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50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

Nancy Pelosi rallies to Maxine Waters’s cause By Andrea Widburg

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

By some metrics, Maxine Waters is a true American success story – the fifth of 13 children to a single mother, she slowly worked her way up the ladder to become one of the most powerful politicians in America. By other metrics, she’s an American success story in the same way Al Capone was a success story: She attained and has retained power through thuggish bullying. Capone was finally brought to justice for his sins and Waters’ latest incitement to violence may finally be catching up with her.

Waters has been in the House since 1991, representing a very poor area in Los Angeles, even as she lives in a $6 million mansion in a mostly-white neighborhood. She has distinguished herself by being rude and obstreperous within Congress, and by inciting violence outside of it.

In 1992, when the Rodney King riots erupted, eventually killing 63 people and leading to the infamous attack on Reginald Denny, Waters didn’t try to calm the rioters. Instead, she led a “no justice, no peace” really in the middle of the riot. Waters defended the violence, saying, “If you call it a riot it sounds like it was just a bunch of crazy people who went out and did bad things for no reason. I maintain it was somewhat understandable, if not acceptable.” During the trial of Damian Williams, who was caught on camera slamming a concrete slab into Reginald Denny’s head and dancing around his body, Waters embraced Williams’s cause.

By 1994, the House’s presiding officer, Rep. Carrie Meek called Waters “unruly and turbulent” and threatened her with the House equivalent of a cease-and-desist order for repeatedly interrupting Rep. Peter King’s speech. Ironically, just recently, Waters told Rep. Jim Jordan to “shut your mouth” and stop questioning Fauci.

In 2000, 2004, and 2016, Waters objected to the results of the presidential elections. Nevertheless, she was one of those leading the charge again Republicans who challenged the results of the 2020 election.

In 2018, at a rally about “kids in cages” (which Democrats ignore now), Waters told people to intimidate people in the Trump administration:

Let’s make sure we show up wherever we have to show up. And if you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. And you push back on them. And you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.

Waters has since escalated her violent demagoguery. This weekend, after having first asked for police protection, Waters crossed state lines to head into Minneapolis. Once there, Waters riled up the crowd gearing up to destroy Minneapolis following a verdict in the Derek Chauvin case.

Even though Chauvin is not charged with First-Degree Murder, and the prosecution struggled to meet the elements of lesser charges, Waters loudly insisted that Chauvin was guilty of First-Degree murder – and urged violence if the jury didn’t find him guilty of a crime for which he’s not being charged:

I know this, we’ve got to stay in the streets. We are looking for a guilty verdict. If nothing does not happen then we have to not only stay in the streets but we have to fight for justice. I am very hopeful and I hope that we are going to get a verdict that is guilty, guilty, guilty and if we don’t, we cannot go away.

Shortly after Waters said that a drive-by shooter attacked a Minnesota National Guard and a Minneapolis police team.

Waters’ demand was so heinous that Chauvin’s attorney argued that it would influence the jury, destroying Chauvin’s right to a fair trial. Judge Peter Cahill denied that the jury would be influenced, but nevertheless lit into Waters for talking about the case “especially in a manner that is disrespectful to the rule of law”:

Judge Cahill added that Waters’ conduct was not only “abhorrent” but could result in the case being overturned on appeal if Chauvin is convicted.

Fools’ overture By Eric Utter

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

It hasn’t taken long: Gas prices are rising. As are the prices of other durable and consumer goods, such as timber. Crime is soaring. China is making threatening gestures and Russia is massing troops on the border of Ukraine. There is a crisis on our own southern border, which even President and Lid-Caller-in-Chief Biden accidentally admitted recently, causing White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki to claim that’s not what he really meant to say.

This was all eminently predictable because, as any rational human being knows, actions have consequences. Banning the Keystone Pipeline, printing and spending trillions upon trillions of dollars and threatening to implement preposterous environmental policies, defunding the police and coddling criminals have had the effects that similar actions have always had. They are the only possible results of actions such as these.

Likewise, pretending that China isn’t a serious and imminent threat to U.S. national interests– while simultaneously proclaiming that Russia is, even as you have no stomach to back up your assertions— was almost certain to result in the present crises situations.

But being a progressive means never having to worry about consequences because: 1) you will be too busy blaming everyone else for the devastation you have wrought 2) the national media is your bitch and 3) most Americans are ignorant of history. These facts also mean you never have to say you’re sorry. Not that you would anyway.

Hell, you can make half of the country believe that it is effective to fight racism with racism, sexism with sexism and intolerance by being intolerant.

THE ENEMY WITHIN- JASON HILL

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/enemy-within-jason-d-hill/

The philosopher E.M. Cioran in his book, The Temptation to Exist, writes: “A decadent civilization compromises with its disease, cherishes the virus infecting it, loses its self-respect… by the same token it admits defeat, worm-eaten, done for. The smell of carrion fascinates and inflames those greedy and garrulous gravediggers we call the Apostles.”

I raise the haunting specter of an infectious virus decimating a civilization against the backdrop of two viruses at present infecting American civilization. One is biological in nature, Covid-19; the other political.

I believe that writer and social philosopher David Horowitz has identified the nature of that second virus. I think that he reasons that it is deadlier than COVID-19, and that its deleterious consequences are far more destructive and long-lasting than any biological infection.

In his latest book, The Enemy Within: How a Totalitarian Movement is Destroying America, Horowitz locates the political ideology destroying every democratic and Enlightenment value on which our constitutional republic was founded. The invasive virus identified by Horowitz is a left-wing reactionary politics ensconced within the Democratic Party.

The philosophical root of this ideology which ties it to several movements that suffuse our culture, whether it be radical feminism, Black Lives Matter, Islamic Jihadism, the equity movements, reparation movements, the trial by media of Justice Brett Kavanaugh or, what Horowitz describes as the racist anti-racist rhetoric of Ibram X. Kendi and Ta-Nahesi Coates, is: “Identity Politics.”

Hypocritical Pelosi Says Maxine Waters ‘Should Not Apologize’ and Did Not Incite Violence Reagan McCarthy

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/reaganmccarthy/2021/04/19/pelosi-on-waters-n2588172

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) weighed in on the growing controversy surrounding a member of her caucus, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA). The Democrat congresswoman instructed protesters to “get more confrontational” with demonstrations, ahead of the verdict in the George Floyd trial.

“We got to stay on the street. And we’ve got to get more active, we’ve got to get more confrontational. We’ve got to make sure that they know that we mean business,” Waters said to a group of protesters.

House Republicans quickly condemned Waters’ unhinged comments that undoubtedly will incite violence. GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) called on Speaker Pelosi to take action.

GOP Conference Chair Liz Cheney also called on Pelosi to act.

“This is dangerous and reckless. No elected official should ever incite violence. Speaker Pelosi must act,” she wrote in a tweet.

Pelosi showed no remorse for Waters’ disgusting rhetoric. The Democrat leader said that the congresswoman’s words did not incite violence and that Waters should not apologize.

Chinese Communist Defense Contractors Reaped $200- $400 Million In U.S. Covid Relief Payments By Adam Andrzejewski

https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2021/04/19/chinese_communist_defense_contractors_reaped_200-_400_million_in_us_covid_relief_payments_773081.html

Yes, it is PPP for the CCP.

A Covid relief program – Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) – meant to help U.S. small businesses on Main Street was hijacked by 125 defense firms with strong ties to the Communist Chinese Party (CCP). A legal loophole sent millions of taxpayer dollars to Chinese companies.

The $660 billion Paycheck Protection Program created in March 2020 to help struggling small businesses in the U.S. has allowed American subsidiaries of foreign companies to get the forgivable loans, sending millions to Chinese companies, according to The New York Times.

The paper cited a study from strategy consulting firm Horizon Advisory that combed through loan data available to the public and found that more than 125 companies that Chinese entities own or invest in had received $192 million to $419 million.

At least 32 Chinese companies received loans of more than $1 million, the report found.

Nanjing Xinbai, a Chinese state-invested company whose controlling shareholder is tied to the Communist Party, owns Dendreon Pharmaceuticals, a California-based biotech company, which received a loan worth $5 million to $10 million.

What the statistics show about police shootings and public safety By Rep. Peter King (Retired-NY District 2)trict

https://thehill.com/opinion/criminal-justice/548740-what-the-statistics-show-about-police-shootings-and-public-safety

Whatever the verdict in the trial of former Minneapolis policeman Derek Chauvin for the killing of George Floyd, that case — and the tragedy of another death, this time of 20-year-old Daunte Wright during a traffic stop in nearby Brooklyn Center, Minn. — should not be used to advance the narrative of systemic police racism and brutality nationwide. No one has done more to save and protect Black lives — indeed, all lives — than the men and women in police uniforms.  

Among the victims in today’s social and racial upheaval are the overwhelming majority of innocent, hardworking people living in minority communities who are being victimized by nationwide spikes in violent crime. Their communities already are beset by a lack of job opportunities and quality education — neither of which is their fault, nor the fault of the police — yet now they are beset by increased crime as well. Police have become victims, too, as they are expected to do the impossible while being attacked from all sides and portrayed as excessively violent or trigger-happy. 

Any discussion of policing and crime, including police interactions with minorities, is complicated and often turned into an emotional debate by an array of factors, including the sources and causes of crime itself. 

But let’s consider some statistics on police actions.

In New York City in 2018, 36,000 NYPD officers answered more than 6.1 million calls. In all of those calls, a total of 35 police shooting incidents were reported — despite one common refrain that the city’s police are trigger-happy. Of those 35 incidents, six involved police suicides or attempted suicides and four involved animals. So we are talking about barely .01 percent of shooting incidents, or 99.9 percent of police calls in which no shots were fired by the police.  

Not exactly a shooting gallery.

BACKLASH? SYDNEY WILLIAMS

“It would be wrong, in my opinion, to suggest the United States is ready to explode. But the pendulum has been pulled far back by “woke” elitists. From their ivory-towered college classrooms, their sound-proofed newsrooms, their glitzed-up Hollywood studios, and the inner sanctums of their corporate offices, they seem unaware of what constitutes the typical American, what they think and how they feel. They are ignorant of the consequences of what they have wrought. Accusations of systemic racism and the teaching of Critical Race Theory foment divisiveness, and divisiveness leads to hate and hate leads to violence.”

The arc of a pendulum carries its bob in an equal and opposite direction from which it starts. Metaphorically, it describes our country, as politics is subject to the same laws of physics.

In 1937, Albert Einstein, then living in Princeton, New Jersey but thinking of the Europe he had left four years earlier, issued a warning: “Politics is a pendulum whose swings between anarchy and tyranny are fueled by perennially rejuvenated illusions.” Even without those extremes, political power in the U.S. has vacillated between Democrats and Republicans. In the seventy-six years since the end of World War II, Democrats have held the White House thirty-six years and the Republicans forty. Thus, political extremism has been contained, not by politicians but by the wisdom of voters. Even today, a balance exists. While the Presidency is held by Democrats, conservatives dominate the Supreme Court. And the Congress is divided, with the Senate split 50-50, and the House with Democrats up by 218-212, with five seats vacant. We are a divided nation, and there is nothing wrong with that as long as minority voices are heard and unafraid to speak out, and as long as extremism remains confined.

In February 1788, Thomas Jefferson looked hopefully at the incoming Presidency of George Washington, the only individual to win election (and re-election) without being a member of a political party. He wrote William Stephens Smith, a Federalist Representative from New York: “We are now vibrating between too much and too little government, and the pendulum will rest, finally, in the middle.” That turned out not to be true in the post-Washington years, and it is not true today. In the nation’s most extreme backlash, a Civil War broke out in 1861. A hundred years later, from the mid-1960s to the early-1970s, Civil Rights and the Vietnam War caused a backlash of protests that turned bloody.

Today, we are in the midst of another such turmoil. The difference, in my opinion, is that this time the causes are politically manufactured. There is no question that inequalities exist. They always have and always will. We are not equal in athleticism, intelligence, looks, aspirations or diligence. But today’s “victims” have little in common with those held in bondage a hundred and sixty years ago, with women who were denied the vote a hundred years ago, with blacks who had to comply with the lie of “separate but equal” public schools of sixty years ago, or with gays who were shunned two decades ago. We have come a long way, which is reason to celebrate, but we also acknowledge that all democracies are works in progress. Differences should be aired, respectfully and with tolerance for those whose opinions differ.

‘White Terror Is As American As The Stars And Stripes’: How The Left Is Answering Ibram Kendi’s Call For Racial Strife Ben Weingarten

https://thefederalist.com/2021/04/19/white-terror-is-as-american-as-the-stars-and-stripes-how-the-left-is-answering-ibram-kendis-call-for-racial-strife/

Although its participants may not know it, our ruling class is speaking in Ibram X. Kendi’s tongue, and realizing his ‘antiracist’ vision.

Ibram Xolani Kendi, born Ibram Henry Rogers to a black liberation theology-adhering tax accountant father and health-care business analyst mother, is the Prophet of Wokedom to whom the likes of Twitter’s Jack Dorsey pays $10 million to prove his virtue.

Kendi is a bestselling author across several categories, with an ever-growing list of scholarly credentials and awards. He is ubiquitous in corporate media, on college campuses, and at elite conclaves. Perhaps most significant of all, Kendi’s ideas are permeating the commanding heights of society, trickling into every aspect of American life, and therefore turning him into a transcendent figure.

Kendi’s Ideas Serve Today’s Ruling Class

On the first day of the Biden-Harris presidency, the administration issued an executive order claiming America suffers from systemic racism, manifested in “[e]ntrenched disparities in our laws and public policies, and in our public and private institutions,” and charged the whole of the federal government with “affirmatively advancing equity” (emphasis mine).

Numerous other government and private institutions are following suit. Oakland is testing a program to provide 600 black, indigenous, or otherwise non-white families—and only these families—$500 per month for 18 months. A Boston medical center is implementing a pilot program to offer “preferential care based on race” and “race-explicit interventions.”

Critical race theory, ethnic studies, and a panoply of related teachings such as the 1619 Project version of American history pervade U.S. schools, while their supporters wage a war on merit for diversity and against any teacher who would dare dissent.

More than 100 executives leading major businesses recently came together to discuss ways they could swing their weight to challenge voting legislation, including Georgia’s, that they dishonestly portrayed as discriminatory. It’s just one data point in the continuing trend of corporate America’s race left that accelerated during the post-George Floyd tumult of 2020.

Increasingly the rationale for all leftist policies is “antiracism,” the movement Kendi leads. One example is casting the filibuster as a “Jim Crow relic.” Although its participants may not know it, our ruling class is speaking in Kendian tongue, and aiming to realize his “antiracist” vision.

If America is fated to succumb to Kendiization—a term coined by a colleague that aptly captures our national moment—and live in a world of “antiracism,” it behooves us to examine the views of the man behind it.

As Maxine Waters Calls for Riots in the Streets to Continue, Minnesota National Guardsmen Shot At Rebecca Downs

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/rebeccadowns/2021/04/18/as-maxine-waters-calls-for-riots-in-the-streets-minnesota-national-guardsmen-shot-at-n2588123

Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA), a sitting member of Congress, took to the streets in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, where she called on riots to continue. She did so in the dead of the night, knowingly breaking curfew and encouraging others to do the same. As Hannah Nightingale with the Post Millennial reported, sure enough, something came of that. A news release from the Minnesota National Guard alerted that the Minnesota National Guardsmen security team were fired upon at about 4:19am, local time. Fortunately, the injuries two guardsmen sustained were minor. 

The Joe Biden Who Never Was Biden is proving the Biden he always was—as incompetent as Jimmy Carter, without the latter’s probity. He may prove as corrupt as Bill Clinton yet without his animal energy. By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2021/04/18/the-joe-biden-who-never-was/

These are the most radical first three months of a presidency since 1933, the most divisive—and certainly the most dangerous. And its catalyst is the myth of ol’ Joe from Scranton who has unleashed furies and hatreds never quite seen in modern American history.

“Woke” Joe Biden

At an age when most long ago embraced a consistent political belief, late septuagenarian Joe Biden suddenly reinvented himself as our first woke president. That is ironic in so many ways because Joe’s past is a wasteland of racialist condescension and prejudicial gaffes. For much of the 1980s and 1990s, he positioned himself as the workingman’s Democrat from Delaware (or, as Biden once beamed, “We [Delawareans] were on the South’s side in the Civil War.”). In truth, he exuded chauvinism well beyond that of his constituents. 

Biden’s concocted working-man schtick meant praising former segregationists of the Senate like Robert Byrd and James O. Eastland. He would talk tough about inner-city predators, even as he pontificated about his support for tough drug sentencing. Kamala Harris, without any political traction other than her race and gender, once predicated her unimpressive and early aborted presidential campaign on the single strategy of knocking Joe out of the primaries for his purported innate racism that hurt victims of color, such as herself, the deprived child of two Ph.Ds. 

Add up what Joe has said about race and it is hard to find any major political figure of either party who has been so overtly race-obsessed. His corny Corn Pop fables positioned Joe as the white working-class everyman. Indeed, he took on supposed gang bangers from the ghetto, standing them down, no less, with his own custom-cut chain. 

On the paternalistic flip side, Joe kindly allowed young African-Americans at poolside the chance to stroke their heroic lifeguard’s shimmering golden leg hairs, or so he tells us. 

As vice president, Biden condescendingly warned an audience of successful black professionals that a rather meek Mitt Romney had the superhuman ability to “put y’all back in chains.” 

Indeed, he warned them in a fake black patois, reminiscent of Hillary Clinton’s grating “I don’t feel no ways tired.” In Bidenland, donut shops are full of Indians and the sum total of Barack Obama is the fact he was supposedly “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” 

We assume then that Joe was suggesting that Shirley Chisholm and Jesse Jackson could barely speak, were unkempt, and perhaps ugly in comparison to Barack Obama. The latter, other than his diction, fastidiousness, and appearance, apparently to Joe had not much to offer the country.