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50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

Biden from the Beginning Right from the start, the Delaware Democrat was all about power and money. Lloyd Billingsley

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/biden-beginning-lloyd-billingsley/

White House resident Joe Biden was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 1972, at the age of 29. Two years later, in 1974, the Delaware Democrat was the subject of a 4,000-plus-word Washingtonian profile, but not for anything he had accomplished in office.

“I have no illusions about why I am such a hot commodity,” Biden told Kitty Kelley.  “I am the youngest man in the Senate and I am also the victim of a tragic fate which makes me very newsworthy.” Biden’s wife Neilia and the couple’s infant daughter were killed in a car accident shortly after Biden’s election in 1972. Biden wanted to resign, but Senate majority leader Mike Mansfield promised him prestigious committee assignments. The grieving newcomer had higher goals in mind.

“I know I can be a good Senator, and I know I can be a good President,” Biden told Kelley. “I know I could have easily made the White House with Neilia. And my family still expects me to be there one of these days. With them behind me anything can happen.” As Biden’s sister Valerie explained, “Joey is going to be president someday. He was made to be in the White House. Just you wait and see.”

Biden proclaimed “there is no other walk of life which can do more good for mankind than politics,” but money was also part of it. “I am worth a lot more than my salary of $42,500 a year in this body,” Biden explained in the Senate. “It seems to me that we should flat out tell the American people we are worth our salt.” That brought a response from William Loeb, editor of the “right wing”  Manchester Union Leader.

Black Supremacy The hate that dare not speak its name. David Horowitz and John Perazzo

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/black-supremacy-david-horowitz-and-john-perazzo/

When a white police officer in Ohio shot and killed Ma’Khia Bryant, stopping her from plunging a butcher knife into the chest of an unarmed black teenager, the racial melodrama that is destroying the very fabric of American society reached what the “woke” refer to as an “inflection point.” At that moment, the narrative of the national lynch mob – verdict first, due process be damned – collided with an impossible reality: a white cop saving the life of a black child. Unable to resolve this dilemma, the woke mob simply refused to see it.

It was left to Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors to formulate their denial bluntly:

The verdict of George Floyd’s murder was a victory in accountability but not a victory towards abolition [of the police]. While we watched Derek Chauvin be convicted for murder, a Black child named Ma’Khia Bryant was murdered by police, proving there is no justice.

Patrisse Cullors is a racist whose sociopathic premise is: all cops are guilty and all black criminals are innocent. This is also the premise and rationale of all the riots and protests of the year just passed: White cops are racists, and blacks their innocent targets, even if they happen to be armed criminals resisting arrest. Through these ideological blinders, the Ohio event – a white cop rescuing an unarmed black teen about to be murdered by a knife-wielding black teen – was simply impossible. The fact that the knife-wielding black teen was shouting “I’m going to stab the fuck out of you, bitch” as she thrust a butcher knife towards her intended victim’s chest was just inconceivable. If white cops protected black victims from black criminals, the goal of abolishing the police could not be justified.

It is a truism that equality and justice require a single standard by which everyone is judged. There can be no justice if black people are innocent regardless of the facts, and whites are guilty despite them. This is a simple truth that everyone recognizes – except when it comes to race. Universally absent from such discussions, therefore, is a taboo subject: black racism. Yet, it is an incontrovertible fact that the overwhelming majority of homicides against blacks are committed by blacks. Moreover, the largest overtly racist organization in America today is black. The Nation of Islam is a racist religion, headed by America’s most virulent, anti-Semitic, anti-white, anti-gay bigot, who is also black: Louis Farrakhan. According to Wikipedia, the Nation of Islam has an estimated 50,000 members; currently, according to the same source, the Ku Klux Klan has 3,000. 

Critical Race Theory Is About to Face Its Day(s) in Court By John Murawski,

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2021/04/27/critical_race_theory_is_about_to_face_its_days_in_court_774290.html

As recently as last summer, few people outside academia had heard of critical race theory, whose central claim is that racism, not liberty, is the founding value and guiding vision of American society. Then, President Trump issued an executive order last September banning the teaching of this “malign ideology” to federal employees and federal contractors.

Trump’s ban was blocked by a federal judge in December and immediately revoked by Joe Biden upon occupying the White House in January. Since then, federal agencies and federal contractors have resumed staff training on unconscious bias, microaggressions, systemic racism and white privilege – some of the most common but also most disputed concepts associated with the four-decade-old academic theory.

Now critical race theory is about to face a major real-world test: a spate of lawsuits alleging that it encourages discrimination and other illegal policies targeting whites, males and Christians. But unlike Trump’s executive order, which ran into First Amendment problems by prohibiting controversial speech, the lawsuits name specific policies and practices that allegedly discriminate, harass, blame and humiliate people based on their race.

The common thread of these legal challenges is the inescapable logic that making accommodations for critical race theory will erode the nation’s anti-discrimination law as it has developed since the 1960s. This would mean replacing the colorblind ideal of treating all people equally, which has been widely viewed as the crowning achievement of the civil rights movement, with a contrary strategy: implementing race-based policies, which can range from affirmative action to reparations for compensating African Americans for the injustices of the past and for producing equitable outcomes in the future.

“Critical race theory is a Trojan horse of sorts,” said David Pivtorak, a Los Angeles lawyer representing two white men who are suing two California state environment agencies. “It disguises itself as the gold standard of fairness and justice but, in fact, relies on vilification and the idea of permanent oppressor and oppressed races. Its goal is not ensuring that all people play by the same rules, regardless of race, but equity, which is a euphemism for race-based outcomes.”

About a dozen lawsuits and administrative complaints have been filed since 2018, with another wave planned this summer by conservative public interest law firms and private attorneys. Their goal is to draw attention to some of the more pronounced practices and win court judgments to slow down the spread of CRT in K-12 schools, government agencies other organizations.

The Tribalist Left When will the “antiracists” start rooting out the bigots in their own ranks? Dave Seminara

https://www.city-journal.org/bigots-within-antiracist-ranks

Most Americans agree that racism in any form is abhorrent. But in recent weeks, far too many who call themselves “antiracists” have inflamed racial tensions with antiwhite bigotry that’s every bit as disgusting as what they claim to oppose. When will the antiracists start rooting out the bigots in their own ranks?

When Robert Long, a 21-year-old Georgia man, killed eight people, six of them Asian, at three spas on March 16, prominent figures on the left reflexively branded it an anti-Asian hate crime. In a piece for The Root titled, “Whiteness is a Pandemic,” Damon Young wrote after the Georgia killings, “Whiteness is a public health crisis. . . . It shortens life expectancies, it pollutes air . . . it devastates forests, it melts ice caps, it sparks (and funds) wars . . . and it kills people.”

There was a palpable sense of disappointment in the media when Georgia police threw cold water on the theory that Long was motivated by animus toward Asians. Many on the left stuck to this story against all evidence, pretending that statements by police and others who knew Long well must have been wrong. Days later, when early news leaked out of Boulder, Colorado that ten people were killed in a mass shooting, a CNN anchor rushed to assert that “another white male” appeared to be responsible. Meena Harris, a prominent lawyer and Vice President Kamala Harris’s niece, wrote in a now-deleted tweet, “Violent white men are the greatest terrorist threat to our country.”

The Nation published a piece by a woman who wrote, “One of the principal benefits of the pandemic is how I’ve been able to exclude racism and whiteness generally from my day-to-day life.” And how about the bizarre poem penned by the (Democratic) mayor of Charlottesville, Virginia, who lambasted her city as a place “anchored in white supremacy” that “rapes you” and “suffocates your hopes and dreams.”

When the Boulder assailant turned out to be a Syrian immigrant, progressives pivoted to their second favorite obsession after race: gun control, because every tragedy must be exploited to advance preferred narratives. Police shootings aren’t noteworthy unless the cop is white and the victim is black. The Oregonian all but acknowledged this recently after Portland police killed a white man, tweeting that it was identifying his race “in light of social unrest prompted by police shootings of Black people.”

America Is In The Hands Of Its Most Foolish Rather Than Its Finest

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/04/28/america-is-in-the-hands-of-its-most-foolish-rather-than-its-finest/

Mark Jan. 20, 2021, as the day the U.S. fell under the control of the lousiest presidential administration of our lifetimes, if not our history. Heaven help us to get past this bunch in Washington that is either so inept, or so blinded by its radical ideology, that it’s ushering the country into an era of decline.

Where to begin? How about with John Kerry? President Joe Biden’s climate envoy believes that “even if we get to net zero, we still have to get carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.” So no CO2, get rid of it all? Was this a slip of the tongue? A misstatement that can happen to anyone? Or simply yet another politician on the left gone mad?

More likely the latter. As our friend Steve Milloy at junkscience.com pointed out, Kerry actually made the same nonsensical statement twice at last week’s virtual climate summit to emphasize his point.

Another friend, Anthony Watts of the world’s most widely read global warming website, reminds us Kerry “said essentially the same thing back in 2015” when arguing – correctly – that no matter what the West does, carbon emissions will still be pouring out of the developing world.

Whether or not Kerry was making this exact same point last week, or was absurdly suggesting a zero-CO2 Earth, matters little. The inanity, however, does. How did we allow ourselves to be saddled with such a character?

Likewise, Kerry’s behavior as secretary of state under Barack Obama indicates he’s a man who cannot be trusted. He reportedly warned Iran about hundreds of Israeli covert attacks on the terrorist regime’s interests in Syria while working for that administration. If reports are accurate – and given the history of Democrats in general and Kerry in particular, there’s good reason to believe they are – then he provided aid and comfort to an enemy of the United States. None from the America-after-all-others administration dare call it treason, though.

Biden’s Post-Trump Honeymoon He’s riding the end of the pandemic to pass a radical agenda.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bidens-post-trump-honeymoon-11619564017?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

When President Biden addresses Congress Wednesday evening, he won’t salute his predecessor but he should. Donald Trump’s raucous Presidency has let the Democrat sell a radical agenda in the soothing tones of a return to normal, while the vaccine project known as Operation Warp Speed has teed up the end of the pandemic and an economic revival. This is the main story of Mr. Biden’s first 100 days.

***

Mr. Biden won the White House as the anti-Trump, and he has continued to benefit from that persona in his first months. Half the country is relieved merely to have a President who isn’t constantly brawling on TV in their living rooms. Whether by design, or necessity due to his reduced capacities, the decision to husband Mr. Biden’s public appearances has been shrewd. He’s the calm after the four-year Trump storm.

The Democrat has also been lucky in timing, as he took the oath of office as the Covid-19 vaccines were coming online. The White House pretense that it inherited a Covid mess is nonsense. The vaccine production was pre-planned. While some state rollouts were bumpy when there was more vaccine demand than supply, the main job of the Administration was to accelerate the distribution that was already underway.

The same goes for the economy, which has been growing since last July, and its acceleration was inevitable as people returned to normal commercial and social life. As New York, Michigan and California have followed the leadership of Texas and Florida in lifting their lockdowns, the inevitable post-pandemic boom has arrived. The same would have happened if Mr. Trump had won.

What is malignant normality and why should you care? Diane Bederman

https://dianebederman.com/what-is-malignant-normality-and-why-should-you-ca

Whoever thought it possible that one day an American theology professor, Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barnes, whose mission is to serve as a catalyst for healing, justice, and reconciliation would write this prayer to God to help her:

“I want to stop caring about them (white people), individually and collectively. I want to stop caring about their misguided, racist souls, to stop believing that they can be better, that they can stop being racist.”

This is possible because the Progressive left is shaming, shunning, cancelling, and silencing anyone who does not agree with their views on critical race theory, white privilege, their new definition of family.

We have been down this road, before.

The world watched as Germany  morphed from a country renowned for its Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, with authors like Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe into one taken over by Hitler. Citizens of all classes followed the orders of Adolph Hitler, snitching on neighbours, turning in Jews, murdering Jews for being different as well as standing by while mentally and physically disabled people were taken away. How was this possible?

The answer may be malignant normality: the way average people—most of us—drift or slide or shuffle or stumble into moral corruption. Malignant normality thrives by silencing opposition and promoting submission to the new value system.

Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, most famous as the author of The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide  suggests we are socialized into “malignant normality.”

They Shouldn’t Have Died; That Doesn’t Make Them Innocent Jane Menton

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2021-4-26-they-shouldnt-have-died-that

Two weeks ago, Daunte Wright’s death sparked another round of protests and calls to defund/abolish the police. A week later, Derek Chauvin’s trial resulting in a guilty verdict has given the U.S. a reprieve from another round of violent riots. Both of these outcomes could have been anticipated: every time a black civilian dies in an encounter with the police, the conversation immediately becomes about police brutality and police reform. I agree there are many things we could do to reform policing in this country — I have discussed a few possibilities here and here. But while excessive policing is a problem, there are two other aspects to the BLM conversation that are ignored by the mainstream: we will always need some policing and law enforcement to protect civilians from criminal behavior, and many of the recent victims who have been held up as martyrs of the BLM movement had been engaged in criminal behavior. 

Daunte Wright had a warrant out for his arrest for carrying an illegal firearm and attempted armed robbery. George Floyd had served several stints in prison. Both men had been accused of armed robbery, attempted in one case and executed in the other. Their final encounters with the police were for non-violent infractions, but their histories of criminal behavior tell a different story. Those histories also indicate that future run-ins with the police were not unlikely.

Ma’khia Bryant, a 16 year old girl shot dead by police in Columbus, Ohio, had been trying to stab another woman. 13 year old Adam Toledo had been firing a handgun in the middle of the night when police were called to the scene. Jacob Blake, left paralyzed from the waist down after an encounter with the police in Kenosha, Wisconsin, was attempting to kidnap his children from their mother, who had been awarded custody. In these scenarios, police intervention was warranted.  

There is a difference between overcriminalization and excessive policing on the one hand, and situations where there is a threat of violence and the police are called to protect innocent civilians on the other. As a society, we need to be able to distinguish between the two. Instead we are creating a dichotomy in which the police are always wrong. Over time, this will result in more leeway for criminal behavior and less protection for law-abiding citizens. Meanwhile, with the public poised to distrust the police, odds increase that people will be more likely to resist arrest, and that fraught encounters with the police are more likely to turn violent.

Who Fears a Society that Hates Itself? Lionel Shriver

https://spectator.us/topic/fears-society-hates-itself-race/

In my teens, criticizing the implacable edifice of the United States felt like kicking a tank in bedroom slippers. Richard Nixon’s ‘silent majority’ was patriotic. Railing about my country’s disgraceful historical underbelly — slavery, the Native American genocide — seemed edgy.

Fast-forward, and in the west trashing your own country has become a central preoccupation of the ruling class. University administrators, corporate board members and media pundits compete with one another over who can denounce their disgusting society with more fervor. Shame, or what passes for it, is the new ostentation. America’s own President decries his country’s ‘systemic racism’. Far more than singing along with ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ at a football game or (God forbid) ‘Rule, Britannia’ at the Proms, joining the chorus proclaiming the odiousness of America or Britain has become downright conformist — one reason why pooping all over the land of my birth ceased long ago to be any fun.

Now self-loathing has gone mainstream, the government-commissioned April report attesting the UK is not ‘institutionally racist’ is what qualifies as genuinely edgy; its assertion that, rather, Britain should act as a model for other white-majority countries is what qualifies as genuinely brave. For sure enough, its lead author, the head of the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, drew comparison to Goebbels. On Twitter, a Labour MP equated the commissioners with cross-burners in the Ku Klux Klan. On the Guardian’s front page, the mother of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence decried the report’s heretical conclusions as giving ‘racists the green light’. On Channel 4 News, a former Met police superintendent slammed the document as having ‘set back racial equality for decades’ (now, that’s one powerful pile of paper). So over-the-top, so foam-at-the-mouth, so eye-bulgingly hypertensive was the immediate response to the ‘gaslighting’ report that the exhibition was almost comical.

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Sen. Rick Scott: Dear Woke Corporate America, beware of the backlash that’s coming It turns out that power doe corrupt, and you have become corrupt By Senator Rick Scott (R-FL)

https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/sen-rick-scott-work-corporate-america-backlash

Dear Woke Corporate America,

I hope you are all having fun with your virtue signaling. I hope you are enjoying trying to one-up each other and showing how woke you can be, all the while believing that you are more sophisticated and morally superior to the hard-working people of this country.

You must have loved the accolades from your elitist, left-wing peers when you took the MLB All-Star Game from Georgia. What a fun day for you on Twitter. Congratulations.

Never mind that you have destroyed working people’s jobs and hurt people who haven’t worked since COVID-19 took a member of their family or destroyed their small business.

You get texts from your elitist friends praising you for your courageous stand when you support “mostly peaceful” movements that loot small businesses, set fire to government buildings, and take the lives of innocent people.

You think that makes you morally superior to the people in what you call “flyover country.”

But you are lying. You are lying to Americans, lying to each other, and lying to yourselves. You know that everything you have said about the election reforms in Georgia being racist is a lie. 

You know that the Georgia law actually expands early voting and does nothing to suppress or curtail the voting rights of anyone. And yes, the Georgia law requires an ID to vote. Well, so does Delta Airlines, and so does Major League Baseball in order to pick up tickets.