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50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

Reparations Are Political Suicide, and Joe Biden Knows It By Charles C. W. Cooke

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/reparations-are-political-suicide-and-joe-biden-knows-it/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_

H.R. 40, the reparations bill, is DOA. Per Politico:

As a candidate, Biden said he supported a commission on reparations. But the administration has yet to endorse the actual bill. After his speech Tuesday, the president met with the members of the Congressional Black Caucus, who brought up the need for H.R. 40, which is named after the “40 acres and a mule” promise that now symbolizes the lack of support formerly enslaved people received from the federal government. According to those involved in the conversations, Biden let them down gently.

“He didn’t disagree with what we’re doing,” said Rep. Brenda Lawrence (D-Mich.), the 2nd vice chair of the CBC. “He did talk about his plate [being] full with trying to get the infrastructure bill passed and that he really wanted to make sure that he could get that through before he took on anything else.”

Ouch.

H.R. 40, note, would not spend any money on reparations. It would simply create a commission to look into spending money on reparations. If Joe Biden is against even that at this early point in his presidency, then he’s going to be against the idea at every single point in his presidency. The next few months are going to be taken up with attempt to spend trillions of dollars on “infrastructure,” and, after that, the midterm election season will be upon us. In a cosmic sense, Biden may not “disagree with” what the CBC is doing. In practical terms, though, he’s running away from them as fast as he possibly can — and, in so doing, killing the idea dead for at least the rest of his tenure.

Joe Biden Attacks Courageous Maverick Democrats By David Harsanyi

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/joe-biden-attacks-courageous-maverick-democrats/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=hero&utm_content=related&utm_term=second

President Joe Biden dinged both Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin during a speech in Tulsa, Oklahoma, yesterday, calling them “two members of the Senate who vote more with my Republican friends.” Some coverage alleged that Biden had merely insinuated that the duo voted against more than with him, but it’s a lie that would have generated cheeky chyron corrections on CNN and instantaneous across-the-board fact-checking — five Pinocchios and all the rest — had it been Donald Trump.

It’s not to say that Sinema and Manchin have signed on to all of Biden’s multitrillion-dollar agenda items — often larded with proposals that Biden himself opposed only a couple of years ago, such as ending the Hyde amendment and allowing unlimited taxpayer funding of abortions. But, to this point, Sinema and Manchin have voted with the president 100 percent of the time. If Republicans are looking to them to be saviors, they will likely be disappointed.

Biden’s quip was meant to pressure both to help pass H.R. 1, and to give Democrats an excuse to blow up the Senate filibuster. The president, after all, framed their obstinance as a roadblock to protecting the “sacred right” of voting, again claiming that state laws that codify traditional integrity measures, rather than allowing the chaotic COVID–style free-for-all voting to become the norm, were on par with Jim Crow. H.R. 1 is an attack on free expression, an unconstitutional federal takeover of elections. Its scope is unprecedented. Yet, since the press has adopted the Democrats’ framing of the legislation — a “voting rights” bill meant to stop “Republican-led voting restrictions across the country” — many voters are probably confused by any reluctancy to support it.

Of course, the way Sinema and Manchin are portrayed by the press bears little resemblance to the coverage of, say, Susan Collins, who often held up Republican-agenda items. She was a plucky maverick ready to stand up for her beliefs. And Mitch McConnell was not, as far as I recall, asked daily whether he was willing to destroy the republican norms of the Senate to ram through his legislative agenda with a razor-thin majority. And even if he had been, reporters wouldn’t be referring to it as “filibuster reform.” Yet, the filibuster is the obsession of political media. Sinema and Manchin are the obsession of the political media. All of it geared to help one party realize its goals.

Never Let a Plague Go to Waste by Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/02/never-let-a-plague-go-to-waste/

During America’s first-ever national lockdown, thousands of unelected bureaucrats, as well as federal and state governments, assumed enormous powers not usually accorded to them.

They picked and chose which businesses could stay open without much rationale. They sent the infected into nursing homes occupied by the weak and vulnerable.

Their rules for prosecuting those who violated social distancing, sheltering in place, mask wearing, or violent protesting often hinged on political grounds. Their spending measures on “infrastructure” and “health care” were excuses to lard up redistributive entitlements.

Conservatives moaned that left-wing agendas were at work beneath the pretenses of saving us from the pandemic. And the giddy left bragged that it was true.

After the 2008 financial meltdown, Barack Obama spoke of “fundamentally transforming” the country. Now he’s back, weighing in on the panic-driven, multitrillion-dollar spending that has pushed America’s debt to nearly $30 trillion.

“There’s a teachable moment about maybe this whole deficit hawk thing of the federal government,” Obama said in a recent interview with Ezra Klein of The New York Times. “Just being nervous about our debt 30 years from now, while millions of people are suffering—maybe that’s not a smart way to think about our economics.”

He apparently means that borrowing tons of money in a pandemic and not worrying too much about paying it back is a new, better approach to economics.

Last year, California Gov. Gavin Newsom boasted about leveraging California’s statewide quarantine.

“There is opportunity for reimagining a progressive era as it pertains to capitalism,” Newsom said. “So yes, absolutely, we see this as an opportunity to reshape the way we do business and how we govern.”

Never Again: Standing Up to the Oligarchy Once again, American companies are doing business and making money with an oppressive foreign government running concentration camps. By Max Morton

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/19/never-again-standing-up-to-the-oligarchy/

Zivia Lubetkin was adamant—there would be no more talk. At 28, she was a leader of her youth group and a born fighter . . .  a Jewish girl, who less than three years earlier had smuggled herself back into German-occupied Warsaw from the Russian zone as Germany invaded Poland. She knew what was in store for her since the Nazis had been running concentration camps for Germany’s Jews since 1933, but she went anyway. Now it was July 1942, and the Nazis had just deported the first 56,000 residents of the Warsaw Ghetto to the Treblinka death camp—without resistance from the ghetto’s residents. 

Against the wishes of the Jewish leadership in Warsaw, who counseled obedience to Nazi authority out of concern for reprisals, Zivia and several members of her underground youth group decided it was time to form an armed resistance movement. There, in their makeshift safehouse at 34 Dzielna Street, with no money and only two stolen pistols, they started the first armed resistance group in the Warsaw Ghetto, the Jewish Fighting Organization Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa, or ZOB—“because it is better to be shot in the ghetto than to die in Treblinka!” 

Shortly thereafter they launched their first partisan action. For a young, ad hoc, and untrained partisan fighting group, it was a fairly complex three-pronged operation. They would conduct an information operation to disseminate posters declaring the truth that Treblinka was a death camp from which there would be no survivors, a sabotage operation to burn warehouses full of Nazi loot stolen from deported Jewish residents, and the assassination of the Jewish ghetto police chief. The operation was a success, although their assassination target did not die from his gunshot wounds.  

Zivia believed the ZOB had accomplished a great victory for the doomed residents of the Warsaw ghetto. She was shocked when she learned that the ghetto’s leaders were furious and that her posters were being torn down. ZOB members were attacked and beaten by many of the ghetto’s residents. 

The New Domestic War on Terror Has Already Begun — Even Without the New Laws Biden Wants Glenn Greenwald

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-new-domestic-war-on-terror-has

The Department of Homeland Security on Friday issued a new warning bulletin, alerting Americans that domestic extremists may well use violence on the 100th Anniversary of the Tulsa race massacre. This was at least the fourth such bulletin issued this year by Homeland Security (DHS) warning of the same danger and, thus far, none of the fears it is trying to instill into the American population has materialized.

The first was a January 14 warning, from numerous federal agencies including DHS, about violence in Washington, DC and all fifty state capitols that was likely to explode in protest of Inauguration Day (a threat which did not materialize). Then came a January 27 bulletin warning of “a heightened threat environment across the United States that is likely to persist over the coming weeks” from “ideologically-motivated violent extremists with objections to the exercise of governmental authority” (that warning also was not realized). Then there was a May 14 bulletin warning of right-wing violence “to attack higher-capacity targets,” exacerbated by the lifting of COVID lockdowns (which also never happened). And now we are treated to this new DHS warning about domestic extremists preparing violent attacks over Tulsa (it remains to be seen if a DHS fear is finally realized).

Just like the first War on Terror, these threats are issued with virtually no specificity. They are just generalized warnings designed to put people in fear about their fellow citizens and to justify aggressive deployment of military and law enforcement officers in Washington, D.C. and throughout the country. A CNN article which wildly hyped the latest danger bulletin about domestic extremists at Tulsa had to be edited with what the cable network, in an “update,” called “the additional information from the Department of Homeland Security that there is no specific or credible threats at this time.” And the supposed dangers from domestic extremists on Inauguration Day was such a flop that even The Washington Post — one of the outlets most vocal about lurking national security dangers in general and this one in particular — had to explicitly acknowledge the failure:

Thousands [of National Guard troops] had been deployed to capitals across the country late last week, ahead of a weekend in which potentially violent demonstrations were predicted by the FBI — but never materialized.

Once again on Wednesday, security officials’ worst fears weren’t borne out: In some states, it was close to business as usual. In others, demonstrations were small and peaceful, with only occasional tense moments.

DIVERSITY IS GREAT, BUT IT DOESN’T MAKE STUDENTS LEARN BETTER. We have always known this, and if the Supremes take up racial preferences again soon, we need to start admitting it. John McWhorter

https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/diversity-is-great-but-it-doesnt

As the Supremes are about to consider taking up yet another racial preferences case – the one about whether Asian applicants are being discriminated against at Harvard in favor of black and brown ones — we are in for the usual round of endless euphemism.

Wise heads will opine as if what we are talking about is administrators working with a pool of applicants of various races with dossiers of equal grades and test scores, hoping to assemble a class reflecting a rainbow of “diversity” from among them. The rub is supposedly that some doodooheads just think it’s plain “racist” to ever make such decisions with race in mind at all.

We will be led to think – or told to pretend to think – that somebody is opposed to there being too many black kids in a class, that they want whites to retain their “privilege” in admissions, that, well … it’s not always easy to glean just what people are trying to get across. But basically, doodooheads think we should just be color-blind, out of some principle hovering somewhere between naivete and bigotry.

We are to take from this that questioning how racial preferences work renders black applicants “unwelcome.”

Just why anyone would have a problem with racial preferences other than this coded bigotry is left gingerly unstated.

If it is acknowledged that racial preference policies entail admitting black students with a lowered cutoff of grades and test scores (italics deliberate – we will return to this) …

.. then it is implied that the lowering is slight, that admitting black students is a mere matter of putting a “thumb on the scale.”

That’s a lie of long standing. I wonder if there is room for an honest discussion of the issue.

* * *

I do not oppose Affirmative Action. I simply think it should be based on disadvantage, not melanin. It made sense – logical as well as moral – to adjust standards in the wake of the implacable oppression of black people until the mid-1960s.

“Facts, Truth & Honesty” by Sydney Williams

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

“Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom.”    Thomas Jefferson January 12, 1819

                                                                                                                                                        

In the above letter to Nathaniel Macon, Senator from North Carolina, a proponent of slavery and a political foe, Jefferson explained wisdom that comes with age – that it can only be based on a foundation of honesty. If we are not honest with ourselves and others, what good are facts and truth?

A friend suggested an essay on facts and truth – a challenging but interesting assignment. The result is my opinion, expressed as truthfully as I was able, but it is not a factual last word. The two words are commonly used synonymously, but they are different. The Merriam Webster dictionary defines fact as “something that has actual existence…an occurrence…[or] having objective reality.” Truth is the opposite of a lie. It is defined by the same source as “the body of real things, events and facts.” But the roots of the two words provide clarity as to their differences. “Fact” comes from the Latin facio, to fashion or fabricate something, while truth comes from the old English word treoth, meaning fidelity or faith, as in “I pledge thee my troth,” an archaic wedding commitment, meaning a lifelong pledge of faithfulness.

Larry Walsh, founder of the technology business strategy company 2112 Group recently wrote an essay on how the technology industry must “freely share new facts” and stop “clinging to accepted truths.” He described the two words: “A fact is something that’s indisputable, based on empirical research and quantifiable measures. Truth is entirely different; it may include fact, but it can also include belief.” In my opinion, his definition of fact is too simplistic. There are facts that are unalterable, like grass is green, water is wet, and skunks are odoriferous. Other facts are subject to change, as products, mechanizations, services and research evolve and improve. A fact is a fact until it isn’t. What better examples than the use of “facts” to determine the origin of COVID-19, the cause of the Trump Russian probe, or what was behind the January 6 protests. Mr. Walsh’s definition of truth implies a deficiency in faith and historical knowledge and a supercilious attitude toward the beliefs of others.

Denver School Board Director and Black Lives Matter Activist Accused of Molesting Over 60 Undocumented Teens By Debra Heine

https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/01/denver-school-board-director-and-black-lives-matter-activist-accused-of-molesting-over-60-undocumented-teens/

A Democrat Denver School Board director and Black Lives Matter organizer has been accused of sexually assaulting over 60 undocumented students—some as young as 14-years-old.

The alleged predator, Tay Anderson, denied the accusations over the weekend, while announcing that he will step back from everyday board duties during the investigation.

The allegations came out during legislative testimony last week, when a parent claimed that a person employed by the district was sexually assaulting and targeting undocumented teens, CBSDenver reported.

Mary Brooks Fleming, a mother of three students within the Denver Public School district, testified before the state House Judiciary Committee that some of the children were “violently raped” by the employee and, in some case, forced to sign a non-disclosure agreement. Brooks Fleming appeared before the committee to testify in support of legislation that would make it easier for victims to sue institutions who employ child sexual abusers. The mother is a volunteer at a local nonprofit organization that aids sexual assault victims.

“Individuals were coming to my home asking for medical attention. One was as young as 14 and needed stitches. All in all, 61 high school students and one recent graduates would turn to me for help,” Fleming said, shaking and holding back tears. “Sixty-two victims as young as 14! Sixty-one were undocumented or dreamers. All were so afraid of this one man!” she added.

The DPS school board confirmed in a statement Friday night that the accusations were against Anderson, and that Denver police was also aware of the allegations.

Progressive Jews Delude Themselves By Eileen F. Toplansky

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/06/progressive_jews_delude_themse

To my Jewish brethren who in their heart of hearts think they are being virtuous, you must understand that the Black Lives Matter movement that so many of you marched for, sent money to, and still support with admiration has at its core the deep desire to annihilate Jews and destroy Israel. Here is the proof. In 2015 at a panel discussion at Harvard Law School, Black Lives Matter cofounder Patrisse Cullors called for the end of Israel.

It does not matter what denomination of Judaism you belong to or if you even believe in G-d but as a thinking being you must begin now to acknowledge that supporting a group that calls for the annihilation of your fellow Jews should go against every fiber of your moral compass.

There is no distinction between hating a country and seeking to wipe out its inhabitants. Israel is always the target with leftist groups like Black Lives Matter.

In fact, the latest form of  Jew hatred is the delegitimization of the Jewish people. It “represents a fundamentally different set of characteristics from prior expressions of hate” and it operates “differently from prior forms of anti-Jewish expression.”

Historically, the Anti-Defamation League’s  ‘model of measuring anti-Semitic attitudes focused on group traits and individual behaviors. This approach, developed in the post Second World War era, does not take into account how as a people and nation-state, Jews today are being re-defined and demonized.’

The ‘global Jew’ is being identified as destroying established cultural and religious norms while promoting Jewish influence and control. The other objective, in connection with this new assault, is the delegitimization of the State of Israel.

The Most Important Book You Will Read This Year And once you’ve read it, spread the word. Or say goodbye to America.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/most-important-book-you-will-read-year-bruce-bawer/

Rarely has an author been proven correct so quickly. Last month, Lt. Col. Matthew Lohmeier, the commander of a Colorado-based Space Force squadron, published a book entitled Irresistible Revolution: Marxism’s Goal of Conquest & the Unmaking of the American Military. On May 7, podcaster L. Todd Wood (“Information Operation”) posted an interview with Lohmeier about the book.

In their 34-minute exchange, Lohmeier – a former Air Force fighter pilot and flight instructor who, at Space Force, was in charge of detecting ballistic missile launches – exuded decency, rectitude, and a deep respect for the uniformed services. He didn’t criticize anybody by name; he only made frankly undeniable statements about the Marxist nature of some of the ideas that are now being taught to U.S. servicepeople. It was crystal clear that in speaking out, he was convinced he was doing his patriotic duty.

A week to the day after the interview was posted, Lohmeier’s superiors abruptly relieved him of his command. A Space Force spokesperson announced that an investigation had been initiated into whether Lohmeier’s comments on the podcast “constituted prohibited partisan political activity.” In fact, the entire point of Lohmeier’s commentary was that members of the American military are today being brainwashed with hard-core Marxist ideas that not only constitute partisan political activity but seek to demonize the country the military is supposed to be defending. As for Lohmeier’s own comments, there was nothing remotely partisan or political about them – unless you consider it partisan or political to be a patriot.

On the one hand, Lohmeier’s dismissal is a disgrace. On the other hand, what better way to draw attention to the supremely urgent message of his book – a truly sensational exposé that should be read by everyone who cares about America’s fate in this perilous era of woke insanity.

Much of Lohmeier’s book consists of anecdotes about his encounters with the Marxist bilge now being endorsed by the Department of Defense in the name of “diversity and inclusion.” For example, last year, after the death of George Floyd, Lohmeier and other men and women stationed at his base were shown two videos. One of them depicted American history as, in the words of its director, “400 years of white supremacy.” It portrayed the Constitution as oppressive and stated that all whites are racists, whether they know it or not. The other video described America as a “system of oppression,” accused Donald Trump of fueling “systematic racism,” presented Obama and the Clintons as anti-racist heroes, and promoted ideas about America that, in Lohmeier’s view, seemed intended “to justify…violent riots.”

Lohmeier was disturbed. But those videos were only the tip of the iceberg. “As a commander of young military professionals, all of whom have taken an oath to support and defend the Constitution,” he writes, “I became concerned that race-based identity politics would erode the trust and confidence these young people have in their country and in the Constitution.” No kidding. He could justifiably have taken his criticism much further. To feed members of the military this kind of propaganda is to plunge them into utter cognitive dissonance – into Orwellian Doublethink. If you’re going to promote such ideas – which paint America as a racist republic that shouldn’t be defended but overthrown – why have a military at all, unless you’re planning to use it to stage a Communist revolution?