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November 2020

Could Nancy Pelosi get the boot? By Monica Showalter

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been looking miserable lately, and for good reason.

In what should theoreticaly be her season of jubilation, supposedly ousting President Trump, she may well be looking at her own ouster, too.

The House election results are still rolling in, and all are bearing bad news for her supposed House majority.

According to RealClearPolitics, the score stands at 221 House Democrats, and opposition 209 Republicans. Democrats have (so far) lost 9 seats and unseated no Republicans. Republicans, meanwhile, have gained 8. Apparently Joe Biden had absolutely no coattails, which is weird stuff in a presidential election, unless maybe something funny was going on.

Five races have yet to be tallied, two in California, one in Iowa, one in New York and one in New Jersey. All show the Republican, so far, ahead, or else unexpectedly close and in the running to overtake. California’s 21st district, won by ballot harvestors in 2018 by Democrat T.J. Cox, now shows Republican David Valadao, an authentic farmer who held the seat earlier, ahead by 50.6% to Cox’s 49.4, with now 99% of the ballots counted, presumably even from Kern County, which encompasses Bakersfield, where leftists were supposedly abundant. Yeah, it could flip. But it might not.

Same deal in California’s 25th, where Republican Mike Garcia leads Democrat Kristy Smith by 104 votes, a technical tie with 99% of the vote in, and a few hundred more to be counted. The district encompasses places like Simi Valley, home of the Reagan Library, parts of Ventura County and Santa Clarita, which are prosperous places with adjacent right-wing back boonies, and far from solidly blue places.

Trump Adds Sidney Powell to Election Legal Effort Ivan Pentchoukov

http://www.theepochtimes.com/trump-adds-sidney-powell-to-election-legal-effort_3579347.html

President Donald Trump on Saturday night announced the addition of Sidney Powell to his campaign’s election legal team.

Powell gained the national spotlight when she took over as the defense attorney representing former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn.

The president also said Joseph diGenova, Victoria Toensing, and Jenna Ellis have joined the legal team led by his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani.

“I look forward to Mayor Giuliani spearheading the legal effort to defend OUR RIGHT to FREE and FAIR ELECTIONS! Rudy Giuliani, Joseph diGenova, Victoria Toensing, Sidney Powell, and Jenna Ellis, a truly great team, added to our other wonderful lawyers and representatives!” Trump wrote on Twitter.

Powell engineered a stunning comeback in the Flynn case. Since she took over the case, the Department of Justice moved to drop the charges against Flynn. A federal judge has yet to rule on the request.

Powell responded to Trump’s announcement by tweeting the hashtag #ReleaseTheKraken.

According to conservative radio show host Mark Levin, scores of attorneys are volunteering to aid Trump’s legal effort.

The Dangers of Historical Revisionism Ginette Weiner

https://combatantisemitism.org/special-features/the-dangers-of-historical-revisionism/

In this original op-ed, Ginette Weiner explores the dangers of mainstream media downplaying the severity of historical anti-Semitism. The author is a member of the CAM Contributor Network. 

The NY Times has now exceeded their previous depths of All the Lies, All the Time, and managed to accomplish two feats at once: revictimizing the murdered Jews of the Holocaust, and issuing a blueprint for future genocide.  “The Times described a notorious partnership between Nazi Germany and an antisemitic leader, Husseini, as a collaboration that targeted “Zionism,” as opposed to Jews. The claim, which appears in the Oct. 6 story “Saudi Prince Accuses Palestinian Leaders of Failing Palestinians” by Isabel Kershner and Ben Hubbard, whitewashes the antisemitism of both the Nazis and their Palestinian ally, Amin al-Husseini, and downplays the nature and extent of their alliance.  Both al-Husseini and the Nazis were rabidly antisemitic, and both were motivated in their collaboration by that antisemitism. To be anti-Zionist as well as antisemitic does nothing to erase or override the antisemitism, and in fact is perfectly consistent with it.”

Al-Husseini called on his followers to enact Islamic Koran’s calls to “Kill the Jews wherever you find them.”  Nazi official Wilhelm Melchers, “the mufti was an accomplished foe of the Jews, did not conceal that he would love to see all of them liquidated.”  In his book on Nazi propaganda in the Arab world, Herf describes al-Husseini’s “intense hatred of Jews, who “lived like a sponge among peoples, sucked their blood, seized their property, undermined their morals,” and so on. Jews had “tormented the world for ages” and were “the enemy of the Arabs and of Islam since its emergence.”  The United States Holocaust Museum, “Husseini is a vicious antisemite and actively supportive of Nazi Germany’s efforts to annihilate world Jewry.”  Yad Vashem, ‘The mufti loaned his support’ to the ‘Final Solution.’ “Haj Amin Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem (and uncle of Yasser Arafat) took refuge in Berlin in World War II. A rabid Nazi, he personally lobbied Hitler to kill as many Jews as possible and even helped out by recruiting Bosnian Muslims to serve in the Waffen SS.“

Biden’s Media Campaign By Charles C. W. Cooke

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/11/30/bidens-media-campaign/#slide-1

In which the media were the campaign.

It is often said that a free press is necessary to the maintenance of a free republic. It is less frequently said that, in order for this to be true, that press must be both virtuous and useful. The American press is certainly free — freer than any press has ever been in the history of the human race, in fact — but it is not virtuous and it is not useful. Until it changes, it will continue to invite the mistrust and opprobrium to which it has of late become accustomed. As for the free republic . . . well, we’ll see.

It is no great overstatement to say that, in the 2020 presidential election, the media did not so much cover the Biden campaign as they were the Biden campaign. What, had they been officially charged with that task, would they have done differently? During the last year, major outlets such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Atlantic, and NPR got into the habit of prominently featuring any news that could plausibly hurt President Trump while assiduously refusing to run stories that might have hurt Joe Biden. Thus it was that the story about Hunter Biden’s exploits in China was smothered without any good explanation other than that it might serve as a “distraction” (well, yes) and that it could possibly be a plot, while a relatively inexplosive New York Times story about President Trump’s taxes was blasted out with abandon. Thus it was that the coronavirus was deemed to be simultaneously so lethal as to warrant the shutting down of Trump’s campaign rallies and so benign as to have no effect through mass protests. Thus it was that a fairly dull Tom Cotton piece arguing for the deployment of the military to help quell riots was deemed too radical for a New York Times opinion page that had recently invited contributions from Vladimir Putin and the Taliban, and would later run a submission from an anti-democracy apparatchik of the Chinese Communist Party, and that had run a piece by Charles Blow arguing that “white women” liked to “use themselves as instruments of terror,” there being “too many noosed necks, charred bodies and drowned souls for them to deny knowing precisely what they are doing.”

Dominion Machines Cover Millions of Voters, But Watch How Easy It Is To Rig One of Them

https://www.westernjournal.com/dominion-machines-cover-millions-voters-watch

The credibility and accuracy of a major supplier of voting equipment are now in question after a chaotic election, with a disastrous resurfaced video only heaping fuel on the fire.

Despite a flurry of fact checks from the establishment media jumping to defend Dominion Voting Systems, the world was shown years ago how easily manipulated the company’s machines are.

When the New York Times posted their 2018 expose on the faults in our election infrastructure, the nation was at the height of the Russian collusion conspiracy theory.

Naturally, the Times piece, “I Hacked an Election. So Can the Russians,” focused more on what foreign actors could do. To demonstrate the potential harm, computer scientist Alex Halderman rigged an informal election.

Putting up an Accuvote TSX machine (manufactured by Dominion, according to Verified Voting) at the University of Michigan, Halderman asked students which was the greater university — their school, or its rival, Ohio State.

MORE HEADLINES NOVEMBER 15, 2020

Massive Crowds March in DC to Show Support for Trump, Demand Election Integrity 
https://www.theepochtimes.com/massive-crowds-of-people-march-in-dc-to-show-support-for-trump-demand-election-integrity_3578923.html
Pro-Trump Rally in Washington, DC; MAGA MARCH
 https://thejewishvoice.com/2020/11/pro-trump-rally-in-washington-dc-live-stream/

Antifa, Black Lives Matter Linked to Violence Against Trump Supporters in Washington
 https://www.theepochtimes.com/antifa-black-lives-matter-linked-to-violence-against-trump-supporters-in-washington_3579249.html?utm_source=newsnoe&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=breaking-2020-11-14-4
WATCH: Antifa Accosts Women, Children, Elderly, and Restaurant-Goers After MAGA March 
https://www.breitbart.com/border/2020/11/14/watch-antifa-accosts-women-children-elderly-and-restaurant-goers-after-maga-march/ 
Trump blasts ‘ANTIFA SCUM,’ media after violence mars MAGA marches in DC 
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/violence-maga-march-dc-antifa-blm-counterprotesters
Media shames Trump challenging election results after giving credence to Al Gore’s battle in 2000, video shows 
https://www.foxnews.com/media/media-trump-challenging-election-al-gores-2000-video
POPE PLAYS ANTI-TRUMP CARD, BLESSES BIDEN 
HTTPS://WWW.CHURCHMILITANT.COM/NEWS/ARTICLE/TRUMP-HATING-POPE-PUFFS-JOE-BIDEN
The Whistleblowers Against Electoral Fraud are Emerging 
https://townhall.com/columnists/gavinwax/2020/11/14/the-whistleblowers-against-electoral-fraud-are-emerging-n2580084?
It’s Happening: MIT Scientist Offers President Trump Proof that Computer Algorithm Likely Transferred 69,000 Votes from Trump to Joe Biden in Michigan 
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/11/happening-mit-scientist-offer-president-trump-proof-computer-algorithm-likely-transferred-69000-votes-trump-joe-biden-michigan/
Flashback: Democrats Warned of Voting Machines ‘Switching’ Votes Last Year 
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2020/11/13/flashback-democrats-warned-of-voting-machines-switching-votes-last-year-n1143044

The Empire Strikes Back, But MAGA Will Strike Harder Never bet against Donald Trump or his supporters. By Roger Kimball

https://amgreatness.com/2020/11/14/the-empire-strikes-back-but-maga-will-strike-h arder/

I’ve written many times that I thought Donald Trump would win the 2020 election. The question always was whether he would win it beyond the margin of fraud and litigation. 

Did he? It’s touch and go. Television networks and even some foreign heads of state tell us Joe Biden won the election. The electors have yet to be appointed and meet to vote. Still, the forces arrayed against Trump are formidable. It’s not just, as Joe Biden bragged, that the Democrats had put together “the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics.” That does appear to have been the case. 

But if Donald Trump loses, it won’t only be because of that “extensive and inclusive” organization. Perhaps more important is the ambient jelly in which that organization has operated. I mean the eructations of the swamp, or to give it a more cinematic name, “The Empire.” 

Children in the United States are (or at least they used to be) told that in America, anyone can become president. 

Of course, that has never really been true. At any given time, there are plenty of people who, for various reasons, could never become president. But the pleasing story did name a sort of half-truth that was also an ideal, an ideal that revolved around the effort to maintain a society that rewarded talent, ambition, and hard work more than it valued wealth, connections, or pedigree. 

Donald Trump put that ideal to the test. The test failed. 

Trump was the first candidate since Andrew Jackson really to challenge the dominant narrative. Trump was rich, which is a plus for candidates these days. But he came not just from the wrong sort of family, but also from the wrong consensus, the wrong universe of opinion and sentiment. 

It was not so much his particular policies that were at issue. It was rather what he himself represented. Some people have banged on and on about Trump’s “character,” which they said was a bad character. But I do not believe that his character was ever really the issue. The issue was that he represented an existential threat to the governing consensus. 

This consensus is not fundamentally Democratic or Republican. It is not really even left-wing or conservative. John Fonte came close to identifying it with his phrase “transnational progressivism.” The “transnational” part was just as important as the “progressive” element, not least because the definition of “progressive” is always a mutable and hungry thing. Yesterday’s progressive ideas routinely become tomorrow’s reactionary throwbacks because the critical thing is not specific policies but specific attitudes. 

The US Elections: An Episode in a Cultural War by Amir Taheri

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16761/us-elections-cultural-war

“If this election was about an attempt at ditching the American narrative, it failed. But the cultural war is far from over.”

Now, however, that narrative is challenged by a good segment of the American elite, especially in academia and media, in favor of a new narrative that replaces heroism with victimhood. In that narrative you must show that you or your ancestors have somehow suffered, granting you the status of a victim deserving empathy, apology and compensation from “the system.”

With the confederacy of minorities in mind, he [Biden] promised to protect and advance community rights, while forgetting that human rights, as spelled out in the Bill of Rights and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, also largely an American product, are individual not collective rights.

For more than a century, America offered the world a different socio-politico-economic model, implicitly trying to make others like itself…. The classical American model remains the most attractive around the world. The irony, however, is that the model in question is being challenged inside the US itself. Rather than wanting to make others like the US, a growing segment of US establishment wants to make the US like others, notably European social democratic models.

Although we don’t yet know the denouement of last week’s election in the United States, one thing is already clear: this was an exceptional event in America’s more than 200-year-old democracy.

To start with, this was the first time that the election was not fought within the rules of the traditional two-party system. The Republican Party offered no manifesto or program, allowing the exercise to become a duel between President Donald J Trump and his opponents. That, in turn, gave the election a personal aspect never seen before. The Democratic Party did offer a program, but mostly to furnish the vacuum — a program half of which canceled the other half. The party’s presidential candidate, Joe Biden, claimed he had a secret plan to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic but mostly campaigned as anti-Trump and attracted support from diverse sectors largely on that basis.

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks

All of us at Gatestone Institute mourn the untimely passing of Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks. He was an intellectual and spiritual giant of our generation and beyond. His reach was global and his message was for all faiths. He believed passionately in the Dignity of Difference and was the moral voice of our time.

Gatestone was immensely privileged to have hosted Rabbi Lord Sacks recently at its Zoom event on September 17th of this year. We did not know then that this would be his final speaking event anywhere. In tribute to his memory we invite you to listen here to his inspiring and meaningful last interview on his recently published book “Morality”.

His passing is an immeasurable loss. We will all miss his knowledge, his insight, and his deeply held belief that together we could all strive, in his words “to heal a fractured world”.

May his memory be a blessing.

Britain: Two-Stepping Toward Totalitarianism by Andrew Ash

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16762/britain-totalitarianism

It has become an almost daily occurrence to find news stories of parents being ‘called out’ by their newly politicised children for expressing on social media ‘wrong’, ‘unwoke’ views, or of people being fired for something they may or may not have said years ago.

This sense of entitlement has come to characterise a group whose younger demographic seem to have no comprehension of the horrors of a war — or indeed, of many authentic hardships — in their own relatively comfortable lives.

This lack of respect for, or understanding of, history, along with an apparent need to invent, import, or re-animate grievances from the past, then lead these protestors to advocate inflicting what they decide is the appropriate revenge for a grievance on people who have had no part in causing it.

Tolerance is to be expected only from others…. One man’s freedom, it seems, has become another man’s cause for resentment.

The protestors’ dismissal of British heritage, a bid to ‘cancel’ history, appears a threat to the nation. We supposedly have nothing to be proud of. Our achievements have presumably been little more than the spoils of an evil, bigoted patriarchal system. These malcontents, by pledging allegiance to the Marxist architects of that narrative, not only insult the memory of those who have fought and died for the freedoms we now take for granted; they are also two-stepping towards totalitarianism.