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50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

Cover-Up Artists for Undercover Operatives Prosecutors say defense lawyers representing five Oath Keepers in their seditious conspiracy trial should be barred from asking any FBI informant about their participation in investigations. By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2022/09/26/cover-up-artists-for-undercover-operatives/

Hot off falsely claiming Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick was bludgeoned to death by “insurrectionists” on January 6, 2021, Representative Mondaire Jones (D-N.Y.) last week identified another faux victim of Trump supporters: Ray Epps.

The infamous red-hatted man seen on video numerous times urging people to “go into the Capitol” remains free despite engaging in conduct far more disruptive than many who face charges for their behavior that day. Jones, however, describes Epps as a “scapegoat” and “bogeyman” of his Republican colleagues; commended Epps for turning himself into the FBI (as did many protesters later charged with crimes); and claimed Epps tried to calm the crowd as the chaos unfolded. 

“There is nothing unusual about a guy who didn’t actually go into the Capitol on January 6 and who did not actually incite violence not being indicted,” Jones said during last week’s House Judiciary Committee meeting to debate a bill demanding that the Department of Justice turn over all records related to Epps. “Mr. Epps and his wife have had their lives threatened. And they’ve had to go into hiding because of this latest conspiracy theory by MAGA Republicans to distract from the existential threat that Donald Trump and the Republican Party pose to our democracy.”

Jones was the latest member of Congress to come to Epps’ rescue, an inexplicable defense of someone who took part in what the Biden regime considers an act of terror comparable to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 that left nearly 3,000 people dead. Despite promises by the January 6 select committee that Epps’ sworn interview would be released to the public, his testimony remains under wraps nearly nine months later. 

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), a member of the committee, called unanswered questions about Epps a “conspiracy theory” and begged Republicans to leave Epps alone. “He’s just trying to survive and he’s on your side!” Raskin yelled during the same House Judiciary committee meeting. Claiming without evidence that Republicans “don’t have many voters left,” Raskin suggested Republicans should stop “vilifying” Epps, an alleged Trump supporter.

So everyone else is an insurrectionist and terrorist but Ray Epps is just a “schmuck?” 

Weird.

Biden’s Student Loan Bailout Is Just The Beginning — Other Debtors Line Up For Relief

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/09/27/bidens-student-loan-bailout-is-just-the-beginning-as-other-debtors-line-up-for-relief/

Nobody has yet come up with a definitive estimate of the full taxpayer cost of President Joe Biden’s student loan bailout, but the numbers are already staggering. And as budget-busting as this one is, it’s only whetted the Left’s appetite for more loan bailouts.

The Congressional Budget Office released a cost estimate for Biden’s loan cancellation executive order. He plans to forgive $10,000 in federal student loans for borrowers who earn less than $125,000 a year. Low-income Pell Grant borrowers are eligible for an additional $10,000 cut. The CBO figures this will cost $400 billion over the next decade. Plus another $20 billion in costs by the extension of Biden’s “emergency” payment suspension through the end of this year – a suspension allegedly in response to COVID, which Biden himself says is no longer a pandemic.

That is close to the estimate that the Wharton school produced in late August. It pegged the 10-year cancellation cost between $469 billion and $519 billion.

But that’s only a small part of the taxpayers’ largesse Biden wants to shower on college students.

As the CBO notes “The estimates presented here do not include any effects of the actions affecting income-driven repayment plans.”

If anything, that will cost taxpayers more than the cancellations. Biden wants to vastly expand this escape valve for student loans. As it stands, students have the option of capping their loan payments at 10% of their income, and any debt left over after 20 years will be forgiven.

Remembering Hate Speech What we used to know as “hate speech” is now presidentially acceptable speech, and what has followed from it is no surprise. By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2022/09/25/remembering-hate-speech/

It has been a canard of the Left that “words matter.” We are lectured that “hate speech” leads inevitably to street violence.

So how ironic that the Left defames nearly half of America as dangerous “semi-fascist” extremists, white-raged and privileged, ultra MAGA, and guilty of all sorts of thought crimes from secession to civil insurrection? And what is the result?

Does this constant demonization matter? And what are the bitter fruits of such labors? After all, what did Barack Obama long ago mean by “clingers” or once Hillary Clinton by “deplorables”  and “irredeemables”?

What did Joe Biden imply by “dregs” and “chumps” and “semi-fascists”? Or what did the FBI lovebirds really mean by smelly Walmart goers and “hillbillies”? After a point, did not America get this monotonous message?

And what does Joe Biden really mean when he recycles his academic advisors’ tired tropes of right-wing insurrectionists threatening the republic?

MAGA Republicans do not respect the Constitution. They do not believe in the rule of law. They do not recognize the will of the people. . . . MAGA forces are determined to take this country backwards—backwards to an America where there is no right to choose, no right to privacy, no right to contraception, no right to marry who you love . . . They promote authoritarian leaders, and they fan the flames of political violence that are a threat to our personal rights, to the pursuit of justice, to the rule of law, to the very soul of this country . . . MAGA Republicans have made their choice. They embrace anger. They thrive on chaos. They live not in the light of truth but in the shadow of lies.

When the president fuels the now familiar old narrative by claiming that 75 million who voted for Donald Trump do not live in the “light of truth” but in the “shadow of lies,” and they do not follow “the rule of law,” some questions naturally arise.

First, what evidence does the president adduce to prove that 75 million Morlocks in the shadows are liars and avoid the “light of truth” of the Eloi? By what criteria does he use to judge them “semi-fascists”?

Is his proof the 120 days of violent looting, arson, violence, and death in the summer of 2020—virtually green-lighted by mayors, the media, and, yes, the current vice president? Who “fanned the flames of political violence” and were a “threat to the rule of law”?

Does Biden mean half the country is not respecting the Constitution by its systematic attack on our long-standing constitutional precepts, from the Electoral College and the rights of states to set voting laws? Are the “semi-fascists” trying to pack the Supreme Court? End the filibuster? Bring in two states solely to elect four left-wing senators?

Slow-Motion Trans Wreck: Neera Deshpande

https://americanmind.org/salvo/slow-motion-trans-wreck/

The ghastly fad of genital mutilation will end when the lawsuits begin.

In January of 2022, the San Francisco-based law firm Girard Sharp, which specializes in class action lawsuits, announced its investigation into the adverse effects of puberty blockers on transgender-identified children. These adverse effects can include low bone density, psychological problems, and potentially, per a July 2022 FDA warning label, pseudotumor cerebri, a condition which can cause brain swelling, headaches, nausea, double vision, and permanent loss of vision.

Across the Atlantic, as of August 2022, the U.K.’s Tavistock Centre, a gender transition clinic, is expecting a class-action lawsuit from at least 1,000 families of children who were prescribed puberty blockers. Meanwhile, Sweden’s National Board of Health and Welfare released in February of 2022 new guidelines on transgender medicine, recommending that doctors not prescribe puberty blockers outside of “exceptional cases,” as their use is built on “uncertain science.” The reality that so-called “gender-affirming” medicine is not safe is now becoming too obvious to deny, and its implications could not be clearer: we are entering the long-overdue lawsuit phase of the transgender movement, and it is in lawsuits that this movement ends. 

That we have reached a turning point on the issue of gender ideology is beyond question, especially seeing the increasing numbers of detransitioners—those formerly identified as transgender who have now returned to identifying with their sex—publicly speak out against the medical repercussions of gender ideology and transgender healthcare. Chloe Cole was put on puberty blockers when she was just 13 years old after identifying as transgender when she was 12. At 15 she was given a double mastectomy; at 16, she became filled with regret. “I was failed by the system,” she told the New York Post in June of 2022. “I literally lost organs.” In 2019, there were over 5,000 members on the subreddit r/detrans; today, in 2022, there are over 37,000, nearly an eightfold increase in just three years. 

Republican Teenager Murdered, Media Yawn They don’t want this in the “political violence” category. by Tim Graham

https://www.frontpagemag.com/republican-teenager-murdered-media-yawn/

A long time ago, when Air Supply and Toto were in heavy rotation on the radio, I was an 18-year-old Midwestern Republican kid in braces. So, I was especially outraged when news emerged from tiny McHenry, North Dakota, that 18-year-old Republican kid in braces Cayler Ellingson was run over and killed for his political views.

Shannon Brandt, 41, struck and killed the teenager with his Ford Explorer SUV early Sunday in an alley. His mother said Cayler called and asked her if she knew Brandt (she did). The boy called again a short time later and said that “‘he’ or ‘they’ were chasing him.” The mother could no longer reach him after that.

Court documents said, “Brandt admitted to striking the pedestrian with his car because he had a political argument with the pedestrian and believed the pedestrian was calling people “to come get him.” He claimed the teen was part of an unspecified Republican “extremist group.” Brandt was released on bail.

While the Fox News Channel and Newsmax both started reporting this story on the evening of Sept. 20, NewsBusters found zero coverage on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN or MSNBC. How about our taxpayer-funded PBS and NPR? Zero coverage. The New York Times and The Washington Post had nothing.

‘Democracy’ by and for the Elites Tocqueville predicted that an ‘immense and tutelary power’ would replace genuine popular rule. By Emily B. Finley

https://www.wsj.com/articles/democracy-by-and-for-the-elites-biden-wilson-jefferson-democratist-popular-rule-threat-america-tocqueville-11664114737?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

President Biden’s Sept. 1 speech in Philadelphia on “unity” is a poignant example of the confusion surrounding the concept of democracy. Mr. Biden declared that MAGA Republicans threaten “the very foundations of our republic.” The phrase a “threat to American democracy” is so commonplace these days that it hardly carries any meaning—except that it encapsulates the reigning ideology of our time, an ideology so pervasive that it almost goes unnoticed. It is like the air we breathe.

I call it democratism. It is an imaginative and idealistic understanding of popular rule that disdains ordinary people and looks to a cadre of so-called experts to operate the levers of power. Under this ideology, “democracy” and “the people” are rhetorical cover for the will of the elites. Think of social media’s censorship of misinformation in the name of “supporting democracy” and “upholding free expression.” How is it that censorship passes as upholding free expression?

“War is peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength” from Orwell’s “1984” comes to mind, but there is a long tradition in the West of this paradoxical interpretation of democracy. Enlightenment-era thinking, and arguably even Plato, puts forth the thought that an ahistorical ideal of justice ought to act as the primary guide to politics. Jean-Jacques Rousseau applied this idea in “The Social Contract.” The general will, Rousseau says, is what the popular will ought to be, even if it isn’t expressed by actual living people. The general will conveniently requires the translation of a wise legislator for its instantiation.

Many of the most vocal champions of democracy, from Thomas Jefferson to our own day, have been advocates of this Rousseauean inversion, using the word “democracy” as justification for what would otherwise be naked authoritarianism.

Thoughts on the Cultural Revolution in Our Midst. Part One Victor Davis Hanson

https://victorhanson.com/thoughts-on-the-cultural-revolution-in-our-midst-part-one/

We are in the middle of a grand effort to create an equality-of-result, race-based, radical Jacobin society. It is by design entirely antithetical to the Founders’ constitutional republic. And the revolutionary agenda is overseen by an exempt bicoastal oligarchy.

The enforced equality of result will, of course, be mandated by elites not subject to their own demands upon the citizenry: no charter schools for hoi polloi, prep schools for the Guardians; Teslas for the anointed, buses for the masses; walls never work, except to protect Martha’s Vineyard, Napa, and Malibu; high rises are green for you, fourth homes are necessary for them; take light rail and save the planet, fly private to ensure that others do not.

We see these disconnects most shamefully with the outrage from the Left about the bussing of illegal aliens (in small numbers no less) into their elite enclaves.

The Obamas and their Martha Vineyard socialites did not care whether 10,000 swarmed onto the sidewalks of a border Hispanic town, destroying social services, overwhelming their schools, and spiking crime. And they care even less when the Biden administration flew thousands under cover of night into red-state communities. But they do not want anyone loitering on the streets in their own downtowns.

Yet for the Leftist pundit, sending a poor immigrant into Martha’s Vineyard becomes the work of the “Holocaust.” What a sick parallel to compare the systematic murder of six million Jews to an illegal entrant getting a free jet ride to one of the safest, richest, and most picturesque beach towns in the world.

Yet none in the Vineyard, not one, will offer his now empty vacation mansion and expansive grounds to the dispossessed. Instead, for a few hours the blessed virtue signaled their concern—and then bussed out the “welcome” in less than a day.

Fair Trials Are Impossible for January 6 Defendants  Judges on the D.C. District Court have denied every change of venue motion, absurdly insisting residents of a city that voted 93 percent for Joe Biden in 2020 can be fair and impartial. By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2022/09/24/fair-trials-are-impossible-for-january-6-defendants/

Odds are jurors in Douglas Austin Jensen’s trial took longer to fill out the verdict forms than they took to decide his fate.

After only a few hours of deliberations on Friday, 12 residents of the nation’s capital found Jensen guilty on seven counts related to his involvement in the Capitol protest on January 6, 2021. Jensen, an alleged QAnon follower, infamously confronted Capitol police officer Eugene Goodman inside the building that afternoon; he potentially faces decades in prison for convictions on impeding law enforcement officers and obstruction of an official proceeding, a dubious nonviolent felony punishable by up to 20 years in jail.

NBC News reporter Ryan Reilly, who covers all things January 6, noted in a tweet that “An ongoing issue with these Jan. 6 jury trials is that you barely have time to write the story on closing arguments before the jury returns their guilty verdicts.” Reilly then swooned over the Department of Justice’s “flawless” track record before D.C. juries.

CBS News reporter Scott MacFarlane predicted the jury would finish its work in one afternoon since January 6 juries have deliberated “swiftly so far.”

Jensen’s conviction adds to the Department of Justice’s undefeated streak for January 6 jury trials. Once upon a time, that would raise at least a sliver of skepticism from journalists and legal “experts” as to whether the constitutional rights, namely the right to face a jury of your peers, are being protected in an unquestionably political prosecution of dissidents of the regime. Instead, these verdicts are praised by the ruling class as proof that the “rule of law” and “justice” still prevail in this country—all evidence to the contrary, of course.

It is clear, after six months of jury trials for Capitol protesters, i.e., Donald Trump supporters, that no one charged in this sprawling criminal investigation can get a fair trial. 

Judges on the D.C. District Court have denied every change of venue motion, absurdly insisting residents of a city that voted 93 percent for Joe Biden in 2020 can be fair and impartial. Further, judges claim nonstop news coverage in addition to the televised performances of the January 6 select committee do not further taint a demonstrably tainted jury pool.

All It Takes Is One Hero By J.B. Shurk

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/09/all_it_takes_is_one_hero.html

Autumn is here.  Brisk mornings have returned.  The midterms are fast approaching.  Electric change saturates the air.  

At a granular level, so much in America today is terribly wrong.  Inflation, crime, unprotected borders, censorship, political persecution, language codes, and other leftist lunacies grip the nation.  From a broader perspective, though, something is right: more and more people in the United States and throughout the West are finally waking up to the sinister machinations of our globalist power brokers and the many miseries they have wrought.  

For so many decades, totalitarianism has spread incrementally across formerly free Western nations, and most citizens were either asleep at the switch or too comfortable to be bothered.  What’s wrong with outlawing speech that’s “hateful”?  Who could be for hate?  What’s wrong with letting private bankers manipulate the value of national currencies?  They do so only to prevent runaway inflation from ruining the economy.  What’s wrong with legislatures spending more money than they have?  They can always print more banknotes, tax more incomes, leverage the properties of ever more distant generations far from being born.  What’s wrong with endless wars against amorphous concepts like “terror”?  Wars against nameless terror could never mutate into military campaigns against domestic civilians.  What’s wrong with disarming civilian populations while arming all-powerful central governments to the hilt?  In “democracies,” after all, “authoritarianism” is not allowed.  

Trust your leaders to do “what’s best,” to do “what’s right,” and everything will be okay.  Believe without hesitation or doubt what the government tells you, and disregard all opposing viewpoints as dangerous lies.  Reject religious traditions as archaic falsehoods instilling bigotry, and accept the State’s “Great Reset” and “Green New Deal” as certain scientific truths.  Support consensus opinion and reject dissent as “extreme.”  Remember that politically incorrect words and unsanctioned beliefs may be recognized as forms of “violence” requiring official response.  Believe the mainstream media.  Trust the scientific bureaucracy.  Report fellow citizens who think too freely.  And no matter what, obey the authorities…for your own good.  

THIS IS NOT THE AMERICA I KNOW: Dozens of FBI Agents Raid Home of Catholic Pro-Life Activist as Children Scream in Terror By Paula Bolyard

https://pjmedia.com/columns/paula-bolyard/2022/09/24/this-is-not-the-america-i-know-dozens-of-fbi-agents-raid-home-of-catholic-pro-life-activist-as-children-scream-in-terror-n1632019

What is going on in America? Every day it seems another story surfaces about an FBI raid on another conservative. This time, it was a Catholic pro-life activist in Pennsylvania. LifeSite News reports:

A well-known pro-life author, sidewalk counselor, and father of seven was the latest victim of a U.S. Department of Justice-sponsored SWAT raid and arrest — for supposed “FACE Act” violations — at his rural home as his children looked on “screaming.”

Mark Houck is the founder and president of The King’s Men, which promotes healing for victims of pornography addiction and promotes Christian virtues among men in the United States and Europe.

According to his wife Ryan-Marie, who spoke with LifeSiteNews, he also drives two hours south to Philadelphia every Wednesday to sidewalk council for six to eight hours at two different abortion centers.

Ryan-Marie, who is a homeschool mother, explained the SWAT team of 25 to 30 FBI agents swarmed their property with around 15 vehicles at 7:05 a.m. this morning. Having quickly surrounded the house with rifles in firing position, “they started pounding on the door and yelling for us to open it.”

The raid apparently stems from events in October 2021 at an abortion clinic. According to Ryan-Marie, on several occasions last year, Mark, 48, took the eldest of his seven children, then age 12, to an abortion clinic where he went to counsel mothers planning to abort their children. For “weeks and weeks,” a pro-abortion protester got in her son’s face, screaming “crude… inappropriate and disgusting things… such as, ‘Your dad’s a fag’” and other statements too vile for the Catholic mom to repeat.