from noticing that Harris is still dodging questions about her complicity with Biden’s disastrous term, his cognitive decline, and the far-left policy proposals that have marked her entire political career.

Despite the post-debate crowing about Harris’s victory, their ropes still aren’t tight enough to keep Trump down. For eight years, the progressive Democrats have labored to restrain Trump, but he keeps loosening his bonds. Let’s hope that the Dems don’t catch on that you can’t beat something with nothing.

Trump’s term was still young when federal agencies began trying to tie Trump down. The Russia, Russia, Russia hoax; turning an unexceptional phone call with Ukraine’s president Zelensky into a flimsy impeachable offense; Trump’s private conversation in 2005 Access Hollywood leaked that turned some sexual braggadocio into evidence for a sexual assaults; numerous statements by Trump distorted with selective editing, like the “very fine people” comment edited to hide’s Trump’s exclusion of neo-Nazis and white supremacists; and the Big Lie that on January 6 Trump instigated an “insurrection” when he told attendees at a rally to march “patriotically and peacefully” to protest at the capital. And don’t forget the multiple indictments by four Dem prosecutors, all based on creative if not duplicitous reading of the laws.

All those efforts and hundreds more failed to end Trump’s political career and clear the decks for a Democrat president. In fact, they’ve increased the size of his support. So now the lies are proliferating beyond those fed to a compliant media–– just like Harris, the moderators, and the media flacks during the debate every time they opened their mouths. But what else do they have to convince voters? They can’t run on the Biden and Harris record in the White House, which is as useless as Jimmy Carter’s record was in 1980.

Trump Didn’t Start The Fire

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/09/19/trump-didnt-start-the-fire/

Could Trump tone down his rhetoric? Sure. But why should he go first?

For the second time in as many months, an assassin targeted Donald Trump, and the left blamed … Donald Trump. It’s his violent rhetoric, you see, that is poisoning the body politic and causing everyone to go crazy. Or something like that.

Never mind that the second would-be assassin, Ryan Routh, had written a book in which he called on Iran to assassinate Trump, gave money to Democrats, and posted on X in April using the exact same language Democrats have been pushing for years – “DEMOCRACY is on the ballot and we cannot lose. We cannot afford to fail. The world is counting on us to show the way.”

David Frum, who we called scum in this space after he wrote in immediate wake of the last assassination attempt that Trump reaped what he sowed, was back at it again. “For a decade, this dangerous political environment has been uniquely inflamed by Trump’s hate-filled rhetoric,” he wrote this week. Plus, he said, Trump supports gun rights. Implication? Trump had it coming.

Others, such as the Cincinnati Enquirer, put it more plainly: “Donald Trump brings a lot of this stuff on himself.”

A Blanket Of Darkness Is Falling Over The West Armando Simón

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/09/19/a-blanket-of-darkness-is-falling-over-the-west/

From Sweden and Germany, to Australia and New Zealand, to France and Finland, to America and Canada, to Armenia and Italy, to Britain and Ireland, a network of censorship has been developing and steadily solidifying. Censorship has even been imposed on scientists. Ironically, this blanket of darkness has occurred in those countries with the longest tradition of freedom, specifically of freedom of speech, assembly and of writing. Soon, the peoples of those countries will have to resort to samizdat.

When Musk took over Twitter and exposed the systematic censorship apparatus within the organization, he also revealed that part of the censorship was being carried out at the request of the Biden regime (Facebook likewise agreed to impose censorship). By doing so, he opened the window to what was, in fact, a governmental conspiracy to establish censorship, thereby ironically putting an end to the automatic dismissal of “conspiracy theories” for those persons who could not, or would not, connect the dots.

He also fired the vermin who were carrying out the censorship.

Leftists in the Biden regime were not happy. The White House is “keeping an eye” on Musk and X, and pseudo-President Biden has spoken out against Musk. In retaliation, the FTC was ordered to harass Musk. One would expect that the American media would support Musk, but the reverse is the case. Except for one.

By exposing to the light of day the existence this conspiratorial censorship and allowing X to become a truly free speech zone, he infuriated the totalitarian elites.

The Road to Springfield Roger Franklin

https://quadrant.org.au/features/america/the-road-to-springfield/

EXCERPT

Consider for starters residents’ testimony at a recent city council public hearing (video below) which heard of Haitians fetching their duck dinners from the pond in the local park, of setting up camps on residents’ front lawns, of intimidating shoppers in the aisles at Walmart and getting behind the wheel without knowing how to drive. That last charge has been officially acknowledged by an emergency deployment of state troopers sent to stop a surge in “erratic driving” in the town, where an unlicenced Haitian on the wrong side of the road last year rammed a school bus and took the life of an 11-year-old boy. That Ohio Governor Mike DeWine has ordered the Springfield traffic blitz can be taken as confirmation there is more than racism behind complaints about Haitians’ estrangement from community norms. Spare a minute or two to watch the video below and, when you’re done, compare the witnesses’ sincerity, their end-of-the-rope pleas, with the Panglossian platitudes of a media that favours the agenda over truth, wokeness above evidence.

An obvious thought, one that doesn’t bespeak a hint of racism, is how any of us might react were tens of thousands of uninvited strangers to arrive in our towns or suburbs, few speaking English and bringing with them customs distinctly at odds with, in Springfield’s case, the culture and traditions of a largely white, Grant Wood kind of town. But that’s a matter which simply can’t be addressed, isn’t permitted to be addressed, for it would be a career-killer for any news show producer giving voice to the heresy that diversity might not be such a strength after all.

The trouble in Springfield began, as do many things with the best, of intentions. The DeWine family sponsors a charity in Port-au-Prince and official connections grew, sponsored migration with them. Then came the Biden administration’s open borders and life in Springfield changed suddenly and dramatically. No one is quite sure just how many Haitians now call the town home, with estimates ranging from 12,000 to twice that number. In a town of 58,000 even the lower figure represents a lot of new neighbours. How many are legal, how many undocumented, how many hold long-term temporary visas? Nobody really knows. The driver who rolled that school us flew to Brazil, came overland to the Texas, declared himself to immigration authorities and was granted one of several varieties of long-term visas, then loaded aboard an aeroplane bound for Ohio. The rest is history and a funeral.

Another assassination attempt shows the Dems’ hostile playbook – blame the victim if it’s Trump By Michael Goodwin

https://nypost.com/2024/09/17/opinion/democrats-always-point-the-blame-on-donald-trump-as-he-survives-another-assassination-attempt/
He had it coming. It’s his own fault. Don’t blame us. 

That sums up how leading Democrats and their media handmaidens are reacting to the second attempted assassination of Donald Trump. Remorse and concern about him or even the perils of the rising tide of everyday violence are in short supply.

Early voting has started, and they weren’t going to waste a day expressing anything other than hostility for the opponent they love to hate. 

And so the chorus of Dems and their propagandists are fending off every charge that they bear any responsibility for the repeated attempts to kill the leader of the Republican Party. 

Just because they compare him to Hitler and Mussolini doesn’t mean they actually want him dead. 

And a Dem congressman wasn’t to be taken literally when he said Trump had to be “eliminated.” 

The blanket denials are also aimed at making sure Trump doesn’t get any political benefit from being the target of another gunman.

To grant him even an iota of sympathy would be to give sympathy to the devil. 

Leave it to Hillary Clinton to be the first to reach the bottom of the barrel.

Here’s what we know about the assassination attempt on Trump in Florida:
Former President Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach on Sept. 15, 2024.
Trump sent out a statement to supporters soon after to report that he was “SAFE AND WELL.”
The suspect — identified as Ryan Routh, 58, of Hawaii — was able to get within 300 to 500 yards of Trump at a chain link fence on the edge of the course, where he had an AK-47 and a GoPro camera set up, apparently to record the planned shooting.
Routh has a history of supporting progressive causes online and has made 19 donations to Democratic candidates since 2019.

A Secret Service agent spotted and opened fire on Routh as he put his gun through the fence. The suspect fled and was arrested on I-95 a short time later.
According to Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw, Trump’s security detail was lighter because he isn’t a sitting president — despite the previous attempt on his life in July.
News photographers have used the gaps in foliage at Trump’s West Palm Beach golf club to take pictures of him — a security gap gunman Ryan Routh exploited.

Trying to hock yet another book about herself — isn’t everything about her? — she complained on MSNBC that the media aren’t tough enough on Trump — the day after the assassination attempt! 

“The press is still not able to cover Trump the way that they should,” Clinton told Rachel ­Maddow. 

We need to talk about the violent hatred for Donald Trump Two assassination attempts in two months? This is a crisis of civilised norms. Brendan O’Neill

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/09/16/we-need-to-talk-about-the-violent-hatred-for-donald-trump/

The BBC says the latest suspected attempt on the life of Donald Trump is proof that ‘political violence’ is the ‘new norm’ in America. It’s half right. There does seem to be a ‘new normal’ over there, but it’s not some abstract thing called ‘political violence’. It’s not some broad-strokes brutish contempt for all rulers of society. It’s more targeted than that. It has one politician in particular in its crosshairs. If there’s a new normal in America, it would appear to be a new normal of an increasingly militant culture of grievance against the 45th President of the United States, now aspiring to be the 47th: Donald Trump.

There’s a palpable reluctance in the MSM today to discuss the Trump-specific nature of recent acts of political terror. Many would rather wring their hands over ‘gun culture’. ‘The secret service didn’t fail Trump on Sunday’, says MSNBC of the latest suspected assassination attempt: ‘America’s gun culture did.’ Commentators agonise over the fact that the alleged would-be assassin involved in yesterday’s fracas was in possession of an AK-47. That’s the crazy thing, they say. Others focus on the poison of ‘polarisation’. The Beeb says it’s a mix of a ‘coarsened’ national discourse and an ‘epidemic of gun violence’ that has made attacks like yesterday’s ‘inevitable’.

Of course, questions can be asked about the easy availability of lethal weapons in the US. Even supporters of the Second Amendment feel iffy that fruitloops can purchase Soviet-invented assault rifles and rock up to a Florida golf course with one in the car. And public life is increasingly frazzled at the moment. Politics feels like a screaming match between opposing poles stone deaf to one another’s concerns. And yet, today’s focus on ‘gun culture’ and ‘polarisation’ feels like a displacement activity: a focus on the method of the violence (guns) and the backdrop to the violence (polarisation) in an effort to avoid looking into the eye of the violence: the strange, swirling contempt for Trump.

The Violence Is Not Symmetrical Noah Rothman

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-violence-is-not-symmetrical/

Political media are constantly on the lookout for right-wing violence, to the exclusion of the menace on the left.

The city of Springfield, Ohio, is besieged. Bomb threats and shooting scares have disrupted municipal events and closed schools for days on end. The disorder has been attributed to the addled Americans who pay overly close attention to the Trump campaign’s rhetoric, which has recently been focused on promoting the claim that Haitian migrants are absconding with local pets and eating them.

This outbreak of menace fits within a rubric the mainstream press can intuitively process. Donald Trump’s supporters are forever “inspired to violence.” They are uniquely susceptible to suggestion, both from the Republican presidential nominee and his acolytes. The MAGA faithful are quick to threaten, harass, and intimidate Trump’s critics and pursuers. As a Reuters analysis published last year asserts, America is “embroiled in the most sustained spate of political violence” since the 1960s. But while some primarily nonviolent criminality can be attributed to left-wing activists, the “attacks on people — from beatings to killings — were perpetrated mostly by suspects acting in service of right-wing political beliefs and ideology.”

The second attempt on Donald Trump’s life, which took place on Sunday afternoon, is just the latest event to call this ponderous assumption into question. The alleged would-be assassin appears to be in some important ways similar to the gunman who shot off a portion of Trump’s ear and killed Corey Comperatore in Butler, Pa., in July. His efforts to advocate on behalf of Ukraine’s cause — going so far as to try to join the fight against Russia’s invaders (he failed) — suggest a desire to make himself a part of a mission grander than himself. While the July 13 shooter’s motives have not yet been firmly established, reports indicating that he considered any target of opportunity, including Joe Biden, suggest that he, too, sought out notoriety. Unlike Trump’s assailant in Pennsylvania, however, the would-be assailant in Florida left a paper trail suggesting that he was a highly impressionable figure radicalized in the support of progressive causes.

Biden-Harris Admin Launches Investigation of RFK Jr for Whale Incident 30 Years Ago The total weaponization of the federal government is happening. by Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/biden-harris-admin-launches-investigation-of-rfk-jr-for-whale-incident-30-years-ago/

Kamala claimed that if Trump wins, he’ll weaponize the government against his political opponents. That’s the most obvious case of projection since the Kinsey report. The Biden-Harris administration uses every part of the government to run investigations of its political opponents on the most implausible of pretexts.

Like trying to put Trump on trial over a law created to stop the KKK from wearing masks on highways.

Or an investigation of RFK Jr over something that happened decades ago.

In 2012, Kick Kennedy, RFK Jr’s daughter, told a story to Town and Country Magazine about something her dad had supposedly done when she was six years old.

Kick’s taste for the extreme was fed by her dad’s eccentric environmentalism. Exhibit A: When she was six, word got out that a dead whale had washed up on Squaw Island in Hyannis Port. Bobby — who likes to study animal skulls and skeletons — ran down to the beach with a chainsaw, cut off the whale’s head, and then bungee-corded it to the roof of the family minivan for the five-hour haul back to Mount Kisco, New York. “Every time we accelerated on the highway, whale juice would pour into the windows of the car, and it was the rankest thing on the planet,” Kick recalls. “We all had plastic bags over our heads with mouth holes cut out, and people on the highway were giving us the finger, but that was just normal day-to-day stuff for us.”

Since Kick was supposedly born in 1988, this would have happened in 1994. Or 30 years ago. (RFK Jr describes it as being 20 years ago so maybe my math is off or his daughter’s age is.)

No one cared. Certainly no one launched investigations of RFK Jr.