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May 2021

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The Capitol Riot Narrative Is Collapsing, but Its Political Exploitation Persists Ben Weingarten

By on May 25th, 2021

https://www.theepochtimes.com/the-capitol-riot-narrative-is-collapsing-but-its-political-exploitation-persists_3826065.html

Virtually the entire American ruling class has invested in a narrative that is collapsing—that what transpired at the Capitol on the afternoon of Jan. 6 represented a murderous, armed insurrection, posing a dire threat to the republic.

Yet, the exploitation of that single event to marginalize and malign up to half the country, in a slew of efforts that pose a threat to the liberty and justice of all, continues apace.

If the foundation of these efforts is crumbling, shouldn’t these efforts be called into question, too?

The events at the Capitol on Jan. 6 were inexcusable and disgraceful, and those who committed crimes ought to be punished to the fullest extent of the law. We settle differences in America by persuasion and reason, and abjure force and coercion—something many of those hyping Jan. 6 as a “domestic terrorist attack” only seem to believe when it suits their political interests.

But this isn’t the whole story of that day. While congressional demagogues and social media speech police claim otherwise, the sole person killed in the riot was an unarmed protester, shot by a Capitol cop. Not one of the more than 400 people charged in connection with the events stormed the building with a firearm. Most of those detained face glorified trespassing offenses.

Video footage indicates that some percentage of the protesters was allowed to waltz into the Capitol, and others, once inside, were permitted to remain there by police, seemingly in contradiction of what prosecutors have argued. Authorities are concealing more than 14,000 hours of additional footage concerning Jan. 6, breathtakingly using the same argument that Spygate participants used to conceal the whole truth about their machinations, that of national security.

The Capitol riot wasn’t on the level of the Civil War, as President Joe Biden has argued, 9/11 as he implied, nor Pearl Harbor, as then-Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer asserted.

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CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Is Biden’s inflated presidency about to burst? Matt Purple

By on May 25th, 2021

https://spectator.us/topic/inflated-presidency-about-burst-inflation/

Is President Joe Biden living up to expectations? It’s hard to say, since the expectations generated on his campaign trail were so murky. Biden made plenty of promises on the stump but only one thing was ever clear: he wasn’t Donald Trump. Beyond that, no one was really certain what iteration of Biden would enter the Oval Office on Inauguration Day. A pragmatic moderate or a progressive ideologue? A return-to-normal steady hand or a malarkey-scourging bomb thrower? The law-and-order author of the PATRIOT Act or the ‘Black Lives Matter’ anti-racist he suddenly morphed into last summer?

Biden was so defined by who he wasn’t that no one ever quite worked out who he was. Now we have our answer. Whatever moderation was once attributed to him has been quickly abandoned. The Keystone XL Pipeline has been canceled, the radical Equality Act has been endorsed, the Paris Climate Agreement has been rejoined. Most glaringly of all, one of the largest spending bills in American history has been signed into law, with promises of much, much more to com e. Most recently, Biden has been haggling with the GOP Congress over his proposed infrastructure package. He wants $2.3 trillion while the Republicans have said they could go as high as $800 billion and even raise the gas tax in order to pay for it.

It’s a stunning dynamic, both because the GOP once filleted Barack Obama for trying to pass a stimulus package of about that same size (though in 2008 dollars) and because of the even higher total that the president is demanding.

So who is Joe Biden? Right now, he’s the most fiscally irresponsible president in American history. Many on the left trace an unbroken thread from FDR to LBJ to Barack Obama, all progressive Democrats who took an activist approach to government and spent big money trying to solve big problems. Biden clearly views himself in this tradition rather than in the more conservative and restrained one of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.

Yet there’s more going on here than mere self-indulgent FDR LARPing. Biden is a product of a post-2008 Washington that increasingly feels no constraints on its ability to spend. With interest rates and inflation having remained low for over a decade, there haven’t been any serious consequences for eye-watering deficits and national debt. In retrospect, this has proven one of the most consequential political developments of the 21st century. It’s effectively dried up both the right’s fiscally conservative streak and the left’s erstwhile desire for ‘good government’. It’s thrashed the Tea Party, cemented a humongous federal bureaucracy, and led to the largest national debt since World War Two.

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FOREIGN POLICY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

My column: Move the 2022 Beijing Olympics or Shun Beijing By Lawrence J. Haas

By on May 25th, 2021

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/move-2022-beijing-olympics-or-shun-beijing-185776

“The politicization of sports will damage the spirit of the Olympic Charter and the interests of athletes from all countries,” a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman said recently about calls for the United States and other nations to boycott the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing over China’s human-rights abuses.

That’s a bit rich because, frankly, the Olympics are inherently political. Especially at times of global tension, the big powers and their allies compete for medals not just to showcase their athletes but to promote the political and economic systems under which they have trained. That was true in the 1930s, as the democracies competed against the fascist powers, and it was true during the Cold War, as the United States and its allies competed against the Soviet Union and its satellites.

Moreover, the international community and individual countries have restricted participation in the games for political reasons on numerous occasions. Germany and Japan, for instance, were not invited to the 1948 games due to their roles in World War II; South Africa was banned from 1964 all the way until 1992 over apartheid; Rhodesia was banned in 1972 amid controversy over its racist policies; Taiwan boycotted in 1980 after the International Olympic Committee (IOC) declared that mainland China would compete as “China” and asked Taiwan to compete as “Chinese Taipei.”

The “politicization” rises exponentially when a nation of sizable power and untoward practice plays host, as Hitler’s Germany did in 1936 and China is slated to do next February. At a time when Beijing is flexing its muscles in Asia and beyond while abusing human rights in ever-more brazen fashion, President Xi Jinping and his Communist Party surely will create a spectacle of self-congratulation from the opening ceremony onward, all to promote the wonders of China’s authoritarian system.

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