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50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

Why Ideology Is the Ancient Enemy of Civilization In such ideological dystopias, eventually even the shelves empty, the currency becomes worthless, and the nation regresses into poverty and chaos. Is that the future we await? By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2022/02/10/why-ideology-is-the-ancient-enemy-of-civilization/

What ultimately destroyed the evil empires of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia were bankrupt dogmas. Crackpot ideology destroyed free expression. It ruined meritocracy and ensured unequal application of the laws—and so paved the way for far worse.

The Nazi idea of a superior Aryan race adjudicated everything from physics to tank design. Soviet commissars did the same, subordinating rational thought to communist agendas.

Zealots in both systems infiltrated the universities and schools to institutionalize indoctrination. 

Wokeism, while not yet as lethal, is similar. Racial wokeism posits that the race and gender of the vice president and the next Supreme Court justice subordinate all other considerations.

But will the current vice president and next Supreme Court justice commensurately select their own future surgeons, or their upcoming airline pilots, on the same predetermined race and sex criteria?

What—other than ideology—explains why rejecting nominations of African American judge Janice Rogers Brown in 2003 and 2005 was not racist and sexist, but blocking Joe Biden’s upcoming nomination of a preselected African American female would be?

Why were most Antifa and Black Lives Matter criminals who looted, destroyed, and assaulted during the 120 days of summer 2020 not charged, much less tried? Why, in contrast, were the January 6 rioters or the current Canadian truckers treated disproportionately harshly by the media?

Had the same rioters on January 6 been waving pride flags and BLM banners, would some of them have been sitting for a year in solitary confinement and still uncharged? 

Had the criminal protestors and looters of summer 2020 been wearing red MAGA hats, would they also have mostly gotten off without charges? 

What would have happened had conservative demonstrators cut out a police-free “MAGA Zone” in Seattle rather than the exempted Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone? Would police have similarly left it alone, and the media similarly romanticized such illegality?

One of the reasons the COVID-19 lockdown and mask policies lost public confidence was their utter corruption by ideology. 

When thousands in June 2020 brazenly defied quarantines—and yet were excused by over 1,000 healthcare professionals claiming that woke agendas justified violating quarantine laws—then millions of Americans concluded government policy was as much about identity politics as saving lives.

Relax: Biden puts an LGBTQ+ activist, gender fluid drag queen ‘pup’ fetishist in charge of the nuclear waste that could be used for terror bombs By Thomas Lifson

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/02/relax_biden_puts_an_lgbtq_

Chalk up another glass ceiling broken by the Biden administration and sleep easy.

One of the most critical national security issues facing the United States is nuclear waste:

…thousands of metric tons of used solid fuel from nuclear power plants worldwide and the millions of liters of radioactive liquid waste from weapons production that sit in temporary storage containers in the US. While these waste materials, which can be harmful to human health and the environment, wait for a more permanent home, their containers age. In some cases, the aging containers have already begun leaking their toxic contents.

Terrorists wishing to construct “dirty bombs” that could contaminate entire cities, rendering them uninhabitable, would love to get their hands on some of this stockpile. So the handling and ultimate disposition of this lethal accumulation, the responsibility of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition in the Office of Nuclear Energy for the Department of Energy, requires a person of scientific/technical erudition, good judgment, and responsible character.

Meet Sam Brinton, hired by the Biden Administration for that role.

Peter Schweizer Video: Joe Biden – Target of a Chinese Espionage Operation? A U.S. president’s disturbing links to Chinese intelligence.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/02/peter-schweizer-video-joe-biden-target-chinese-frontpagemagcom/

This new edition of The Glazov Gang features Peter Schweizer, the author of the new #1 New York Times Bestseller, Red-Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win. He is the president of the Government Accountability Institute and the former William J. Casey Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

Peter Schweizer discusses Joe Biden – A Target of a Chinese Espionage Operation?, revealing A U.S. president’s disturbing links to Chinese intelligence. 

Don’t miss it!

What the Truckers Want I’ve spoken to 100 of the protestors gathered in the Canadian capital. What’s happening is far bigger than the vaccine mandates.Rupa Subramanya’

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/what-the-truckers-want?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjoxNDc5

For two weeks, the 18-wheelers, the semis, the tractors and the pick-up trucks streamed through the snow and ice into the center of Ottawa, the Canadian capital.

They came from across the country. Vaxxed, unvaxxed, white, black, Chinese, Sikh, Indian, alone or with their wives and kids. They huddled around campfires. They set up pop-up kitchens and tents with block captains doling out coffee and blankets. They honked (and honked and honked). They blasted “We Are the World.” And everywhere you looked, someone was waving the Maple Leaf.

It dipped to 4 degrees. The mayor declared a state of emergency. And they didn’t budge.

The truckers were scared of running out of gas—freezing to death in their little truck beds in the middle of the night. The city threatened to arrest anyone who brought it to them. In response, hundreds of Ottawans did just that. The truckers stayed put. 

They are a city inside a city whose inhabitants—there are an estimated 8,000 to 10,000—were outraged with a country that seemed to have forgotten they existed. This past Sunday, as if to confirm that suspicion, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who has yet to meet with Freedom Convoy leaders, took a personal day. On Monday, during an emergency debate at the House of Commons, he called them “a few people shouting and waving swastikas.” 

DHS:  American Thought Police  The transition from tracking terrorism to chasing thought crime has a major advantage. It exonerates U.S. counterterrorism officials from the meddlesome job of catching actual terrorists.  By Kyle Shideler

https://amgreatness.com/2022/02/09/dhs-american-thought-police/

The Department of Homeland Security, which under the Biden Administration routinely lets watch-listed terrorists cross the southern border unmolested, and which approved entry to the United States for Colleyville Synagogue hostage-taker Malik Faisal Akram despite his being known to British authorities as a terror risk, has taken upon its broad bureaucratic shoulders an even more challenging job.

Stopping the flow of MDM.

MDM isn’t the latest flavor of fentanyl, produced by the Communist Chinese regime for sale to Mexican drug cartels, and now the leading cause of death for Americans between the ages of 18 to 45. No, MDM stands for mis- dis- and mal-information, the latest government acronym from which you must be protected.  

DHS’ latest “Summary of Terrorism Threat to the U.S. Homeland,” released Monday, has much to say about the dangers of American minds being polluted with MDM, and curiously little to say about actual terror threats.

MDM is a term developed by the DHS Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to replace the old-fashioned phrase “foreign influence.” Now let us caveat that the U.S. government does indeed have a responsibility to monitor and to identify foreign influence operations. This was the remit of the Reagan-era Active Measures Working Group, which worked tirelessly to identify Soviet lies being spread to undermine the United States’ global standing in the world, and then countered them with the truth.  

DEMS SUDDEN FLIP-FLOP ON SCIENCE

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/02/10/dems-sudden-covid-flip-flop-it-aint-science-its-politics/

It ain’t science…its politics.

Polls show congressional Democrats face an historic drubbing in the 2022 midterm elections as voters inspect the COVID wreckage of the economy and civil society after just a year of Democrat control. So it should be no surprise that Democratic politicians across the nation are discovering the wisdom of ending their wildly unpopular and draconian COVID lockdowns and masking regimes.

According to the Washington Examiner, eight very blue states — California, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York and Oregon — have suddenly reversed course and are now busy dismantling their COVID police states as they face a growing political backlash from average Americans, including members of their own party.

It’s about time. As NBC News observed Wednesday, before scheduled remarks by the White House, “The era of big mandates is over.” We’re sure the fact that President Joe Biden has a measly 40% approval rate for his handling of COVID has something to do with that.

A Very Strange Fellow Is Our Joe, Our “always evolving” president Larry Thornberry

https://spectator.org/joe-biden-constitution-always-evolving/

Our more than slightly off-plumb president is a fount of odd and counterintuitive claims. One of his latest and most cynical is that our Constitution is “always evolving.” I’ll wait here while you think about this for a few seconds.

A few seconds is all that’s needed to see that there is no difference between having a “constantly evolving” Constitution and having no Constitution at all. With an evolving Constitution there’s no guarantee that what it is said to mean on Monday would bear any resemblance to what it will mean on Tuesday. It would simply mean whatever is consistent with the policies and prejudices of the party in power. An evolving Constitution is simply words on old paper, words with no more effect on our laws and the daily conduct of government affairs than a note passed in study hall.

Of course our Joe’s positions on the large issues of the day have been “always evolving” since he chose politics over legitimate work back in the butt end of the Tricky Dick administration. The eccentric voters in tiny Delaware first coughed up this hairball in 1972 and regularly sent him back to the U.S. Senate every six years (I can see their point — it got him out of Delaware) until Barack Obama, needing a white guy to share his presidential ticket, drafted him.

Biden’s policy positions have evolved depending on where the center of gravity of the Democrat Party has been, merging effortlessly from the center-left/reasonably moderate Democrat Party of the ’70s to the present two steps left of WHOOPIE! socialist Democrat Party. The man is a political and philosophical empty suit with no center of gravity of his own. A windsock.

He’s gone from being tough on crime to the current Democrat creed that cops are criminals and criminals are victims faster than you can say focus group. He’s gone from being tough on illegal immigration to the current voter replacement stance of his party — economically stated, “We don’t need no stinking border” — faster than you can say Bienvenidos a los Estados Unidos. It’s no wonder that his handlers keep him away from mirrors, for fear that the world might notice that he doesn’t reflect in them, there being nothing to reflect.

Yesterday’s Sister Souljah Moment, Today’s Costly Silence Charles Lipson

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2022/02/09/yesterdays_sister_souljah_moment_todays_costly_silence_147159.html

President Biden’s quick trip to New York City was the perfect moment to assert a genuine commitment to public safety by calling out Manhattan’s left-wing prosecutor, Alvin Bragg. But Biden and his attorney general blew the opportunity. They said nothing, aside from the usual pablum about safe communities and guns coming in from out of state. That’s not enough, even in very liberal cities like New York.
 
Democrats simply aren’t trusted on crime. That’s hardly new, but it has become much more damaging politically now that voters consider crime one of their top issues. For years, the party has framed its policies as “pro-justice” and “anti-racism,” with little attention to “law and order.” Race gets pride of place, of course, because, in city after city, a disproportionate number of those arrested are African American, mostly young men.
 
Republicans say that what Democrats call “racial justice” really means “soft on crime.” More and more Independents are siding with Republicans on this issue. These critics not only demand safety for themselves. They point out that most of this rising crime harms law-abiding people in poor, minority communities. The arrest statistics, they say, reflect the hard reality of who commits crimes, not biased policing.
 
The parties’ sharply opposed views on crime, law enforcement, and prosecution have become central issues in American politics. It’s an issue that strongly favors Republicans.
 
Some three decades ago, Bill Clinton understood this political landscape and attacked the Democrats’ image head-on by calling out a black celebrity, Sister Souljah. In the aftermath of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, she said, “If black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?” Clinton’s angry response reinforced a political argument he made during the campaign: he intended to deter crime by punishing criminals, severely if need be.
 

“It’s Still the Culture, Stupid” Sydney Williams

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Just over a year and a half ago, June 8, 2020, I wrote a TOTD, “It’s the Culture Stupid.” It was two weeks after George Floyd died under Derek Chauvin’s knee. I wrote: “…the permitting of protesters in the wake of George Floyd’s killing was right. The failure to confront and arrest violent rioters and looters was wrong.” It is that failure to distinguish between right and wrong – a failure to punish wrongdoers and to reward virtue – that haunts our nation and its people. Driven by a sanctimonious and intolerant “woke” community, the situation has worsened over the past twenty months.

In 1992, while advising Bill Clinton on his Presidential campaign against George H.W. Bush, James Carville coined the phrase, “It’s the economy, stupid.” The economy had entered recession in July-August 1990 but had recovered by the end of the first quarter of 1991. However, job creation lagged, so the recovery became known as the “jobless recovery.” Unemployment continued to rise into mid-year 1992, which provided Mr. Carville the opportunity to conceive a phrase recalled thirty years later.

What we face is more onerous. Economies go through booms and busts, while cultures are fundamental to who we are. A self-important, moralizing wokeism offers a new and different threat. Traditionally, our culture has been embedded in families – passed down from one generation to the next. It is confirmed in civil behavior, in our schools, churches and communities. It is institutionalized in our Declaration of Independence, Constitution and reflected in Constitutional amendments. It has been enhanced as our country absorbed immigrants from all over the world. But the underlying rules and customs that allowed this country to survive and to thrive should persist – that we are all, no matter our race, ethnicity or gender, created equal and have equal protection under the law, that private property is protected, that we live in a nation of laws not men, that we should be judged by our character, not the color of our skin or gender, and that success is a function of merit, ability, effort and diligence, and that civility, respect and tolerance are necessary for a free, civil and democratic society to exist.

The ADL Must Apologize to America’s Jews: Charles Jacobs

Like too many Jewish organizations, the ADL been taken over by radical leftists who have subverted its original mission by promoting a progressive ideology at the expense of protecting the Jewish community. As the recent Whoopi Goldberg incident illustrates, the ADL seems morally confused.

Whoopi Goldberg was suspended from The View for two weeks for saying that the Holocaust was about white people killing other white people. According to Goldberg — who was simply repeating current woke ideology — Jews are white, and so Hitler could not have hated them because of their race. The Holocaust was, she said, merely another case of “man’s inhumanity to man.” Jews who were shocked by Goldberg’s outburst were further shocked to learn that Whoopi Goldberg was actually using the ADL’s definition of racism.

A few years ago, ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt redefined racism to align with woke ideology. Racism, the ADL declared, now meant the “marginalization and/or oppression of people of color based on a socially constructed racial hierarchy that privileges white people.”

Under this definition, only white people can be racists. Acts of bigotry directed at whites — now including Jews — would not qualify as racism, and hate crimes committed by people of color would not qualify as racism. This definition of racism, which derives from an insidious ideology, has infiltrated the ADL and actually feeds anti-Semitism.