First thoughts about Biden’s address to Congress By Andrea Widburg

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

Biden spoke for over an hour to roughly 200 masked, vaccinated Congresspeople in a mostly empty House chamber. Showing the manic energy of a grasshopper on amphetamines, he did much better than I expected. Barring a few verbal slips, Biden managed to stay on point the whole time. Really, the only problem with the speech was that it was a lie from beginning to end.

The biggest lie was Biden’s relentless calls for togetherness. “And my fellow Americans, we must come together to heal the soul of this nation.” “My fellow Americans, we have to come together.” “We need to work together to find a consensus.” “We came together.” “There is nothing – nothing – beyond our capacity – nothing we can’t do – if we do it together.”

That’s a lovely sentiment – and Biden uttered it with a straight face on the same day that his Department of Justice sent the FBI with an open-ended search warrant to conduct a pre-dawn raid on Rudy Giuliani, President Trump’s lawyer. This is a terrifying descent into practices common in dictatorships:

The next biggest lie was how Biden framed the events of January 6, when a few hundred unarmed people, egged on by leftist provocateurs, pushed their way into Congress, just as leftists have done since George W. Bush became president. They did so, not to overturn the government, but to ask for an honest certification vote.

‘Worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War!’ Can Biden really be this dumb? By Patricia McCarthy

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

Whoa!  Joe Biden thinks that that relatively mild, wholly unarmed breach of the Capitol was the “worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War!”  How historically ignorant are his speechwriters?  They seem to have forgotten about the assassination of Lincoln, WWI, Pearl Harbor and WWII, the Kennedy assassination, 9/11!  Did they really think that line would resonate with anyone with a modicum of historical knowledge?  

While the entire speech was banal, this was the most egregious spoken line.  That an American president would utter such an unspeakable lie is the measure of this man.  He is a fool.  Surely, he knows better but he and his handlers believe that most Americans are so dumb, so uninformed, they will accept such a lie as true.

That one line tells us everything we need to know about who Biden and the cabal running him are; they absolutely believe the American people are not only simpleminded but virtual toddlers who will believe anything they say.  

The rest of his not-SOTU speech only confirmed that Joe is the puppet of some thoroughly ridiculous people.  No wonder Jen Psaki, when asked about vaccine hesitancy among “white, Republican men,” replied that they are placing ads on country music stations and NASCAR sites!  Yeah, that’s right Jen.  The only people not submitting to the jab are rubes too dumb to know what’s good for them.  In fact, no vaccine for covid was necessary since there are effective treatments and a 99% recovery rate.  It’s perhaps just a greedy grab for big bucks by big pharma.  Biden is in their pocket too. 

Top Ten Most Racist Colleges and Universities: #3 University of Southern California Kowtowing to the woke mob.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/top-ten-most-racist-colleges-and-universities-3-toptenracistuniversitiesorg/

#3: University of Southern California

The website of the University of Southern California proudly lists a multitude of “Student Equity and Inclusion Programs” which are designed to create “a sense of belonging” for the diverse array of students at USC.  But when a Communications Professor at the university attempted to educate his students about Chinese linguistic patterns, explaining the meaning of a Chinese word that—to the uneducated ear of American students sounded similar to the N-word—he was reported as a racist and suspended from teaching the class.

Greg Patton is a professor at USC’s Marshall School of Business and an “expert in communication, interpersonal and leadership effectiveness.” During the fall 2020 semester, Patton taught an online class during which he spoke about the use of “filler words” in the speech of various languages.

“If you have a lot of ‘ums and errs,’ this is culturally specific, so based on your native language,” the professor explained. “Like in China, the common word is ‘that, that, that.’ So in China it might be ‘nèi ge, nèi ge, nèi ge.’”

To a native Chinese speaker, the word sounds nothing like the American racial slur. Patton himself has worked in China although is not a fluent speaker of Chinese. Despite the crystal-clear context of Patton’s example, and his status as an expert in communications, a number of African-American students were so offended by his example that they sent a letter to the Marshall School of Business Dean Geoffrey Garrett accusing Patton of racial insensitivity and stating that he was unfit to teach the class.

Confused Elderly Dictator Delivers Rambling Speech Demanding Money

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/04/confused-elderly-dictator-delivers-rambling-speech-daniel-greenfield/

Biden finally got around to delivering his State of the Union address and is was almost as worth the wait as the Oscars.

Sometimes the pills work and sometimes they don’t.

They really didn’t work this time around. The same identity politics theatrics were there as at the Oscars. And just as at the Oscars, the man of the hour turned out to be an elderly man who wasn’t there. Except Anthony Hopkins wasn’t there physically. Joe Biden wasn’t there mentally.

Instead, Americans got something closer to Biden unfiltered, squinting in bafflement, turning his head from side to side like a wind-up doll, and delivering a long tedious series of demands for money, empty promises, and even more hollow talking points.

 The set was empty. And so many empty seats only highlighted the utter emptiness of this administration. 

The demands for money have gone from the billions to the trillions. The promises are even more ridiculous and astronomical. But the figure at the center of it could barely sell ice on a hot summer day to a man dying of thirst. 

Even in his basement, Biden performed better than this. Maybe it was the big stage. Maybe it was the people. Or maybe he didn’t nap hard enough. 

Or maybe it’s hard to sell nothing. And nothing is all that Biden has.

Macron’s Folly Is he serious about fixing France’s Islam problem? Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/macrons-folly-bruce-bawer/

Last October I reported here that French president Emmanuel Macron had just “delivered what, on the face of it, seemed to be a remarkable speech on Islam.” Having previously been wishy-washy on the topic, he now promised a new program “intended to defend French laïcité, or official secularism, from ‘Islamist separatism,’” which he explicitly characterized as an existential threat to the Republic. Acknowledging that “one reason why ‘Islamist separatism’ had been allowed to fester was the ‘cowardice’ of French authorities,” Macron proclaimed that a new day had dawned.

In public services, in cultural and athletic associations, in schools and universities, and in other sectors of society, Islamic indoctrination would be officially, firmly, and comprehensively resisted, and Islam itself modernized into an “Islam of the Enlightenment.” My comment at the time was that a great deal of Macron’s scheme, on close examination, “starts to look not like a program for the secularizing of Islam but, rather, like a blueprint for propping up public laïcité while actively promoting private Islamic observance – a blueprint born, one imagines, of pie-in-the-sky hopes that, when the Muslims take over, they won’t replace the Napoleonic Code with sharia law.” In any event, given the decades of French government inaction on the Islam issue, it was hard to take Macron’s vows any more seriously than a boeuf bourguignon prepared with a Beaujolais. 

Two weeks after Macron’s speech, a Muslim named Abdoullakh Abouyezidovitch Anzorov beheaded a history teacher named Samuel Paty, who’d shown his students some cartoons of Muhammed as part of a lesson on freedom of expression. The French took to the streets in outrage (which soon subsided). The government expelled a couple of hundred immigrants who’d been identified as potential terrorists (leaving heaven knows how many hundreds of thousands of others). A mosque was closed (and has since been reopened). Macron praised Paty while also making the usual nice, empty noises about Islam, but admitted that he hadn’t done enough about the problem so far and again promised action. Again I was dubious. “What guarantee is there,” I wrote, “that Macron will keep his eye on the ball after the furor over Paty’s murder dies down – let alone that he will take action that is sweeping enough to make a real difference in this long-term civilizational war?”

Another Prestigious School Pummeled by Critical Race Theory By Jack Fowler

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/04/another-prestigious-school-pummeled-by-critical-race-theory/

Regis High School seems ashamed of its legacy and purpose.

There is a lot of trouble afoot at my alma mater, and it seems worth sharing.

Maybe that should be “more trouble,” because prestigious Regis High School has been in the news of late, with its president being fired over charges of sexual misconduct.

A Jesuit-run institution, and yes, the high school of one Anthony Fauci, Regis is not “prestigious” because of my particular alumnus status (nor that of my colleague, Daniel Tenreiro), nor because of cost (actually, it’s tuition-free per its founding in 1914). Simply, it is regularly ranked as the best Catholic high school in America.

It got that status because it was a determined fire hose of classical education that graduated young men who were put to many a test so they could think and analyze as adults, for God and country, as the blunt school motto stated.

But now, Regis — like many a school — seems ashamed of its legacy and purpose, maybe even of Deo et patria, and has become quick to genuflect and lie prostrate before the gods of Critical Race Theory. More on that shortly.

Back in the day, when Abe Beame was still mayor: Every year, Regis took around 120 Catholic boys (parochial-schoolers from classes low to high, and having a silver spoon in your mouth at birth was not a condition of acceptance) from New York and the surrounding area — through competitive exam and ensuing interview — into the freshman class. A goodly amount fell away through the ensuing four years (a grade of 75 was failing) of grueling and unrelenting work (learning Latin, self-taught physics among the heavier stones to push uphill). There was many a big brain among my classmates, but how I survived to graduate with the remaining 100 remains a mystery.

All being in this together, close quarters for four years, you could not help but notice the black classmate was black, the Puerto Rican senior was Puerto Rican, the gay freshman was gay. (We noticed the musical one was musical too, the artistic one artistic too — but such things are of no use in our times of pigmentary politics and cultural ethics.) My experience and perception was that we were all young guys who regarded each other as comrades. We were caught up in some worthwhile academic marathon. Ours was a brotherhood that transcended the facts of the Sharks vs. Jets neighborhood characteristics that still held forth. Able to walk in only my own shoes, I look back and find Regis to have been a place of e pluribus unum, of sanctuary, a haven, of true camaraderie — a thing set against the backdrop of a New York choked by unrelenting racial tensions. I feel blessed to have gone there, to have run the race, to have crossed the finish line, no matter how distant from most of my classmates.

Why Isn’t John Brennan in Prison? By Michael Brendan Dougherty

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/why-isnt-john-brennan-in-prison/

John Brennan is giving moral lectures about what good liberals should do. This is like Jeffrey Epstein giving a lecture on the virtues of chastity and poverty.

John O. Brennan
@JohnBrennan
I always found it difficult to fathom how a nation of people deeply scarred by a history replete with prejudice, religious persecution, & unspeakable violence perpetrated against them would not be the empathetic champions of those whose rights & freedoms are still abridged.

This is John Brennan tweeting about Israel and Palestinian statehood. Now, I’m not an uncritical observer of Israel. But this tweet is a breathtaking expression of an attitude that is quite common in European circles and among Arabists at the State Department. It breezily takes the view that the Holocaust is a crime of ethnonationalism against the Jews, and therefore the response of Jews of building their own ethnostate is perverse in some way. The speaker thinks: Why can’t you be better liberals? But the thinking Zionist wonders: Why do you want Jews to be defenseless?

It’s also historically illiterate, as Zionism predates the Holocaust by several decades, and was part of a flowering of European nationalisms — German, Polish, Hungarian, Irish — as some nation-states consolidated and some traditional Empires began to break apart. Sometimes this phenomenon was interrelated in perverse ways. Polish nationalists often encouraged Zionism — peacefully, and violently — in order to make the new Polish state more Polish.

Biden’s Dishonest Sales Pitch In a much-hyped address to Congress, the president pushed a radical agenda by perpetuating falsehoods.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/04/bidens-dishonest-sales-pitch/

President Biden’s address to Congress connected only intermittently with reality.

On his telling, every good thing that has happened in America since he took office — from vaccination to job creation — is a tribute to his wisdom, rather than a continuation of a trajectory set beforehand. All presidents say such stuff, and they all get away with it, although Senator Tim Scott made a valiant attempt to correct the record. Worse was the dishonesty of Biden’s sales pitch for his policies. 

He insinuated that the ten-year ban on assault weapons had reduced the murder rate in the U.S. — something neither careful studies nor a casual look at the trends supports. He pretended that the Trump administration had ended successful efforts to control migration across our southern border, a brazen inversion of the truth. He claimed that the country supports federal legislation that would, among other things, ban states from verifying voters are who they say they are. Poll after poll says otherwise. He promised that Medicare could save hundreds of billions of dollars by cracking down on drugmakers. Not according to the Congressional Budget Office, it can’t.

Biden conjured a world in which there was no danger from unprecedented deficit spending, no possible adverse consequences from raising taxes on corporations and rich people, no spike in violent crime that needs attending, and no foreign threats that demand of us more than platitudes about leadership.

Even as he proposed one of the most radically Left policy agendas in American history, he continued to feign an eagerness to work with Republicans. 

The press, which has invested absurd importance in every president’s first 100 days, is hardly bothering to conceal its excitement at the low-fifties approval rating Biden has at this marker. It is simultaneously hyping his left-wing legislative agenda. Those same polls show, however, that a plurality of Americans disapproves of how he is handling taxes and spending — and that his numbers on guns and on border security are abysmal. The implication is that a COVID recovery he has done little to cause is buoying him, while his agenda threatens to pull him down. Biden is providing Republicans plenty of material to work with, and nothing to intimidate them.

Biden’s Cradle-to-Grave Government His latest $1.8 trillion plan rejects the old social contract of work for benefits.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bidens-cradle-to-grave-government-11619650937?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

The progressive hits keep coming from the Biden Administration, and the latest is the $1.8 trillion American Families Plan introduced in broad strokes on Wednesday. It’s more accurate to call this the plan to make the middle class dependent on government from cradle to grave. The government will tell you sometime later, after you’re hooked to the state, how it will force you to pay for it.

***

We’d call the price tag breathtaking, but by now what’s another $2 trillion? Add $2 trillion or so each for the Covid and green energy (“infrastructure”) bills, and that’s $6 trillion of new spending in 100 days. That doesn’t include the regular federal budget of more than $4 trillion a year. No worries, mate, the Federal Reserve will monetize the debt.

But the cost, while staggering, isn’t the only or even the biggest problem. The destructive part is the way the plan seeks to insinuate government cash and the rules that go with it into all of the major decisions of family life. The goal is to expand the entitlement state to make Americans rely on government and the political class for everything they don’t already provide.

The White House talking points pitch this in the smothering love of the welfare state: “making care affordable”; free medical and family leave; “free education”; two years of “universal pre-school”; “invest in the care workforce.” Subsidies and millions of new care givers, all licensed and unionized, will nurture you through the challenge of earning a living and raising a family.

No Escape From Hong Kong New legislation lets the government block people from leaving.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/no-escape-from-hong-kong-11619650575?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Mark another step in Hong Kong’s descent: On Wednesday the Legislative Council made it easier for the government to block Hong Kongers from leaving.

The new legislation gives authorities the power to prevent Hong Kong residents and foreigners from boarding any plane or vessel docked in the city. All that’s required to block a departure is an administrative order, not a court order. The text suggests broad extraterritorial reach. Watch if the implementing rules let authorities demand that a foreign plane or boat that has departed Hong Kong must return or make a detour so an arrest can be made.

The law means that millions of Hong Kongers who participated in the pro-democracy protests have reason to fear they’ll be trapped. The language is also ambiguous enough to worry foreigners working in the city. All of this expands the ambit of exit control beyond last year’s national-security law that lets authorities block the departure of anyone charged with secession, subversion, terrorism or “collusion” with vaguely defined foreign forces.

Beijing is installing the door locks now to avoid the embarrassment of a Hong Kong exodus. After the Communist Party violated the Sino-British Joint Declaration with its abridgement of autonomy, the United Kingdom offered a path to citizenship for Hong Kongers who hold British National (Overseas), or BN(O), passports, as well as their family members.

The British government said on March 19 that it had received some 27,000 applications from Hong Kongers seeking to resettle in the U.K., and the Home Office anticipates “between 123,000 and 153,700 BN(O) status holders and their dependents coming in the first year and between 258,000 and 322,400 over five years.” Bloomberg estimated this month that emigrating Hong Kongers may sell as much as $19.3 billion in property this year.

This brain drain is a tragedy for Hong Kong. But it’s no surprise that the same people who were willing to fight for their freedom in 2019 are now willing to flee for it as Communist control tightens. The U.S. should follow Britain’s lead and welcome Hong Kong’s refugees.