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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION

50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

Justice Thomas grumbles over Trump’s social media ban Thomas’ complaints track closely with those of Republicans, but the GOP is not alone in its concerns about big tech.

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/04/05/justice-clarence-thomas-trump-twitter-ban-479046

The decision by social media giants Twitter and Facebook to ban former President Donald Trump from their platforms appears to have drawn the ire of one of America’s most prominent jurists: Justice Clarence Thomas.

As the Supreme Court issued an order Monday declaring moot a lawsuit over Trump’s blocking of some Twitter users from commenting on his feed, Thomas weighed in with a 12-page lament about the power of social media firms like Twitter.

“Today’s digital platforms provide avenues for historically unprecedented amounts of speech, including speech by government actors. Also unprecedented, however, is control of so much speech in the hands of a few private parties,” Thomas wrote. “We will soon have no choice but to address how our legal doctrines apply to highly concentrated, privately owned information infrastructure such as digital platforms.”

Thomas singled out the owners of Google and Facebook by name, arguing that the firms are currently unaccountable personal fiefdoms with massive power.

“Although both companies are public, one person controls Facebook (Mark Zuckerberg), and just two control Google (Larry Page and Sergey Brin),” Thomas wrote.

A Victory for Reality Articles by Carl R. Trueman

https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2021/04/a-victory-for-reality

Karl Marx looked at the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century and declared that all that was solid seemed to be melting into air, but witnesses of the Cultural Revolution of the twenty-first century might be tempted to respond that the Communist Manifesto had only the vaguest idea of what such dissolution looks like. It is one thing to replace the hand loom with the factory production line, quite another to replace the material realities of the world with linguistic fictions.

In this context, I have noticed recently that numerous correspondents have begun to identify their “preferred pronouns” in the bylines at the bottom of their emails. Yet it is already clear that the notion of “preference” functions somewhat like “volunteer” did at my old school. It is really code for “required,” and any deviation or refusal might not simply cause personal offense but lead to more significant and sinister consequences.

Such was true in the matter of Meriwether v. Hartop, a case decided last week by the United States Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. Nicholas Meriwether, a philosophy professor at Shawnee State University in Ohio, had found himself in trouble for initially refusing to use the preferred pronouns of a transgender student (referred to as “Doe” in the court filing) because this would require him to act against conscience.

Hundreds of Transgender California Inmates Request Transfers to Women’s Prisons By Zachary Evans

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/hundreds-of-transgender-california-inmates-request-transfers-to-womens-prisons/?utm_source=

The California prison system has received 261 applications since January 1 from transgender, intersex, or non-binary inmates to transfer to facilities that match their preferred gender identity, the Los Angeles Times reported on Monday.

The requests were filed after a state law came into effect allowing transgender inmates to transfer to different prisons. Around 1 percent of prisoners in California, 1,129 inmates in total, have notified the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation that they are transgender, intersex, or non-binary.

The transfers have been welcomed by transgender women who reported suffering sexual violence while incarcerated at men’s prisons. However, inmates at Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla told the Times that staff have warned them of potential sexual violence from men who may try to take advantage of the transfer system.

Guards said “that if we think it’s bad now, be prepared for the worst. That it’s going to be off the hook, it’s going to be jumping,” inmate Tomiekia Johnson told the Times. “They say we’re going to need a facility that’s going to be like a maternity ward. They say we’re going to have an inmate program where inmates become nannies.”

Nina McQueen, a transgender woman and inmate at Mule Creek , said she had helped prison staff identify male inmates who attempted to transfer to women’s facilities by pretending to be transgender.

Will You Be Drowned By Biden’s Coming Tidal Wave Of Tax Hikes?

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/04/06/will-you-be-drowned-by-bidens-coming-tidal-wave-of-tax-hikes/

Joe Biden’s massive $2 trillion “infrastructure plan” is in fact another giant tax hike disguised as a jobs program. Even worse, the Bidenites pretend that the taxes will hit wealthy people and big corporations hard, while the spending will provide jobs for struggling workers. Don’t believe any of it.

First, a reality check. Spending was up sharply last year, and will likely be up at least 50% this year. Yet, even the tax hikes now being discussed won’t come close to covering the spending increases.

Let’s review: During the pandemic year, the U.S. spent $6.5 trillion, a 47% surge in just one year. This year, we’ve already added about $4 trillion in new spending. Debt is now an unimaginable $30 trillion, and headed much higher. And yes, we have to pay it off, even if we “owe it to ourselves,” as some like to say.

With a deficit of $3 trillion last year and perhaps even higher this year, Americans are soon going to feel the pinch. Yes, the Fed can print more money by buying government bonds. But eventually, it all has to be paid back. And when that happens, the taxes will hit the economy hard, forcing the government to spend more (while crowding out private sector spending and investment), and jack up taxes at the same time.

The Biden administration’s great lie is that it will “go after” big companies and the rich to pick up the tab for the infrastructure spending.

Debunking the COVID Vaccine Doomsayers . By Marilyn Quigley

https://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2021/04/05/debunking_the_covid_vaccine_doomsayers_771222.html

It’s hard to ignore the wave of anti-vaccine videos circulating on social media. Curiosity makes us click, and we watch yet another doctor’s emphatic advice—“Do not take the COVID-19 vaccine if you value your life!” They all speak with the confidence and authority of spies planted last year in the Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson labs. Now these self-proclaimed experts—some with acceptable medical backgrounds, but others more questionable—have become whistleblowers predicting horrific outcomes from the vaccines. They look into our eyes and claim to care deeply about our health, urging, “Pass my video on to everyone you know as fast as you can.”

Having viewed several, I asked myself, “Can I find the truth?” My hands-on science training consists of dissecting and drawing a frog in tenth grade. But I can dissect long sentences and draw conclusions, use a dictionary, and apply critical thinking with logic. 

So I intensively researched respected sources and found most of the doomsayer doctors’ assertions to be wrong. Here’s what my homework found. (Note: some names are changed but the claims are reproduced accurately.)

“Dr. Whistle Blower” insists the new medication is not a “real” vaccine because it does not fit the CDC’s own definition: “A product that stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease, protecting the person from that disease.” The meaning of immunity is the hangup for him.

Dr. Blower wrongly limits his definition of a “real,” immunizing vaccine to the sterilizing type, which kills the pathogen on contact and establishes immunity by preventing any disease from entering the body. This “gold standard” has not been achieved for many diseases which, nevertheless, are no longer a threat, thanks to vaccines.

Crony capitalism and professional sports by James Piereson

https://newcriterion.com/blogs/dispatch/crony-capitalism-and-professional-sports

On public funding for professional athletic arenas.

Professional athletic leagues have traditionally steered clear of politics in order to emphasize the purity of their entertainment and to avoid dividing fans over partisan controversies. That has changed in the last year. Players in the National Football League have “taken the knee” during playing of the national anthem as a protest against police practices; the National Basketball Association has embraced Black Lives Matter, also as a protest against the police; and now Major League Baseball has taken this year’s All-Star game out of Atlanta as a protest against Georgia’s new voting law, though baseball executives do not appear to have studied that law. Through these gestures, formerly non-political organizations have allied themselves with explicitly political causes.

These steps are unusual and unprecedented. Business corporations generally prefer to serve inclusive markets while avoiding controversies that might divide customers for or against them. The new corporate alliance with liberals and the Democratic Party is not only new – it is also dangerous. It will politicize the country along new lines, introduce political controversies into the internal operations of corporations, encourage boycotts and assaults on all sides, and much more. Some of this is already happening. As a strategy for dividing America, this one would be hard to beat.

Professional sports leagues, while mostly operating as for-profit enterprises, nevertheless receive generous subsidies from federal, state, and local sources to build and maintain modern stadiums and arenas. Importantly, these subsidies assume that the enterprises are non-political and non-partisan in nature, otherwise they would not be granted. Are professional sports franchises violating the bargains they made with taxpayers and public authorities?

Up until the 1950s, professional stadiums were constructed with private funds provided by owners. Fenway Park in Boston was built in 1913 by the franchise itself, as was Ebbets Field in Brooklyn (1913), Yankee Stadium in New York (1923), Wrigley Field in Chicago (1913), and nearly every other professional ballpark and stadium built in that era. Many professional football franchises leased these stadiums to stage their games. It did not occur to the owners that the public might pay for their facilities. That mindset disappeared in the 1950s when owners began to ask cities and states to pay for their stadiums.

The totalitarians’ Covid con unintentionally explained by CNN public health ‘expert’ Thomas LIfson

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/04/the_totalitarians_covid_con_unintentionally_explained_by_cnn_public_health_expert.html

Too much freedom is a bad thing because it limits the ability of the state to coerce its subjects (“citizens” seems almost archaic as the Great Reset looms) into behavior they otherwise would resist. That’s the basic message explained to Chris Cuomo by a professor of public health policy that CNN favors with its airtime.

We lost an incredible amount of the freedom we formerly took for granted when Covid-19 leaked out of a lab in Wuhan, China, and was greeted by world leaders as a pandemic justifying the radical curtailment of liberty and enhancement of their own power. Now, they and their lackeys in the academic and medical establishment see the restoration of those liberties as a threat. George Washington University Public Health Policy Professor Laura Wen said it out loud – a classic Kinsley gaffe of accidentally telling the truth about something that politicians would rather the public not understand. A lot of people noticed, including Ace of Spades, Legal Insurrection, and Instapundit. This tweet with 38 seconds of video has gotten almost 4 million views: WATCH HERE.  :

It’s clear to them that the vaccine is the ticket to pre-pandemic life….and the window to do that is really narrowing. You were mentioning, Chris, about how all these states were reopening. They are reopening at 100 percent….and we have a very narrow window to tie reopening policy to vaccination status.

Because, otherwise, if everything is reopen, then what’s the carrot going to be? How are we going to incentivize people to actually get the vaccine? So that’s why I think the CDC and the Biden administration needs to come out a lot bolder and say, “If you’re vaccinated, you can do all these things…here’s all these freedoms that you have.” Because, otherwise, people are going to go out and enjoy those freedoms anyway.” [emphasis added]

You can’t have people enjoying freedoms before the government forces them all to take a experimental drugs, some of which act on their genetic makeup. One that has caused severe reactions in some, including a number of deaths.

Donald J. Trump: Joe Biden’s Best Friend By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2021/04/04/donald-j-trump-joe-bidens-best-friend/

The myth of Biden the healer, and Trump the cruel divider, got Biden elected. But the fantasy that Biden had the answers to problems that Trump created is a far greater—and more dangerous—delusion.

The Pavlovian “Trump did it!” sums up Joe Biden’s fallback excuse when faced with any embarrassment.  

His own completely optional, self-created, illegal immigration disaster? Trump somehow caused it, despite leaving office with a stable and secure border.  

Vaccination rates soaring? There would be even more if not for Trump’s mere 1-million-a-day vaccination rate, mere weeks after the rollout of the “experimental” vaccinations that supposedly would take “years” to develop. 

Chinese aggressiveness? Trump’s provocations again due to all his paranoid talk of travel bans, and a lab-escaped virus. 

European unwillingness to confront the Chinese? Yep, Trump’s the cause again, with jawboning our friends into paying $100 million more for their own defense.  

In truth, Trump’s atmospherics were chaotic, but not just due to his incessant tweeting and candid ad hoc outbursts—or even media hatred that led to 90 percent negative coverage by the networks, newspapers, and online social media. (Notice how few, Left or Right, use any more the adjective “left-wing” or “liberal,” since to do so is a redundancy: “the media” is now accepted as a synonym for “left-wing media.”)  

THIS IS CIRCULATING ON THE INTERNET WITHOUT ATTRIBUTION…..RSK

 I apologize for this depressing e-mail . This morning, I realized that everything is about to change. No matter how I vote, no matter what I say, lives are never going to be the same.

 I have been confused by the hostility of family and friends. I look at people I have known all my life so hate-filled that they agree with opinions they would never express as their own. I think that I may well have entered the Twilight Zone.

 You can’t justify this insanity. We have become a nation that has lost its collective mind.
 We see other countries going Socialist and collapsing, but it seems like a great plan to us.

 Somehow it’s un-American for the census to count how many Americans are in America.

 People who say there is no such thing as a gender are demanding a female President.

 Universities that advocate equality, discriminate against Asian-Americans in favor of African-Americans.

 Some people are held responsible for things that happened before they were born, and other people are not held responsible for what they are doing right now.

 Criminals are caught-and-released to hurt more people, but stopping them is bad because it’s a violation of THEIR rights.

 People who have never owned slaves should pay slavery reparations to people who have never been slaves.

 After legislating gender, if a dude pretends to be a woman, you are required to pretend with him.

 It was cool for Joe Biden to “blackmail” the President of Ukraine, but it’s an impeachable offense if Donald Trump inquiries about it.

 People who have never been to college should pay the debts of college students who took out huge loans for their degrees of real or questionable value.

 Immigrants with tuberculosis and polio are welcome, but you’d better be able to prove your dog is vaccinated.

 Irish doctors and German engineers who want to immigrate to the US must go through a rigorous vetting process, but any illiterate gang-bangers who jump the southern fence are welcomed.

 $5 billion for border security is too expensive, but $1.5 trillion for “free” health care is not.

 If you cheat to get into college you go to prison, but if you cheat to get into the country you go to college for free.
 And, pointing out all this hypocrisy somehow makes us “racists”!

 Nothing makes sense anymore, no values, no morals, no civility, and people are dying of a Chinese virus, but it is racist to refer to it as Chinese even though it began in China.

 We are clearly living in an upside-down world where right is wrong and wrong is right, where moral is immoral and immoral is moral, where good is evil and evil is good, where killing murderers is wrong, but killing innocent babies is right.

 Wake up America. The great unsinkable ship Titanic America has hit an iceberg is taking on water and sinking fast.

Glazov Gang: Mike Lindell Tells His Story The CEO of MyPillow takes a stand for America, for freedom of speech – and for hope.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/glazov-gang-mike-lindell-tells-his-story-frontpagemagcom/