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January 2023

The Real Differences Between the Biden and Trump Troves One of these things is not like the other. By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2023/01/25/the-real-differences-between-the-biden-and-trump-troves/

Donald Trump for now certainly seems to have had more documents labeled classified at Mar-a-Lago in Florida than did Joe Biden at his various homes in Delaware. 

Yet otherwise, the comparisons between the two cases, contrary to popular punditry, hardly favor Biden. 

First, a stranger would face a far greater challenge entering a post-presidential Mar-a-Lago than a pre-presidential Joe Biden’s home, office, or garage—or who knows where?  

Secret service agents and private security were stationed at Mar-a-Lago. Prior to the 2020 presidential election they were not at citizen Biden’s various troves for most of 2017-2020 much less prior to 2009. 

Second, we seem to forget that for much of the developing controversy, Joe Biden’s own team was investigating Joe Biden. 

On the other hand, the Biden Administration’s Justice Department and the FBI were not just investigating Trump as an outside party, but as a former president—and possible 2024 presidential candidate and opponent of Biden himself. 

Remember, the narrative of the first Democratic impeachment of Donald Trump was the allegation that Trump had used his powers of the presidency to investigate Joe Biden and his family, a likely 2020 challenger to Trump’s reelection bid. 

Third, no one in a position of government authority had passed judgment on Joe Biden’s alleged security violations. 

That was not the case of the still alleged violations of Donald Trump. 

Another French Writer is Alarmed About the Future of France The bleak possibility of civil war? by Hugh Fitzgerald

https://www.frontpagemag.com/another-french-writer-is-alarmed-about-the-future-of-france/

Like Eric Zemmour, like Michel Houllebecq, the French writer and essayist Laurent Obertone is alarmed about the future of France. He sees the country as a likely victim of the Great Replacement. By this is meant the replacement of the indigenous Europeans by non-European migrants. More specifically, in France the worry is that the French will be demographically overwhelmed by millions of Muslim migrants and their large families. Laurent Obertone considers the bleak possibility of a civil war in France in an article from November 2022, but of course nothing has changed in the intervening months: “‘The more time passes, the less reversible the situation will be,’ says prominent author Laurent Obertone on risk of civil war in France,” by Olivier Bault, Remix News, November 17, 2022:

Renowned French author Laurent Obertone presents a bleak future of a France in conflict in his books, but he says that such a reality is not far from fiction.

An exclusive interview with French journalist, essayist, and novelist Laurent Obertone, author of the prophetic bestseller novel “Guerilla – The day everything went up in flames” (in French: “Guérilla – Le jour où tout s’embrasa”) and of several essays on the violent and totalitarian drift of French society (“La France Orange Mécanique” – Clockwork Orange France, “La France Big Brother” – Big Brother France, etc.). Following its big success in France, the novel “Guerilla” has also been translated into German, Italian, Hungarian, and Japanese, and will soon be published in Spanish.

Has Globalism Met Its Waterloo? An eight-point plan to assure its demise. by Scott S. Powell

https://www.frontpagemag.com/has-globalism-met-its-waterloo/

Wouldn’t it be great to make 2023 a turning point in the United States, after two years of spiraling degeneration and confusion under a Biden administration that has delivered a myriad of policies that have done much more harm than good for the American people? We have gone awry in large part because of the deceit and encroachment of the Deep State and globalists whose influence has weakened and neutered the Constitution and its legal protections of citizens’ rights and national sovereignty.

Among the most visible and influential globalist organizations is the World Economic Forum (WEF), which coincidentally just completed its annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. Reviewing the Biden administration’s policies and forward-looking priorities, it’s self-evident that there is a close correlation with the WEF agenda. For instance, consider: 

The Biden open border policy—resulting in an unprecedented number of illegal aliens, drugs, and human trafficking crossing our southern border—burdens taxpayers and weakens national sovereignty.
 Fear-mongering over CO2 emissions and the alleged related climate apocalypse has diminished America’s competitive advantage in oil and gas production while driving a greater reliance on more expensive and less reliable alternatives, such as wind and solar power, resulting in the loss of U.S. energy independence.
The violation of American citizens’ First Amendment Rights by U.S. government agencies’ overriding influence and manipulation of media and social media to control the public narrative, affect elections, and suppress and cancel contradicting views.
The usurpation of parental authority over their children by government authorities.
The push to surrender control of U.S. healthcare policy to the United Nations World Health Organization (WHO).
The plan to regulate digital assets and develop central bank digital currencies (CBDC) was established by Biden’s Executive Order 14067.

American citizens need to hold the majority party of the 118th Congress accountable for bringing about correctives to all of these. But it is also time for Americans to take action against the Globalist agenda at the local and the federal level.

Turkey’s Elections Are Not Just Turkey’s by Burak Bekdil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19342/turkey-elections

To maximize the opportunity for the Turkish public to come to the polls… President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan brought forward the election date from an originally scheduled June 18 to May 14.

Erdoğan’s treatment — through a judiciary totally under his control — of one of his potential rivals, Istanbul’s Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, who defeated Erdogan’s party in 2019, is revealing. A court sentenced the popular İmamoğlu to a two-year prison sentence and a ban from politics for calling election officials who had annulled his first election “idiots.” (Imamoğlu won twice.) If his conviction is not annulled or overturned, that verdict may take the Imamoğlu out of the presidential race.

Erdoğan has made it a habit to use the courts in the way he thinks would best suit his political agenda. As of 2020, the number of Kurdish mayors in prison was 21. The Erdoğan administration had appointed its own administrators to 45 of a total of 65 municipalities won by the pro-Kurdish party, Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), in 2019.

Turkey’s Constitutional Court is currently being asked to order the closure of the party, which has 56 deputies in Turkey’s parliament. An indictment against the party seeks to ban 451 politicians and party members from organized political activity or membership of political parties for a period of five years and forfeiture of the party’s assets…. Even the mere freezing of assets [as has occurred] will deprive the HDP of the means to finance its election campaign.

Turkey’s 2023 elections will not only be a race between those Turks who want freedom and despise Islamist rule and those who prefer to starve while dreaming of Ottoman times. It also promises to be maker of Turkey’s global journey for at least the next five years.

Everyone in Turkey, in its region and in countries with interests or concerns about Turkey’s political future, probably agree that presidential and parliamentary elections this spring will be the most important for every nation involved. To maximize the opportunity for the Turkish public to come to the polls, after calculating external factors such as Muslim Hajj pilgrimage, a religious holiday and university entrance exams, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan brought forward the election date from an originally scheduled June 18 to May 14.

Treason in America – Again by Lawrence Kadish

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19346/treason-in-america

Benedict Arnold, move over.

Loathed as one of America’s most despised traitors, we are reminded that Arnold once was the hero of Saratoga during the Revolutionary War, only to become a turncoat prepared to hand over West Point to the British.

During the last century there was Aldrich Ames, a former Central Intelligence Agency officer turned KGB double agent. Now serving a life sentence without parole, he did enormous damage to our national security while sending many American intelligence assets to their deaths in the Soviet Union. You want an example of how one American can do incalculable damage to his country? Read the Ames file.

But wait. There is now a 21st Century indictment that, if proven in a court of law, is absolutely mind-numbing.

The FBI’s former top spy-hunter based in New York, Charles McGonigal, has been charged with violating U.S. sanctions and other criminal counts stemming from alleged ties to Russian oligarch billionaire Oleg Deripaska, a confident of Vladimir Putin.

The indictment also says McGonigal is accused of trying to get Deripaska removed from a U.S. sanctions list.

A second indictment accuses the G-man of hiding payments totaling $225,000 that he allegedly received from an individual considered an asset by an Albanian intelligence agency.

The Great Resignation in a Collapsing Health System By Carla Peeters

https://brownstone.org/articles/the-great-resignation-collapsing-health-system/

In an increasing number of countries all over the world chaos and despair is rising. People are more frequently ill and dying at higher rates than the past 50 years. At the same time health systems are deteriorating. We need to rethink humanness of health systems versus cold technological solutions.  

More than a seasonal problem

The pandemic measures have accelerated public health systems to the brink of collapse. In many Western countries these systems are facing severe problems, an inferno of pressures, including staff shortages from pandemic burnout, underpaid salaries, discrimination and a cost-of-living crisis, with many health professionals leaving the workforce while the demand for care from the community is rising. 

The often-used explanation for the current situation in healthcare, a tripledemic after two lockdowns resulting from a surge in winter viruses (RSV, Flu and Covid-19), does not hold. Current data do not represent an outlier season. 

Political ideology and catastrophic leadership costs healthy years of lives 

The health system in the UK is collapsing because of a decade or more of underinvestment in the National Health Service and other public services. The indicators for the health service are all red. Increased ambulance times and people waiting for a hospital bed, stranded outside overflowing hospitals, have spiked since December 2022. The overstretched system, with the longest delays on record for millions of treatments for cancer and operations, has left patients in pain, people enduring unnecessary suffering, and has led to 300-500 people a week dying avoidably because of the unsolved current crisis. The roots lie in political choices made, not cold weather or a seasonal flu.

Biden Has Blood On His Hands At The Border, Says … Biden? 

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/01/25/biden-had-blood-on-his-hands-at-the-border-says-biden/

In a data dump Friday, the Biden administration announced that more than a quarter million people crossed the border illegally in December – the highest ever recorded. The timing of this release was designed to bury the news, not that it mattered, since the mainstream media have ignored the growing border crisis with fierce determination. 

But that’s not the worst of it. Border deaths also reached all-time highs. That news is so bad, the “most transparent administration in history” tried to keep it hidden altogether, coughing it up only in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. When that data did come out … crickets.

This silence is particularly galling, given that Democrats were screaming bloody murder about border deaths during the Trump administration.

The publicly released news showed that Border Patrol agents stopped 251,487 illegal crossers in December. That’s a 7% increase from November, a 40% increase from the year before, and a 240% increase from December 2020.

Keep in mind that it’s not like Border Patrol agents caught a quarter million trying to sneak into the U.S. In Biden’s open-border world, illegal immigrants cross the border and then wait patiently wait for border agents to pick them up, process them in border facilities, and release them into the country, often with the sub-rosa help of NGOs. The Biden administration has turned illegal immigration into a well-oiled machine.

Turns Out the Atlanta Terrorists Are Children of Privilege By Chris Queen

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/chris-queen/2023/01/25/turns-out-the-atlanta-terrorists-are-children-of-privilege-n1664631

We’ve already learned that the vast majority of the Antifa insurrectionists who terrorized Atlanta over the weekend — and have occupied the future site of a public safety training facility for months — hailed from nowhere near Atlanta, but the more we learn about the Antifa criminals who attacked cops and did damage all over downtown Atlanta, we realize that these aren’t oppressed minorities rising up against the system.

It turns out the Atlanta terrorists are largely children of immense privilege.

Take, for example, the rather evil-looking Francis Carroll (whose name WSB misspelled below), the guy who allegedly lit a police cruiser on fire Saturday night.

Carroll hails from Kennebunkport, Maine — yep, the same Kennebunkport that is home to the Bush family compound. And we all know that towns with compounds are always fancy. He’s the scion of a multimillion-dollar family that owns a yacht, and he lived in his parents’ mansion before coming to Atlanta to wreak havoc.

Over at the New York Post, Andy Ngo notes that Carroll “was among six people arrested and charged with domestic terrorism, aggravated assault and other crimes on Dec. 13 following a string of property attacks around the area, a carjacking and assaults on officers. They were all bailed out by activists who crowdfunded their legal defense using Twitter.”

And then there’s Serena Hertal. The Idaho native is a graduate of $82,000-a-year Pitzer College in Claremont, Calif. How has she made use of that high-dollar education? By facing charges of domestic terrorism, aggravated assault, and criminal trespass in Atlanta.

How about Ivan James Ferguson? The 23-year-old Nevada native is a clarinetist who performed with orchestras up and down the West Coast before throwing it all away to interfere with the safety of a city two thousand miles away. Ferguson studied at the swanky San Francisco Conservatory of Music, which should serve him well in jail.

Good News—School Choice Is Back on the Agenda for Republicans By Stephen Kruiser

https://pjmedia.com/columns/stephen-kruiser/2023/01/26/the-morning-briefing-good-news-school-choice-is-back-on-the-agenda-for-republicans-n1665175

When I first began writing about politics, I had two areas that I focused on more than any others: liberal media bias and school choice. In fact, the first political conference I ever attended was focused on school choice.

A dozen or so years ago, the Republican party was focused on it too. Somewhere along the way, that focus was blurred. The support for school choice was still there, the issue just wasn’t front and center.

I wrote in September of 2021 that the pandemic gave the GOP a chance to “get serious” about school choice. The teachers’ unions peeled back their masks and showed how truly evil they are during the worst of the COVID shutdown days. Well, a lot of us already knew that they were evil, but COVID made that plain to even the naivest among us.

The issue appears to be on the menu again for some in the GOP, especially in Iowa. Rick has the story:

Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds was in an ebullient mood on Tuesday when she signed into law the most sweeping and revolutionary school choice program in the nation.

“What an amazing day for our children!” she exclaimed to the crowd of kids, parents, and lawmakers who had gathered in the Iowa Capitol rotunda to witness the historic signing.

Indeed, the new law, which will take effect this year, is a game changer for parents. The law will allow any Iowa family to use taxpayer funds to pay for private school tuition — at a cost of $345 million annually to the state once fully phased in.

Come See The Racism Inherent In The Paint Chip!

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/01/26/come-see-the-racism-inherent-in-the-paint-industry/

It sounds like a bad joke about woke gone amok, but it’s not. Norway’s University of Bergen is sponsoring research into tackling the burning question of whether and how white paint contributes to white supremacy and why Norway should feel guilty about it because of its role in it.

It turns out, you see, that Norwegians were behind the innovation of titanium white paint, which is considered pure white.

The university wants researchers to explore “the cultural and aesthetic changes instigated by titanium white … and how can both the material in itself and these changes be conceptualized and made visible?”

This story quickly made the rounds in conservative circles. But let’s take a closer look. And, holy cow, does racism in the paint industry run deep!

Examine with us, if you will, the color wheel of Sherwin-Williams, the largest paint manufacturer in the country and brags that it covers the earth. There are literally dozens of variations of white, all of them with names such as:

Greek Villa
Pearly White
Extra White
Pure White
Reserved White
Incredible White
Nice White
Windfresh White.