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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION

50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

Growing evidence Capitol attack was pre-planned undercuts Trump impeachment premise Emerging evidence also raises questions about whether the FBI and other security agencies acted proactively enough to thwart the violence.By John Solomon

https://justthenews.com/government/courts-law/mon-growing-evidence-capitol-attack-pre-planned-undercuts-trump-impeachment

Days before former President Trump’s impeachment trial begins, newly filed federal charges against anti-government activists offer fresh, compelling evidence that the accused perpetrators of the Capitol riots pre-planned their attack days and weeks in advance and in plain sight of an FBI that vowed to be vigilant to extremist threats.

A dozen FBI affidavits supporting charges against the more than 200 defendants show rioters engaged in advance planning on social media sites. The planning included training, casing sites, identifying commanders on scene, and requests for donations of cash, as well as combat and communication gear.

More than a half dozen of the suspects are now charged with conspiracy to commit violence for actions predating the Jan. 6 riots. The early actions identified in court documents date back to November, with planning and rhetoric accelerating after Christmas, court records show.

That growing body of evidence raises questions about whether the FBI and other security agencies acted proactively enough to thwart the violence. It also undercuts the House Democrats’ impeachment claim — supported by 10 Republicans — that Trump’s speech spontaneously incited the riots, legal experts told Just the News.

Big Brother comes to America Experts in the US are calling for the creation of a Reality Czar. They mean a Ministry of Truth. Frank Furedi

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/02/08/big-brother-comes-to-america/

At first I couldn’t believe what I was reading. A writer for the New York Times was enthusiastically supporting a call made by ‘several experts’ around the Biden administration to create a Reality Czar. Apparently, a Reality Czar is needed to counter the campaign of disinformation being pushed by bitter conservatives.

The NYT commentator concedes that giving someone the authority to pronounce on what is and isn’t real ‘sounds a little dystopian’, but suggests it is warranted by the threat of ‘disinformation and domestic extremism’. The experts promoting the enthronement of a Reality Czar are unapologetic advocates of giving the government the power to decide what is true, what is real. They hope that the establishment of a reality task force ‘could become the tip of the spear for the federal government’s response to the reality crisis’.

The NYT is not alone in demanding that the government take an active role in determining what is true. Recently, New York University’s Stern Center for Business and Human Rights published an alarmist report about the allegedly distorted perceptions held by millions of conservatives. Apparently, huge numbers of conservatives wrongly believe that their views are suppressed by digital platforms on partisan grounds. To prevent this view from gaining greater influence, the authors of the report call on the government to set up a ‘new Digital Regulatory Agency’. No doubt this agency would become another tip of a spear to be hurled at anyone who accuses the giant social-media companies of showing bias against the political right.

The principal aim of the Stern Center’s report is to restore trust in the moral authority of the mainstream media in the US. It fears that millions of Americans no longer trust the media as a reliable source of information because they have bought into the belief that it is biased. It argues that people’s distrust of the media and their ‘wrong’ belief that social media are biased against conservatives will escalate in coming years, especially as social-media companies increase their ‘fact-checking’ operations.

Warping the Credit for Trump’s Operation Warp Speed Let’s give credit where credit is due.

https://spectator.org/trump-operation-warp-speed-biden/

“I think the [Trump] administration deserves some credit getting this off the ground with Operation Warp Speed,” conceded then-President-elect Joe Biden in late December upon he and his wife Jill getting their first dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine in Wilmington, Delaware.

Biden’s notable concession to Trump didn’t get the attention from his media partisans that it should have. That’s no surprise. They revile Donald Trump, they made it their mission to run him out of office, and they shape their “journalism” accordingly.

As for Biden, the concession was gracious, but he should say more. A lot more.

In fact, it would be a great gesture of unity — the very unity that President Biden says he seeks, and a gesture of goodwill and decency that Trump advocates would remember appreciatively — if Biden paused to more deliberately thank and recognize Trump’s efforts. Unfortunately, I don’t think he’s going to do that, and the terribly biased liberal media certainly will not be stepping up with any awards for the dreaded MAGA man.

That’s a shame. It’s yet more rancorous, toxic, bitter partisanship, by a media that claims to be objective. It’s not right. It fails to recognize a truly historic accomplishment by Trump and the biomedical community.

We are now full-throttle into the mass distribution of vaccines for the COVID-19 pandemic. And let there be no doubt: the swiftness of the development and delivery of these vaccines is a remarkable achievement. I want to underscore the point by revisiting what I wrote about in several columns here in The American Spectator last spring, most notably placing President Trump’s Operation Warp Speed into historical context — looking particularly at the polio vaccine that was pioneered by Dr. Jonas Salk at the University of Pittsburgh in the 1950s. Considering that comparison really helps us to understand what a big deal Operation Warp Speed has been.

When American Lawyers Are Taught to Hate America By Eileen F. Toplansky

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/02/when_american_lawyers_are_taught_to_hate_america.html

It is no longer a surprise why so many American students have come to despise their own country.  The latest example of deliberate misinformation comes from the New Jersey State Bar Foundation (NJSBF).  Claiming that “informed citizens are better citizens,” the NJSBF issued a May 20, 2020 article titled “Explaining the Roots of Institutional Racism.”

Institutional racism was baked into the U.S. Constitution, dating back to when the Founding Fathers were determining how to calculate the number of seats each state would have in the House of Representatives.  Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution states: ‘…shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons … three fifths of all other Persons.’ Those three-fifths persons were slaves.

In fact, the “words ‘slave’ [and] ‘slavery’ do not exist in the Constitution.  Thus, as escaped slave abolitionist, Frederick Douglass stated ‘[a]bolish slavery tomorrow, and not a sentence or syllable of the Constitution need be altered.’  Thus, Douglass steadfastly believed that the government created by the Constitution ‘was never, in its essence, anything but an anti-slavery government.'”

In the “1776 Report” now scrubbed by the Biden administration but available here, one learns that Douglass “initially condemned the Constitution, but after studying its history came to insist that it was a ‘glorious liberty document.'”

Our Animal Farm The Left’s 1960s dream is America’s 2021 nightmare. By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/07/our-animal-farm/

George Orwell published Animal Farm in August 1945, in the closing weeks of the Pacific War. Even then, most naïve supporters of the wartime Soviet-British-American alliance were no longer in denial about the contours of Moscow’s impending postwar communist aggression. 

The short, allegorical novel’s human-like farm animals replay the transition of supposedly 1917 revolutionary Bolsheviks into cynical 1930s Stalinists. Thereby, they remind us that leftist totalitarianism inevitably becomes far worse than the supposed parasitical capitalists they once toppled.

Orwell saw that the desire for power stamps out all ideological pretenses. It creates an untouchable ruling clique central to all totalitarian movements. Beware, he warns, of the powerful who claim to help the helpless.

Something so far less violent, but no less bizarre and disturbing, now characterizes the American New New Left. It is completing its final Animal Farm metamorphosis as it finishes its long march through our cultural, economic, and social institutions. Leftists may talk of revolutionary transformation, but their agenda is to help friends, punish enemies, and to keep and expand power.

First, remember the 1960s and 1970s agendas of the once impotent, young, and supposedly idealistic leftist revolutionaries.

BLM’s Nobel Peace Prize Nomination Rewarding the destruction of a nation — in the name of “peace.” John Perazzo

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/blms-nobel-peace-prize-nomination-john-perazzo/

These are exciting times for Black Lives Matter (BLM) and its comrades. First, they spent most of 2020 raking in countless millions of dollars in donations as compensation for turning dozens of American cities into war zones—an activity they describe as “racial justice” activism. Next, they helped get two their two most influential supporters on Earth, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, installed in the White House. And now, they have been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.

The nomination was put forth by the Norwegian parliamentarian Petter Eide, who lauds BLM for its noble “struggle against racism and racially motivated violence.” In light of the fact that Mr. Eide has represented the Socialist Left party in Parliament since 2017, it is no surprise that he should be impressed by the agendas and tactics of BLM, an organization founded by three self-identified “trained Marxist” revolutionaries: Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi. Under their leadership, BLM has perfected the longtime Marxist strategy of portraying the U.S. as a racist cesspool in desperate need of fundamental transformation. Presumably Mr. Eide believes that such a message, if repeated with sufficient frequency and passion, will promote “peace.”

Perhaps he also believes that yet another Marxist ideal advocated by BLM—the dissolution of “the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure”—will likewise further the cause of “peace.”

While conceding that “people message me to say that BLM is a violent organization,” Mr. Eide dutifully explains that “if some elements of the movement may have been violent, that is not a reason to blame the whole movement.”

Biden Is Increasingly Detached From Reality On The Economy

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/02/08/biden-is-increasingly-detached-from-reality-on-the-economy/

A favorite Democratic cliché is “never let a crisis go to waste.” But with the “urgently needed” $1.9 trillion relief bill, Democrats are inventing the crisis. While they keep depicting the economy as being in a free fall, it is, by historic standards, doing well.

Some Democrats are already coming to realize that piling another $1.9 trillion in deficit spending on top of the more than $3 trillion already targeting COVID relief is an enormous mistake. Here’s what Politico reported last week after liberal economist Larry Summers cautioned that the Biden plan was too big.

Summers, the former Treasury secretary for Bill Clinton and top economic adviser to Barack Obama, puts down on paper what many liberal wonks have been whispering about for weeks: that President Joe Biden’s stimulus bill may be too big, that its overall cost could sacrifice other progressive priorities and that it could harm the economy next year, when Democrats will be defending narrow congressional majorities in the midterms.

Summers warns of “inflationary pressures of a kind we have not seen in a generation, with consequences for the value of the dollar and financial stability.”

Give Summers and those anonymous “liberal wonks” credit, at least, for staying in the neighborhood of reality, something that seems to have escaped “No Malarky” Biden.

George Pratt Shultz As Secretary of State, he helped Reagan end the Cold War by winning it.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/george-pratt-shultz-11612725575?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

President Harry Truman’s Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, called his memoir “Present at the Creation,” an account of rebuilding the postwar world and the realities of a Cold War with the Soviet Union. Former Secretary of State George P. Shultz, who died Saturday at age 100, titled his memoir “Turmoil and Triumph,” an apt description of the historic role Shultz played in ending the Cold War some 40 years later.

Shultz served as Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of State for almost the length of Reagan’s Presidency, from 1982 until 1989. The “turmoil” of his memoir’s title described the world as he took control of foreign policy for Reagan.

The Soviet Union, possessing a huge arsenal of nuclear weapons, was led by Yuri Andropov, a determined communist opponent of the West. Hard to believe now, but Europe then was still divided by what Winston Churchill called an “iron curtain,” which separated the free democratic nations of Western Europe from the closed, Soviet-dominated countries to the east. Millions were imprisoned inside these countries, unable to emigrate. Those who tried to flee could be imprisoned or shot.

Jonathan Turley: Impeaching Trump – House threatens to trash this core principle to ensure conviction The statement of House manager Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., last week was breathtaking

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/impeaching-trump-house-threatens-core-principle-jonathan-turley

Over the last four years, we have seen an alarming trend of law professors and legal experts discarding constitutional and due process commitments to support theories for the prosecution or impeachment of Donald Trump or his family. 

Legal experts who long defended criminal defense rights have suddenly become advocates of the most sweeping interpretations of criminal or constitutional provisions while discarding basic due process  and fairness concerns. Even theories that have been clearly rejected by the Supreme Court have been claimed to be valid in columns. No principle seems inviolate when it stands in the way of a Trump prosecution.

Yet, the statement of House manager Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., last week was breathtaking. A former law professor, Raskin declared that the decision of Trump not to testify in the Senate could be cited or used by House managers as an inference of his guilt – a statement that contradicts not just our constitutional principles but centuries of legal writing.

Yet, it appears a signature of this team of House managers. Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., insisted in the last impeachment that the failure of then-President Trump to turn over documents by citing privilege or other defenses should be cited as evidence of guilt on any underlying claims.

The Reichstag Fire of the Democrats A pretext for political terror. Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/reichstag-fire-democrats-daniel-greenfield/

There are thousands of soldiers outside Congress and political terror inside its halls. That political terror isn’t coming from a QAnon Shaman who only eats organic food, but from the Democrats who are using a manufactured state of emergency to purge the opposition.

Democrats deployed 26,000 troops to Washington D.C. at a cost of $500 million. Thousands of soldiers, authorized to use deadly force as they were forbidden to do either at the border or during the Black Lives Matter assault on the White House, will stay to fight an imaginary threat.

While walls, razor wire, and military encampments rise outside the halls of government, inside them the Democrats have unleashed a true coup. Protesters have “stormed” Congress before, from both the Left and the Right, which cannot be called overthrowing the government. But Democrats began their own overthrow by launching an unconstitutional post-office impeachment of President Trump for speaking at a peaceful protest and a push to remove Senate members who objected to the stolen election by abusing the 14th Amendment.

The fake emergency has been extended to March. The FBI continues falsely claiming that there is some sort of threat that requires 7,500 soldiers to conduct a military occupation of the nation’s capital. The FBI’s claims that this threat would occur during “First Amendment-protected protests” has a massive credibility problem because there have been no protests in D.C.

Even though these protests have yet to emerge for over a month, the occupation goes on.