RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2021/09/13/bush-denigrates-war-on-terror-veterans/

On September 11, 2001, Flight 93 reportedly was headed for Washington, D.C. when Americans attempted but failed to overcome Islamic terrorists who planned to use the hijacked plane as a missile against the U.S. Capitol building. The plane crashed in a field outside of Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

Twenty years later, George W. Bush stood on that same ground and compared patriotic Americans at the U.S. Capitol protesting a hijacked presidential election to the Islamic terrorists who murdered nearly 3,000 innocent people on 9/11. Bush’s “War on Terror” came full circle, realizing the worst fears of his legion of haters from the time—the same people now praising his “courage” in confronting imaginary domestic terrorists.

“[W]e have seen growing evidence that the dangers to our country can come not only across borders but from violence that gathers within,” Bush said Saturday. “There’s little cultural overlap between violent extremists abroad and violent extremists at home. But in their disdain for pluralism, in their disregard of human life, in their determination to defile national symbols, they are children of the same foul spirit, and it is our continuing duty to confront them.” 

Now, one might reasonably assume Bush was addressing leftist protesters who burned down cities, tore down monuments, and brutally attacked innocents in the summer of 2020. Perhaps Bush’s condemnation of those who “disregard . . . human life” was meant for the thugs who murdered retired police captain David Dorn last summer?  

Nope. The former president wasn’t talking about Antifa or Black Lives Matter. Bush, in fact, attempted to justify the summer 2020 riots: “Looting is not liberation, and destruction is not progress,” he said in a June 2, 2020 statement. “But we also know that lasting peace in our communities requires truly equal justice. The rule of law ultimately depends on the fairness and legitimacy of the legal system. And achieving justice for all is the duty of all.”

The term Bush used on 9/11—“violent extremist”—applies to Americans who were in Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021. Don’t take my word for it. Take the word of Avril Haines, Joe Biden’s director of national intelligence.

In March, Haines issued an urgent bulletin warning “domestic violent extremists” pose a heightened threat to the homeland. “Newer sociopolitical developments—such as narratives of fraud in the recent general election, the emboldening impact of the violent breach of the US Capitol, conditions related to the COVID-19 pandemic, and conspiracy theories promoting violence—will almost certainly spur some DVEs to try to engage in violence this year.”

A sketch of the U.S. Capitol building was included in the document.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/we-have-won-lloyd-billingsley/

“We Have Won!!! All-Praises be to All-Mighty Allah! Congratulations on your victory over those who hate for the Laws of All-Mighty God to be supreme on the land. I pray to Allah that He helps you implement Shariah Law fully, correctly, and fairly.”

That was Fort Hood mass murderer Nidal Hasan, in a letter to his attorney retired U.S. Army Col. John Galligan, directing his remarks to the Taliban. Hasan’s most significant word is “We.”

Hasan was a major in the U.S. Army Major but described himself as a “soldier of Allah.” In 2009, Hasan was communicating with al Qaeda terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki about killing American soldiers, then shipping out for Afghanistan. On November 5, 2009, at Fort Hood, Texas, Hasan gunned down 13 unarmed American soldiers and wounded more than 30 others. The soldier of Allah saw himself as a combatant for the Taliban, but those in charge at the time didn’t see it that way.

For the composite character president David Garrow described in Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama, it was only “workplace violence,” not even gun violence. As Col. Galligan told Fox News this week, “workplace violence” is not even a punishable offence in the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). True to form, Hasan was charged with mass murder, but not terrorism. According to Galligan, “the government could have elected to proceed along that line but chose not to.”

The composite character president, formerly known as Barry Soetoro, called the killings “incomprehensible,” adding that “no faith justifies these murderous and craven acts.” For Hasan, it was fully comprehensible, and he certain believed Islam justified his actions.

Vice president Joe Biden said, “Jill and I join the President and Michelle in expressing our sympathies to the families of the brave soldiers who fell today.  We are all praying for those who were wounded and hoping for their full and speedy recovery.  Our thoughts and prayers are also with the entire Fort Hood community as they deal with this senseless tragedy.” For Nidal Hasan, the attack made perfect sense.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/09/democrat_party_the_gravest_threat_to_the_republic.html

There was a time when the two-party system functioned for America, a time when the Democrat party was patriotic and offered a viable alternative to the GOP. A time when we could agree to disagree about the relative size of government, and various marginal policy issues. The Democrat party once featured the likes of Harry Truman, Adlai Stevenson, and JFK.

That time is long gone. As are any principles and scruples the party may have had. It now vehemently disagrees with virtually all the founding principles of the nation. No longer does it purport to believe in limited government, of, by, and for the people. It believes in unlimited government, of, by, and for those in government. It does everything it can to undermine the rule of law and equality under law. Democrats are summarily assaulting the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. They are attacking each of the Ten Amendments, including the right to free speech, and the right to protect oneself. And now, even the right to control over one’s own body. (And, in a related note, they have previously and largely successfully disparaged the Ten Commandments and banished them from the public square.)

Democrats for the most part no longer hide their desire to control others’ lives. President Biden recently stated that he has authorized the deployment of “Surge Response Teams” made up of “experts,” in part from the Defense Department, to combat the coronavirus and bully the unvaccinated. But maybe we shouldn’t be too concerned based on the Defense Department’s recent performance in Afghanistan.

Democrats love taxing the hell out of those with gainful employment. They love spending other people’s money, often on schemes to help them attain or retain power. They have the temerity to label a tax cut a “risky spending scheme.” They currently plan to raise taxes across the board, and proposed a corporate tax rate higher than communist China’s.

Democrats routinely traffic in obfuscation, projection, deceptions and lies. The vast majority of elected Democrats seem to be for baby genocide, obstruction of justice, and a return to a race-based society, and against election integrity and the concept of God-given rights.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/09/blinkens-idiocy-on-the-taliban-and-wo men/#slide-1

The notion of women holding governmental positions is anathema to the Taliban.

I n an observation that would be amusing were it not made under such appalling circumstances, Secretary of State Antony Blinken acknowledged to the House Foreign Affairs Committee that, in assembling its regime in Afghanistan, the Taliban had fallen “very short of the mark” expected by the vaunted “international community.” As the New York Times reports, he was referring specifically to the fundamentalists’ failure to include women in the new government.

I’m constrained yet again to note the sheer idiocy of such remarks from our State Department, nearly 30 years after the principles of sharia supremacism (which is the Taliban’s ideology) figured prominently in U.S. terrorism prosecutions.

The salient point here is not so much about women as it is about fundamentalist Islam’s theory of governance. But maddeningly, our government has always stood ready to turn a blind eye at the latter if it could just get a bit of window dressing on the former.

The Taliban are as literalist and unevolved as it gets, so the notion of women holding governmental positions is anathema to them. But that’s not merely because these are government positions; it’s mainly because they are outside-the-home positions. Before you’d even get to questions of governance, you’d confront the Taliban’s opposition to women’s being outside the home without the supervision of a male relative, to the perceived impropriety of women’s interacting with men to whom they are neither married nor related, and to the perceived intellectual inferiority of women that results, for example, in their testimony being valued at half that of a man’s (rooted in an ancient hadith, the provenance of which is questioned by reformist Islamic scholars and authentically moderate Muslim modernizers).

Yet sharia supremacism is not monolithic.

The Muslim Brotherhood is a sharia-supremacist organization, but it is the most influential one in modern history because it is flexible, even nuanced, about means of advancing sharia’s implementation while remaining unyielding on the crucial matter of ends — fidelity to sharia principles. As I’ve explained on other occasions (and discussed extensively in The Grand Jihad, my 2010 book on the Brotherhood and its alliance with transnational progressives), the most influential scholar in this most influential organization is Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi.

Notwithstanding his endorsement of violent jihad, Qaradawi has won plaudits from the usual suspects (such as the State Department) because of, among other things, his “moderate” views on the rights of women to vote and hold elective office.

Now, let’s put this in context.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/here-comes-the-joe-biden-tax-bill-nancy-pelosi-richard-neal-house-ways-and-means-democrats-11631566810?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

It’s been under wraps longer than some Egyptian mummies, but the bill for the Joe Biden – Nancy Pelosi -Bernie Sanders spending agenda is about to be exposed to the air. The Ways and Means Committee draft tax increase that leaked over the weekend is a $2.2 trillion Washington money grab for the ages.

The tax proposals aren’t final, but Ways and Means will start debating them as early as Tuesday. So much for deliberation. As Chairman Richard Neal has said, publicizing tax increases too soon gives the opposition time to build. Now that the details are out, we see what he means.**

The most bizarre spin is that the House Democratic draft is less onerous than President Biden has proposed. As a share of GDP, the House proposal is still the largest tax increase since 1968. It also doesn’t account for the Senate Finance Committee, which has floated a paper with multi-trillions in tax increases to choose from. Think of this exercise as the all-you-can-eat politician’s dinner at Applebee’s.

If Americans are successful, Democrats want to tax more of their income. The top individual tax rate will rise to 39.6% from 37%, as Mr. Biden promised. But wait: The higher tax rate will kick in at a mere $400,000 for individuals and $450,000 for married couples. That’s down from $523,600 and $628,300 under current law.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-19-coronavirus-breakthrough-vaccine-natural-immunity-cdc-fauci-biden-failure-11631548306?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Dr. Makary is a professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and the author of “The Price We Pay: What Broke American Health Care—And How To Fix It.”

The U.S. spends lavishly on healthcare yet can’t answer basic questions about Covid-19. Some of the best research has come from Israel. American public health agencies should be producing data on breakthrough infections, boosters and natural immunity. But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has failed to provide the information needed to inform a sound Covid strategy.

Israel began its vaccine rollout with Pfizer in December, only days after the U.S. But Israel kept good data, reported them out frequently and quickly, and used them to track subsequent Covid infections. When the White House announced its plan to recommend a booster shot for all Americans, it cited Israeli data. The World Health Organization and others criticized the plan, calling the evidence insufficient, and in what seemed like a coordinated protest, two top scientists at the Food and Drug Administration abruptly resigned.

The Biden administration recently got the supporting data it needed to justify its booster plan. But not from the CDC. Another Israeli study showed that a booster resulted in a 10-fold reduction in severe Covid illness in people over 60. The results were published mere weeks after the study’s completion, not months later as often happens in the U.S.

“There’s no doubt,” Anthony Fauci said of the findings in a press briefing, “from the dramatic data from the Israeli study that the boosts that are being now done there and contemplated here support very strongly the rationale for such an approach.” The FDA, trying to evaluate the question of boosters, scrambled to obtain the raw data from Israel.

The bigger question is: Why didn’t the CDC produce the research?

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/09/13/ii-tipp-poll-the-distrust-of-scientists-is-widespread-including-on-covid-vaccines/

From coronavirus vaccines and the virus’ origin to climate change, a substantial portion of the country distrusts scientists to do their jobs honestly and capably. The latest data from the September Issues & Insights/TIPP Poll also found significant differences among Americans of different political views, reflecting a growing politicization of science in America.

The I&I/TIPP poll asked Americans “how much trust do you place in scientists” in three areas of science prominent in today’s headlines: “vaccine safety,” “climate change,” and “coronavirus origin.”

Overall, among the three, vaccine safety was tops in scientist trust, at 61%. Perhaps not surprisingly, that almost perfectly matches the share of the U.S. population currently vaccinated: 63%.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/09/12/wokeness-an-evil-of-our-age/

History is replete with examples of nations, successful and not-so-successful alike, that abruptly committed suicide. 

The ancient polis of Corcyra devoured itself in a bloody conflict as a collective madness took hold of the island city-state during the Peloponnesian War. 

The Jacobins in 1793 hijacked the French Revolution and turned a movement toward a constitutional republic into a totalitarian, year-zero effort to destroy the past and ensure equity for all—or else. The Reign of Terror—and eventually Napoleon—followed. 

The effort to force war-weary Czarist Russia to reform into a constitutional monarchy ended up being kidnapped by a small but lethal clique of Leninist Bolsheviks. What ensued was the destruction of Russian life—and millions of corpses—over the next 70 years. Ditto Mao Zedong’s various murderous resets culminating in the cannibalistic “Cultural Revolution.” Mao’s final tab was 60-70 million deaths of his fellow Chinese. 

French, Russian, and Chinese wokists all toppled statues, canceled out the nonbelievers, wiped away history, tore down monuments, and declared themselves the purest of all generations in their year zero—before getting down to the business of dividing up the spoils and settling scores.

Most of these bloodbaths started out with the supposedly noble idea of delivering social justice, equity, and fairness before they inevitably went deadly and feral. We should be just as worried about our own woke pandemic.

Mythological

Start with the idea that “wokeness” is an ideology divorced from reality. Nearly all of its premises are complete distortions.

Between 2017 and 2020, minorities had made the greatest gains in employment in U.S. history. Women currently represent about 60 percent of all college students. 

Recent wage gains for minority middle-class Americans outpaced those of the white working- and middle class. The latter were underrepresented in college enrollments and as graduates—but vastly overrepresented (at twice their percentage of the general population) in the toll of combat dead in Afghanistan and Iraq. Asian-Americans and a dozen other ethnic groups outpace so-called whites in per capita and household income. “White privilege” is usually a sloppy term that applies mostly to the white elites who use it to smear others.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2021/09/12/medical-mandates-a-hideous-strength-n1477878

One recalls C.S. Lewis’ dystopian novel That Hideous Strength, a longtime favorite of mine, where he speaks of “false writings” and “men maddened with false promises and soured with true miseries.” Lewis held to an apocalyptic vision of moral and intellectual surrender to the idols of mere self-sufficiency and hedonistic indulgence, of a time characterized by the death of meaning and the weakening of belief in a just and merciful God. “The shadow of one dark wing is over all Tellus,” the human spirit is being progressively “enclosed,” as he describes it. There is not much of the Rapture here, little indication of the new Jerusalem prophesied in Revelation.

David Marshall, also a devoted reader of Lewis, regards the novel as “a profound and prescient vision of institutional evil, of a sort that is all too recognizable in our time…fus[ing] political power, technology, and the occult.” Of course, Lewis was not thinking of a biovirus closing down the planet but of the relentless slide toward totalitarian governance everywhere he looked, especially in the democratic West, much as Yevgeny Zamyatin, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and José Saramago forecast in their signature works. Lewis was more preoccupied with the eclipse of faith, which he saw as undermining the integrity and cohesion of the great Judeo-Christian experiment to establish a system of individual liberty and rule of law, grounded in natural and divine justice. 

The belief in such principles ensured and sustained a viable culture, which was inevitably fragile and always susceptible to the incursion of the “demonic” in one form or another. He would not have been surprised at the current pandemic of lies, political demagoguery, and the recruitment of a public devoid of the moral strength to resist an orthodoxy of deception—the sway of the sons and daughters of the Father of Lies.

For COVID has provided the pretext to inaugurate precisely such a declension as Lewis feared. Our public institutions are engaged in establishing a virtual medical dictatorship mandating masks, lockdowns, contact tracing, curfews, business closures, excessive police powers, and more. And now we have the vaccine passports, predicated on a quasi-theological division between the saved and the damned, or in current terms, the vaccinated and the unvaccinated.