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June 2020

The Berman Resistance The grandstanding former U.S. Attorney is no political martyr.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-berman-resistance-11592757973?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

So here’s the plan. We need to remove a U.S. Attorney because he’s investigating associates of the President. Let’s wait until four months before the election, and let’s do it on a Friday night so it looks suspicious and the guy can refuse to step down and make himself a martyr to the Resistance. Yeah, that’ll fool everybody.

That’s what the media and Democrats want everyone to believe about President Trump’s weekend dismissal of U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman. It’s more accurate to say this looks like a fiasco of bungled execution by the Administration and self-indulgence by Mr. Berman that is being overplayed as an abuse of power. In other words, it’s your average Trump melodrama.

Mr. Berman has been U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York for more than two years under a judicial appointment but was never nominated or confirmed by the Senate. Mr. Trump has every right to fire Mr. Berman as an inferior officer in the executive branch. Attorney General Bill Barr was negotiating with Mr. Berman over a transfer to another senior job on Friday when the Justice Department issued a statement that Mr. Berman is “stepping down,” which is standard Justice Department language in these cases.

The Agents and Instruments of Decadence Antony Carr

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2020/06/the-agents-and-instruments-of-decadence/

“Given the academic poison that has permeated and rotted so much in schools and universities in recent years, the waves of protesters parading their ignorance on our streets as hard-core revolutionaries smash windows and defile statues is no surprise. Far more shocking would be the existence of elected officials prepared to cry ‘Enough!'”

Right now, all around the world, people’s lives and livelihoods continue to be devastated by the COVID-19 pandemic. If you are young and healthy, the Wuhan flu’s impact is generally mild and recovery almost certain, the casualty numbers confirming it is the elderly and those already suffering from other medical conditions for whom it is a deadly threat. It is, however, highly contagious, and it is this characteristic, together with the modern revolution in globe-girdling travel, that has led to its rapid spread around the world — a spread driven first through Chinese deceit abetted by World Health Organisation’s connivance and subsequently boosted by incompetently administered, or non-existent, national border controls.

Recent events have brought to light another contagion, this one let loose by the killing of George Floyd  beneath the knee of a white policeman in Minneapolis on May 25. It spread rapidly — virally, as they say — around the world, thanks to the internet and revolution in communications.  That the circumstances in Minneapolis don’t necessarily apply elsewhere remains of no account. Facts don’t matter. Floyd’s death has been a pretext, the stated concern largely fraudulent, for blacks murdered by other blacks are of little concern and whites killed by blacks not worth mentioning at all.  The demonstrators believe social distancing rules are for others, not themselves.

Apart from the enjoyment of looting and destruction, what those in the rampaging crowds who actually have a serious social intent are really campaigning for is the destruction of Western civilisation, which they regard as primarily responsible for every evil known to man – racism, oppression, exploitation, misogyny, sexism, slavery, ‘catastrophic’ climate change. The list is endless. They believe that only by destruction  can  a new era of peace and enlightenment come about. Taking their cues from the French and Cambodian revolutions, they seek a societal re-set, starting from a new Year Zero.  Monuments must be destroyed, places and institutions renamed, books burned, films and TV programmes banned, historical figures forever condemned, history itself rewritten, anyone not fully with the programme “de-platformed” and a new power structure implemented.  It’s reminiscent of George Orwell’s dystopian 1984 in which the  all-powerful Party understands that “who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”

The rioters are not just ignorant vandals; they are following an ideology, a venomous cult every bit as insane as that promoted by Mao Zedong which led to the trashing of Chinese history and culture by the Red Guards in 1966. In contrast to COVID-19, this contagion most seriously afflicts the young rather than the old and experienced.  It is a virus of the mind.

‘Dirty Tricks’ Sabotage Trump Tulsa Rally By Rick Moran

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2020/06/21/democratic-dirty-tricks-sabotage-trump-tulsa-rally-n557476

Tik-Tok and K-Pop users are claiming they reserved hundreds of tickets for Donald Trump’s Tulsa rally, never having any intention of showing up. The result was a half-empty arena in Tulsa for the president’s post-coronavirus restart of his campaign.

In fact, Twitter is alight this morning with reports that dozens of teens reserved thousands of rally tickets to sabotage the optics of Trump’s speech.

Trending on Twitter this morning is #EveryoneLaughingAtYouDonald and #TrumpRallyFail.

Steve Schmidt

✔ @SteveSchmidtSES
My 16 year old daughter and her friends in Park City Utah have hundreds of tickets. You have been rolled by America’s teens. @realDonaldTrump you have been failed by your team. You have been deserted by your faithful. No one likes to root for the losing team. @ProjectLincoln https://twitter.com/parscale/status/1272191356845391875 …

Brad Parscale

✔ @parscale

Just passed 800,000 tickets. Biggest data haul and rally signup of all time by 10x.
Saturday is going to be amazing! https://twitter.com/parscale/status/1271581845910704128 …

Steve Schmidt was John McCain’s campaign manager and a driving force behind the anti-Trump Lincoln Project.

Daily Mail:

He then added: ‘This is what happened tonight. I’m dead serious when I say this. The teens of America have struck a savage blow against @realDonaldTrump. All across America teens ordered tickets to this event. The fools on the campaign bragged about a million tickets. lol.’

The gloating is absolutely nauseating. The Trump rally was sabotaged by political “dirty trick” worthy of the Nixon campaign and Democrats are celebrating?

What If I Trust Science and Don’t Trust Dr. Fauci? By Stacey Lennox

https://pjmedia.com/columns/stacey-lennox/2020/06/20/what-if-i-trust-science-and-dont-trust-dr-fauci-n551584

I wanted to trust Dr. Anthony Fauci. I really did. Early in the pandemic, I took the advice of Dr. Drew Pinsky and listened to what he said. Maybe I listened too closely. Lockdowns leave a person a lot of free time, and a Google machine and keyboard are an excellent way to pass the time.

This week on a Department of Health and Human Services podcast, Dr. Fauci made the following comment:

“One of the problems we face in the United States is that unfortunately, there is a combination of an anti-science bias that people are — for reasons that sometimes are … inconceivable and not understandable, they just don’t believe science, and they don’t believe authority,”

My head almost exploded. He made this comment in the same week he admitted the nation’s Health Experts™ lied to Americans about the effectiveness of masks. They decided to tell us masks didn’t work rather than tells us they were effective in preventing the spread, but please refrain from buying them until we have an adequate supply for healthcare workers.

Having worked as a Registered Nurse, I was pretty confident that was what they were trying to do at the time. However, that is not why I have lost confidence in the nation’s Health Experts™. Instead, the findings of the research I did on my own during the initial months of the outbreak have me questioning their honesty, effectiveness, and rejecting their authority.

The Models and Lockdowns

Do I need to say anything more? We crashed the economy based on a model from the Imperial College. All other models were ignored, even when the modeling had predicted the experience in other countries. Voices not calling for extreme response measures were silenced.

Even at that point, it was clear that large swaths of the population would likely weather the illness with few if any, effects. People under 65 and without chronic diseases should never have been forced to stay home. This pandemic is the first time we have quarantined the healthy. It was an insane premise to start with. The real kicker was finding out a high school science project informed the lockdown policies.

As the lockdown progressed in other countries, there was little to no correlation between the nature of the lockdown and the experience with the virus. Maybe because they eventually had to admit that surface transmission was not a thing. And asymptomatic transition might be, but they aren’t sure.

Hydroxychloroquine

The debate over this generic drug that has been in use for decades is one of the most puzzling and ridiculous things about the entire pandemic. The medicine was politicized and became controversial. After researching it myself and listening to practicing physicians who were using it, I expected Dr. Fauci to step up and clarify why there was a reason to believe it may work in conjunction with the mineral zinc. He never did.

Joe Biden and Friedrich Nietzsche How the “resounding tinkle of virtue” has poisoned our politics. By Roger Kimball

https://amgreatness.com/2020/06/20/joe-biden-and-friedrich-nietzsche/

According to Joe Biden, the basement candidate for president, ending “systemic racism” in the United States is “the moral obligation of our time.”

Too late, Joe! Systemic racism in the United States ended with the Union victory in the Civil War. Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox on April 9, 1865. On June 19 of that year, Union General Gordon Granger announced in Galveston, Texas, that all slaves in the state were free—Texas being that last state to comply with the Emancipation Proclamation. That is the date that the latest Kwanzaa-like manufactured racialist holiday, “Juneteenth,” is intended to celebrate and that Joe’s minders intended to capitalize on by writing “Juneteenth: A Reminder Of Black America’s Long-Fought Fight For Justice.” 

The institution of slavery, which ended nearly 150 years ago, has no bearing—zero—on the plight of American blacks today. What does affect them, mightily, is the destruction of the black family, a project brought to us by more than five decades of Democratic welfare policy. 

The PR surrounding Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program told the world that its aim was to abolish poverty. It’s actual effect was to institutionalize poverty and promulgate an endless agenda of dependency, which all but guaranteed black subservience to the governmental overlord. It also institutionalized the gigantic network of government workers charged with servicing—and, by extension, perpetuating—the welfare state. The metabolism of this establishment was expertly anatomized by Christopher Caldwell in his latest book, The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties. It makes for a mournful story. 

The New Iconoclasm

Also mournful is the spectacle of violence and destructive iconoclasm sweeping the country in the wake of the death of the career criminal George Floyd while in police custody. 

For the last few of weeks, we’ve seen stores looted, police stations and police cars torched, and all manner of public monuments defaced or destroyed. As we know from (in the words of Laplace) expériences nombreuses et funestes, it is one thing to start a revolution, quite another to bring it to an end. Those gleefully riding the tiger at the beginning often wind up inside it before the journey comes to an end. 

Why Are University Students So Stupidity-Friendly? By Robert Weissberg

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/06/why_are_university_students_so_stupidityfriendly.html

The contemporary political landscape is mired in a tsunami of bad ideas. Who would have ever anticipated that defunding police departments, emptying out prisons, eliminating cash bail, free health care, free college, looting as a legitimate form of social protest politics, among other screwball ideas would go mainstream?  Socialism? How did views resting on blatant falsehoods jump from the academy’s ideological wet markets to the New York Times?

A full explanation must wait until passions cool, but in the meantime let me offer a personal account based on decades of university teaching where this nonsense initially metastasized from a few quirky campus ideas to a conquering idiocy.  

I began teaching government at an ivy league school in 1969. Yes, the students were exceptionally bright, but the faculty were unafraid of pushing them hard and an occasional Marine drill sergeant mentality was necessary. Stupidities were immediately confronted, often sarcastically and grading was tough. Some colleagues especially relished slicing and dicing fools, and students years later, would praise these martinets for “making me think and work hard.” Survivors could boast of a world-class, rigorous education.    

Matters began shifting in the ’70s as some faculty conflated easier grading (which facilitated student draft deferments) with opposing the War in Vietnam. Affirmative action admission now appeared and while these admittees lagged far behind regular students, most faculty anticipated no long-term harm, believing that blacks would eventually catch up. In any case, faculty still confidently dominated, students were still considered ignorant, and periodically informed of their failings. 

On capitalizing ‘Black’ but not ‘white’ By Eileen F. Toplansky

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/06/on_capitalizing_black_but_not_white.html

As we descend farther into more racial balkanization, it is noteworthy to point out that in 2015, the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) ushered in a discussion about how to capitalize the words “white” and “black” when referring to groups of people.  Back then, they stated:

Language can reflect and foster bias and even invite violence, so respectfulness should always trump style or linguistic ambiguities.  There may be contexts where bias is appropriately intentional, but absent that, equality should rule.

To start with, let us stipulate that any discussion involving race is fraught: Even thinking there is such a thing as race is controversial, since many anthropologists believe that people cannot be so grouped biologically.

In fact, according to the Newsweek article that the CJR cites, “[w]hat many people do not realize is that this racial structure is not based on reality.  Anthropologists have shown for many years now that there is no biological reality to human race.  There are no major complex behaviors that directly correlate with what might be considered human ‘racial’ characteristics.  Many of our basic policies of race and racism have been developed as a way to keep these leaders and their followers in control of the way we live our modern lives.  These leaders often see themselves as the best and the brightest.  Much of this history helped establish and maintain the Spanish Inquisition, colonial policies, slavery, Nazism, racial separatism and discrimination, and anti-immigration policies.”

Smart Society, Stupid People Jeffrey A.Tucker

https://www.aier.org/article/smart-society-stupid-people/ 

EXCERPT BELOW from very long – but outstanding – article. I highly recommend that you read it when you have time.  C.B.

‘A virus is not a miasma, a cootie, or red goo like in the children’s book Cat in the Hat. There is no path toward waging much less winning a national war against a virus. It cares nothing about borders, executive orders, and titles. A virus is a thing to battle one immune system at a time, and our bodies have evolved to be suited to do just that. Vaccines can give advantage to the immune system through a clever hack. Even so, there will always be another virus and another battle, and so it’s been for hundreds of thousands of years.

If you read the above carefully, you now know more than you would know from watching 50 TED talks on viruses by Bill Gates. Though having thrown hundreds of millions of dollars into cobbling together some global plan to combat microbes, his own understanding seems not to have risen above a cooties theory of run away and hide.

There is another level of virus comprehension that came to be observed in the 1950s and then codified in the 70s. For many viruses, not everyone has to catch them to become immune and not everyone needs a vaccine if there is one. Immunity is achieved when a certain percentage of the population has contracted some form of virus, with symptoms or without, and then the virus effectively dies.

This has important implications because it means that vulnerable demographics can isolate for the active days of the virus, and return to normal life once “herd immunity” has been realized with infection within some portion of the non-vulnerable population. This is why every bit of medical advice for elderly people has been to avoid large crowds during the flu season and why getting and recovering for non-vulnerable groups is a good thing.

It’s Time To Cancel The Democratic Party For Its Long History Of Racism  Francis Menton

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-6-20-its-time-to-cancel-the-democratic-party-for-racism

We are living in the age of cancel culture. All icons from the past associated in any way with mistreatment of minorities are in the process of being eradicated.

Statues of Confederate figures? They’re mostly already gone. But that was just the start. How about statues of George Washington or Thomas Jefferson? In New York, First Lady Chirlane McCray will decide on their fate. How about a statue of Ulysses Grant (who may have done more than anyone other than Lincoln to free the slaves, but also once briefly owned a slave before freeing him)? His statue in San Francisco was toppled yesterday. How about the weathervane atop the Dartmouth College library (featuring a sculpture of a Native American)? It now must go (it “do[es] not reflect Dartmouth’s values” says the president). Aunt Jemima? Uncle Ben? They are now unacceptable racial stereotypes.

And God forbid you are a conservative at a U.S. university who fails to toe the official party line, such as by criticizing Black Lives Matter. You will be subject to an unrelenting campaign to get you fired and silenced. (Read about the case of William Jacobson of Cornell Law School here.). Or a journalist who dares to publish something critical of Black Lives Matter. (Read about the case of Lee Fang here.)

Readers can undoubtedly come up with dozens of additional recent examples of social media mobs descending to ostracize well known individuals or institutions for conduct deemed insufficiently sensitive, often conduct that is far in the past.

But what American institution of all those existing today has the longest and deepest association with violent bigotry and grotesque racism, including slavery, segregation, Jim Crow, and the Ku Klux Klan? The answer is the Democratic Party.

When we consider the history of racism in the Democratic Party, we are not talking about some debatable lack of “sensitivity” or uncaring use of stereotypes. No, this is something fundamentally different. This is the most overt, explicit and direct sorts of actions targeted specifically at the oppression of African American citizens.

Isn’t it time that this institution with a long history of the most vicious racism gets canceled?

In a post back in August 2017 (at the time of demonstrations about Confederate statues in Charlottesville, Virginia), I compiled a small sample of some of the most egregious racist conduct of the Democratic Party. Rather than re-do that work, I will include a substantial excerpt here:

Just as in 2016, the Democrats and the Press Think We’re Stupid J.B. Shurk

www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/06/just_as_in_2016_the_democrats_and_the_press_think_were_stupid.html

Do you remember how Democrats were openly scheming to help nominate Donald Trump during the 2016 Republican primary?  Paul Krugman wrote a Labor Day column back in 2015 defending Trump from Jeb Bush and praising his economic platform.  Jimmy Carter told the British Parliament the following February that he preferred a President Trump to a President Cruz because Trump would be a pragmatic and non-ideological leader.  A Democratic National Committee email released by WikiLeaks later that year revealed that the Clinton campaign and the DNC were colluding to ensure that Trump won the nomination.  An attached memorandum outlined how important it was to Democratic leadership that Trump, Ted Cruz, or Ben Carson face Hillary in the general election: “We need to be elevating the Pied Piper candidates so that they are leaders of the pack and tell the press to [take] them seriously.”  The “press” dutifully complied, running headline after headline in the New York Times and Washington Post and on CNN (“Clinton, Trump trade insults as rhetoric heats up between front-runners,” CNN blared in September of 2015!) creating a narrative even before the Iowa caucuses that the election was essentially between Clinton and Trump, and leaving the original Republican frontrunner, Jeb Bush, clamoring for the occasional clap.

They got what they wanted but were horrified to discover that the “Trump Train” could no longer be slowed down or derailed after his nomination.  The morning after President-Elect Trump delivered his victory speech, Krugman was predicting economic catastrophe that would last a thousand years, Carter was calling the election illegitimate, and Hillary and the Democrats were concocting a Russian conspiracy theory in an attempt to hide her humiliation (among other things).  Talk about backfire!