January 6th - The Made for TV Movie.

January 6th has assumed an event of epic proportions.  Democrats claim that it is worse than Watergate. a more significant threat to the country than the Civil War and a greater tragedy than 9/11.  

It was an "insurrection."  An attempt to "overthrow the government." A bloody event that injured hundreds and killed five police officers.  

Republicans have retreated to simply calling it a riot.  Something that was not that bad but should not have happened.  

But why begin by asserting that Jan 6th should not have happened? 

Public demonstrations are as American as apple pie. It was what America stands for or, at least, stood for — protesting and making their feelings known. 

Ask any of the BLM demonstrators and their supporters in the government and media who defend events that led to the violent deaths of dozens, widespread arson and looting, and the destruction of billions in property.   

But as evidence that has been suppressed about the events of January 6th is released, it's becoming more likely that much of what happened in the Capital on Jan 6th was stage-managed.

In some respects, it resembles a play involving the audience, who become actors unaware of their roles in the play, Not just the people who entered the building but the police that allowed them in. 

It's becoming more evident that some people saw the opportunity of the half-million people who attended a Trump rally in Washington on the day the Senate certified the election of Joe Biden as an opportunity to create a stage-managed event that would destroy the MAGA movement.  

These MAGA people liked Trump and believed that the election had been stolen from them.  They were tinder for a team of professional provocateurs. American intelligence agencies had become skilled at creating mobs in foreign countries to overthrow governments.  They saw Trump and the entire Conservative populiust movement as a threat to their hold on the nation and had to be stopped.

What better way to do that was to create a riot, film it, and destroy it with the help of the media that hated Trump and the MAGA movement.  Enter Ray Epps, a team of FBI agents and informants, a generous helping of Antifa shock troops, and a deliberately weakened police force, and then herd hundred of flag-waving Trump supporters into the Capitol building.

The Qanon Shaman was so perfect for his part that he was actually brought into the Senate chamber by the police officers to be recorded by a battery of photographers to do a "Star turn."  

As final proof that the entire event was stage named is that the "official fact checkers" are busy denying that the entire January 6th play was stage-managed. Virtually everything that was denounced as an insane conspiracy theory about Covid, its origins, its treatment, and the vaccine has been proven to be the truth, and the official statements lie.  Regarding January 6th, no police officers were killed, but two Trump suppers were.  The people who entered the Capitol were peaceful and orderly.  The people smashing windows were black-clad Antifa.  Ray Epps, who was most prominent in urging people to enter the Capitol, was never arrested for his part in the so-called "insurrection."  

Revolver News has done great investigative work on the facts surrounding January 6th, debunking some of the more egregious lies.  With the revelations that are coming out from the release of the over 40,000 hours of videotape and lots of videos from participants that are being released, the truth will come out.

Roger Kimball.:What happened on January 6th.   

Biden declares war on half the country

 

Joe Biden’s speech at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall on Thursday was one of the most remarkable in living memory. By “remarkable,” I hasten to add that I do not mean “good.” On the contrary, it was a breathtaking act of what the psychoanalysts call “projection,” blaming others for the bad things you do yourself.

The speech itself was a malignant act of demagoguery that will have colonels and generalissimos everywhere catching their breath with envy. The neo-totalitarian stage set, replete with red lighting effects and military personal flanking the shouting, gesticulating Biden, was right out of central casting. Next time, perhaps Biden will wear epaulettes along with his signature aviators.

Read the whole thing

Bad Portents for Biden

 

The ancient world was full of signs and portents that the high and mighty ignored at their peril. When, for example, Xerxes set out on his campaign against Greece in 480 B.C., Herodotus tells us that “a great portent” appeared. ...

I thought of that episode the other day when I read of the dramatic collapse of a bridge in Pittsburgh just before Joe Biden was due to arrive to rally his troops for a further assault on American independence and prosperity. 

Read the whole thing. 

Trump in 2024? Maybe!

 Roger Kimball:  

Read the whole thing.

Is there such a thing as “Trumpism without Trump”? I do not know. I understand those who argue that asking for Trumpism without Trump is a bit like asking for sunshine without the sun. It was often said, sometimes thankfully, sometimes as a matter of fact, that Trump was sui generis. If that is the case, then it might well be that the message and the messenger are so closely bound up with each other that the effort to disentangle them is doomed to fail. 

I understand the concern about Trump’s vaunted “divisiveness.” But it is well to acknowledge this irony. The tsunami of hatred and vitriol that washed over Donald Trump since before he assumed office until the present moment was nothing if not “divisive.” It infected the Twittersphere as brazenly as any of Trump’s “mean tweets” about Jim Acosta, the “fake news,” or sundry other “losers.” Why was that not castigated as “divisive,” evidence of bad character, against the norms or civilized political behavior? 

We now know that the whole Russia collusion delusion was invented lock-stock-and-barrel in the fetid skunkworks of the Clinton campaign. We know, too, that it was seized upon and pumped up by an irresponsible media and the rancid outposts of the administrative state and its so-called intelligence agencies. Trump was cooked before he set foot in the Oval Office.... 

... But maybe there is something in the oft-urged point that two can play at incontinent temper tantrums. 

Why should the anti-Trump fraternity have a monopoly on that species of intemperate insanity? There might be some positive good achieved if the Left and the NeverTrump neither-Left-nor-Right were to suspect that they might themselves be the object of the sort of hysteria they have visited upon their opponents. There might be something salutary in making that sort of intimidation reciprocal. It’s worth pondering. ...

It’s too early, I think, to decide who the best Republican candidate will be in 2024. Age will certainly be a consideration. But so will the question of who gets to say whom the American people are allowed to elect. Not too many, I think, will be willing to hand over that honor to Liz Cheney and her smug, entitled, and repellent confrères.

Anthony Fauci’s metaphysical get-out-of-jail-free card

 

Anyone wishing to appreciate the nature of our two-tier society needs only to contrast the fate of St Anthony Fauci with that, say, of General Mike Flynn or any of the dozens of political prisoners who are, many of them, being held without charge in appalling conditions in a Washington, D.C. prison even as I write.

Fauci has been a carbuncle on the countenance of American life at least since he help spread the myth of heterosexual transmission of AIDS in the 1980s. The new Chinese flu was custom made for his brand of panic-mongering and totalitarian posturing.

... He lied, under oath, about his role in his testimony before Congress, most pointedly in his heated exchanges with Senator Rand Paul this last summer....

You understand this, right? If you are part of the nomenklatura, you are endowed with a sort of metaphysical get-out-of-jail-free card, an immunity inscribed like a vaccine confirmation on your soul. You can lie to Congress, lie to the FBI, lie to the public with impunity. More than that, if you are part of the nomenklatura’s shock troops — a member, for example, of antifa or Black Lives Matter — then you can burn down police stations and destroy private property with impunity — nay, you can be hailed as a hero, a campaigner for “social justice.”

The moral of Caesar

 

Roger Kimball:

“No country was ever saved by good men,” Horace Walpole once observed, “because good men will not go to the length that may be necessary.”...

People are beginning to wonder:

In his Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, Edmund Burke, writing about the court of George III, noted with pointed understatement that “It was soon discovered that the forms of a free, and the ends of an arbitrary Government, were things not altogether incompatible.” It is a phenomenon that we conjure with to this day. We have elections. We have institutions whose prerogatives are supposedly limited by law. But to what extent does the American Republic circa 2015 live up to the ideals of limited government envisioned by the Founders?

Things will definitely not stay the same.  

The events that Barry Strauss chronicles took place more than two thousand years ago. But their significance continues to resonate, if only we have ears to listen. Toward the end of The Death of Caesar, Strauss quotes my favorite line from Lampedusa’s great novel The Leopard: “If we want things to stay the same, a lot of things are going to have to change.” The Roman Republic had to change if it was going to endure. That insight escaped the wit of the conspirators and their allies. A look at the world today suggests that this is a paradox we neglect at our peril.

The upside of defeat in Afghanistan

 

Right now the nation is facing its second defeat in the last 50 years.  First, we were defeated in Viet Nam.  Now we are defeated in Afghanistan.  Tens of thousands of our citizens are trapped behind enemy lines.  The country is reeling from this disaster.  

But there's the upside.  This is a defeat, a disaster so blatant, so avoidable, so close to everyone in the country that it can't be covered up.  We're watching it live on TV.  Keep in mind that this disaster was brought to you by the same people who thought that this was a smart idea.  White House intern skipping around the office.

And that means it's an opportunity to change the direction of the country.

Conservatives - and I am persuaded that includes most of the people in this country - know in their bones that the country was headed in the wrong direction.  This country was rapidly being consumed by the Left.  The Left was triumphant everywhere you looked: culture, academia, government, law, medicine, churches, and especially the media were steering the country in the direction they wanted it to go.  And those who objected were canceled, destroyed, even imprisoned.  

Now suddenly, in the space of a few days, the Left crashed.  The political leaders of the Left: Biden, Loyd Austin, General Milley, Kamela Harris, Anthony Blinken the rest of the Biden administration, have crashed.  

The Afghanistan debacle was not the fault of the men who fought there, but the leaders who failed, and lied.  They failed and lied so spectacularly that even its handmaidens in the press are unable to spin their way out of this.   

Roger Kimball writes: 

The Rotten Edifice Revealed

In Afghanistan, the technocratic legitimacy of our administrative masters is being exploded.

 The problem is, of course, the wondrous world of instant communications. We have all seen these videos of the Taliban manhandling the crowds outside the gates of the airport, not to mention the scads of anxious reports from people trapped in their homes, awaiting a knock on the door from the Taliban, and news reports of the condemnation of the Biden Administration by the British Parliament. And there is the now-iconic image of that gigantic military transport plane lumbering down the runway in Kabul, surrounded by hundreds, maybe thousands, of Afghans, some of whom clung to the landing gear only to fall from the plane after it took off. 

Afghanistan is becoming the largest hostage crisis in our history, making Jimmy Carter's hostage crisis in Iran disappear into irrelevance.  Where are we headed?   We are in for a reckoning.

For that we have the bumbling, mentally incontinent Joe Biden to thank, he and his clown car of self-absorbed spiritually adipose bureaucrats who prance about in a cloud of self-importance, shedding disaster like dandruff. 

But they're simply the end result of a nation that has killed tens of millions of its children in the womb, where actual educational institutions charge obscene sums to teach children to hate their parents, their religion, their country, and people with different skin colors.  Where inept government officials perform medical experiments on an entire world while lying that it's about science.

There is a God and he punishes sin.  And there has been a lot of sinning.  The Israel of the Bible learned this lesson numerous times.  But he forgives those who repent.  

Roger Kimball: "Reality and the Narrative" about the stolen election

 The strongest argument for Biden’s victory is not the vote tally. It is the monolithic narrative, pumped up like one of those inflatable play castles at a child’s birthday party. With every passing day, that narrative becomes more boisterous, more assertive, more uncompromising. It is a collective primal scream, emitted with eyes shut and ears plugged. 

There is a problem for the narrative, however. Or more to the point, there are 73 million problems. A major concession in the Biden-won-give-it-up-narrative is revealed by the hawkers of the “Unity Now” meme. Let us all come together as one nation, under Joe, and reassert the American normality that has been so sorely missing under the despotic reign of Donald Trump. 

No. No, that’s not going to fly, and not only because of the snarling viciousness that attended Donald Trump and his entire administration from the moment he was elected until now. Granted, Democrats are masters of hypocrisy. I will give them that. Brazenness is part of the formula. They are utterly unembarrassed by double standards. Indeed, they glory in them. But glaring hypocrisy is not the only reason that the narrative’s call for unity is failing. 

It's all about November 3

Roger Kimball:

The unremitting, monolithic wall of noise that has been crashing against Donald Trump since election day 2016 has gotten louder and louder, more cacophonous, more furious, more irrational. Everything is what it is, and not another thing. But the one thing that takes precedence over everything now is defeating Trump, which means defeating not only Trump himself but what he stands for—those 63 million voters who put him in office, for starters.

...

And just about now, a great chasm is opening up. The choice, they see, is not so much between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. It is between the America they love—that Donald Trump celebrates—and the out-of-control forces of anti-American hatred that, though he does not understand them, Joe Biden manages to blink and nod and gibber around.

Everything that is happening between now and November 3 is about November 3. But the fundamental choice is not really Donald Trump or Joe Biden. It is civilization and America on one side, anarchy and woke tyranny on the other. The Democrats thought they could ride the tiger to victory. Instead, they will be consumed by the monster they created but could not control.

In praise of Kayleigh McEnany

Is Kayleigh McEnany the best Press Secretary in history? I think she may be. True, it’s early days. She was elevated to the position only in April and presided over her first briefing just a few weeks ago on May 1. But so far her tenure has been glorious. Despite having attended both Georgetown and Harvard, where she took a law degree, she remains quick-witted, forthright and occupies a cant-free zone that suffuses the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room with a spirit of patriotic candor that is as welcome as it is rare in the self-involved purlieus of the so-called mainstream media.

She is also, I think it important to observe, distinctly dishy, another advantage. ‘Oooo, that’s sexist,’ the churls, scolds, pajama boys, and other moist chihuahuas of the press will object. ‘You can’t say that she is good looking. That doesn’t matter.’ Right-o, chum, that doesn’t matter. Put it in your report before you head back to the ditto pool to get your pencils sharpened....

Wallace complained that ‘McEnany isn’t acting like she is working for the public. She acts like she is what she used to be, which is a spokesperson for the Trump campaign.’

‘If Kayleigh McEnany had asked Sam Donaldson and me what questions we should ask, that would not have gone well,’ he intoned. Oh dear. Not the great Sam Donaldson! Scourge of would be tyrants, speaker of truth-to-power! Where is the air-sickness bag, the one marked ‘for use with self-important blowhards’?

Read the whole thing.

Let’s Call the Russian Collusion ‘Hoax’ What it Really Is

It was much more than a hoax.  Roger Kimball:

But thinking about it, I conclude that the term “hoax” is wholly inadequate to describe the enormity of the political scandal that was perpetrated against Donald Trump, against the office of the president, and ultimately against the American people.

For one thing, the word “hoax” implies something jocular or prankish. The joke might be malicious, but it is still intended to be humorous. There was nothing at all humorous about what just happened in our political life, though the hysteria of the anti-Trump chorus—the pussy-behatted females complaining about how “crude” Trump was, the “comedian” who paraded about with a bloody doll’s head representing the president, the tears and imprecations and jeremiads disgorged by the press and by Trump’s political enemies: all that did have a sort of ghastly if pathetic humor about it.

But when we step back and consider what actually happened over the past three years—and, more, what almost happened—it is clear that the word “hoax” does not begin to cover the reality of what I have been calling for many months the greatest political scandal in the history of the American republic.

Does that, too, sound hyperbolic, like worrying about commas when Shanghai is burning? Some people think so. I have several times said why I think they are wrong.

Perhaps the best way of summarizing my disagreement is by suggesting an alternative to the word “hoax.” It’s not a novel suggestion.

On the contrary, it’s often been used in concert with or as a synonym for “hoax.” But I think it is a better word in this context because it expresses the malign intention behind the multifarious activities directed against candidate Trump and then President Trump. The word I have in mind is “coup.”
....
We should face up to that unpleasant fact and call things by their real names. The actions taken by the Obama Administration threatened not just Donald Trump and his presidency but the very processes and protocols by which the peaceful transition of power has been effected in the United States. As L.J. Keith observed, “Even in the most contentious elections and after disputed results, there was never been this sort of dangerous, systematic, deliberate rejection of the will of the people. The abrogation of the constitution to use extrajudicial methods to destroy the incoming president. It is the very definition of a coup.”

Indeed. So let’s call it what it is. A coup.

It's not that uncommon in the Third World and our coup attempt was engineered by our very own Son of Africa.

Roger Kimball: "The so-called ‘adults’ in the Trump administration are surprisingly childish"

OK, so maybe I overestimated Mad Dog Mattis.

Like President Trump, I liked the fact that Mattis’s nickname was ‘Mad Dog,’ though I understand he dislikes the soubriquet. After the America-last, apologize-first foreign policy of Obama, it was nice to have a Secretary of Defense with sufficient backbone to compliment the steeliness of a robust Commender-in-Chief such as Donald Trump.

At the same time, I remember several conservative friends expressing reservations about Mattis when his nomination for the post of SecDef was announced. He was, it was widely rumored, a Hillary supporter and, what’s more, his view of foreign policy was much more in line with the Bush-Obama species of moralism than Trump’s ‘we’ll-do-what’s-in-our-national-interest’ pragmatism.
[snip]
The sad thing about Jim Mattis’s exit is his grandstanding, not to say petulant and immature, mode of departure. The letter announcing his resignation, circulated yesterday, is half bureaucratic boilerplate (‘I have been privileged to serve,’ ‘proud of the progress,’ etc., etc.).

But those nuggets are set in a jelly of snarky recrimination about how he, Jim Mattis, has always believed that our strength as a nation is ‘inextricably linked’ to our system of ‘alliance and partnerships.’ Further, he says we must treat our allies ‘with respect’ while remaining ‘resolute and unambiguous’ about ‘those countries whose strategic interests are increasingly in tension with ours,’ e.g., Russia and China.

You do not need an advance degree in hermeneutics to unpack the implications of such statements. ‘I, Jim Mattis, am the adult in the room. I want to foster our partnerships with our allies — unlike some people — and I want to be tough with respect to opponents like Russia and China’ — again, not stated but clearly implied, unlike some.

The implication is made all-but-explicit in the next paragraph which begins ‘Because you have the right to have a Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with yours on these and other subjects…’ Well, because of all this, I quit. In other words, I am the good guy who wants to reward our friends and stand up to our enemies, whereas you, Donald Trump, do not.

I think there is plenty of room for disagreement and shades of opinion about how the United States ought to conduct its foreign policy. I can understand how Donald Trump’s heterodox behavior and rhetoric raises eyebrows among establishment diplomats. The President speaks a novel language most of us are unused to hearing among politicians. I believe that thus far the he has been admirably resolute in his dealings with Russia and China while at the same time regularly reminding us that ‘it would be a good thing, not a bad thing’ to have good relations with both countries. I think that is true, notwithstanding the thuggishness of Putin and the neo-Maoist ambitions of Xi.

In any event, the larger point here is that Secretary Mattis’s letter of resignation exhibits a petulance and smallness unbecoming a man of his distinction, accomplishments, and position. I was sorry to see it. Curiously, however, it was of a piece with the behavior of other former high-ranking officials in the Trump administration. The most conspicuous is Rex Tillerson, Trump’s first Secretary of State, whose chief qualification for the job seems to have been that he looked the part. Since being abruptly fired, he has taken to sniping at the President publicly, an unbecoming and counterproductive habit. The takeaway, alas, is that many of the figures who were hailed as the adults in the Trump administration have turned out to be grandstanding partisans. In the aftermath of Mattis’s resignation, the spigots of fake news are gleefully disgorging dire predictions of ‘global chaos’ and ‘international shock waves.’ The whole spectacle is childish and distasteful, and it reminds us that it is not always as easy to tell who are the real adults in the room as we might think.

There's more tha a little truth in that.  So far Trump has been one of the most successful Presidents in my memeory and I'm unwilling to concede that despite this his enemies are right and Trump's wrong.

Roger Kimball: "The DNC limps towards a laughable midterms slogan"

The usual suspects

But the strain has been terrific, and there is no doubt that the man [Brenan] is barking. So he deserves our compassion. He also deserves our vigilance. Give him a sweet and wipe his brow as you walk by, but make sure that the straps on the straight jacket are secure.

It was President Trump’s summit meeting and subsequent press conference with President Putin in Helsinki that sent poor John Brennan and his faithful anti-Trump cultists into orbit. I don’t think we’ve seen anything quite like it since the melee at Charlottesville, when Trump had the temerity to suggest that there was plenty of blame on both sides of the protest.

That was supposed to be a “moral disgrace” just as his efforts to patch things up with Russia was supposed to be “treasonous.”

You may think, as I do, that Trump is doing the right thing by reaching out a hand to Vladimir Putin, odious though he is. Or you might believe, as many thoughtful people do, that Putin is just too odious to do business with. People can disagree about that, though I would note that I cannot see that Putin is any more odious than Joseph Stalin, with whom FDR consorted, or his successors, which every US President since have had to deal with. Mao Tse-Tung was one of the greatest monsters in history. That didn’t stop Richard Nixon from making overtures to him. Was that “treasonous”?

And ...

Yep, the party that has spent a decade and more coddling Washington elites and ignoring the heartland as a bastion of “irredeemable deplorables,” the party that has destroyed black inner cities across the country by a making their inhabitants wards of the state: here they are with “for the people.” “House Democrats,” Politico says, “plan to begin working ‘For the People’ into their statements and press conferences.”

Please stop giggling.