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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION

50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

Doing the Enemies’ Bidding Eileen F. Toplansky

In his 1980 book titled Seeds of Progress, Leonard E. Read reminds the reader of the prescient words of George Washington.

There is a natural and necessary progression from the extreme of anarchy to the extreme of tyranny, and arbitrary power is most established on the ruins of liberty.

Leonard E. Read then goes on quote Dr. Ludwig von Mises who wrote “Socialism is planned chaos.  Anarchy is unplanned chaos.”

Consider the weeks of violence and anarchy in Portland and other cities.  It was the first step in the communists’ designs upon America.  The continuing erosion of our culture is intended to restrain America’s potential in every conceivable way.

Furthermore, in the chapter “Two Ways to Go Wrong” Read emphasizes that those who would deny impartial justice will heartily support anarchy and tyranny.

First tell me who you are and then I’ll tell you what your rights are.

A society in which gross inequalities before the law are tolerated will prevent the market from operating in its economic life.

And so socialism and communism worm their way into the fabric of our lives aided and abetted by the most Leftwing President this country has ever experienced and our economy is worsening.

As Read asserts “[w]hen the government enters your home, takes your possessions, keeps them for himself or gives it to others to obtain their votes, it is coercive force.”  

When Biden mandates what people must do with their bodies and when his henchmen (DeBlasio, Murphy, Lightfoot and Newsom) dictate where Americans can dine, shop and enjoy life, we are in the throes of a dictatorship.

The internal enemies of the state are ensuring that America’s youth are denied learning about their birthright and the foundational ideas such as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.  Without understanding and valuing these basic principles, the young cannot perceive they are worth defending.  Mull over the erasure of the 1776 Project by Biden.

Instead, indoctrinate them with misinformation and outright lies and demand they regurgitate the information.  Create at least two generations of historically illiterate youth.  Consider the administration’s embrace of Critical Race Theory.                                                                                           

Eliminate literature that emphasizes character building. Instead advocate tracts of repetitive hate-filled ideas that  pit student against student based on their skin pigmentation. Reflect on the adoption of the works of anti-White author Ibrahim Kendi with nary a word from the Department of Education.

Distort language so students are ignorant of the nuances of words and ideas and cannot engage in genuine critical thinking or introspective questioning.  Heck, men are women and girls can be erased altogether. Confusion abounds because as Jacques Barzun stated, “[i]ntellect deteriorates after every surrender to folly.  Unless we consciously resist, the nonsense does not pass us by but into us.”

Should one, however, dare to speak out, quickly punish the offending individual. Consider the ongoing censorship and assault against speakers on campuses and no rebuke from the administration. Consider the inhumane incarceration of Americans who marched on January 6, 2021.

High Stakes in Virginia This is only one battle in a much bigger war. Thomas Sowell

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/10/high-stakes-virginia-thomas-sowell/

Although Virginia has been a politically blue state for years, this year’s election has the Democrats’ governor facing a serious challenge.

One of the reasons is that many Virginia parents are outraged by the “woke” propaganda their children are being subjected to in the public schools — and the governor has sided with the education bureaucrats and the teachers union.

Very few politicians in any state dare to go against the teachers unions, which have millions of votes and millions of dollars in campaign contributions.

This is one battle in a much bigger war, and the stakes are far higher than the governorship of Virginia or the Democrats and Republicans. The stakes are the future of this nation.

When school propaganda teaches black kids to hate white people, that is a danger to all Americans of every race. Anyone at all familiar with the history of group-identity politics in other countries knows that it has often ended up producing sickening atrocities that have torn whole societies apart.

If you have a strong stomach, read about the 1915 atrocities against the Armenians in Turkey, “ethnic cleansing” in the Balkans, or the reciprocal atrocities between the Sinhalese and Tamils during their civil war in Sri Lanka.

Do not kid yourself that this cannot happen in America. The relations between the Sinhalese and Tamils in Sri Lanka were once held up to the world as a model of intergroup harmony.

24 Hours in the ER A reminder that humanity prevails even in COVID hell. Katie Hopkins

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/10/24-hours-er-katie-hopkins/

Good friends say I’m stubborn as hell. My own mother has slightly less choice words for it — pig-headed, she says, and I guess she knows best.

Either way, as a result of my unwillingness to acknowledge I am struggling, or asking for help last week, I ended up in the back of an ambulance headed to the ER.

I knew I was sick. Even after I regained consciousness, vomiting on my bathroom floor, I thought sleep and a NyQuil would sort me out…pig-headed, you see.

I was wrong. Do not fear, this is not a splurge about myself and the inner workings of my intestines or nasal passages. Nor is it a self-pitying lament about how jolly hard it can be on the road. My affliction was my old adversary, meningitis, returned to remind me I am mortal and need to be a great deal more grateful to be alive.

Rather, this is a glimpse into the inside of an American ER, and a peek into the inner workings of a hospital, in the grip of the COVID storm.

The ambulance men were brusque on arrival, finding my British accent indecipherable and unable to fathom how I had washed up at a hotel on the Oklahoma border without car or a loved one to get me to the hospital. Impatient with my feeble answers, they marked me down as homeless and warned me the hospital was swamped, I should be prepared for a 6-hour wait, and that I should watch my back because “this place is COVID soup.”

Dr. Dog Torturer Fauci funds barbaric torture of beagles in a Tunisian lab. Lloyd Billingsley

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/10/dr-anthony-fauci-funds-torture-beagles-tunisian-lloyd-billingsley/

“Our investigators show that Fauci’s NIH division shipped part of a $375,800 grant to a lab in Tunisia to drug beagles and lock their heads in mesh cages filled with hungry sand flies so that the insects could eat them alive,” the non-profit White Coat Waste project told reporters. “They also locked beagles alone in cages in the desert overnight for nine consecutive nights to use them as bait to attract infectious sand flies,” all to test an “experimental drug.”

White Coat Waste also claimed that some of the dogs had their vocal cords removed so their barking would not disturb the attending scientists. Rep. Nancy Mace fired off a letter to the National Institutes of Health, calling the cordectomies “cruel” and a “reprehensible misuse of taxpayer funds.” Mace is a South Carolina Republican but signatories to her letter included Democrats Cindy Axne, Steve Cohen, Jimmy Gomez, Josh Gottheimer, Ted Lieu, Mike Quigley, Lucille Roybal-Allard, Terri Sewell and Eleanor Holmes Norton, plus more than a dozen Republicans, including Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick and Maria Salazar.

In a related cause that could use more bipartisan support, Dr. Fauci and his National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) are also under fire for funding dangerous gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. The NIAID boss denied funding such research, but now the NIH admits a “limited experiment” to test if bat coronaviruses were “capable of binding” to a human receptor. That contradicts Fauci, the nation’s chief white coat supremacist, who has escaped scrutiny on a number of fronts.

Arming the Taliban—But Not Cops? Lawmakers take aim at a program equipping police with military-surplus gear. Dorothy Moses Schulz

https://www.city-journal.org/equipping-cops-with-military-surplus-lawmakers-taking-aim-at-1033-program

Can anyone forget the images of Taliban fighters riding around Kabul on U.S. vehicles, wearing U.S.-supplied uniforms, and carrying U.S.-made rifles? In addition to stranding people in Afghanistan, the Americans also abandoned Humvees; trucks and armored vehicles, including Mine-Resistant Ambush Protection (MRAP) vehicles valued at about $800,000 each; artillery; aging but operable helicopters and attack aircraft; drones; artillery and mortars; and millions of rounds of ammunition. No one is quite sure how many of these items were disabled or are too sophisticated for the Taliban to operate. Estimates of their value range from $24 billion to $83 billion. Whatever the true figure, U.S. agencies and a few independent investigators agree that close to one-third of what Washington spent on the Afghan defense forces went for war matériel now held by an enemy we ousted 20 years ago.

Contrast the relative apathy shown by many over Taliban possession of this equipment with the ongoing furor over the $7.5 billion worth of decommissioned military gear that the Department of Defense provides to U.S. and territorial police departments under the 1033 Program, which many on Capitol Hill and in state legislatures want to curtail or eliminate. The 1033 Program was meant to save tax dollars by passing off the Pentagon’s excess equipment to local police, who receive the items for free except for shipping costs. The program was part of the 1997 National Defense Authorization Act, though there have been similar programs since the end of World War II. An earlier version of the program under President George H. W. Bush in 1990 and 1991 sought to aid police departments in fighting the war on drugs. Under President Bill Clinton, counterterrorism was also included among the program’s goals.

According to the Law Enforcement Support Office (LESO), which operates the program as part of the Defense Logistics Agency’s Disposition Services, about 8,000 of the nation’s 18,000 police agencies have received military-grade equipment, subject to approval by their states. Much of the cast-off gear is office equipment, clothing and uniforms, tools, and radios.

It is the “controlled equipment,” including armored vehicles, weaponized aircraft, rifles and grenade launchers, that has led to demands to rein in the program. The outcry over images of police riding on armored vehicles, wearing night-vision goggles, and carrying military-grade firearms during the 2014 Michael Brown protests led President Barack Obama to issue Executive Order 13688 in 2015, limiting what the Defense Department could transfer. Prohibited items included tracked armored vehicles; weaponized aircraft, vessels, and vehicles; .50-caliber firearms and ammunition; bayonets; camouflage uniforms; and grenade launchers. In response, LESO reported that police had returned 126 tracked armored vehicles, 138 grenade launchers, and 1,623 bayonets by April 1, 2016.

But the prohibition was short-lived. In August 2017, President Donald Trump revoked EO 13688, again permitting the transfer of tracked armored vehicles, bayonets, and utility knives—with the rationale for the last two being that officers kept these in their vehicles for use during emergency situations. The program had discontinued transfers of grenade launchers in 1999, prior to Obama’s executive order—a policy that remains in effect today.

Gallup: Biden’s 11-point approval rating drop is the worst of any president since WWII

Jeffrey Swindoll

Oct 23rd, 2021 10:14 pm

President Joe Biden is on a historic run … but not the good kind.

Biden started 2021 with a 56% approval rating. He’s now down 11 points (44.7%) in the third quarter of 2021 — the worst drop of any U.S. president since World War II.

Epic Fail: Vaccination Rates Now Lower Than When Biden Took Office

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/10/25/epic-fail-vaccination-rates-now-lower-than-when-biden-took-office/

President Joe Biden continues to insist that his vaccine mandates have been a roaring success. The truth is far different. In fact, the only thing the mandate seems to have increased is the labor shortage and supply-chain crisis.

“It’s working. We’re making progress,” Biden said recently, pointing to the fact that daily cases had declined 47% and hospitalizations were down 38% in the previous month and a half.

Somehow, the army of media fact-checkers failed to notice that Biden was, shall we say, misleading the public.

First, Biden’s employer mandates still haven’t taken effect, since the federal rules governing companies with more than 100 workers have yet to be released. Biden’s mandate covering federal contractors doesn’t take effect until Dec. 8.

Second, the decline in new COVID cases started at the end of August, nearly two weeks before Biden’s Sept. 9 pronouncement, and hospitalizations and deaths have followed suit, as expected.

This bell curve pattern is the same thing COVID has demonstrated in the past – before vaccines were available or were widespread. Last winter, for example, new COVID cases peaked at the start of January and then plunged, at a time when a comparatively tiny fraction of the public was vaccinated.

The other inconvenient truth for Biden is that vaccination rates are no guarantee that COVID rates will decline. The United Kingdom, to cite on example, is right now experiencing a surge in COVID cases, even though 73% of its population is either fully or partially vaccinated.

In contrast, new COVID cases have been steadily falling in Mexico in recent weeks, where only 40% of the population is fully vaccinated and another 14% partially so.

A Culture that Celebrates Fake Heroes While Crucifying Real Ones Cannot Endure By William Sullivan

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/10/a_culture_that_celebrates_fake_heroes_while_crucifying_real_ones_cannot_endure_.html

“Believe in something,” Nike told consumers in 2018, “even it means sacrificing everything.”  The advertisement features former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick giving a stoic stare to those social justice warriors being spurred to buy the company’s product. 

In what may be the swiftest example of the Mandela Effect taking hold on the American cultural psyche, many Americans believe that Colin Kaepernick was headlong into a promising NFL future when he boldly decided to take a knee during the National Anthem in order to protest police brutality, and for this crime against the political and social status quo, he was ostracized by the racist NFL and its fans. 

The broad belief in this myth is much more pernicious and destructive, however, than our innocently misremembering that the Monopoly man wears a monocle.

And it is most certainly a myth.  The reality is that on August 26, 2016, Kaepernick decided to sit on the bench during the Anthem, not kneel.  Nothing ostentatious, and there was something almost childish about it, in fact.  Perhaps he didn’t like being benched for Blaine Gabbert, who was, according to Mike Foss at USA Today, possibly “the worst quarterback employed by the NFL” at the time, before he goes on to explain that he might have actually been the second-worst quarterback — behind only the horrendously bad Kaepernick in 2015.

It wasn’t the first time that he sat during the Anthem, but it was the first time that reporters seem to have been struck by it enough to ask him about it.  When asked why he didn’t stand, he famously said, “I’m not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color.” 

BLM, the MSM, and SJWs rejoiced, of course.  There were many critics, too (myself included), but the NFL didn’t exactly censure or oppress him in any way.  They issued a statement saying that the league “encouraged” but didn’t “require” standing for the Anthem.  The team and coach supported him.  And eventually, he got his shot in the 2016 regular season (and earning about $17 million for his trouble), playing in 11 games.  Unfortunately, the 49ers only won one of those games, and he went into free agency after that terrible season as the league’s most inaccurate passer of the previous two years, with nearly a quarter of his passes statistically categorized as “off-target” passes.

The Farce of American Despotism The Soviets had the gulag, we have “cancel culture” in our universities and a brittle obsession with race and weirdo sexuality everywhere.  By Roger Kimball

https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/23/the-farce-of-american-despotism/

Reflecting on Joe Biden’s disastrous “town hall” with Anderson Cooper on Thursday, The Spectator’s Dominic Green asks a question that has to weigh heavily on the mind of every American adult: “Is it more worrisome that Joe Biden might not be in charge, or that he actually is in charge?” I have long argued that allowing Biden to appear in public is a form of elder abuse, and I have speculated that he really is not in control of his actions but is manipulated, puppet-like, by a shadowy cadre of unnamed string-pullers I have called “The Committee.”

I do not have any proof that such is the case. I infer the existence and machinations of The Committee from Biden’s ostentatious incompetence and apparent senility. Has any president in the history of the Republic overseen such a destructive litany of failures so early in his tenure? Observers around the world caught their breath in August as our botched exit from Afghanistan went from appalling to something much worse and more deadly. What will be its defining image? The desperate Afghans clinging to and then falling from the landing gear of a transport plane as it took off from the Kabul airport? Or will it be the images of the slaughter perpetrated by a suicide (that is, a homicide) bomber outside the airport, an incident that killed some 170 people include more than a dozen U.S. military personnel?

Or maybe it will be the image of the drone strike launched in retaliation for that slaughter, a strike that was supposed to have targeted an ISIS-K operative but in fact killed zero terrorists and instead blew to bits 10 Afghan civilians, including seven children. The United States initially said they had obliterated an ISIS-K operative along with the collateral damage, but eventually they had to admit that, nope, they got no bad guys, just 10 innocent Afghans. 

General Mark “White Rage” Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, initially called the attack a “righteous strike,” but then walked that back to describe it as a “heart-wrenching” “horrible tragedy of war.” Meanwhile, Joe Biden himself called the evacuation from Afghanistan an “extraordinary success.” 

I wonder what the hundreds of Americans stranded in Afghanistan think about that? The administration initially said that everyone who wanted to get out could get out, then it acknowledged that a handful of Americans were left behind, then “about a hundred.” That number has just been adjusted up to more than 400. I wonder, too, what the families of those murdered by the Taliban, and then hanged from construction cranes as “examples” to the populace, think of that judgment? Something similar, I suspect, to what the husband and children of Negar Masoomi, the pregnant policewoman who allegedly was murdered in front of them by Taliban agents in September, think. 

A Jet Blue Jihadist? The Great Press Cover-up by Chris Farrell

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17841/jetblue-jihadist

If we are trying to ascertain motive in a situation like this, shouting “Allah” would seem to be a key detail. That potentially moves the incident from “disturbed passenger freaks out over failed phone connection” to “jihadist tries to commit suicide attack.” It does not prove the latter case of course, but it does make it part of the conversation.

However, you would have to go to the FBI affidavit to get that detail. The Washington Post write up of the incident, clearly based on the affidavit, went so far as noting that El Dahr “yelled in Spanish and Arabic” but omitted that he was shouting about Allah — despite the obvious news value in that detail.

Granted there could be a variety of reasons why El Dahr was invoking his supreme being. But there is only one reason for not reporting it — deliberately to obscure a possible tie to Islamic radicalism.

If a radical Islamist hijacked an airplane, we might never know it was an act of terrorism. That is, if we rely only on the mainstream media.

Case in point: On September 22, Khalil El Dahr, a passenger on JetBlue Flight 261 from Boston to Puerto Rico, suddenly rushed to the front of the aircraft, choked and kicked a flight attendant, tried to break into the flight deck, and urged crew members to shoot him. It took a half-dozen flight attendants to restrain El Dahr, tying him down with flex cuffs, seat belt extenders and a necktie. On landing in Puerto Rico, El Dahr was arrested and charged with interference with flight crew members and attendants, a federal crime.