To the Parapets, Defenders of Free Speech! Anyone who aims to chill, curtail, infringe, or end free speech has outed themselves as an aspiring tyrant and must be stopped. By Thaddeus G. McCotter

https://amgreatness.com/2021/03/26/to-the-parapets-defenders-of-free-speech/

To date, a number of observers have diagnosed and condemned the rancid ideology and insidious aims of the true threat to America: the radical Leftist American Communists or Am-coms. 

In his anti-socialist manifesto, Evan Sayet coined the term and dissected the totalitarian designs of The Woke Supremacy; Lisa De Pasquale satirically skewered the intrinsic insanity and hypocrisy of our self-anointed “moral superiors” in The Social Justice Warrior Handbook: A Practical Survival Guide for Snowflakes, Millennials, and Generation Z; and most recently, Senator Tim Scott (R-S.C.), a leader of exceptional intellect and moral courage, condemned the intolerance behind the regressive policies and neo-racist practices of the often less-than-non-violent “woke folk.”

But it is not just observers from the center-Right decrying the Am-coms. Granted, this oppressive movement will be called many different things depending on who across the political spectrum is discussing it, but the recognition of its dangers remains. Some of the most poignant critiques have come from intellectually honest journalists who are not on the Right, such as Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi. Both ably set forth the Am-coms’ goal of controlling the media and Big Tech to censor political opponents. Taibbi, for example, exposes the “troubling views” of Columbia law professor Timothy Wu, who feels the First Amendment is “obsolete.” In doing so, Greenwald and Taibbi provide the first step in identifying and defeating the Am-coms.

There is no surer way to identify an Am-com than by his lust for censorship.

Media Suddenly Much Less Interested in Guy Busted w/6 Guns in Supermarket Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/03/media-suddenly-much-less-interested-guy-busted-w6-daniel-greenfield/

When this story first broke right after the Boulder supermarket shooting, the media thought it had a train full of narrative. But the Boulder shooter turned out to be a Syrian Muslim forcing the media to play defense while telling everyone not to pay attention to the identity of the shooter.
And the guy with all those guys in the Atlanta Publix? He doesn’t fit the narrative either.
A 22-year-old accused of taking six guns and body armor into a busy Atlanta grocery store will remain in jail after waiving his first appearance hearing Thursday.
Rico Abednego Neequaye Marley faces 11 felonies after authorities said he walked into the Atlantic Station Publix on Wednesday afternoon armed to the teeth. He was arrested after a shopper spotted him with a rifle in the men’s restroom about 1:30 p.m. and alerted the store’s employees, Atlanta police said.
According to an incident report, Instacart shopper Charles Russell entered the restroom and heard “clicking sounds” coming from a bathroom stall.
Marley has the expected record for a member of the Democrat base.
Jail records show Marley was arrested by Chamblee police on a simple assault charge in January 2018. He was arrested again four months later on a theft by receiving stolen property charge in DeKalb County, court records show.
Sorry guys, just an ordinary criminal. Not at all the Trump voter you were looking for. Better luck next time.

When this story first broke right after the Boulder supermarket shooting, the media thought it had a train full of narrative. But the Boulder shooter turned out to be a Syrian Muslim forcing the media to play defense while telling everyone not to pay attention to the identity of the shooter.

And the guy with all those guys in the Atlanta Publix? He doesn’t fit the narrative either.

A 22-year-old accused of taking six guns and body armor into a busy Atlanta grocery store will remain in jail after waiving his first appearance hearing Thursday.

Rico Abednego Neequaye Marley faces 11 felonies after authorities said he walked into the Atlantic Station Publix on Wednesday afternoon armed to the teeth. He was arrested after a shopper spotted him with a rifle in the men’s restroom about 1:30 p.m. and alerted the store’s employees, Atlanta police said.

According to an incident report, Instacart shopper Charles Russell entered the restroom and heard “clicking sounds” coming from a bathroom stall.

Marley has the expected record for a member of the Democrat base.

Jail records show Marley was arrested by Chamblee police on a simple assault charge in January 2018. He was arrested again four months later on a theft by receiving stolen property charge in DeKalb County, court records show. 

Sorry guys, just an ordinary criminal. Not at all the Trump voter you were looking for. Better luck next time.

The CCP Is a Threat. Why Won’t the President Call It One? By Jimmy Quinn

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/03/the-ccp-is-a-threat-why-wont-the-president-call-it-one/

What recent speeches by Biden and Blinken say about the administration’s wrongheaded emphasis on cooperation with China.

Top Biden administration officials have largely kept their promises to vigorously compete with China. Building on the Trump administration’s China policies, they’ve pressed Beijing on its horrific human-rights abuses, bolstered U.S. support for Taiwan using the previous administration’s framework, and built out the Quad of Pacific democracies. In addition to that, the Biden team’s own focus on multilateral action has started to yield some results: This week, they announced sanctions on Chinese officials, coordinated with the U.K, the EU, and Canada, to punish CCP officials for their role in the Uyghur genocide.

But this flurry of activity has been joined, puzzlingly, with a deliberate effort to leave room for meetings such as last week’s rancorous U.S.-China summit in Alaska and President Biden’s decision to invite the CCP’s general secretary to a global climate summit.

To hear Biden appraise the challenge posed by the CCP is to listen to a meandering description of his recent phone conversation with its general secretary Xi Jinping, as he did yesterday. “I made it clear to him again what I’ve told him in person on several occasions: that we’re not looking for confrontation, although we know there will be steep, steep competition.”

No one wants a military conflict, but if calling out an authoritarian regime’s human-rights abuses and international bullying is anything, it is confrontation. In other words, the policies and statements of the president’s own administration belie a need to call the situation what it is, and not a sugarcoated version of the truth.

The problem is not that officials have backed down from speaking out on the CCP’s transgressions. On a trip to Tokyo earlier this month, Secretary of State Antony Blinken accused Beijing of using “coercion and aggression to systematically erode autonomy in Hong Kong, undercut democracy in Taiwan, abuse human rights in Xinjiang and Tibet, and assert maritime claims in the South China Sea” in violation of international law. If that doesn’t put a fine enough point on matters, Blinken has accused the Party of genocide in Xinjiang and referred to Taiwan as a “country” (a notable use of the term for a top U.S. official) as the mainland continues its airborne harassment of the world’s only Chinese democracy. Blinken and Biden both have defined this contest as a fundamental battle between democracy and authoritarianism in the 21st century.

Biden nominates swing vote Sen. Joe Manchin’s wife for $160K federal job

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/mar/26/joe-biden-nominates-swing-vote-sen-joe-manchins-wi/

President Biden intends to appoint the wife of the Senate’s top swing vote, West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin III, to a plum federal position that pays upwards of $160,000 annually.

The White House announced on Friday it would nominate Gayle Connelly Manchin, a former president of the West Virginia state board of education, to serve as federal co-chair of the Appalachian Regional Commission.

The organization is responsible for spurring economic development and investment in the 13 states that make up the region of Appalachia — which spans from northern Mississippi to Pennsylvania.

If confirmed by the Senate, Mrs. Manchin is slated to replace Tim Thomas, a former staffer for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. The role comes with a salary of approximately $163,000 annually, according to a federal pay database.

Mrs. Manchin’s nomination comes as her husband has become a vital political player in Washington, D.C.

USA Today fired the Diversity editor who jumped to conclusions about the identity of the Boulder shooter John Sexton

https://hotair.com/archives/john-s-2/2021/03/26/usa-today-fired-diversity-editor-jumped-conclusions-identity-boulder-shooter/

When authorities in Boulder, Colorado named the supermarket shooter this week, there were a whole lot of people on the left who had egg on their face. That’s because many had wrongly assumed the shooter must be white. I wrote an entire post based on a Twitter thread just collecting some of the many blue checked lefties who made this mistake.

One of the most conspicuous people to make this error was Hemal Jhaveri. As Dave Rubin pointed out she had tweeted this about the shooting: “It’s always an angry white man. Always.” Only in this case, it wasn’t.

Jhaveri isn’t just some rando leftie on Twitter. She was the Diversity and Inclusion editor at USA Today Sports. Today Jhaveri wrote a piece on Medium explaining she was fired shortly afterwards.

On Monday night, I sent a tweet responding to the fact that mass shooters are most likely to be white men. It was a dashed off over-generalization, tweeted after pictures of the shooter being taken into custody surfaced online. It was a careless error of judgement, sent at a heated time, that doesn’t represent my commitment to racial equality. I regret sending it. I apologized and deleted the tweet.

By Tuesday morning, after the shooter was identified as Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, several high profile alt-right Twitter accounts picked up the tweet as an example of anti-white bias and racism against whites…

There was social media outrage, threats and harassment towards me, and by the end of the day, USA TODAY had relieved me of my position as a Race and Inclusion editor.

Was her firing reasonable? To be honest, I’m not sure. On the one hand I’m against canceling people over tweets, especially old tweets someone put up when they were a dumb teenager.

On the other hand, I do think there are times when someone’s tweets are not compatible with their job. For instance, I think the SF School Board made the right call to strip Alison Collins of her leadership position based on her tweets about Asians. Collins hasn’t really apologized and hasn’t deleted the tweets. She clearly still believes Asians use “white supremacist thinking” to “get ahead.” And that’s just not a tenable position to hold if you are part of a district that is 30% Asian people.

Largest ever incursion of Chinese air force near Taiwan John Sexton

https://hotair.com/archives/john-s-2/2021/03/26/largest-ever-incursion-chinese-air-force-near-taiwan/

Reuters is reporting that the Chinese air force sent another incursion of military aircraft near the island of Taiwan today. This has become a somewhat routine occurrence lately but today was a bit different because of the size of the incursion.

Twenty Chinese military aircraft entered Taiwan’s air defence identification zone on Friday, in the largest incursion yet reported by the island’s defence ministry and marking a dramatic escalation of tension across the Taiwan Strait…

It marked the largest incursion to date by the Chinese air force since Taiwan’s defence ministry began disclosing almost daily Chinese military flights over the waters between the southern part of Taiwan and the Taiwan-controlled Pratas Islands in the South China Sea last year…

The presence of so many Chinese combat aircraft on Friday’s mission – Taiwan said it was made up of four nuclear-capable H-6K bombers and 10 J-16 fighter jets, among others – was unusual and came as the island’s air force suspended all training missions after two fighter jet crashes this week.

From the moment the Biden administration took office, China has been rattling its air force saber over Taiwan. Then there was that not-so-subtle warning from a military spokesman that “Independence Means War.” What’s significant about this latest action is that China is clearly escalating the situation. That’s worrisome because our own military leaders have been warning recently that China clearly has the annexation of Taiwan in its sites.

WaPo fact check: Yep, Biden told whoppers, even with cheat sheets Ed Morrissey

https://hotair.com/archives/ed-morrissey/2021/03/26/wapo-fact-check-yep-biden-told-whoppers-even-cheat-sheets/

Perhaps those who predicted a four-year hiatus in media fact checks on the White House should take heart in this game effort from the Washington Post. After yesterday’s press conference, their fact-check team dissected Joe Biden’s statements and found that he “made a number of incorrect statements or made claims that lacked important context.” Not only did they refute several of them, they included most of those rebuttals in this video posted last night.It’s a start, anyway:

This includes one of the most egregious of the lies Biden offered — the idea that Donald Trump deliberately chose to starve children to death at the border rather than let them in:

“Well, look, the idea that I’m going to say, which I would never do, that if an unaccompanied child ends up at the border, we’re just going to let them starve to death and stay on the other side — no previous administration did that either, except Trump.”

Biden claimed, without apparent evidence, that children “starved to death” in Mexico under President Donald Trump’s 2019 policy allowing border officers to return non-Mexican asylum seekers to locations in Mexico as their claims are adjudicated in immigration courts. Asked for evidence of such deaths, a White House official referred to reports of “widely reported treacherous conditions at camps along the border on the Mexican side that formed as a result of the Trump Administration’s use of the Migrant Protection Protocol, more commonly known as ‘Remain in Mexico.’”

Joe Biden’s presidency is a reality TV series in a care home The President’s first press conference was nerve-wracking and enervating to watch: Dominic Green

Joe Biden is the face of the United States. But Joe Biden no longer looks like Joe Biden. And he no longer sounds like Joe Biden — especially in the long and excruciating silences when he forgets what he’s saying or fumbles for his cue cards.

The United States no longer looks like itself either. The sorry theatrical display of Biden’s first press conference is an accurate image of what has happened to American democracy. A carefully limited number of carefully selected journalists asked carefully vetted questions. A carefully chosen president read carefully written answers off his cue cards, and carefully avoided taking any questions from Fox or Newsmax.

The White House is no longer the home of democracy. It’s a reality TV series in a care home. Biden mused about how the country has lost its way, about how it used to be so much better, but he seemed fatalistically feeble, as if it was all too much and all too late, and he has already given up. As if the nation is in its twilight years.

‘We’ve got so much more to do,’ he said, as he continually does. But he also ad-libbed, ‘I’ve never been able to plan three-and-a-half, four years ahead.’

How funny. How sadly reflective of the senility of American democracy that he thought that was a smart answer. How shamefully embarrassing for the compliant, complicit media that not one of his questioners bothered to ask whether an inability to plan for the future was what the American people need in their president — especially a 78-year-old who says he expects to run, if that is really the word, in 2024, when he will be 82.

It’s true, Biden managed not to fall off the dais, or go completely blank, or fall over his dog. It’s true, he matched the topics on his cue cards to the subjects of the questions. But this press conference was nerve-wracking and enervating to watch. It’s obvious that Biden’s mind often has no idea what his mouth is saying. This press conference was supposed to dampen concerns about his mental acuity. Instead it confirmed that Biden is too old and complacent for the scale of the task.

He was, as old people tend to be, lucid in recalling details from his past. He was, as people whose minds are running down tend to be, unable to say anything coherent and spontaneous beyond quavering sentimentality. And that is not enough.

Beijing Targets American Business The U.S. and China’s Communist Party are strategic and ideological competitors. CEOs have to decide which side they want to help win. By Matt Pottinger

https://www.wsj.com/articles/beijing-targets-american-business-11616783268?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

In the weeks that surrounded President Biden’s inauguration, Chinese leaders waged an information campaign aimed at the U.S. Their flurry of speeches, letters and announcements was not, as the press first assumed, addressed mainly to the new administration. It was an effort to target the U.S. business community.

The Communist Party’s top diplomat, Yang Jiechi, spoke to a virtual audience of American business leaders and former government officials in early February. He painted a rosy picture of investment and trade opportunities in China before warning that Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong and Taiwan are “red lines” that Americans would do well to keep quiet about. Mr. Yang excoriated Trump administration policies toward China and was unsubtle in pressing his audience to lobby the Biden administration to reverse them.

General Secretary Xi Jinping, seated before a mural of the Great Wall of China, beamed himself to business elites in Davos, Switzerland, in late January. He urged them to resist efforts by European and American policy makers to “decouple” segments of their economies from China’s. Mr. Xi also wrote a personal letter to a prominent U.S. businessman exhorting him to “make active efforts to promote China-U.S. economic and trade cooperation.”

To make clear that these were requirements, not suggestions, Beijing announced sanctions on nearly 30 current or former U.S. government officials (me among them). These were in addition to the sanctions Beijing placed on American human-rights activists, pro-democracy foundations and some U.S. senators last year.

Beijing’s message is unmistakable: You must choose. If you want to do business in China, it must be at the expense of American values. You will meticulously ignore the genocide of ethnic and religious minorities inside China’s borders; you must disregard that Beijing has reneged on its major promises—including the international treaty guaranteeing a “high degree of autonomy” for Hong Kong; and you must stop engaging with security-minded officials in your own capital unless it’s to lobby them on Beijing’s behalf.

Europe’s Covid Bill Is Coming Due EU leaders made unforced errors with lockdowns and vaccine debacles. Their parties may pay. By Dominic Green

https://www.wsj.com/articles/europes-covid-bill-is-coming-due-11616795722?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

Europe’s leaders have told citizens that they’re all in the Covid-19 crisis together. But in the U.K., roughly 40% of the population has received at least one Covid-19 shot. Across the water, only about 13% of the European Union’s citizens have received a jab. In France, that number is closer to 10%.

In Britain, case rates and hospitalizations are falling, and the rate of excess deaths from Covid has reached zero. But in Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel has warned of an “exponential” rise in cases. Ms. Merkel floated an Easter lockdown, which she quickly walked back. Italy, where more than one million people over 80 haven’t been vaccinated, has entered another lockdown.

Paris and other major French cities are shut down. Critical-care hospital beds in the Paris region are full, according to Frederic Valletoux, head of France’s hospital network. Mr. Valletoux has reported “exploding” numbers and says that only lockdowns can prevent an “unprecedented violent shock” to France’s healthcare system.

Europe’s third wave will cost thousands of lives and billions of euros. Summer vacationers, essential to the economies of Southern Europe, may have to stay away for a second year. This will increase the gulf in competitiveness and debt between the eurozone’s rich north and poor south. Southern states could require another bailout, a scenario deeply unpopular with German voters, who go to the polls in national elections in September.

Europe’s elected leaders, French President Emmanuel Macron and Ms. Merkel in particular, are responsible for the tragedy of errors that has caused Europe’s vaccine fiasco. They and their parties are starting to pay the political price.

In mid-March regional elections, Merkel’s Christian Democrat Union had its worst-ever showing in two of its historical strongholds. In the southwestern state of Baden-Württemberg, which the CDU ruled for 58 years until 2011, Ms. Merkel’s party won only 23% of the vote. In Rhineland-Palatinate in the West, once the launchpad for the CDU’s Helmut Kohl, the party finished at 26%, far behind the center-left Social Democrats.