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Never let truth get in the way of a good woke story by Hugo Gurdon

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/never-let-truth-get-in-the-way-of-a-good-woke-story

Last month’s Atlanta shooting spree that killed eight people helped out the left-wing media. Six victims were Asian, which let news organizations stoke alarm about white racism. If you squint hard enough, set aside the two victims who weren’t Asian, and ignore the perpetrator’s psychosis about sexual addiction, you can resell the shopworn trope about simple Trumpian intolerance.

This had been tricky when anti-Asian violence rose up the news agenda after New Year and videos repeatedly showed black thugs assaulting frail and elderly Asian victims. Keeping this key fact from viewers was straining the ingenuity of reporters, whose training is to assume that victims of racism are darker-skinned than their persecutors, not the other way around.

We reached a tragi-comic point in mid-February when ABC News reported a string of incidents, backed by video, yet left actor-producer Daniel Dae Kim unchallenged when he opined, “It is not one community against another, it’s everyone versus racism.”

But as everyone knows and honest people acknowledge, racism is not the preserve of only one race, however forcefully woke warriors squeak their countervailing prejudice. Some of them, when reluctantly acknowledging preponderantly black violence against Asians, claim that even this is really about white supremacy.

Against the COVID Clingers Matthew Boose

https://amgreatness.com/2021/04/01/against-the-covid-clingers/

With all signs indicating that things are improving, there is no justification for carrying on this way. After all the country has suffered, it is a slap in the face. Americans have lived in stultifying confinement for a year now. Persistence in this social experiment is not merely irrational, but anti-social and hostile to life.

If we do not reclaim the world we had, we will have a new form of life dictated to us by social engineers.

The COVID Clingers Won’t Let Go

Let’s not kid ourselves. For some, the coronavirus has been a joyride. Topping the list of COVID clingers is Biden. Where would he be without the pandemic? Not in the White House, that’s for certain. Without COVID, Biden would still be tottering around one of his mansions in Delaware.

COVID-19 has also been a blessing to the “expert” class and their media mouthpieces who have been elevated to god-like status, the newly contrived “essential” worker classes, and our ghastly health bureaucracy, praised ad nauseam for its “heroism” while preventing families from seeing loved ones and limiting transparency.

For countless unremarkable people, being a COVID hall monitor has provided a sense of superiority and importance. They will miss scolding their maskless neighbors. They have come to love the fear. Ironically, or perhaps not, those who ostensibly fear coronavirus the most seem most loath to lose it.

The COVID clingers are trying to squeeze everything they can out of this “crisis” before the momentum fades. We are, by a sleight of hand, being nudged to accept a “new normal” that we never asked for under the guise of returning to the normal that we once had. 

The Threats American Jewry Refuses to Face Carolyn Glick

https://carolineglick.com/the-threats-american-jewry-refuses-to-face/

After being forced by Covid-19 restrictions to celebrate Passover alone last year, like their Israeli brethren, American Jews were by and large able to celebrate the Passover seder with their friends and families this year. And as in Israel, American Jewish families reveled in their deliverance from loneliness on the Jewish festival of deliverance.

But even the joy of Passover couldn’t dispel the twin storm clouds rising around the largest Jewish diaspora.

The first threat is growing Jew-hatred. American Jewish groups are good at fighting white supremacism. Unfortunately, the most dangerous external threat to Jewish life in America doesn’t come from neo-Nazis. It comes from their home base.

Along with Hindus, Jewish Americans are the most highly educated religious group in America. American Jews have long assumed that the primary source of anti-Semitism in America is ignorance and that as education levels rise, levels of anti-Semitism would decrease. Given the prevalence of anti-Semitism on university campuses, researchers at the University of Arkansas decided to check this assumption.

Publishing their findings this week in Tablet magazine, they demonstrated just how wrong this assumption has become. Contrary to what Jewish organizations have long claimed, it turns out that the more educated Americans are, the more anti-Semitic they are.

College graduates are five percent more likely to apply anti-Semitic double standards to Jews than Americans who haven’t gone to college. Holders of advanced degrees used double standards against Jews 15% more often than respondents without higher educations.

The implications are dire. Academia, American Jewry’s home turf for a century and the key to their entry into the American elite – is now hostile territory.

Terms of Servitude

https://americanmind.org/salvo/terms-of-servitude/

A fresh lesson in the un-American cost of chilling online political speech.

After January’s explosive drama, the battle for digital control of American life is now proceeding quietly, by soft degrees. The shock of 1/6 has morphed into a pretext for something still more consequential: a new phase of national crisis wherein corporations with strategic control over Americans’ communications enforce a creeping line of censorship against critics of the sitting regime. While online platforms claim only to be applying their terms of service in neutral fashion, those terms themselves stink of delegitimization. Once this shadow falls upon you and your account, you are as good as deactivated. You know this; you know they know this; they know you know they know it. Forced de facto to impose a precautionary principle on yourself, you “voluntarily” recoil well from the fuzzy line of unofficial censorship that advances far beyond the bright official line.

Already in March of 2020, Google had erased heterodox research on COVID-19. But things escalated rapidly when election season came in earnest. The New York Post was locked out of Twitter for breaking a story about Hunter Biden’s Chinese business ventures. The sitting president had his social media accounts shut down entirely. Twitter competitor Parler was removed from Amazon’s servers for hosting discussions among Trumpists about the unfolding events. And YouTube banned even the allegation of widespread election fraud. Americans realized—or should have—that they had suddenly been herded into a communications control system unlike any ever imposed—or even conceived—in America.

Not merely a handful of fringe cranks, but a full half of the country, is being pre-screened out of the kinds of political discourse fundamental to American citizenship. Yet this radical change is setting in with unnerving ease and rapidity. Day by day, Americans are losing faith that there is anything they can do about it. Day by day, they are getting used to it.

U.S. Gets Ready To Go Full Venezuela On Economic Policy  Francis Menton

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2021-4-1-us-to-go-full-venezuela-on-economic-policy

It was in 1998 — a mere 23 years ago — that Hugo Chavez first got elected President of Venezuela. From the start, his program was explicitly one of vastly increased government spending, which was supposed to make the economy grow, reduce income inequality, eliminate poverty and bring about social justice. Chavez called the social programs his “Bolivarian missions.” Among some 30 or so such “missions,” big ones included blowout spending on education, subsidized food, subsidized housing and healthcare.

In the early years, things seemed to be going swimmingly, at least if you believed the official statistics put out by Chavez’s government. Not only was there supposedly steady and mostly rapid economic growth (often over 5% per year, particularly 2004-10), but they also regularly crowed about how the redistributionist spending had greatly reduced the rate of poverty. Then, starting around 2013, it all started to fall apart. Today, eight years later, it continues to fall apart. More details on that later.

Yesterday, the Biden White House put out what they call the “American Jobs Plan.” It’s $2.3 trillion of new government spending, on top of the $1.9 trillion just passed, and several trillion more to come, all on top of a $4 trillion or so annual level of baseline federal spending. Yes, it’s blowout government spending, on the usual issues pushed by advocacy groups, which supposedly will shortly achieve all the usual promises of the left: economic growth, increased economic fairness, and social justice. In other words, it’s the Venezuela economic program, blown up to U.S. scale and then tweaked a little here and there to buy off the squeaky wheels of the moment.

As I pointed out in a post on March 8 addressing the previous $1.9 trillion (“Could This Be The Very Worst Piece Of Legislation Ever?”), that bill was touted as “Covid-19 Relief,” but in fact only about 5% of the spending was for anything that could be called actual public health measures related to the pandemic. The rest was “a grand orgy of vote buying and giveaways to left-wing interest groups.” Following the same playbook, this $2.3 trillion monster calls itself an “infrastructure” plan:

The Coalition of the Un-Woke The imperative of the moment demands that Left-liberals join the Right in an alliance against the neo-Marxism of wokeness, “cancel culture,” and “anti-racism.” By Josh Hammer

https://amgreatness.com/2021/04/01/the-coalition-of-the-un-woke/

The metastasis of the “woke” ideology is the most comprehensive threat facing the American republic. It is appallingly totalitarian, insofar as the woke wield the levers of cancel culture to suppress all dissident speech, root out all wrongthink and achieve by sheer force an intellectual homogeneity. It is outright racist, insofar as intersectionality and identity politics, to say nothing of vogue concepts such as “critical race theory” and “racial equity,” overtly discriminate on the basis of race and thus undermine the preeminent American ethos of equal protection under the law.

As if out of a dystopian novel, though, the woke ideology has nonetheless become the unifying creed of the American ruling class. That ruling class, which extends from public sector bureaucracies to the Fortune 500 to Hollywood to Silicon Valley and sundry others in between, has in recent years universally come to imbibe, promulgate and disseminate the core tenets of wokeness.

What’s more, that universality often takes the more insidious form of cross-institutional collusion. As Matthew Schmitz put it in a Tablet essay in September, “Governmental authorities and corporations now coordinate in enforcing the dictates of the new secular progressive faith.”

Thus has the woke ideology completed, à la the Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci, its long march through the institutions. And let’s not mince words: This is Marxism. As Israeli political theorist Yoram Hazony carefully outlined in a Quillette essay in August, “The new Marxists do not use the technical jargon that was devised by 19th-century Communists,” but “their politics are based on Marx’s framework for critiquing liberalism.”

When Will Big Tech Face a Reckoning for January 6? If Americans truly want a full accounting of what happened on January 6, who was responsible, and who must be punished, Big Tech must be part of the accounting. By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2021/04/01/when-will-big-tech-face-a-reckoning-for-january-6/

Nearly 300 Americans face a slew of charges related to the melee on Capitol Hill last January. As I’ve reported over the past few months, offenses range from assaulting a police officer to destroying government property to trespassing.

More than 70 protestors stand accused of “aiding and abetting” various crimes; even people who didn’t vandalize the Capitol or even enter the building have been charged with helping others do damage and interrupt Congress’ certification of the Electoral College results.

Nonviolent offenders languish behind bars for months, denied bail, and transported to Washington, D.C. to await delayed trials. Federal prosecutors suggest President Trump could be indicted for fueling the chaos that day. Democratic congressmen want their Republican colleagues held accountable for their alleged role, too.

One entity, however, appears to be off the hook so far: Big Tech. Social media platforms were instrumental in communicating and organizing the so-called “insurrection” to destroy our democracy, as it’s hyperbolically described by the Left and plenty of Republicans. If random Americans can be held legally responsible for others who commit crimes, then why are Silicon Valley tycoons with immense power and loads of money not similarly liable?

Facebook As Conduit

I’ve reviewed thousands of pages of charging documents and can confirm much of the evidence collected by investigators was found on the defendants’ own social media accounts. Facebook accounts posted the most incriminating content by far. 

For example, in the Justice Department’s conspiracy case against the Oath Keepers, the defendants are accused of “[u]sing websites, social media, text messaging, and messaging applications to recruit other individuals to travel to Washington, D.C., to support the January 6 operation.”

In addition to a conspiracy charge, all 10 Oath Keepers face one count of “aiding and abetting” the obstruction of an official proceeding, a felony punishable by up to 20 years in jail.

But the Oath Keepers’ alleged conspiracy very likely would not have been possible without Facebook. As early as mid-December, according to the indictment, Oath Keepers were using Facebook to post information and direct message others about the January 6 protest. “Trump said It’s gonna be wild!!!!!!! It’s gonna be wild!!!!!!!” Kelly Meggs wrote on Facebook on December 22. “He called us all to the Capitol and wants us to make it wild!!! Gentlemen we are heading to D C (sic) pack your shit!!”

To understand 2021, watch a KGB defector’s mid-1980s interview By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/04/to_understand_2021_watch_a_kgb_defectors_mid1980s_interview.html

On Thursday, Dan Bongino urged his audience to watch or just listen to a video of Yuri Bezmenov, a KGB defector to Canada, who came to love America and tried to warn Americans about the KGB’s plans. Listen to him is eerie because he spelled out in detail exactly what the Soviet Union was doing – it wasn’t planning to take America done through the military. Instead, it intended to destroy America from within by infiltrating the education system, three generations of young people to hate this country and each other and then watching them go forth and plan the seeds of self-loathing throughout the nation.

When it came to understanding how the Soviet Union operated, Bezmenov was the real deal. His father was a high-ranking army officer, so Bezmenov was raised inside the system. He went to KGB schools and worked for the KGB for a decade until he defected to the West, eventually landing in Canada.

In the 1980s, Bezmenov was able to move to Los Angeles, where he lived for five years. It was in L.A., in 1984 or 1985, that he gave an interview to G. Edward Griffin, a conservative writer and thinker. During the interview, Bezmenov explained that the Soviet Union was not interested in fighting America. It was interested, instead, in coopting it through psychological warfare. It is that interview that you’ll see below.

Biden Defines Infrastructure Down Now it’s mostly about green-energy subsidies and payments to social workers.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-builds-government-back-bigger-11617231190?mod=opinion_major_pos1

Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders lost the Democratic presidential nomination, but you wouldn’t know from President Biden’s first two months in office. First came $1.9 trillion in social spending under the cover of Covid-19, and now comes $2.3 trillion more for climate and political spending dressed as “infrastructure.”

Most Americans think of infrastructure as roads, highways, bridges and other traditional public works. That’s why it polls well, and every President has supported more of it.

Yet this accounts for a mere $115 billion of Mr. Biden’s proposal. There’s another $25 billion for airports and $17 billion for ports and waterways that also fill a public purpose. The rest of the $620 billion earmarked for “transportation” are subsidies for green energy and payouts to unions for the jobs his climate regulation will kill. This is really a plan to build government back bigger than it has ever been.

Vaccination Passports: The Cornerstone of a Totalitarian State Ushering China’s Social Credit System into America. Matthew Vadum

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/vaccination-passports-cornerstone-totalitarian-matthew-vadum/

“Illegal aliens may not need a real passport to get into America, but actual Americans may soon need a vaccination passport to travel inside America if they don’t take action.America needs to get back to being America, not this nightmarish dystopia we are rapidly becoming.”

Vaccination passports, like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris want everyone to be forced to carry, are profoundly un-American.

This data-driven authoritarianism, if it comes to pass, will wash away what remains of the rule of law and the Constitution, and annihilate the American way of life.

First, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) inflicted their possibly lab-designed Wuhan Virus on America, and now we get their Social Credit System, their totalitarian digital architecture for society as well.

America’s placeholder president, the Communist Chinese ventriloquist’s dummy who fantasizes about becoming the new Franklin Delano Roosevelt, wants these vaccination passports badly.

POTUS 46* signed Executive Order 13998 on January 21 directing government agencies to “assess the feasibility of linking COVID-19 vaccination to International Certificates of Vaccination or Prophylaxis (ICVP) and producing electronic versions of ICVPs.”

The Biden-Harris administration is now working on a “vaccine passport” for Americans to carry to prove they have received a vaccination against the novel coronavirus, according to the Washington Post.

“The passports are expected to be free and available through applications for smartphones, which could display a scannable code similar to an airline boarding pass,” the Jeff Bezos mouthpiece reports. “Americans without smartphone access should be able to print out the passports, developers have said.”

Five administration sources supposedly told the “Democracy dies in darkness” fabulists that COVID Czar Jeff Zients is working with unidentified private entities to institute the program. A reported 30 international airlines are said to be demanding vaccine passports.