Displaying posts published in

June 2021

Deprogramming of January 6 Defendants Is Underway The entire investigation is an attempt to prosecute people based on their beliefs. Those who purge their views and admit their wrongthink will be given mercy. Those who don’t will pay dearly. By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/23/deprogramming-of-january-6-defendants-is-underway/

“My lawyer has given me names of books and movies to help me see what life is like for others in our country. I’ve learned that even though we live in a wonderful country things still need to improve. People of all colors should feel as safe as I do to walk down the street.”

That passage is part book report, part white privilege mea culpa submitted to a federal court this month by Anna Morgan-Lloyd, one of the more than 500 Americans arrested for her involvement in the events at the U.S. Capitol on January 6. The 49-year-old grandmother of five from southern Indiana was charged with four counts of trespassing and disorderly conduct even though she walked through an open door and was inside the building for about five minutes. She was ratted out to the FBI by a county worker who saw her January 6 posts on Facebook.

On Wednesday, Lloyd, who has a clean criminal record, pleaded guilty to one count of “parading, demonstrating, or picketing in a Capitol building”—but not before she consented to undergo a reeducation exercise at the urging of her court-appointed lawyer. (Like many January 6 defendants, Lloyd does not have the means to hire a private attorney.)

It’s safe to say Heather Shaner, a D.C.-based criminal defense attorney representing a handful of January 6 protesters, does not share the political beliefs of her Capitol clients, which is why she’s forcing them to read books and watch movies highlighting dark chapters in U.S. history.

In an interview with Huffington Post, Shaner explained her belief that “this is the most wonderful country in the world, it’s been great for all kinds of immigrant groups, except for the fact that it was born of genocide of the Native Americans and the enslavement of people.” 

Shaner’s legal captives are learning the hard way what the government will do when one resists their commands to comply. Not only have their personal lives been shattered, finances depleted, and reputations destroyed by an abusive Justice Department investigation, Shaner’s clients must be indoctrinated with leftist propaganda about America’s alleged systemic racism.

The purge of the populist mindset is underway, courtesy of the fetid Beltway judicial system and the Joe Biden regime. Judges routinely lecture January 6 defendants about the wrongthink of a “stolen election” while prosecutors openly mock their political beliefs, including home schooling and gun ownership.

“I have had many political and ethical discussions with Anna Lloyd,” Shaner wrote in her motion agreeing to the plea and probation for Lloyd. “I tendered a booklist to her. She has read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Just Mercy, and Schindler’s List to educate herself about ‘government policy’ toward Native Americans, African Americans and European Jews. We have discussed the books and also about the responsibility of an individual when confronting ‘wrong.’”

Shaner also told the court that Lloyd watched the “Burning Tulsa” documentary on the History Channel as well as “Mudbound,” a story of two families, one black and one white, living on the same property after World War II.

The Palestinian Jihad Summer Camps by Khaled Abu Toameh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17490/palestinian-summer-camp

As the international community seeks ways to help the residents of the Gaza Strip after the recent war between Israel and Hamas… and PIJ are diverting their budgets to training children to become soldiers in the war to destroy Israel.

Palestinian Islamic Jihad confirms that… the Palestinians “are preparing the liberation generation for the ‘great liberation’ battle for this blessed land.”

They have enough funds to launch camps to brainwash and indoctrinate their own children, but are not prepared to invest in rebuilding homes that were destroyed or damaged during the last Israel-Hamas war.

For Hamas and PIJ, the ambition to destroy Israel is evidently stronger than the desire to protect the lives of their children and raise them to become, say, doctors or engineers. The children who are now undergoing military training in the Gaza Strip will soon appear as masked men in the armed groups of Hamas and PIJ.

This bodes rather ill for the Biden administration’s talk about a “two-state solution” and the need to revive the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians.

As the international community seeks ways to help the residents of the Gaza Strip after the recent war between Israel and Hamas, the leaders of the Palestinians are busy preparing the next generation for more hate and violence.

The two major Palestinian groups controlling the Gaza Strip, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), recently launched campaigns to recruit thousands of Palestinian children and teenagers to their own summer camps.

The young recruits are not going to be taught how to swim or play soccer. They are not going to be part of a Palestinian Cub Scouts.

Instead, the goal of the camps, according to Hamas and PIJ, is “to ignite the flame of jihad [holy war] among the generation of liberation, instill Islamic values and prepare the next triumphant army for the liberation of Palestine.”

The camps, run by the armed wings of Hamas and PIJ, Izaddin al-Qassam Brigades and Al-Quds Brigades, are being held under the banners “Sword of Jerusalem” and “Vanguards of Liberation.”

Why Are They Woke? The systemic con behind wokeism. By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/23/why-are-they-woke/

There are lots of reasons why wokeism spread like wildfire once America lost its collective mind during the pandemic, quarantine, self-induced recession, and rioting of 2020. 

Wokeism was never really about racism, sexism, or other -isms. Instead, for some, it illustrated a psychological pathology of projection: fobbing one’s own concrete prejudices onto others in order to alleviate or mask them. 

So should we laugh or cry that Black Lives Matter’s self-described Marxist co-founder turns out to be a corporate grifter? Patrisse Cullors has accumulated several upscale homes and is under investigation by the IRS for allegations of the misuse of funds from one of her foundations.

Is it the case that the more Cullors professes Marxist ideology and damns toxic whiteness, so all the more she feels at home living in a $1.4 million Topanga Canyon home, in an almost exclusively ritzy white neighborhood?

Consider outspoken liberal icon Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.). He’s one of the Senate’s most woke. Yet Whitehouse turns out to be a mostly unapologetic member of a de facto all-white prestigious “beach club” of elites in Newport, Rhode Island. Is Whitehouse committed in the abstract to rooting out white privilege so he can concretely relax amid it with fellow bluebloods?

Barack and Michelle Obama occasionally venture out of either their multimillion-dollar Washington, D.C. mansion or their Martha’s Vineyard estate to lecture the country on its systemic racism. They express worry over the dangers that apparently white people pose to the very safety of their own daughters.

The ‘Party of Science’ Can’t Do Math The Maricopa County election audit is necessary and there’s no legitimate logical reason for anyone to oppose it.  By Dylan Johnson

https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/23/the-party-of-science-cant-do-math/

The Democrats can pretend to be the “party of science” but one thing is for sure: they are definitely not the party of math.

The 2020 election has been and likely will continue to be a point of great contention among Americans in all 50 states. Even as a young American born during the Clinton Administration, I’ve noticed a skyrocketing spike in partisan strife between ordinary Americans. 

In the past few years alone, we’ve watched the media become ever more vicious, the politicians markedly more brazen, and the political ruling class dangerously more corrupt.

We are told to believe that Joe Biden received 81 million votes—the most in history—while winning only 509 counties across the country—the fewest in history.

Millions of Americans not only have concerns about election integrity but have also developed the conviction that America is no longer governed “by the people” and instead is governed by political power brokers.

We are told to believe that for only the second time since 1952, and that for the first time in nearly 25 years, a Democratic candidate for president won Arizona and did so by a margin of roughly 10,000 votes statewide.

In response, a small group of courageous leaders in the Arizona State Senate did the responsible thing: they asked for an independent forensic audit of their own election to ensure that this apparent, sudden, and drastic change was actually one called for by the people of Arizona. 

It’s Outright War on Conservatives By Janet Levy

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/06/its_outright_war_on_conservatives.html

Last November, the now-defunct Trump Accountability Project, linked to former Democratic National Committee press secretary Hari Sevugan, bruited its plan to blacklist those who worked for the Trump administration.  Sevugan tweeted, “Employers considering them should know that there are consequences for hiring anyone who helped Trump attack American values.  Find out how at the Trump Accountability Project.” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (Dem-NY) too called for devising lists of Trump supporters for punishment and ostracism. The rhetoric reeked of a witch-hunt to name and shame anyone linked to the former president.

Now that the Biden administration is securely ensconced in the White House, the blatant malice has been toned down with disingenuous calls for unity. But there’s persistent targeting of “unwoke” conservatives — in fact, of anyone not aligned with the hate America script of social justice warriors. In this the Biden administration has been active. There are several recent instances that highlight a hypocritical progressive agenda to enforce groupthink and extinguish critical and independent thinking.

In May, the IRS denied 501(c)(3) status to Christians Engaged, a Texas-based prayer group that encourages members to pray for the country and its elected officials, motivates citizens to vote for cultural impact, and campaigns for preserving our constitutional republic. The group endeavors to integrate civic involvement as part of religious practice but does not promote any party or candidate. However, in his official letter denying tax-exemption, Stephen A. Martin, the IRS’s director of exempt organizations, clearly implies that biblical values are exclusively Republican. He wrote: “While you educate voters on what the Bible says about issues, your educational activities are not neutral. The topics typically are affiliated with distinct candidates and specific political party [Republican] platforms.”

The First Liberty Institute, a Christian legal organization, is appealing the IRS decision as discriminatory. It argues that there is no requirement that organizations must be neutral on public policy issues, and that just because there is some overlap between the views of Christians Engaged and the Republican party, the IRS cannot conclude that the organization serves private interests. The IRS decision amounts to a violation of the free speech, free exercise, and free establishment clauses of the First Amendment. Declaring biblical teachings as exclusively Republican is the slippery slope that could lead to future discrimination against Christian organizations and even churches.

Suppressing and Punishing Speech to Fight ‘Racism’ in Public Schools Those who begin eliminating dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Richard L. Cravatts

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/suppressing-and-punishing-speech-fight-racism-richard-l-cravatts/

Even before the death of George Floyd under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer, universities had demonstrated that they were in thrall with an obsession about racism and racial equity. Diversocrats in bloated fiefdoms of equity, diversity, and inclusion diligently indoctrinated so-called marginalized students on how to be victims and oppressed, and whole systems were set up to monitor the behavior of potential racists and punish them for their transgressions.

At the University of San Diego’s Law School, for example, members of the Black Law Students Association, in order to confront “the oppression that is inextricably linked to [their] Blackness,” demanded that the law school “develop a classroom diversity officer position tasked with observing classroom practices and reporting questionable conduct within the classroom to the administration” so that perpetrators could be censured and punished.

At Princeton, several hundred faculty members published a letter to the administration in which they asked that the University form “a committee composed entirely of faculty that would oversee the investigation and discipline of racist behaviors, incidents, research, and publication on the part of faculty . .  ,” overlooking the fact that what they were calling for was a veritable star chamber in which a handful of virtue-signaling, race-obsessed faculty would use their own bias and subjectivity to vet the research and teaching of fellow faculty and decide which viewpoints would be permitted and which, henceforth, would not (and would potentially even be punished)—a blatant violation of both the spirit and intent of academic freedom.

That same desire to ferret out any racist thought or bias which might injure or make uncomfortable a member of an identity group has seeped into public schools, as well, along with the impulse to censure and punish any staff or students who violate the overly-broad strictures of conversations about race, culture, and politics.

In Chicago, for example, where out of nearly 1,500 shooting victims so far in 2021, over fifty were 15 or younger, at least school-aged children will not be threatened by racism and bias on the part of their school peers now that they can identity and report bigotry in their schools. The formal program, “Transforming Bias-Based Harm,” promotes some of the insidious aspects of now-typical diversity and inclusion campaigns, including finding racism where it is almost imperceptible: implicit or unconscious bias and microaggressions. Students will be able to report the misbehavior of fellow students, including “everyday verbal, nonverbal, and environmental slights, snubs, or insults, whether intentional or unintentional,” directly through the Chicago Public Schools website, and perpetrators are potentially subject to being punished for their unacceptable speech. 

Chairman Milley Degrades, Divides and Politicizes the Military Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/06/chairman-milley-degrades-divides-and-politicizes-daniel-greenfield/

General Milley of the Joint Chiefs of Staff turned in a performance that was part gaslighting and part humiliating theater. 

It’s hard to imagine how his part in the hearing could have gone any worse than defending the imposition of critical race theory by arguing, “I’ve read Mao Zedong. I’ve read Karl Marx. I’ve read Lenin. That doesn’t make me a communist.”

The military does not, as of yet, conduct Communist indoctrination sessions. And while officers might have read Mao and Lenin, they weren’t being told to read it because it was “on the right side of history”.

As I said, yet. At the rate we’re going it may only be a matter of time.

Learning from the enemy is very different than becoming the enemy. Indoctrinating personnel with critical race theory is not studying the enemy. It’s trying to convince our men and women that America is the enemy.

Milley made that point quite well when he protested, “I want to understand white rage. And I’m white,”

Is Milley suffering from white rage? Does rage have a color? And is diving America around such cheap race-baiting tactics strengthening or weakening the military? Milley knows the answer, but he also knows, like so many other figures in this career space, that he has to parrot the party line if he wants to have a future. And national security is a small price to pay for his career.

The Anti-Trump Verbal Preemptive Cringe Conservative pundits might do well not taking their cues from Democrat elites. Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/anti-trump-verbal-preemptive-cringe-b

Even conservative commentators who are not afflicted with terminal Trump Derangement Syndrome are compelled to drag Trump into their writing and criticize him in order to preempt any suspicion that their comments critical of progressives show support for the hated ex-president.

This verbal preemptive cringe is a way for members of the bipartisan political guild to signal their virtue and assure progressives that they’re not one of those knuckle-dragging “deplorable” Trump supporters. In doing so, they remind Trump voters why they supported him in the first place: He cut through all the class-signaling politesse and specious “norms” the cognitive elite use to advertise their superiority.

A good example can be found in a commentary from Lance Morrow in the Wall Street Journal. Much of the piece is a spot-on dissection of the progressive class-hatred of conservatives in general and Donald Trump’s supporters in particular. His portrait of these plutocrat progressives is worth quoting:

In their voices, you hear a throb of opulent hysteria—an ostentatious despair, the boutique self-pity of the privileged. Hating Mr. Trump and his followers dramatizes one’s own virtue. It makes elites feel good about themselves in the way, classically, that poor whites in the South were able to feel better about their own lot by despising and discriminating against black people. Progressives think that hating not only Mr. Trump but all conservatives settles their debts and cleanses them of sin. It gives them a certain moral luster.

But immediately there follows the preemptive cringe, the reflexive criticism of Trump lest Morrow’s fellow cognitive elites interpret those prior remarks as support for him:

Mr. Trump is to blame for much of this. Character is destiny, and Mr. Trump was quite a character. He gave his enemies the gift of Jan. 6. He played peek-a-boo with forbidden thoughts. He tossed cherry bombs at the Constitution to see if he could give it a scare. Whatever else one may say about Jan. 6, it was one of the stupidest afternoons in American history.

Democrats Get an Anti-Leftist Wake-Up Call from New York By John Fund

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/democrats-get-an-anti-leftist-wake-up-call-from-new-york/

President Biden gave a speech this afternoon on the rising crime rate. Even the White House admits that in recent months “homicides rose 30 percent and gun assaults rose 8 percent in large cities.”

The timing is politically significant given the results of Tuesday’s New York City mayor’s primary. Crime and the Loony Left’s agenda were dominant issues.

Brooklyn Borough president Eric Adams, who spent 22 years as a cop, currently has a ten-point lead in the Democratic primary. Outstanding absentee ballots and NYC’s bizarre ranked-choice voting system will delay a final count until mid July. But Adams is the prohibitive favorite to win. Nathaniel Rakich at FiveThirtyEight says that Adams can start “measuring the drapes” at City Hall.

If he wins, it will be because he ran full tilt against defunding the police.

Starting in 1994, smarter policing under Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg made New York the safest big city in America. Those gains eroded under Mayor Bill de Blasio and accelerated last year with his weak response to riots, the elimination of bail, and the demonizing of the NYPD.

Adams ran full tilt against the leftist agenda of Wiley, a de Blasio appointee who is now in second place in the vote count.  He attacked her for wanting to slash NYPD’s budget and being open to the idea of taking their guns away.

He also called for lifting the cap on charter schools so the half of New York City students who fail basic proficiency tests would have a chance at a better education. He vowed to make better use of a law to get the mentally ill homeless to take the medications they need. He clashed with Governor Andrew Cuomo over how fast to end the city’s lockdown and get people back to work.

What Was Kamala Harris Thinking? By Jim Geraghty

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/what-was-kamala-harris-thinking/

Vice President Kamala Harris “clearly thinks she’s ‘winning’ something by refusing to [visit the border],” I noted at the end of today’s Morning Jolt. “What she thinks she’s winning is anybody’s guess.”

This afternoon brings word that Harris will indeed travel to the border, 91 days after President Biden appointed Harris to “lead efforts to stem migration across the U.S.–Mexico border.” Many Democrats have disputed the characterization of Harris as the “border czar.” But Biden himself said this, referring to her role on this issue: “I’ve asked her, the VP, today — because she’s the most qualified person to do it — to lead our efforts with Mexico and the Northern Triangle and the countries that help — are going to need help in stemming the movement of so many folks, stemming the migration to our southern border.”

Would Harris have gotten some bad press by visiting the border three months ago? Sure, but it would have been one bad news cycle. White Houses get those all the time, and they survive them all the time. By waiting, Harris ensured that Republicans could bring it up over and over again, while also ensuring she would get asked about it and have awkward moments like her giggling, “I haven’t been to Europe, either. I don’t know what you’re getting at,” in response to NBC News’s Lester Holt. Now, when Harris visits, Republicans will point out, accurately, that U.S. Customs and Border Protection have had three straight months of border captures that are the worst in 20 years. With four months to go, it’s already the worst year since 2006.

To avoid one bad news cycle, Harris accepted three months of bad press.

And we’re left wondering: Just why the heck was Harris so reluctant to visit the border? It certainly isn’t a blanket administration opposition to photo opportunities, or else the president wouldn’t visit an Alexandria rock-climbing facility and joke about scaling a 60-foot wall. It’s become almost cliché in conservative media to say that Harris has bad political instincts, but I think that understates just how much she chooses to make avoidable mistakes.

It’s possible that for three straight months, Harris assumed that the following week or month would bring better news and signs that the waves of migrants are abating. If that’s the case, it’s not encouraging, because it suggests the administration’s policies and messaging will work any day now, despite all the counter-evidence.