RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/09/why-are-we-surprised-bidens-speech-bruce-thornton/

Last week’s speech by Joe Biden was the epitome of the Democrat Party’s totalitarian instincts. Even the banana-republic staging–– two Marines flanking the president, the lurid blood-red lighting, and a photo of Biden orating with raised fists––evoked the theatrics beloved by dictators. The burden of the speech was the dangerous “semi-fascism” of Donald Trump and his millions of MAGA supporters, which similarly recalled the “enemies of the state” like Jews, “deviationists,” and kulaks that typify autocratic regimes, as do the numerous “big lies” lacing Biden’s rant.

All this has been noted and deservedly criticized by commentators, some of them even on CNN. But the implications that the Dems and Biden have violated some venerable norms of “our democracy” were puzzling. For nearly 60 years the Democrats have been relentlessly moving farther to the Left and adopting its vicious “any means necessary” tactics for acquiring and keeping power. All it needed to reach a wider audience were decades of an educational system corrupted by leftist ideology.

But even before the chaos and degradation of politics in the Sixties got this malignant ball rolling, starting in the late 19th century Marxism had gained a foothold in our culture and politics. Progressivism was the political philosophy that was the vehicle of Marxist assumptions that both ideologies share.

Like Marxism, progressivism favors centralized power, technocratic control, the perfectibility of people, and the pretensions of “science” as the means for undermining the Constitution’s limited, balanced, and divided powers. This constitutional structure is necessitated by a human nature driven by zero-sum “passions and interests” that need power in order to be realized. And both ideologies scorned the Founders’ principles of federalism, unalienable human rights, individual freedom, traditional wisdom, common sense, and civil society.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2022/09/04/it-took-less-than-a-day-for-joe-biden-to-retract-his-attacks-on-maga-republicans-n2612635

Joe Biden, who everyone thought would play the role of Mr. Unity, set off a bomb Thursday and later went on vacation. That incendiary device was the fascistic speech he delivered on the grounds of Independence Hall in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Biden decided to waste precious time not talking about inflation, drug cartels, border security, the rising fentanyl crisis, rising crime, or inflation—but MAGA Republicans and their supposed threat to the country.

The irony is as thick as concrete. The speech was supposed to be a smackdown of the alleged “semi-fascist” elements in America but made Biden look like Franco. The Democrats are obsessed with Nazi references when attacking politicians and viewpoints they don’t like. This speech is the closest anyone has ever come to embodying those heinous principles, Joe Biden, of all people, was the one to send it when it came to channeling their inner Hitler.

The remarks were a trainwreck. He smeared tens of millions of Americans who voted for Donald Trump as enemies of the republic and then called for unity. Questioning election results, protected by the First Amendment, is now a domestic terrorist activity. Does Joe know his press secretary is an election denier? 

https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/09/03/whos-really-threatening-american-democracy/

There were many striking things about that weird Joe Biden speech the other night. First and foremost, it was a spectacular failure of optics, something the political class from which Biden hails is supposedly so brilliant at. For some reason, Biden and his team decided he should address the American people in front of an Independence Hall in Philadelphia – birthplace of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution – illuminated in blood-red lighting: a peculiarly Nuremberg-esque aesthetic given his subject – as we’ll come on to – was the supposedly proto-fascistic threat posed by Trumpist right-wingers. But the speech was also a spectacular display of brassneck – a tirade against authoritarianism that only underlined the ‘respectable’ authoritarianism that Biden himself has helped usher in.

Building on his recent shameful comments about the supposed ‘semi-fascism’ of former president Trump and his supporters, Biden cast the modern Republican Party in his speech as a threat to America itself. ‘Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic’, he thundered. ‘Not every Republican, not even the majority of Republicans, are MAGA Republicans’, he kindly conceded. ‘But there is no question that the Republican Party today is dominated, driven and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans, and that is a threat to this country.’ Given 74million people voted for Trump in 2020 – the second-highest number of Americans to ever vote for a presidential candidate, just behind Biden in that same election – one wonders who does or does not count as a MAGA Republican. Still, the effect was to make Hillary Clinton’s infamous ‘basket of deplorables’ comment look cute by comparison. Biden essentially cast vast swathes of the American public as domestic terrorists.

He reeled off a laundry list of the usual scare stories about Trumpism, ditching what might be legitimate criticisms of Trump and his more crazed supporters in favour of painting an image of a lurid fascistic hellscape. ‘[H]istory tells us that blind loyalty to a single leader and a willingness to engage in political violence is fatal to democracy’, Biden said, in a not-so-subtle nod to the 1930s. ‘January 6’, the storming of the US Capitol in January 2021, came up a lot. But while the Capitol riot was an unhinged and anti-democratic display, fed by Trump’s conspiratorial nonsense about the election being ‘stolen’ from him, it was not an ‘insurrection’, as Biden put it in his speech on Thursday night. It was a strangely carnivalesque riot that got seriously out of hand. Most of the Trumpists just wandered around the Capitol aimlessly, posing for self-incriminating selfies.

Of course, this hasn’t stopped ‘January 6’ being turned into a new 9/11 – a comparison vice-president Kamala Harris has explicitly made – and the justification for a new wave of authoritarianism. Which is where the cheek of Biden’s speech comes in. Since he came to power he has made tackling ‘domestic terrorism’ a priority. In June 2021, his administration published the first-ever national strategy for tackling domestic terrorism, pledging new resources to fight this ill-defined threat. When you hear officials and FBI agents speak about domestic terrorism, it seems to encompass both racist mass murderers and a much broader, vaguer category of ‘those who ascribe to extremist anti-government and anti-authority ideologies’. Nevertheless, it seems to be the latter – with ‘January 6’ in mind – that particularly preoccupies the administration. Indeed, it is striking that this Democratic-led clampdown on extremism was sparked not by, say, the racist Charleston church shooting at the tailend of the Obama years, but by a big, dumb riot at which the only person shot was a Trump supporter.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/09/a_heartbroken_grad_watches_the_woke_descent_of_the_us_naval_academy.html

As reported by TheBlaze, it is apparent that those in charge of the U.S. military are on a mission to destroy what is left of a once unmatched war-fighting capability that was earned by blood and sweat.   As a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy (USNA), I may be qualified to analyze recent events that had the commandant of midshipmen publish the “Diversity Education Program” as an USNA standing order on how to “foster a culture of inclusion across the Yard.”  

It is inconceivable that instead of promoting unity, strength, and courage among other noble attributes of military leaders, the U.S. Navy and specifically USNA are advancing that midshipmen are to be assigned as agents of this diversity nonsense and that these young, impressionable students

• serve as a walking safe space for peers and

• facilitate discussion among company-mates to ease the tensions surrounding diversity topics.

These are actual bullet points from material used to train midshipmen in executing this destructive diversity directive on the Yard.  What is a “walking safe space”?  Can a person be a “space”?  If I were a midshipman, I would run from such an assignment, with demerits accrued if necessary.  

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/09/will_the_person_or_persons_who_wrote_that_vile_speech_please_step_forward.html

While pathetic old Joe Biden delivered his “soul of the nation” speech on Thursday with the fury and rage of a demented man, everyone knows he did not write the words he spewed with such venom.  So, who did write it?  And exactly who thought staging the event like Hitler’s Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl was a good idea and that parroting Hitler’s gestures would win over supporters?   

The Nazi-like staging could only be lost on the very young.  Are the writer (or writers) and stage designers so contemptuous of America, as Obama surely was, that they thought presenting Biden as some third world dictator would be well-received?  From Independence Hall where our Founders signed the Declaration of Independence?   

Surely, they must be proud of their work.  One might expect them to admit authorship and enjoy bragging rights.  But no, no one has claimed credit for what will come to be known as the most infamous speech ever delivered by an American President.  Whoever they were, they need to be identified and fired for they are enemies of America.  

Oh, we all get that the goal was to drive Trump supporters into the streets to wreak violence in the style of Antifa and Black Lives Matter, those thugs who are allowed to destroy entire cities without being charged with any crimes.  That was abundantly clear.  

The left badly wants an excuse to accuse Republicans of the kinds of violence those left-supported groups commit on a regular basis.  But conservatives simply do not behave that way.  On the whole, Trump supporters are more evolved than the street goons the leftists cheer.   Biden claimed that Trump’s supporters are violent but given Kamala’s support for the rioters of the summer of 2020, it is the left that incites violence and participates in it, and then bails out the perpetrators.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/09/03/biden-puts-the-total-in-totalitarianism/

Joe Biden certainly set the punditocracy abuzz with his neo-totalitarian performance piece at Independence Hall in Philadelphia on Thursday. The significance of that speech can be broken down into three parts, two of which have already received abundant commentary. 

The first has to do with the theater of the piece, its optics or stagecraft. As many commentators (myself included) noted, the feel of the event was distinctly, and distinctively, bombastic. The melodramatic red lighting, the presence of armed Marines flanking the president, and Biden’s hectoring, gesticulating delivery made the event seem eerily reminiscent of a speech by Stalin, Mao, or—the closest parallel—that diminutive former house painter who, for a few short years, mesmerized the world with his elaborately staged rallies before pushing ahead with more kinetic activities. 

To those who object that I am flirting with Godwin’s Law by invoking old AH, I reply that the flirtation was not mine but the doing of Biden’s producers and puppeteers. The visual similarity between Joe Biden’s event and some nighttime events at Nuremberg are just too striking to be coincidental. Leni Riefenstahl, as someone noted, would have been proud. Those who point out that Biden’s speech took place on September 1, a fraught day on the Polish border anno domini 1939, may be too ingenious for this historically illiterate age, but who knows? Often these things are, as our Marxists friends like to say, no accident. There are wheels within wheels. 

Which brings me to the question of the intent behind the theatrics. Was this exercise in garish, totalitarian kitsch a “gaffe,” as some are saying—an aesthetic miscalculation for which that blinking inarticulate muppet who is Biden’s press secretary will have to apologize? Apparently not, since she just said that the speech was “not political.” 

The entertainment committee never sleeps. 

https://www.jns.org/opinion/joe-bidens-four-d-speech/

 In the fall 2004 issue of the Jewish Political Studies Review, published by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Natan Sharanksy outlined what he called the “new anti-Semitism”—a resurgence in democratic countries of Jew-hatred aimed at the State of Israel.

In his piece, the author of Fear No Evil and The Case for Democracy presented a “three-D” test (demonization, double standards and delegitimization) that he had devised to distinguish this worrisome phenomenon from acceptable criticism of Israeli policies.

Little did he know at the time that, nearly two decades later, the word “new” could be removed from the description. Indeed, the dastardly triplet not only continues to be applied to the Jewish state by its sworn enemies, but has become mainstream even in the halls of power in Washington.

Rather than being eradicated through exposure, however, the three-D vilification technique has proven so effective that the left began to adapt it to discredit any figure or movement that doesn’t toe its line. The practice is especially blatant during political campaigns, such as the one being conducted in Israel ahead of the Nov. 1 Knesset elections and those surrounding the midterms in the U.S. Congress.

Here, a fourth “D” can be added to the arsenal: disingenuousness. As is the case with the “new-old” anti-Semites who pretend only to be targeting certain policies, the above detractors claim merely to be protesting against a particular politician. In Israel, it’s opposition leader and former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In the U.S., it’s former President Donald Trump. That the supporters of each, who constitute half of their countries’ populations, are also treated to hefty doses of the first three Ds is where the last comes in.

Nothing better illustrates this demonization, imposing of double standards, delegitimization and disingenuousness than U.S. President Joe Biden’s prime-time speech to the nation on Thursday in front of Philadelphia’s Independence Hall.

https://spectatorworld.com/newsletter/bidens-infantile-self-aggrandizing-democracy-speech/?utm_source=

“Even if you buy Biden’s infantile, self-aggrandizing Harry-versus-Voldemort account of the current moment, the president offers you no solutions other than “vote for me.” Which, of course, was the whole point of the speech.”

Democracy for dummies 

Allow me to indulge in a quick thought experiment. Let’s assume that Biden is exactly right when he says, as he did in his primetime address last night, that the extremism of “MAGA Republicans… threatens the very foundations of our republic.”

In this experiment, the dark diagnosis is the truth and Biden knows it to be the truth. What should a responsible president do under such circumstances? The answer, as my colleague Matt Purple put it in his must-read reaction to the speech, is to seek to vanquish election denialism and ugly conspiracy theories by “working to bring [Trump supporters] back into the national fold” rather than “treating them like the enemy — which will drive them deeper into the MAGA maw.”

Look at what Biden has done in office and you will struggle to find instances of such action. Examples of exactly what a responsible president should not do, however, are easier to come by. To list a few, briefly: recommend the effective abolition of the filibuster; vilify Supreme Court judges; look on as your party spends tens of millions of dollars boosting the most extreme voices in Republican midterms; slander anyone who refuses to support your voting legislation as no better than a segregationist; describe modest changes to the rules that govern elections as “Jim Crow on steroids”; indulge in economic policymaking by executive edict in a way that you know is unconstitutional.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2022/09/marines-are-not-props-biden-fascist-theatrics-daniel-greenfield/

Biden’s people decided to stage his campaign speech denouncing half the country with a sense of crisis with red lighting against dark shadows and had two Marines standing in the shadows against a brick wall. There was a real sense of crisis in making Biden look like the villain in a movie about a fascist dystopia, but not the one they wanted.

The Biden regime claimed that having them there was about showing the “deep and abiding respect the president has for these service members.”

Showing them respect would mean handing out medals or delivering a speech praising them. Not using them as props in his fascist theatrics.

And even Democrats and the media are questioning using Marines as props.

An Iraq War veteran and former Democratic Party official on Friday criticized the presence of US Marines in the backdrop of President Joe Biden’s speech in Philadelphia, during which he issued stinging political criticism of Republicans.

“We need to make sure that our military is as removed from politics as possible and it’s not right if a Democrat uses the military as a political pawn and it’s not right if the Republican Party does it as well. None of our politicians or elected leaders should do that,” Allison Jaslow, a former executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, told CNN’s Brianna Keilar on “New Day.”

https://amgreatness.com/2022/09/02/the-biden-regime-collapses-the-public-private-distinction/

On Thursday, Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, who is also the Show Me State’s candidate for U.S. Senate this November, unveiled some very interesting documents that his office, along with the office of Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, have received since the two states jointly filed a potentially pathbreaking lawsuit in May. Their lawsuit alleges that various high-ranking Biden administration officials have been colluding, in censorious fashion, with the purportedly “private” oligarchs of Big Tech. The straightforward aim of this collusion is the suppression of the dissident “wrongthink”—viz., conservative speech—that threatens the Biden regime’s tenuous grasp on power.

The documents Schmitt and Landry have received, pursuant to their serving of discovery requests and issuing of third-party subpoenas, shine a spotlight on the depths to which the Biden regime has fallen to collapse any putative distinction between the “public” sector and the “private” sector. Their findings thus far in this still-pending litigation reveal to all, as if we needed more evidence but a week after Mark Zuckerberg’s podcast confession heard ’round the world with popular host Joe Rogan, the extent to which Big Tech platforms such as Facebook and Twitter no longer qualify as meaningfully “private” and have instead simply become appendages of the state.

According to Schmitt, the Biden Department of Justice has, since Missouri and Louisiana’s lawsuit was filed, identified 45 federal officials who have “interacted with social media companies on misinformation.” What’s more, Meta (Facebook’s parent company) pinpointed 32 additional Biden functionaries with whom it communicated, and YouTube (a Google product) identified 11 such flunkies with whom it communicated.