Displaying posts published in

January 2021

The Conservative Purge Isn’t Over, It’s Just Getting Cranked Up

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/01/25/the-conservative-purge-isnt-over-its-just-getting-cranked-up/

Not quite two weeks ago we noted that Big Tech was settling the family business with its suspensions, bans, and deletions of then-President Donald Trump and as many of his supporters as it could pull into its dragnet. It was only a start. The left wants to wipe the right from the political map as quickly and effectively as possible.

Playing the role this week of Michael Corleone, who in the first of “The Godfather” installments eliminated his families’ enemies, is the Democratic Party. Congressional Democrats are going forward, with the blessing of the new president, whose plea for unity is clearly a sham, with a domestic terrorism bill in both chambers of Congress.

The public is being told the legislation is needed to thwart “the potential threat of more terrorist attacks in Washington and around the country,” says Rep. Brad Schneider, an Illinois Democrat and co-sponsor of the House version. Among other co-sponsors is Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., who in July denied that Antifa, which was wrecking Portland at the time, even existed.

One lone Democrat stands out among this jihad, and, unfortunately, she’s no longer in Congress. Former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii told Fox News on Friday that should the bill become law, it would undermine “our civil liberties, our freedoms in our Constitution,” while “targeting of almost half of the country.” That half being a collection of Trump supporters, conservatives, Christians, and anyone who refuses to go along with the Democrats’ legislative agenda, surrender to Black Lives Matter intimidation, and yield to the dominant narrative.

Are the Republican NeverTrumpers Happy Now? How are “principles” and “democratic norms” served by aiding the Democrats in reversing Trump’s successes? Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/01/are-republican-nevertrumpers-happy-now-bruce-thornton/

In less than a week Joe Biden has issued a slew of executive orders rolling back many of Donald Trump’s orders that returned some sanity to our country after the Obama-era policies weakened us at home and abroad. Soon we also will see attempts to undo Trump’s positive achievements in reviving a sluggish economy and restoring America’s credibility as a great power other powers may not like, but definitely had to respect.

Are you happy now, Republican NeverTrumpers, that your orange bête noir demonized for his scorn for your managerial elite protocols and “norms” has been driven from the Republican, Inc. country club?

Take Biden’s return to the Paris Climate Accords, a globalist orgy of virtue-signaling by Western nations, and serial grifting by China, the world’s largest emitter of CO2 who isn’t required to do anything but make promises. Three decades of such gab-fests have not achieved as much as the fracking revolution did in reducing emissions. So of course, Biden has forbidden fracking and oil development on federal lands, thus ending the economic boon of cheap energy and good jobs at home, and geopolitical leverage abroad that come from being the world’s largest producer of oil.

Compounding that blunder, he’s stopped construction on the Keystone pipeline, killing thousands of jobs and subjecting the environment to the risks of transporting oil with trucks and trains. And our ally Canada, none too pleased, will likely look for new markets to sell their oil–– perhaps to our geopolitical rival China. Why has Biden taken these self-wounding steps? Because upscale progressives aren’t comfortable with icky things like producing and transporting oil, which offend their Disneyfied natural world.

Snarky Celebs Give Melania a Hateful Sendoff Her heinous crime was to be married to the man who exposed the fathomless depths of leftist hate and hypocrisy. Mark Tapson

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/01/snarky-celebs-give-melania-hateful-sendoff-mark-tapson/

Remember those halcyon days of yesteryear when American comedians managed to poke fun at politicians on both sides of the aisle and make all Americans laugh together, instead of dividing us by mocking grotesque stereotypes of Americans in flyover country? Remember when late-night television was dominated by Johnny Carson, who managed to make clever quips about current events without descending into vicious snark aimed at half the country?

That is a distant memory, and our culture is immeasurably the worse for it. Now the Left enjoys total political domination in the field of entertainment, and late-night TV features a gaggle of uniformly leftist comedians/hosts who spent eight years refusing to mock Progressive Messiah Barack Obama, and the subsequent four years spewing increasingly angry nightly monologues about the Man Who Is Not Obama who occupied the White House until last week.

And not just Donald Trump, but his wife Melania as well, whom they despise because she is not Michelle Obama. In fact, The CBS Late Show, hosted by the eminently punchable and politically uninsightful Stephen Colbert, gave the First Lady an insulting musical sendoff Wednesday as she and her husband prepared to leave the White House.

Colbert’s comedy chops are only slightly less worthless than those of fellow propagandist/faux comedian Seth Myers from the NBC version of Colbert’s show, Late Night With Seth Myers. Myers, you may recall (but more likely not), is most notable as the unfunniest Saturday Night Live alumnus in the leftist propaganda outlet’s 45-year history.

Joe Biden and the crisis of the New World The Biden-supporting woke elites pose a graver threat to the American republic than Trump did.Brendan O’Neill

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/01/20/joe-biden-and-the-crisis-of-the-new-world/

America is saved. The republic has been rescued. The healing of the nation can begin now that authoritarian populism has been defeated and ‘the adults’ are back in charge. That’s the narrative swirling around the inauguration of Joe Biden today. It couldn’t be more wrong. The Biden-supporting woke elites pose a graver threat to the American republic, to its visionary founding ideals, than Donald Trump did. Behind the facade of today’s restoration of normalcy, the New World trembles.

The hyperbole has been cranked up to 10 ahead of today’s inauguration. America is talked about as if it were a patient recovering from a bout of madness. Trump was the disease, Biden is the cure. A CNN anchor described the lights running alongside the reflecting pool at the National Mall in Washington, DC as ‘extensions of Joe Biden’s arms embracing America’. British Labour Party politician Lisa Nandy is giddily celebrating the fact that a ‘woke guy’ and an ‘amazingly strong woman of colour’ – cringe – are now in the White House, providing a ‘source of hope’ to the world. Praise be!

One of the most common cries of the vast pro-Biden lobby is that ‘the adults’ are back in charge. You can even buy a Biden-Harris t-shirt that says ‘The Adults Have Arrived’. ‘Here come the adults’, says the New Republic. It cheers the fact that Biden and his Cabinet are all ‘experienced and non-controversial’ (boring?), meaning they can help to restore American democracy and heal a confused, divided world.

This metaphor of the adults re-entering the room is a revealing one. The vote for Trump in 2016, like the vote for Brexit in the UK in the same year, is clearly viewed by the managerial elites as a temper tantrum, an explosion of rage among overgrown children.

THE D.C. OCCUPATION WILL CONTINUE UNTIL DEMOCRACY IS SAVED: DANIEL GREENFIELD

http://www.danielgreenfield.org/2021/01/the-dc-occupation-will-continue-until.html?ut

On a cold, windy day with a small group of spectators watching from behind barbed wire, Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. swore another in a long series of false oaths before his motorcade passed between a long row of soldiers with their backs to him looking outward for threats.

No inauguration has been this empty in a century of American history. And at no inauguration have the spectators been outnumbered by a raw display of armed force. American presidents have been inaugurated in wartime and during actual national emergencies with a better turnout.

Through world wars and wars on terror, Washington D.C. has remained a national capital where the hundreds of millions of taxpayers who labor to pay for its grand edifices, free museums, and lavish lifestyles could briefly come to enjoy a little of the life lived by the ruling class in the Imperial City. Now the ruling class has made it clear that it doesn’t want peasants entering D.C.

Even as Biden’s team prepped the executive orders that would end the national emergency at the border and shut down construction of the wall, new walls topped by razor wire were rising across the imperial city. The new Fortress of Government sealed off two miles of the National Mall and parts of downtown D.C. and filled it with more soldiers than are deployed in Iraq.

It’s Happening Already: Joe Biden Calls a Lid Four Days Into Presidency By Matt Margolis

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2021/01/24/its-happening-already-joe-biden-calls-a-lid-four-days-into-presidency-n1407860

Joe Biden’s campaigning from his basement and frequent lids, where Biden was kept away from the media, were a common punchline in conservative media. “How can Joe run a campaign from his basement and hiding from the media?” “How can he be trusted to run the country if he can’t handle a campaign?”

Even when he did leave the basement he got questions about milkshakes. There were times when Joe Biden wouldn’t be seen for days. His campaign told us that it was because of debate prep, but no one actually believed it.

But the campaign is over now. Regardless of whether you believe Biden was legitimately elected, he has the job he applied for, the job we were told repeatedly by his campaign he was fit to handle. So it’s more than a bit concerning that on Saturday, a mere four days into his presidency, Kelly O’Donnell, the White House correspondent for NBC News, reported that the White House had called a lid, and Biden would not be seen in public for the rest of the day.

The Washington Post Just Proved How Desperate It Is to Be Kamala Harris’ Pravda By Tyler O’Neil,

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2021/01/24/the-washington-post-just-proved-how-desperate-it-is-to-be-kamala-harris-pravda-n1406583

The Washington Post attempted to throw an embarrassing story about now-Vice President Kamala Harris down the memory hole but reversed course after Reason and others exposed the paper’s attempt to become Kamala Harris’ personal Pravda. How embarrassing.

Back on July 23, 2019, when Harris was a lowly senator from California and one of the many 2020 Democratic candidates for president, the Post dared to run quotes from an unflattering interview. How impertinent!

In the original version of the article, Harris compared life amid the rigors of the campaign trail to living behind bars and pleading for food and water.

Here are the first seven paragraphs of the original article, written by Ben Terris and preserved by Reason‘s Eric Boehm:

It was the Fourth of July, Independence Day, and Kamala Harris was explaining to her sister, Maya, that campaigns are like prisons.

She’d been recounting how in the days before the Democratic debate in Miami life had actually slowed down to a manageable pace. Kamala, Maya and the rest of the team had spent three days prepping for that contest in a beach-facing hotel suite, where they closed the curtains to blot out the fun. But for all the hours of studying policy and practicing the zingers that would supercharge her candidacy, the trip allowed for a break in an otherwise all-encompassing schedule.

Biden’s return to the Paris accord is a gift to China

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/editorials/bidens-return-to-the-paris-accord-is-a-gift-to-china

President Biden’s decision to rejoin the Paris climate accord immediately delivered on a campaign promise, fulfilled a top priority of the Left, and delighted our European allies. But most of all, it was a gift to China.

Federal action to reduce the world growth of carbon emissions, particularly action as ineffective as that embodied in the Paris accord, should not be taken at the expense of U.S. citizens in relation to foreigners. Yet that is exactly what an immediate return to the Paris accord means. It commits the United States to reductions that will entangle American businesses and jobs in new lengths of red tape, and will also probably increase electricity prices.

Supporters of the Paris climate accord underplay or ignore these concerns. But it is a simple fact that renewable energy mandates have driven up household energy bills in states where they have been introduced. Democrats like to boast that they are lifting up struggling families, but this first step in their energy policies does nothing of the kind. Republicans should scrutinize Biden’s energy policies closely.

America has already reduced its carbon emissions significantly since the Paris accord was signed and has outstripped the achievements of its closest allies, which, on carbon emissions, mostly preach but do not practice. No international climate accord can work unless it considers seriously the emissions of the rapidly growing East. The Paris accord does nothing of the sort.

India emits roughly half as much carbon each year as the U.S. but will become a far worse polluter as its economy grows. China, which emits twice as much carbon each year as we do, has given the rest of the world nothing by empty promises and has been allowed to continue emitting greenhouse gases unabated.

Chinese dictator Xi Jinping says China will be carbon neutral by 2060. He is willing to discuss doing more in furtherance of what China calls “win-win” cooperation with the world. Yet there is a great divergence between Xi’s sweet words and what China’s communist-run government is actually doing — that is, bringing online hundreds of new and very dirty coal plants.

The Echo Chamber Era Trust in media is down, but if journalists don’t listen to critics anyway, why should they care? Matt Taibbi

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-echo-chamber-era

“It’s bad that trust in media is down, but even worse that so few in the business seem to think it’s a problem. ”

A day after Joe Biden’s inauguration, the headline in Axios read: “Trust in media hits a new low.” Felix Salmon wrote that “for the first time ever, fewer than half of all Americans have trust in traditional media.” The Edelman survey showed overall faith in the press dropping to 46%.

The traditional explanation for this phenomenon is that Republicans hate the press a lot, but Democrats just a little. The Axios story bore this out somewhat, as only 18% of Republicans reported trusting media, versus 57% of Democrats.

Still, 57% of half your potential audience is nothing to brag about, when you’re in the trust business. Other numbers, like 56% of respondents believing journalists are “purposely trying to mislead people,” or 58% thinking that “most news organizations are more concerned with supporting an ideology… than with informing the public” are more ominous.

Media critics who work in the corporate press, like Margaret Sullivan of the Washington Post, seem determined to look everywhere but inward for solutions. The dominant legend in our business is that if Republicans believe in fairy tales like Q and “Stop the Steal,” the traditional press can do nothing but stand its ground.

Sullivan’s reaction to at-times “embarrassing” Inauguration Day coverage was an injunction to reporters to resist the temptation to try to appear more balanced by showing “toughness” with regard to the incoming Biden regime. If anything, Sullivan said, the press should stand even taller in its opposition to red-state lie merchants like Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, “without fearing that they’d be called partisan.”

Mitch McConnell’s Lie 75 million Americans are watching all of this. And it is very, very safe to say they will not forget. Jeffrey Lord

https://thejeffreylord.com/mitch-mcconnells-lie/?

So, of course, one of the Establishment’s favorite media outlets put the news front and center. The headline in The Washington Post said this:

McConnell says Trump provoked mob; hearings underway for Biden nominees

The story began this way:

“Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) pointedly blamed President Trump on Tuesday for having ‘provoked’ the violent mob that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6.”

To be polite? This Trump-incited-riot business is bunk. Debunked bunk.

Where to start? How about with the timeline of events?

Over there at Conservative Review is this headline:

Timeline reveals Capitol Hill riot began 20 mins before end of Trump’s speech
The timeline shows that the violence at the Capitol building began 20 minutes before Trump finished his speech that Wednesday afternoon.

“The New York Times compiled video footage with timestamps to document nearly every moment of Jan. 6 siege of the Capitol building in Washington D.C.

The timeline shows that the violence at the Capitol building began 20 minutes before Trump finished his speech that Wednesday afternoon.

Roughly 20 minutes before the end of his speech is when scuffles began to break out between protesters and police on Capitol Hill, according to the NYT’s timeline.”