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The ‘Insurrection!’ House of Cards Is Collapsing The American people should prepare for more stunning revelations about the FBI’s key role in the events of January 6. By Julie Kelly

Posted By on November 21st, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/11/19/the-insurrection-house-of-cards-is-collapsing/

Amid bombshell revelations that the FBI embedded numerous informants in two militia groups accused of plotting to overthrow the government on January 6, FBI Director Christopher Wray finally is facing some heat. 

During a House Homeland Security Committee hearing on Tuesday, Representative Clay Higgins (R-La.) angrily demanded to know more details about the use of FBI informants related to the Capitol protest. Higgins twice asked Wray whether FBI informants disguised as Trump supporters were planted inside the building even before protesters gained entry.

When Wray offered his usual obfuscating tap dance about protecting sources and methods—“the suggestion that the FBI’s confidential human sources or FBI employees in some way instigated or orchestrated January 6th, that’s categorically false,” he indignantly insisted—Higgins called his bluff. “It should be a no!” he yelled when Wray wouldn’t give a straight answer.

Ironically, Wray was saved from directly responding by none other than Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-La.), the chairman of the January 6 select committee. One would assume the lawmaker in charge of the 18-month congressional investigation into the events of January 6 would force Wray to respond. Thompson should have been shocked at the suggestion the FBI stationed assets dressed as Trump supporters inside the Capitol prior to the breach.

Further, given reporting by friendly regime news organizations such as the New York Times confirming the existence of FBI informants months before January 6, Thompson and his fellow Democrats should have blasted Wray for either inept sources or a complete failure to collect accurate intelligence from those informants. Where’s the outrage that Wray concealed this information from the public and various  congressional inquiries?

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The Strange Morality of the Bay-Area Billionaire Left  Sam Bankman-Fried is the ultimate dangerous and ridiculous expression of the most toxic and creepy culture in America. If he did not exist, he would have to be invented. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on November 21st, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/11/20/the-strange-morality-of-the-bay-area-billionaire-left/

“Ya. Hehe. I had to be. It’s what reputations are made of, to some extent. I feel bad for those guys who get f—ed by it, by this dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths and so everyone likes us.” —Sam Bankman-Fried

The FTX Bitcoin empire of 30-year-old CEO Sam Bankman-Fried is in shambles. Or more specifically, his “dumb game” cryptocurrency exchange has destroyed thousands of lives. Electronically, he may have robbed perhaps a million investors, and along with them hundreds of large institutional investors. 

Mysteriously, only after the conclusion of the midterm elections, did we suddenly learn that this left-wing “philanthropist” and benefactor of Democratic politics, this megadonor to the quid pro quo puff-piece media, this con artist protected from federal securities regulators, had drained off, lost, hidden, or spent billions of dollars of other people’s money. 

As a result, the Bahamas-basking, tax-avoiding, polyamorous sybarite, and heartthrob of progressive moralists, now claims he has no wherewithal to honor his financial commitments to his own investors. Preliminary postmortem auditors sigh that they have never encountered a greater financial mess than what Bankman-Fried has left in his wake. 

How does the most sophisticated financial system in the history of civilization allow a virtue-signaling nerd to nearly wreck it? Where were the Federal Trade Commission, the Department of Justice, the IRS, and all the other alphabet soup agencies that supposedly exist so that someone like Bankman-Fried does not? Where is Merrick Garland and his special prosecutors, the FBI with its televised SWAT swoops and leg irons?

For all the performance-art boasts of simply doing good for others by doing far better for himself, Bankman-Fried may soon be revealed to be one of the great, dissolute con artists in American history. Like the infamous Charles Ponzi, “Bankman” may become our eponymous word in the 21st century for electronically driven, pyramid-scheme theft. 

His Stanford-Silicon Valley moral veneer was shiny but otherwise razor thin. Yet Bankman-Fried told at least one truth when he explained to obsequious media what his ilk easily does to fool purported suckers who send him cash, while he avoided federal and media oversight: “This dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths and so everyone likes us.” 

Well, not everyone. Instead, he might qualify his “everyone” as the like-minded, cynical, left-wing politicos, the kindred media hacks at the Washington Post and New York Times, and brethren investor toadies who helped him render Bernie Madoff a small-potato sinner in comparison.

Bankman-Fried had showered Joe Biden in 2020 with millions of dollars in campaign donations and did so again with larger sums to congressional candidates in 2022. His public relations arm of FTX exuded the usual virtue speak—including promised impending multibillion-dollar gifting—for utopian, Democratic, and progressive causes. And the media on spec gushed about their pet grunger as he sought to buy protection from Democratic fixers. 

“Effective Altruism,” Ponzi-Style

EDUCATION Comments turned off

School Board Battles Are Raging Teachers unions finally have some competition in all-important school board races. by Larry Sand

Posted By on November 21st, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/school-board-battles-are-raging/

It’s no secret that the teachers unions have control over most aspects of public education in the U.S. The school boards, which negotiate with unions over salary, work rules, etc. are particularly important for the unions to dominate. To that end, Michael Hartney, a fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, recently quantified the unions’ stronghold on the all-important boards.

Hartney asserts that union-endorsed candidates win about 70% of all competitive school board races. Union support helps both incumbents and challengers, and union-friendly candidates also tend to win in both conservative and liberal school districts.

As teacher union watchdog Mike Antonucci notes, union involvement has been going on for years, and it’s been a massive effort. The largest union in the country, the National Education Association, has 13,000 local affiliates in all 50 states. A study conducted by the National School Boards Association found that in 2018, 24% of school board members surveyed were current or former members of a teachers union.

Not surprisingly, California leads in union involvement in school board races. Per Antonucci, in the recent election, the California Teachers Association funded 287 board candidates in 125 school districts – large and small – dispensing more than $1.8 million for its candidates.

The process is simple. The teachers unions fund left-wing school board candidates, who, when they win, then support generous pay and benefits for teachers as well as various radical causes. Then, via union dues, a portion of teacher pay is routed back to the union to start the cycle again. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

Union leaders clearly know the game. As former Los Angeles teacher union boss Alex Caputo-Pearl once explained, “We have a unique power – we elect our bosses. It would be difficult to think of workers anywhere else who elect their bosses. We do. We must take advantage of it.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Is Multiculturalism Destroying Western National Identities? by Giulio Meotti

Posted By on November 21st, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19127/multiculturalism-national-identities

Today, 90% of British demographic growth comes from immigration.

The same shift is taking place in Sweden. In 2015 alone, Sweden welcomed 163,000 immigrants, the equivalent of 1.65% of its total population. Combined with other years, it is a demographic revolution: As of 2015, approximately 17% of the population were foreign-born.

“Therefore, there has been a huge cultural change in the immigrant population, as its largest group has gone from being Finnish to being Muslim… with immigration unchanged, ethnic Swedes will be a minority in 2065.” — Kyösti Tarvainen, professor at the Aalto University of Helsinki, Folkbladet, April 13, 2021.

That is why Swedish people recently voted in a conservative government. It is their last chance to stop an unprecedented national self-destruction.

“Brussels is no longer Belgium…. There are more Brussels residents of Moroccan origin than Flemings or Walloons”. — Philippe Van Parijs, Belgian academic and economist, De Standaard, September 5, 2022.

A country facing demographic suicide (1,707 kindergartens in Italy closed down in the last ten years) cannot afford to be overwhelmed by mass immigration without losing its national identity.

The West is at stake. The choice Europeans urgently need to make is whether they would like to transform their countries into a wholly different culture — as the people who inhabited Turkey did after center of Christendom fell to the Ottoman Empire, or as Egypt did from being the land of the Christian Copts to that of a state where the Copts now face non-stop persecution.

Unfortunately, Europe, whether it likes it or not, has virtually no time left to decide whether or not it wishes to continue embracing open borders, multiculturalism and globalism, and, through passivity, find that its hard-won Judeo-Christian values, freedoms and identity will be quickly made extinct.

Twenty years ago, the United Nations published a document titled “Replacement Migration: Is it A Solution to Declining and Ageing Populations?”. It was not a right-wing conspiracy theory, but a sophisticated working plan for Western democracies dealing with demographic aging. It has since gone mainstream. Just read what Richard Thaler, a Nobel laureate in economics, said this month: “We need more immigrants to pay pensions”.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Xi Dresses Down Trudeau When you get a tongue-lashing from your boss. by Christine Douglass-Williams

Posted By on November 21st, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/xi-dresses-down-trudeau/

Canada is heavily infiltrated by China, aided by a longtime partnership between the Chinese leadership and Justin Trudeau. See more HERE.

During the G20 meetings, Trudeau, who has been referenced as “little potato” by China, was openly reprimanded by China’s leader Xi Jinping:

Also newly reported:

Yusheng Wang, 35, an employee of Canada’s largest electricity producer Hydro-Quebec, was arrested at his home south of Montreal by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) on Monday. A special national-security investigations unit of the RCMP charged Wang with stealing trade secrets for China.….

“Foreign actor interference is a priority for many law enforcement and intelligence agencies around the world. Hydro-Quebec is considered a critical infrastructure and a strategic interest to be protected,” the RCMP said in a press release announcing the arrest.

China invests heavily in academic research and development, and along with it comes longstanding concerns about China stealing foreign technologies and trade secrets. A 2020 Bloomberg report asked the question in reference to the Nortel Canada, a one-time world leader in wireless technology that seemed suddenly to disappear: “Did a Chinese Hack Kill Canada’s Greatest Tech Company?” In short, the answer is yes. Hackers breached Nortel’s uppermost ranks and “roughly 800 documents” were sent off to China in an elaborate corruption scandal. Then came the rise of the tech giant Huawei.

P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

Standing Up to Trans Tyrants The choreographer who refused to dance to the transgender beat. by Bruce Bawer

Posted By on November 21st, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/standing-up-to-trans-tyrants/

Now 46 years old, the British choreographer Rosie Kay founded the Rosie Kay Dance Company in 2004 and, to quote the BBC, “has been making challenging, socially committed and political work for decades.” She’s the kind of artist, in other words, that the left-wing media love to celebrate. In August 2020, for example, when she premiered 5 Soldiers – for which she’d prepared by embedding herself in an infantry battalion – the Guardian reviewer summed up his verdict as follows: “The life of a soldier is already full of choreography, and Kay works with that to make dance that feels rooted in reality.” In May 2021, the Guardian’s critic described her dance piece Adult Female Dancer, about “a woman’s struggle to define herself, inside and out,” as “superb.” And in September 2021, her Romeo + Juliet was praised by not one but two Guardian writers, both of whom used the word “brilliant.”

Then, quite suddenly, Kay’s star fell. On the evening of August 28 of last year, she held a dinner party at her home for the Romeo + Juliet troupe, which skewed very young. It began well enough. The wine, by all accounts, flowed. But when Kay was asked about her next project, an adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel Orlando, the conservation entered what is, in high-culture circles in the year 2022, exceedingly dangerous territory. Since Orlando is about a man who changes sex mysteriously, it was no surprise that mention of it led to a discussion of gender. Two of Kay’s dancers, as it happened, identify as “non-binary.” She asked them about that.

“Initially,” one of the dancers later told the BBC, “I was OK with her asking about why we identify as non-binary. It’s OK to be a bit curious. But her repeated questioning stepped into micro-aggression territory, then into something more potent. If you’ve seen as many YouTube videos by self-identified transgender people as I have, you know that asking questions about their pronouns and the like is more than welcome until, suddenly, it isn’t.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Finally! Arizona Attorney General Launches Inquiry Into Maricopa County Election Day Fiasco By Athena Thorne

Posted By on November 21st, 2022

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/athena-thorne/2022/11/20/finally-arizona-attorney-general-launches-inquiry-into-maricopa-county-election-day-fiasco-n1647357

Good news for everyone as apoplectic as I am that no one ever does anything about the third-world-level incompetence (and perhaps worse) plaguing the Maricopa County elections: the Arizona attorney general’s office (AGO) is conducting an inquiry into the disastrous administration of the 2022 midterm election.

On Saturday, Arizona Assistant Attorney General Jennifer Wright informed Thomas Liddy, the Civil Division Chief at the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office, that the AGO wanted some answers.

In an email she sent to Liddy regarding “Maricopa County’s Administration of the 2022 General Election,” Wright wrote:

The Elections Integrity Unit (“Unit”) of the Arizona Attorney General’s Office (“AGO”) has received hundreds of complaints since Election Day pertaining to issues related to the administration of the 2022 General Election in Maricopa County. These complaints go beyond pure speculation, but include first-hand witness accounts that raise concerns regarding Maricopa’s lawful compliance with Arizona election law. Furthermore, statements made by both Chairman Gates and Recorder Richer, along with information Maricopa County released through official modes of communication appear to confirm potential statutory violations of title 16.

Pursuant to the AGO’s authority under A.R.S. § 16-1021, the Unit hereby requests Maricopa formally respond to and address the following concerns that have been raised. …

The letter went on to demand answers about three major issues that compromised the ability of some Arizonans to exercise their right to vote and for their vote to be counted, as well as the county’s responsibility to ensure the integrity of the election:

Election Day Ballot-on-Demand Printer Configuration Settings;
Election Day “Check-out” Procedures; and
Ballots Deposited in Door 3 and Statutorily Required Election Board Close Out Duties.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

The Climate Cons

Posted By on November 21st, 2022

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/11/21/why-should-u-s-pay-reparations-to-u-n-climate-shakedown-artists/

The world’s climate criminals aren’t the energy companies selling the fossil fuels needed to power a modern economy, nor those that make the products that burn those fuels. The real offenders are the global warming alarmists who have once again revealed what the game is, and it has nothing to do with protecting the environment.

This year’s United Nations climate hootenanny, the 27th Congress of Parties, produced an agreement in which rich nations will pay reparations to poorer ones for the damage that their energy consumption has supposedly caused. Our own country, at the insistence of its increasingly impaired, ever-pandering-to-eco-cranks president, will even participate in the scam. The amount is not much relative to our economy – $1 billion – but it sets a precedent and tells the world that we’re willing dupes.

After all, 81 million Americans voted to put a mentally infirm man in the White House. So we must be in favor of atoning for our environmental sins by taking part in a U.N.-controlled slush fund.

But some of us see the shakedown for what it is: Part of a ruse to use a manufactured climate crisis as a way to punish prosperous nations for being rich (putting the greedy West in its place through wealth redistribution), and to replace capitalism with a collectivist economic system wherever and whenever possible.

Naturally the international highwaymen congratulated themselves on a job well done.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Third Time’s a Charm For Merrick Garland Would Merrick Garland have wheeled out the old special counsel wheeze absent Trump’s announcement that he was running for president again? Roger Kimball

Posted By on November 21st, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/11/19/third-times-a-charm-for-merrick-garland/

What do you suppose the chances are that Merrick Garland, Joe Biden’s attorney general and chief enforcer, is a student of Søren Kierkegaard? Pretty slim, I’d wager. But his announcement yesterday that he was getting the old band back together and appointing yet another “special counsel” to investigate Donald Trump made me think that he should take a gander at Repetition, a book that Kierkegaard published in 1843 under the pseudonym Constantin Constantius.

The book is an arch, hothouse affair, full of Kierkegaard’s mocking and self-indulgent philosophical curlicues. But the MacGuffin of the book—whether one can really repeat the events of one’s life and, if so, what significance that repetition has—is something Garland might want to ponder for himself. I don’t think I will be spoiling things by revealing that Kierkegaard—or at least his pseudonymous narrator—concludes that, no, “there simply is no repetition” in life.  

I don’t expect that would faze Garland. A man who can direct his Stasi agents to treat parents as domestic terrorists because they complain about the actions of their local school board is clearly made of strong stuff. Why not conduct an unprecedented raid on a former president’s home? Why not organize another political vendetta against him? 

Sure, this will be the third special counsel assigned to harass Donald Trump, the most investigated American president in history. It would be nice if Garland could lure Robert Mueller out from his Golden Pond activities to take on the attack against the once and possibly future president once more. I suspect, though, that Mueller is too deep in Bidenesque (or Fettermanesque) mental twilight to mount that steed again. Maybe Garland can harness up the despicable Andrew Weissmann, Mueller’s brain and primary dogsbody in the now thoroughly discredited “Russian collusion” delusion. 

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trump in Exile: A Tale of Two Men By Frank Miele

Posted By on November 21st, 2022

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2022/11/21/trump_in_exile_a_tale_of_two_men_148495.html

He was the best of candidates. He was the worst of candidates. He was regaled for his wisdom. He was reviled for his foolishness. He gave his followers hope, led his opponents to despair.

Donald Trump is not Paris, and no 21st century American political writer reminds anyone of Charles Dickens, but I invoke the opening of “A Tale of Two Cities” to illustrate the duality of hope and despair that the name Donald J. Trump elicits.

MAGA Republicans got their wish Tuesday when Trump announced his third campaign for president. So did progressive Democrats. It remains to be seen which of them will live to regret their luck.

Will ex-President Trump be able to harness the raw power of Candidate Trump circa 2016, the populist tornado who wrecked his opposition, or will he be a lackluster imitation who is motivated not by any desire to improve the nation, but by a puerile desire to salve his own ego?

It’s no secret that I’ve been a nearly unswerving supporter of the man ever since his famous ride down the escalator at Trump Tower in June of 2015. The one exception was a column I wrote in September 2017 when it appeared that Trump was about to surrender on the issue of illegal immigration. It is useful to recall that moment because it demonstrated what could be called Trump’s potential fatal flaw – an overweening desire to be liked. Trump is most successful when he follows his instincts and throws caution to the winds. When he curries favor with the political class, or follows polls rather than his heart, he can lose his way.