Did Cops Attack and Provoke Peaceful Protesters on January 6? Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/28/did-cops-attack-and-provoke-peaceful-protesters-on-january-6/

If the American people deserve the truth about an “attack on our democracy” then they deserve the truth about the way law enforcement handled the crowd on January 6. Release the tapes.

Joe Biden’s Justice Department is using every legal maneuver at its disposal to keep under wraps more than 14,000 hours of surveillance footage captured by the United States Capitol Police security system on January 6. Prosecutors insist the recordings are “highly sensitive” material; USCP’s general counsel warns that releasing the videos would provoke another “attack” on the Capitol complex.

But the trove of footage held by USCP isn’t the only video used as incriminating evidence in court proceedings, particularly hearings where prosecutors argue that a January 6 defendant should remain behind bars awaiting trial. The Justice Department also has footage recorded by body cameras worn by D.C. Metropolitan Police officers. (According to the USCP’s general counsel, Capitol police officers don’t wear body cameras. Interesting.)

Federal prosecutors routinely petition the court for pre-trial detention of January 6 defendants; judges have concurred in dozens of cases. Proof that the accused is a “danger” to society largely rests on cherry-picked video clips created by the government from video footage exclusively held by the government.

After news organizations complained their reporters could not see the clips during virtual court hearings, Beryl Howell, the chief judge of the D.C. District Court handling each one of the 500 or so Capitol breach cases, set up a way for journalists to access video evidence on a case-by-case basis.

The Justice Department now is using that ruling to perpetuate the idea that law enforcement officials were savagely attacked by bloodthirsty Trump “insurrectionists” on January 6. Earlier this month, the agency released a brief clip of a former New York City police officer angrily confronting a D.C. cop at around 2:30 p.m. on January 6. CNN, which obtained the clip, described the 56-second video as “horrifying.”

Thomas Webster, a decorated Marine and ex-NYPD officer with no criminal record, was arrested in February and charged with seven counts including assaulting the officer with a flag pole that was attached to his U.S. Marine Corps flag. (He did not hit the officer with the pole.) He’s been behind bars ever since.

Suck It, Liberals: Manhattan DA Isn’t Filing Charges Against Trump Matt Vespa

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2021/06/28/suck-it-liberals-manhattan-da-isnt-filing-charges-against-trump-n2591724

The media and the Democrats have attacked him so much, lobbed so many conspiracy theories, and propped up so many shoddy legal inquiries into Donald Trump and his entities that it’s hard to keep up. Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance had been looking into the Trump Organization for months. The Left thought this would be it. The Left hoped this would be it, that Donald Trump would be charged over fraud allegations. Not the case. Don is still Teflon. Vance is not going to charge the former president and liberal America is going to lose it. Even out of office, Trump still owns the Left (via Politico):

Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance has indicated he does not currently plan to charge the Trump Organization with crimes related to allegations of “hush money” payments and real estate value manipulations, according to a personal lawyer for Donald Trump.

Ronald Fischetti, a New York attorney who represents the former president, said on Monday that in a meeting last week, he asked Vance’s team for details on charges they were considering.

According to Fischetti, members of Vance’s team said they were considering bringing charges against the Trump Organization and its individual employees related to alleged failures to pay taxes on corporate benefits and perks. It has been widely reported that those perks included cars and apartments and appear to only involve a small number of executives.

“We asked, ‘Is there anything else?’” Fischetti told POLITICO. “They said, ‘No.’”

“It’s crazy that that’s all they had,” he added.

Forget About Making Peace with the Islamic World By Victor Sharpe

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/06/forget_about_making_peace_with_the_islamic_world.html

The great humorist, Jerome K. Jerome, suggested many years ago that, “… we all love peace, but not peace at any price.”

Peace is only a reality between states that are rational and can in time become friendly towards each other. Today leftists and all those who shout out the vacuous phrase, “peace and justice,” have turned those once noble words into soiled and tarnished rags.

They have become the very folk who, through one of life’s supreme ironies, shout down dissenting voices and thus become guilty of the very violent behavior they claim to oppose. The universities and colleges have become hotbeds of radicalized students who chant slogans of peace and justice yet howl down invited speakers with whom they disagree. Free speech withers on today’s university campus while tenured professors, smiling indulgently, espouse the monolithic message of the Left, which tolerates no disagreement.

That word, “peace” has permeated the democracies for decades and flowed from numerous pulpits. But despite untold forests cut down in order to produce posters, books, banners, placards, and learned tomes calling for peace, there is less peace in the world today and more hypocrites selling it like snake oil peddlers.

On the banks of the East River in New York City stands the Temple of Peace, the huge United Nations building that claims to be its repository, but which in reality is the ultimate Temple to Hypocrisy. The worshippers of “Peace” are the supreme idealists who never abandon their dreams, even if their naïve acts lead them to inadvertently make tyrants stronger and create living nightmares for the very victims for whom they claim they are bringing peace.

If a nation desires peace with its neighbor, but that neighbor implacably rejects peace, then any imposed peace process from outside is nothing more than a handmaiden to futility or worse. The peacemaker often creates a catastrophic erosion of security for the peace-loving nation, which because of its peaceful intentions is the only party that is then leaned upon to make endless and one-sided concessions to a belligerent enemy. Such has been the curse of the peace process for Israel in its attempts to survive relentless Arab and Muslim aggression.

Israel’s leaders have sought peace above all else and considered its attainment with hostile neighbors as the great panacea. But making peace must never be the goal of a nation when confronted by irredeemable enemies who look upon peace with contempt. For almost a century Jews have begged the Arab and Muslim world to agree to a lasting peace in the Middle East. They have offered what no other nation or people would dream of offering to a belligerent. But they have received nothing, for the simple reason that the Muslim Arab is only interested in a limited ceasefire so as to continue aggression against the Jews as soon as he feels strong enough. In this, he follows the example of Islam’s founder, Mohammed.

General Milley Leads the Enemy Within Championing critical race theory, undermining the military. Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/general-milley-leads-enemy-within-daniel-greenfield/

“Milley has spent his career telling politicians what they want to hear because it was good for his career. His endorsement of the divisive racism of critical race theory shows that there are no limits to what he will support as long as it’s good for his career. But this time the cost may not just be thousands of dead Americans abroad, but a defenseless nation at home.”

As the Black Lives Matter riots torched the country, Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, insisted that the violent assaults threatening the nation’s capital were merely protests, and berated Trump’s adviser Stephen Miller who warned, “These cities are burning”.

After the White House came under attack and a BLM mob set fire to the gatehouse, Trump aides, at the request of the president, drafted a document invoking the Insurrection Act that would have ended the nationwide reign of Democrat terror by putting troops on the street.

Milley vocally rejected the idea, claiming that the violent riots were just a protest, and it wasn’t appropriate for the military to be involved in political issues. Of course Eisenhower had sent the troops into Little Rock to integrate the schools, Kennedy had sent them to Mississippi to do the same, and George H.W. Bush had sent them to Los Angeles to put down the Rodney King riots.

After accompanying President Trump to Lafayette Square, where Black Lives Matter rioters had tried to set the ‘Church of the Presidents’ on fire, Milley quickly withered under media pressure.

“I should not have been there,” Milley recited in an apology video and defended the BLM-Antifa insurrections as responses to the “centuries of injustice toward African Americans.”

After scores of cities had been torched, statues pulled down, and hundreds of police officers wounded at the hands of racist Marxist hate groups, Milley argued that, “we should all be proud that the vast majority of protests have been peaceful.”

Why the Fight over Critical Race Theory Matters By Michael Brendan Dougherty

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2021/07/12/dewey-defeats-critical-race-theory/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=top-of-nav&utm_content=magazine&utm_term=title

CRT is not just an attack on the American inheritance of political institutions; it is an attack on the social function of public schools.

Moms are rising up in counterrevolutionary revolt. I’ll say it again, moms are rising up in counterrevolutionary revolt against critical race theory, “anti-racism,” the introduction of the 1619 Project into high-school curricula, and the suddenly invasive demands of diversity, equity, and inclusion consultants who are being hired by their school districts. Although progressives wish, in vain, that this movement were an Astroturf operation run by shadowy right-wing donor networks, it has been springing up in school districts in reaction to initiatives led by administrators themselves.

Tatiana Ibrahim stood up in front of the Carmel school board in Putnam County, N.Y, and denounced what she termed the “communist values” that teachers and administrators in the district are promoting. “Stop indoctrinating our children. Stop teaching our children to hate the police. Stop teaching our children that if they don’t agree with the LGBT community, they’re homophobic,” Ibrahim demanded. “You have no idea of each child’s life,” she said, before announcing, in an only-in-America moment, that she is a Christian and her daughter is a Muslim.

She’s far from alone. “Telling my child or any child that they are in a permanent oppressed status in America because they are black is racist — and saying that white people are automatically above me, my children, or any child is racist as well,” said Quisha King, a mother in Duval County, Fla. “This is not something that we can stand for in our country.” Other revolts — as in Southlake, Texas, and Loudoun County, Va. — have been even more dramatic.

As with the Tea Party movement a decade before it, Fox News, Republican-run legislatures, and the institutions of conservatism are only just catching up to a political movement that has already gone viral. And again, as with the Tea Party, one of the reasons conservative institutions are only just catching up is that this movement — a defense of public schools as they were until recently — is not entirely conservative. But we’ll get to that.

Progressives, seeing the backlash, are feigning ignorance. They snort that critical race theory is a technical discourse that developed in law schools, and that it obviously isn’t taught in public schools. But Jean Stefancic and Richard Delgado, in their 1995 book trying to define that rising movement of legal scholarship, do give a definition that seems suitable for describing the ideas now filtering down to other schools under a variety of names. “Unlike traditional civil-rights discourse, which stresses incrementalism and step-by-step progress,” they write, “critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.”

Four Biden proposals would dole out taxpayer money based on critical race theory by Brad Polumbo

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/four-biden-proposals-would-dole-out-taxpayer-money-based-on-critical-race-theory

What happens when you mix toxic critical race theory with progressive economics? Thanks to President Joe Biden, we may soon find out.

Under Democratic leadership, the federal government is rolling out numerous race-based economic initiatives that explicitly dole out taxpayer money along racially discriminatory lines. Here are four examples, as identified by Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty attorney Dan Lennington.

A nearly $10 billion Treasury Department mortgage-assistance initiative plans explicitly to favor “socially disadvantaged individuals,” essentially defined as nonwhite people, in assigning the funds.
A $1 billion Department of Agriculture initiative targeting “socially disadvantaged farmers” would specifically dole out taxpayer money “based on race and ethnicity.”
Another USDA program would spend up to $400 million to buy food from “local, regional, and socially disadvantaged farmers,” with “socially disadvantaged” once again basically standing in for “non-white.”
A $10 billion Small Business Administration credit program intends to emphasize funding businesses with nonwhite ownership.

There are too many problems with this race-based approach to federal spending to count.

For one, the legality and constitutionality of these openly discriminatory government schemes are highly dubious. Some race-based government programs such as affirmative action have, unfortunately, been upheld by courts in the past. However, a federal appeals court ordered a halt to a similar Biden administration initiative that allocated COVID-19 relief funds based on race.

The Left Is Now Scaremongering The COVID ‘Delta Variant

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/06/29/the-left-is-now-scaremongering-the-covid-delta-variant/

COVID-19 infection rates are down. Deaths are down. Vaccinations are up. So what’s the response from the left? It continues a desperate attempt to scare the public and blame Republicans.

The left’s bellwether outlet, the New York Times, perfectly sums up this agenda with a story headlined “Red America’s COVID Problem,” in which the Times writes that “COVID remains a serious threat to unvaccinated adults, especially those middle-aged or older” and that it’s rising in Trump-supporting areas of the country where vaccination rates, they say, are lower.

“No wonder, then, that the number of new cases keeps falling in Biden counties, while it has begun to rise in Trump counties,” the Times goes on.

The Washington Post’s increasingly leftist “conservative” columnist Jennifer Rubin declares that “Red states are dangerous to America’s health.”

President Joe Biden is doing his level best to keep the country in a state of panic, warning that the new “Delta variant” is more easily transmissible and potentially deadlier and, he claims, is “especially dangerous for young people.”

The congenital liar Anthony Fauci chimed in as well, saying that “the Delta variant is currently the greatest threat in the U.S. to our attempt to eliminate COVID-19.”

Fauci, you may have noticed, has changed the goalposts again, from “flattening the curve” to eliminating COVID-19 entirely – which is an impossibility, but would let him play dictator for years to come.

Biden’s Plan for an Entitlement Society For the first time in history, more than half of all Americans would be on the federal dole. By John F. Cogan and Daniel L. Heil

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bidens-plan-for-an-entitlement-society-11624918494?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

The federal government’s system of entitlements is the largest money-shuffling machine in human history, and President Biden intends to make it a lot bigger. His American Families Plan—which he recently attempted to tie to a bipartisan infrastructure deal—proposes to extend the reach of federal entitlements to 21 million additional Americans, the largest expansion since Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society.

For the first time in U.S. history—except possibly for the pandemic years 2020 and 2021, for which we don’t yet have data—more than half of working-age households would be on the entitlement rolls if the plan were enacted in its current form. Contrary to Mr. Biden’s assertion that his plan “doesn’t add a single penny to our deficits,” his plan would add more than $1 trillion to the national debt over the next decade.

The American Families Plan proposes several new entitlement programs. One promises students the government will pick up the entire cost of community-college tuition; another promises families earning 1.5 times their state’s median income that Washington will cover all daycare expenses above 7% of family income for children under 5; still another promises workers up to 12 weeks of federally financed wage subsidies to take time off to care for newborns or sick family members.

The American Families Plan would follow longstanding government practice and make temporary emergency programs permanent. In March, Congress enacted the American Rescue Plan, which expanded Affordable Care Act subsidies and refundable tax credits for child care and low-wage workers. The expansions were sold as temporary measures to combat the effects of pandemic lockdowns. A month later, Mr. Biden asked Congress to make them permanent.

It’s the Entitlements, Stupid The guaranteed nature of Biden’s spending is the real threat to America’s economic future.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/its-the-entitlements-stupid-11624920486?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Sen. Joe Manchin’s public support Sunday for at least $2 trillion in new spending in a partisan budget bill is a huge win for the political left. This means a giant tax-and-spend bill this year is likely, and the biggest expansion of the entitlement state since the 1960s is now possible.

The entitlements are by far the biggest long-term economic threat from the Biden agenda. Tax increases can be repealed by a future Congress. Spending on infrastructure will slow as funding falls. The courts may block his racial preferences. But entitlements that spend automatically based on eligibility are nearly impossible to repeal, or even reform, and they represent a huge tax-and-spend wedge far into the future.

The media won’t talk about this, and Republicans are so far missing in action. But Americans need to understand the stakes.

***

Hoover Institution scholars John Cogan and Daniel Heil document nearby the entitlement expansions of the Biden Families Plan. It’s an important piece that lists how far the progressive left wants to go in expanding government’s reach into American family life. Federal child care, government paid family leave, free community college, a $3,600 tax credit per child, a permanent expansion of ObamaCare premium subsidies, universal pre-K, permanent expansion of the earned-income tax credit to workers without children, and more.

We’d highlight two points. First is the dishonesty about costs. Entitlements always start small but then soar. The Biden Families Plan is even more dishonest than usual.

Amazon’s Woke Smokescreen The new inclusion policy put out by Amazon Studios offers entries on “womxn” and “acquired limb difference.” Meantime, the company’s drivers urinate in bottles. Bari Weiss

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/amazons-woke-smokescreen?token=eyJ1c2VyX2l

A few years ago, my friend Dan Ahdoot was auditioning for a sitcom on Fox. And things were looking good; he’d heard from his agent that he made it to the last round. Then, he got a call from one of the creators of the show, a friend of his who was calling to say sorry: Dan wasn’t going to get the part. The reason, he said, was that he wasn’t “diverse.”  

Dan is Iranian. He has photos of his parents in Tehran before the revolution and the eyebrows to prove it. (Don’t worry, I asked Dan if I could objectify him.) But Fox apparently didn’t see Iran as “diverse.” 

Given that Dan is not just Jewish but also Persian and therefore in possession of more than the usual amount of chutzpah, he then thought to ask: What about Afghanistan? Was Iran’s neighbor sufficiently diverse?

The showrunner said he’d find out and give him a call back. 

In the meantime, Dan says he hopped onto his Wikipedia page and inserted a little edit: He was now an “Iranian Afghan Jew,” despite the fact that nobody in Dan’s lineage is from, nor has ever visited, Afghanistan.

The showrunner called back and pronounced that, according to the poobahs over at Fox, Afghanistan was indeed diverse. 

I thought of this story when I read Amazon Studios’ new inclusion policy, vaunted by stenographers in the mainstream media. It announces a goal, by 2024, of having 50% of creative roles in its movies and shows filled by women or people of color.