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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION

50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

Sandmann Lawyer Agrees to Represent Carter Page By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2020/07/26/sandmann-lawyer-agrees-to-represent-carter-page/

Four long years after the FBI and the press tried to ruin him, the former Trump campaign associate might finally get the exoneration—and payday—he deserves.

On Friday, Lin Wood, the attorney representing a Kentucky teenager in a number of defamation lawsuits against major media outlets, announced a settlement with the Washington Post. The terms of the agreement between the family of Nicholas Sandmann—the Covington Catholic High School student accused of disrespecting a “native elder” while wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat during the January 2019 March for Life—remain secret. 

Wood and Sandmann settled a similar lawsuit against CNN earlier this year. Cases still are pending against NBC News, ABC News, CBS News, the New York Times, Rolling Stone, and Gannett.

On Sunday, Wood confirmed he will represent another innocent person maligned and defamed by the American news media: Carter Page, the Trump campaign associate who James Comey’s FBI accused of acting as an agent of Russia. 

Page was the target of four Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants. The most powerful, invasive government tools—usually reserved for suspected foreign terrorists—were unleashed against Page as a way to infiltrate and spy on Team Trump.

Former Chicago Bears Coach Has a Message for Kneeling Athletes Beth Baumann

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/bethbaumann/2020/07/26/watch-former-bears-coach-mike-ditka-blasts-nfl-players-that-refuse-to-stand-for-n2573145

““If you can’t respect our national anthem, get the hell out of the country. That’s the way I feel. Of course, I’m old fashioned. So, I’m only going to say what I feel. I think there’s a way you protest and there’s a way you don’t protest,” he explained. “You don’t protest against the flag. You don’t protest against this country that’s given you the opportunity to make a living playing a sport you never thought would happen.”

During an interview with TMZ, Former Chicago Bears Coach Mike Ditka shredded National Football League players that decide to kneel during the national them. According to Ditka, it’s disrespectful to “protest” against the flag and the country that has provided opportunities to professional athletes.

“The whole kneeling thing in the NFL, you’ve got guys saying they’re gonna do it. You know, baseball players, different teams, last night I watched baseball, you got the Red Sox and the As and the Giants, a lot of teams are kneeling, athletes are kneeling. In your league here, you’re the chairman of this league, is that going to be allowed if the women want to take a knee during the anthem?” TMZ asked. “What’s the policy on that from you guys?”

Critical Race Comes to the Folger Shakespeare Library A tale told by leftist idiots signifying nothing. Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/critical-race-comes-folger-shakespeare-library-daniel-greenfield/

In 1932, the Folger Shakespeare Library was dedicated on Shakespeare’s birthday with President Herbert Hoover and Robert Frost in attendance. The Library would house the world’s largest collection of Shakespeare First Folios, and and hundreds of thousands of volumes gathered across the centuries.

“In almost unbelievable fullness and richness, we assembled books, pamphlets, documents, manuscripts, relics, curios,” John Quincy Adams Jr, its first director, wrote. “The library is thus more than a mere library; it is also a museum of the Golden Age of Elizabeth, and a memorial to the influence that Shakespeare has exerted upon the world’s culture.”

These days, the Folger Shakespeare Library has a new mission. And it isn’t Shakespeare.

After George Floyd died during a confrontation with police, the director of the Folger Shakespeare Library declared that, “the fight against racial injustice is essential to what we do as an institution.”

What does Floyd have to do with Shakespeare and what does racism have to do with the Folger Library?

Fake actor (Jussie Smollett) attends fake protest By Ethel C. Fenig

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/07/fake_actor_attends_fake_protest.html

A year and a half ago, fading actor Jussie Smollett claimed he was attacked by two masked white men who shouted anti-homosexual and anti-black slurs at him, while dousing him in bleach in the late hours of a freezing night in Chicago. 

The city of Chicago later charged him with paying two Nigerian brothers, black by the way, who lived in the city to stage the attack.  The charges against Smollett were later dropped but the city is now suing him to recoup its costs in the case which is continuing.

That was then.  This is so now.  Saturday, on a warm summer day in New York, Smollett joined a group shrieking …yep!…”black lives matter” outside…yep! Trump Tower.

Smollett wore a blue T-shirt and jean shorts for the protest and was recognized by his distinctive equal sign tattoo on his right arm. It’s not clear what group he was protesting with. 

And you thought 2020 couldn’t get more bizarre!

Florida Is A Case Study In Media-Induced COVID-19 Panic

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/07/27/florida-is-a-case-study-in-media-induced-covid-19-panic/

What do all these news accounts have in common?

“Florida Sets Yet Another Coronavirus Record: 173 Deaths In A Day”

“A record 173 Floridians died from the virus Thursday, an average of more than one every eight minutes.” 

“The 134 new confirmed deaths is the second-largest increase on record, coming five days after the largest one-day jump of 156 last week.”

“COVID-19 has ravaged Florida, with more than 237,000 people testing positive and 2,013 dying from the virus in July alone.”

So what characteristic do all of the reports share? They are all false.

It is not true that 173 people died from COVID-19 “in a day” in Florida. Nor did 134, or 156 on previous days.

It is also untrue than 2,013 had died in July when that story was published. 

All of these scary headlines are based on the number of deaths reported by the state on any given day. This is not the same as the number of deaths that occurred on those days.

The difference might seem trivial. But it’s crucial because the press is using the timing of Florida’s death reports to whip up a frenzy about COVID-19 running riot in the state.

Take a look at the chart below. The blue bars are the number of deaths reported in four days last week. Notice the sharp uphill climb? That’s the story the press has been telling.

Violence Erupts Around Protests Across U.S. Weekend clashes occur as demonstrators press further against racism and police tactics by Douglas Belkin

https://www.wsj.com/articles/violence-erupts-around-protests-across-u-s-11595784837?mod=hp_lead_pos6

Large demonstrations turned violent around the country over the weekend as tens of thousands of Americans continued a monthslong wave of civil unrest protesting racism and police tactics.

Seattle protesters hurled rocks and explosives at police officers during violent confrontations near the police department’s East Precinct station on Saturday. Dozens of people were arrested and 59 officers were injured, including many with burns and abrasions, according to police. The explosives also caused structural damage to the station, the officials said.

In Portland, Ore., where protesters have been marching for more than 50 days, thousands of demonstrators—some wearing gas masks and carrying shields, leaf blowers and hockey sticks—gathered outside the U.S. Courthouse, police officials said. Some in the crowd threw rocks and fireworks before breaking through a section of reinforced fence surrounding the building.

In Austin, Texas, a protester was fatally shot during a Black Lives Matter gathering near the state capitol.

Protests have taken place across the U.S. after the May 25 death of George Floyd, who was killed in police custody in Minneapolis. But many marches grew in size and intensity over the weekend, and focused on what demonstrators say is overreach by local and federal officers in Portland and other cities. At some events, protesters carried guns.

Police officials in Portland and Seattle declared some demonstrations in their cities “riots” and used pepper spray and other crowd-control tools to disperse gatherings. Both police departments were bracing for more confrontations with protesters on Sunday.

The Left Has Turned Into A Crazed Maoist Cult. It’s Time For The Sane To Exit. Francis Menton

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-7-25-the-left-turns-into-a-craze

If you have been paying any attention whatsoever, you have to have noticed the recent rapid transformation of the progressive left movement into a crazed Maoist cult. Yes, the phenomenon of “political correctness” — meaning a leftist orthodoxy enforced among willing participants who think themselves sophisticated — has been around for a long time. We even used that term back when I was in college 50 years ago.

But recent events take the phenomenon to a whole new level. Back in the 70s my friends and I could stand aside from the politically correct crowd and laugh at them as second raters lacking the ability for independent thought. Now if you are in the wrong place there is no more standing aside and no more laughing. Whole swaths of major institutions, most notably essentially all of academia and the media, plus many large corporate entities, no longer brook any dissent from progressive orthodoxy. One slip and the wrath of the mob gets called down upon you.

Consider Professor Alan Dershowitz of Harvard Law School. You would think that there could hardly be a better example of left-center Democratic normalism than this guy. But he does have a tendency to stray from the party line from time to time. It probably started close to twenty years ago, when he came out in favor of due process for males accused of sex-related misconduct. More recently he committed the unpardonable sin of participating the the defense of President Trump in his impeachment trial.

The perfidious among us, past and present Zahava Shapiro

https://www.jns.org/opinion/the-perfidious-among-us-past-and-present/

Peter Beinart is moving fast and furiously to solidify his acceptance by his co-progressives, at a time when Jew-hatred permeates their politics.

Max Naumann was the founder of Verband nationaldeutscher Juden (League of National German Jews). In his efforts to resolve his brand of “the Jewish Question,” he called for the elimination of Jewish ethnic identity through Jewish assimilation. Naumann advocated total assimilation as an answer to Jew-hatred. With Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, while many German Jews were still very much in denial about their precarious future in Germany, Naumann’s league, a minority within a minority having only about 6,000 followers, took it further, pushing his skewed ideology.

During the Weimar Republic, Naumann was active with the German People’s Party. Advancing a delusional perspective, the League supported a Nazi-led national revolution, which was to realize the “rebirth of Germandom.” Nauman continued to be faithful to the “fatherland.” Detesting the Zionist Jews, he was noted as saying, “Unwilling to slough off their oriental traits, they are a disturbing factor to us who are bound to the soil.”

The Zionists were an embarrassment to the patriotic German Jews like Max Naumann, and went so far as to say that the Nazis were justified in putting a price on Albert Einstein’s head for speaking out against the Nazis and for being supportive of Zionism. But, like all patriotic German Jews, Max was in for a rude awakening.

With the rise of Hitler, the German People’s Party naturally did not want anything to do with Nauman’s group. His league was outlawed by the Nazis and dissolved by the Gestapo in 1935. Naumann was imprisoned and later released. Max Naumann was one of the lucky ones—he ended up dying from cancer in 1939.

The Democrats’ Cargo Cult Theodore Roosevelt Malloch

https://amgreatness.com/2020/07/25/the-democrats-cargo-cult/

Cargo ritual, or cargo cult, is a religious practice whereby relatively primitive societies attempt to conjure up modern technology or lifestyle advancements through ritualistic behavior. Classic examples include the building of an airplane runway in the hopes of materializing the kind of cargo that airplanes bring, or building radios out of coconuts and straw.

The Democratic Party has been running a cargo cult for some decades. It is placing a bet that its latest savior figure, Sleepy Joe Biden, albeit an empty senile shell of a cult leader, can do it again and fool the people—one more time. As Biden is wont to say, “C’mon man.”

During World War II, Americans landed their huge aircraft, big bombers and fighters, all over the Pacific islands of Melanesia. The local natives came to love “Joe From,” (a.k.a. G. I. Joe from somewhere stateside). The planes would drop their goods, i.e., cargo, and the people got stuff like free soft drinks, canned Spam, chewing gum, and candy bars. They became totally addicted to it. 

But then the war ended, and the planes stopped arriving.

Ignorant as to why, the islanders built their own bamboo and wooden planes, many life-sized, beckoning the return of yet more cargo. It didn’t cause them to come.

It Doesn’t End Well Roger Kimball *****

https://amgreatness.com/2020/07/25/it-doesnt-end-well/

The hooligans smashing up courthouses and police stations as they pursue indiscriminate carnage are fired by the same unholy “train of disorderly appetites” that Edmund Burke anatomized 230 years ago.

Denis Diderot, model of the French Enlightenment that he was, gave memorable expression to that movement’s inveterate anti-clericalism. “Man will never be free,” said the energetic Encyclopédiste, “until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.”

They don’t talk much about kings and priests, but the civilization-hating anarchists of the Black Lives Matter movement would applaud Diderot’s sentiments. Although they sometimes wrap their destructive actions in fine-sounding rhetoric about justice and anti-racism, what they are really about is hate. 

Recapping Thursday’s madness, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany noted that “A federal agent’s hand was impaled by planted nails, another federal agent was shot with a pellet gun, leaving a wound deep to the bone, and tragically, three federal officers were likely left permanently blinded by the rioters using lasers pointed directly into their eyes.” 

No wonder Brooks Brothers, Nike, Uber, and practically every other wretched business you have ever dealt with are falling all over themselves to proclaim their solidarity with Black Lives Matter and committing to end “systemic racism” in the United States. 

How to explain the mind-boggling disjunction between the violent savagery of the BLM crusaders, on the one hand, and the nauseating spectacles of frightened though congratulatory self-abasement by the white elite, on the other? Are the latter pleased by the news emanating from Portland and similar enclaves of vicious woke sentimentality?