Jen Psaki is the condescending face of the Biden administration

 

Psaki, a former competitive swimmer raised in Greenwich, Conn., seems to never have encountered people living paycheck to paycheck, or worried about how they’ll feed, clothe or educate their kids — amid a global pandemic, no less.

If anything, her statements seem aimed at one cohort alone: high-earning, highly educated liberals and progressives just like her, ones who think anyone on the other side is too stupid to acknowledge.

Last October, as the nation confronted unprecedented supply chain issues affecting not just the holidays but food and medical supplies, Psaki sarcastically minimized it all as “the tragedy of the treadmill that’s delayed.”

Yes, to Psaki, and the Biden administration, the supply chain crisis was down to a Peloton backlog, a minor inconvenience afflicting the crabby 1 percent.

After White House chief of staff Ronald Klain doubled down, the RNC’s Tommy Pigott tweeted, “Struggling to pay for fuel, food and housing because of rising prices is not a ‘high class problem.’ Biden is making everyone worse off, but instead of stopping the damage, their strategy is to try to gaslight Americans.”

Indeed, gaslighting is Psaki’s M.O. Here she is on our withdrawal from Afghanistan, days after a 17-year-old boy fell to his death from a departing US C-17 transport plane, huddled masses below clinging to the aircraft as it took off:

“I would not say that this has been anything but a success.”

 Psaki recently told the ladies of “The View,” “Feel those emotions, go to a kickboxing class and have a margarita.”

This answer is “the tragedy of the treadmill” redux. I couldn’t say it better than Stephanie Gallardo, who is running for Congress from Washington state.

“Unfortunately,” Gallardo replied, “kickboxing classes average $150 so are $149 outside of my budget. Drinking a margarita at 11:37 a.m. on a Friday doesn’t seem advisable.”

Psaki announced she’ll be leaving her post sometime this year. If Biden hopes to turn things around, he’d do well to find a spokesperson who feels our pain — rather than one who mocks it.

Is the Rift Between the Public and the C-Suites Permanent?

 

Yes. 

  Read the whole thing.

When I was a boy growing up on the shores of Lake Michigan, the "wealthy" people in our town were close to the people who worked for them and the people who bought their products.  They drove Pontiacs and Buicks, not Cadillacs or Rolls Royces.  They contributed to local charities and mentored young people from their communities.  

That was in a universe far, far away, and long, long ago.

This is What a Whole of Government Epistemic Failure Looks Like

 3 years and 2 months; 38 months. That is how long the Soviet trained Afghan Army and government lasted after the withdraw of the Red Army.

There is your benchmark. The Soviets were 38-times more successful in Afghanistan than we were, and they did it in half the time.

Let that soak in. Let the humiliation flow over you like a healing balm. Fear and shame – regardless of what modern minds try to tell you otherwise – are great motivators. Let this motivate you.

Almost exactly two decades after the attacks of 9/11, as a nation we are covered in disgrace. A global humiliation on a national scale. Accept that. Hold it close to you. Feel it. Smell it. Know it, because it will be attached to us for at least the rest of the decade – most likely longer.

Good people can agree or disagree about staying or going from Afghanistan, but no one can defend how we did it.

Everyone here who [was] given responsibility by the American people failed.

The president failed. . . . All our intelligence agencies failed their government and the people.

Our think tanks, the legions of foreign policy and diplomacy PhDs from all the right schools who populate the National Security State who like to tell everyone how smart they are – they all failed.

The Big Club Spit on Trump but Embraces Biden

 The “Big Club” is the establishment, deep state, cabal, elites, ruling class, or whatever you want to call those in power.

Looking at politicians, it is clear who is in the big club and who is not. Most Democrats are in the big club, with few exceptions such as Bernie Sanders or members of The Squad. They may serve as useful idiots to further the Democrat agenda but will never get close to the reins of power, as Bernie learned twice during his ill-fated presidential campaigns.

Some Republicans are club members, typically those referred to as RINOs - Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney, the Bushes, and former conservatives, now known as NeverTrumpers. Media cranks like Chuck Todd, Jake Tapper, and Chris Wallace are in the big club. Other media bigwigs like Rush Limbaugh were never in the club.

Members of Congress not in the Big Club are treated like leppers, examples being Devin Nunes, Lauren Boebert, and Marjorie Taylor Greene.

A simple litmus test is whether someone is given a pass for transgressions that would normally land someone not in the club in prison. Think Bill and Hillary Clinton or Hunter Biden. BLM rioters are part of the club and released from jail lickety-split. Those let into the US Capitol on January 6 by Capitol Police, not part of the club, are rotting away in solitary confinement for months.

 

Read the whole thing.

Democrats closing their states caused a sharp divide in class wealth.

 From Seeking Alpha:

But the pandemic is causing a sharp divide in class wealth. COVID-19 brought the sharpest rise in the U.S. poverty rate since the 1960s, according to a study by the University of Notre Dame. The poverty rate in the U.S. increased by 2.4 percentage points during the latter half of 2020, meaning an additional 8M people nationwide are now considered poor. In the same time frame, the collective wealth of America's 651 billionaires jumped by over $2.95T to over $4T, in a trend that's likely to trigger more discussions about equality in the economic sphere. 

Leftists are all about increasing their own wealth and driving those in the middle into poverty because they are easier to control.  They used the pandemic to destroy the small shopkeeper, the waiter, the barber, the entrepreneur while enriching Big busines like Amazon, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Wal-Mart and Apple.

The investor class got much richer last year while the working class, the people who lived paycheck to paycheck lost their jobs, turned to drugs and alcohol or committed suicide.  This was not an accident.  That is how Communists take over.

FreedomCovid LoopholesUK "High-value business travelers" are exempt from UK Covid quarantine rules. In case you were wondering, no, you are not a high-value business traveler.

In the United States, the powerful and connected only pretend to feel badly when they are caught sneaking around doing things the little people are not permitted to do.

In the UK, they have the common decency to just say it out loud.

Some people are just more important than you.

Who is exempt?

"Individuals undertaking specific business activity which would deliver a significant benefit to the UK economy – including activity that creates or preserves 50+ UK jobs – will no longer need to self-isolate when travelling or returning from non-exempt countries."

"Creates or preserves" 50+ UK jobs"

I could see this being handy.

Border Agent: I'm afraid you'll have to quarantine.

CFO: If I have to quarantine I'll fire 50 people.

Border Agent: In that case you're exempt.

There are other exceptions as well that should not at all make you furious.

"Exemptions will also come into force at the same time for domestic and international performing arts professionals, TV production staff, journalists and recently signed elite sportspersons, ensuring that industries which require specific, high-talent individuals who rely on international connections can continue to complete their work."

These all make perfect sense, of course. Performing arts professionals and TV production are absolutely essential to the maintenance of life itself.

 

CODEVILLA: Biden Has No Foreign Policy. Here’s Why Americans Should Be Worried

 Between 2016 and 2020, their use of national security powers in matters of domestic political consequence made it possible for the ruling class to cast aspersions on its opponents while preventing them from challenging the bases on which the aspersions were made. Thus, federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies were key to the evolution of America’s political system from a republic of equal citizens to an oligarchy by, of and for its bureaucratic and corporate constituents. 

For the oligarchy to endure, to foreclose opposition from the Deplorables, it will need to continue to shut down access to authoritative information about what its components are doing and to further enable un-answerable aspersions against its opponents.

The Chump Effect

 Do you ever feel like a chump, like this dad?

Last January, a small but telling exchange took place at an Elizabeth Warren campaign event in Grimes, Iowa. At the time, Warren was attracting support from the Democratic Party’s left flank, with her bulging portfolio of progressive proposals. “Warren Has a Plan for That” read her campaign T-shirts. The biggest buzz surrounded her $1.25 trillion plan to pay off student-loan debt for most Americans.

A man approached Warren with a question. “My daughter is getting out of school. I’ve saved all my money [so that] she doesn’t have any student loans. Am I going to get my money back?”

“Of course not,” Warren replied.

“So you’re going to pay for people who didn’t save any money, and those of us who did the right thing get screwed?”

When Political Fire Means Failure

 Richard Fernandez (Wretchard) pens an interesting essay about the price the Left has paid to take over the country.

The costs of keeping the unwilling onside are even bigger. The American scene is also illuminated by fire of another kind: the incandescent efforts of those who want to return Washington to the 2016 normal over those determined to continue a revolution in the capital. But a political scene lit with the flames of burning personal bridges is less a sign of imminent triumph than with stalemate and retreat....

... the prospects of the liberal project to remake America have declined because an agenda that was once “inevitably” advancing must now be actively imposed on a conscious opposition. The burning of bridges in 2020 means it must now spend enormous amounts of energy for every inch it wants to gain.

The only chance to suppress the populist rebellion cheaply was through something like Crossfire Hurricane. But it failed and now the progressive project is facing what is at best a protracted campaign, a long slow slog that may prove too expensive for even them to mount.

If that enterprise seemed formerly viable it was because it could command enough assent through the application of nudges and prestige to make way. But those powers to persuade have been expended in the bitter acrimony. The prestige well is dry and friction has gone way up. 

The Left owns the press and social media, a combination that lulled a soothed the American public to accept the inevitability of the transformation of America to socialism.  That's where Obama's inevitable "arc of history" was supposed to lead.  

 But the excesses of the last 4 years have so damaged their power to define a reality that today roughly half of the American people don't believe anything they read.  They now know they have been lied to and have their opinions suppressed by power brokers and technology oligarchs who were grasping for total power.  

The Antifa/BLM  riots in Portland, Seattle, Minneapolis, Kenosha, and dozens of places throughout the country were naked attempts to intimidate.  People stocking up on guns and ammunition in record numbers are but one reaction to this physical threat.  

It is possible for a minority to rule a passive majority.  It remains to be seen whether the majority has a core of rebels who will make it prohibitively expensive for the Left to cow the country to its will.  

The experiment in freedom for the individual continues.  

Revolution 2020

 Understanding what drives the revolution that is destroying the American republic gives insight into how the 2020 election’s results may impact its course. Its practical question—who rules?—is historically familiar. But any revolution’s quarrels and stakes obscure the question: to what end? Our revolution is by the ruling class—a revolution from above. Crushing obstacles to its growing oligarchic rule is the proximate purpose. But the logic that drives the revolution aims at civilization itself. What follows describes how far along its path that logic has taken America, and where it might take us in the future depending on the election’s outcome.

Read the whole thing 

Re-thinking George W. Bush

It's a club and we ain't in it.

 

Artist Richard Bledsoe on George W. Bush

2020 is an appropriate year to indulge in hindsight. I must admit now when looking back, I got played.

I profoundly misunderestimated the true intentions and agenda of a man I once respected. I suspect I was not alone in buying into the delusion. We all can’t blame ourselves too much for being fooled. We were up against a massive psyop of enormous subtlety and resources, and the alternatives we had presented at the time were outright monstrous.

Mark Steyn: "The Reset Jet Set"

 One of the themes of our summer audio entertainment The Prisoner of Windsor is that most of the chaps who matter in this world are people you've never heard of - by which I mean they are other than the omnipresent pygmies of the political scene: In a settled democratic society such as Canada, for example, if you wind up with an electoral contest between a woke mammy singer with a banana in his pants and a hollow husk less lifelike than his CBC election-night hologram whose only core belief is that he has no core beliefs other than that party donations should pay for his kids' schooling, you can take it as read that the real action must be elsewhere.

A lot of those chaps you've never heard of turn up in this video from the "World Economic Forum" - ie, the Davos set. After five months of Covid lockdown, you'll be happy to hear that all the experts have decided that 2021 will be the year of "The Great Reset":

I see my chums at the Heartland Institute headline this the "World Leaders' 'Great Reset' Plan". But, if by "leader" you mean an elected head of government accountable to the people, there is a total dearth. Indeed, it's a melancholy reflection on the state of "world leadership" that the nearest to anyone accountable to the people in this video is HRH The Prince of Wales, in whom one day in the hopefully extremely far distant future the executive authority of the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, etc will be nominally vested but which cannot be exercised without the consent of the people's representatives. Yet even that token accountability is, as noted, in the future. So right now he's just another guy who's a "world leader" because he gets invited to Davos and you don't - and, even if you were minded to show up anyway, you'd need a private jet because all the scheduled flights have been Covid-canceled and the world's airports are ghost towns.

Public Health Agencies Care More About Controlling You Than Prepping For Pandemics

There was so much money available that they lost track of their primary function and were hijacked by the Ruling Class who saw you as a science experiment.

Think back to a different time not so long ago. During the second half of 2019, federal, state and city health officials throughout the country were busy confronting a new and scary lung disease. The health reporters covering them churned out news articles, regularly garnering front-page placement. Major charities such as Bloomberg Philanthropies were making large public health grants. So it should come as no surprise that the American public and political leaders were keenly focused on this emerging health threat.

The disease wasn’t Covid-19, of course. It was a something the Centers for Disease Control called e-cigarette or vaping product use-associated lung injury, or EVALI....It turned out that none of these nicotine e-cigarettes were ever responsible for the lung disease that bears their name. It took until late December for the Centers for Disease Control to (partly) acknowledge that the lung injuries were caused not by vaping liquid nicotine e-cigarettes such as Juul, but by the use of THC oil contaminated with vitamin E acetate....

I’m not suggesting that public health’s EVALI scandal was the only or even primary culprit for the failure of public health departments around the country to ensure that their communities had an adequate supply of personal protective equipment in the event of a predictable communicable disease outbreak, or that the CDC was otherwise preoccupied. Instead, the EVALI episode was more of a symptom of something wrong in public health.

The institution of public health has largely been co-opted by those with a desire to control individual choices to such a degree that it has largely lost sight of its fundamental role of pandemic preparedness. At this point, taxpayers should realize that we are giving the keys to the public health car to people who have long been driving in the wrong direction.

Biden Sold Out America to China While Working for Hollywood

We’re Not Exporting Our Values to China — We’re Importing Theirs.

Who Invited The World To Infect America?

We have the worst ruling class in the world.  There is a lot of truth in this article.  The US had a policy of outsourcing production to low-labor-cost countries and China with its huge population offered it's services after Japan turned into a high-labor-cost country. 

The result was a series of individual decisions by American corporations which started as a trickle and became a torrent as corporate CEOs competed with each other to lower labor cost by moving production to China.  And the American government fully participated with free-trade zones and a tariff policy the practically invited the hollowing-out of american manufacturing and assembly.

And everyone participated: government on Left and Right, large corporations, distributors like Amazon, even labor unions which drive American wages higher making Chinese labor more and more attractive. 

Hate the Chinese government if you wish, but hold your own government responsible for hollowing America out like a husk....China didn’t force the traitors of the American economy to shift crucial production lines to its country and strand Americans without surgical and N-95 masks and medication; homegrown turncoats made that decision, all by their lonesome....

The sphinxly Bill Gates, we are told, foresaw the pandemic. Gates also pioneered the outsourcing of American lives to China (and India). I say “lives,” because, as it has become abundantly clear, in the wake of COVID, the very stuff of life has been outsourced to China. Not mere jobs; but careers, not just some products, but entire production lines; not one or two manufacturing plants, but the entire means of production.

NANCY PELOSI'S MARIE-ANTOINETTE MOMENT: "LET THEM EAT JENI'S"

This is something every single American can appreciate, and it’s not at all tone-deaf. Those containers of Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams you saw packed into Pelosi’s freezers are only $12 per pint, so you can buy literally 100 of them with your Trump check. Almost as many as Pelosi has. Now that’s what I call bipartisanship!

Which she keeps cold via a good $20K+ worth of refrigeration:  Click on this link

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

We’ve been under the crushing dominion of one particular evil riddling sphinx for a long time now: the PSYOP tyranny of Postmodernism. For decades, global elitists have gone all in on a society-wide Cultural Marxist system of deceit and manipulation as a means to gather unaccountable power.

These indoctrinated idiots either really believe reality must conform to their word games and enforced opinions, or they know it’s a scam, but expect us to submit to it. We are supposed to not believe our lying eyes, and follow the thought leaders.

Going along with them is what has brought us to this catastrophe.

I believe what we are going through now-a wildly overblown reaction to a suspiciously timed outbreak- is because, after an uninterrupted winning streak for decades, the establishment is losing. This mother of all false flag operations is their desperate means of self-defense....

I wouldn’t be surprised if this sudden-and yet-strangely-choreographed meltdown was pre-planned, and was scheduled to occur during a Hillary Clinton presidency. What an opportunity it would have been for that hag and her Chinese partners-in-crime to oversee the permanent dismantling of our constitutional republic! It’s bad enough, even with President Trump doing his best to work around, through, and over all the traitors embedded in our institutions. When Trump talks about an invisible enemy, he’s not just talking about a virus.

But here’s a twist. What if the rough beast slouching our way this time is not the latest oppressor, but is the terrifying prospect of actual freedom?

We have been in the thrall of a Ruling Class that had become truly evil. Recall that just before the world shut down the biggest issues facing us was that there were hundreds of sexes and the top of the cultural totem pole demanded that we identified our preferred pronouns? That "Xer" was a word? That parents subjected their children to sex assignment surgeries and hormones to transform little boys to girls and vice versa? The the public bathroom you entered depended on whether your felt girlish or boyish that day? That seems now like it happened long, long ago in a galaxy far away.  But these were issues that dominated academia, the "arts" and popular culture and anyone who scoffed at them was made an outcast.

Where do we still see them, the Masters of the Universe who are "our betters/"  Watch the daily press briefings by President Trump and see the performing monkeys of the Washington Press Corps and you will see them in action.  And then realize that a lot of what you see is bought and paid for by the Chinese Communist Party.  The real bosses of these idiots, the chairmen and presidents, the movers and the shakers have made a big financial commitment to China and they answer to them now or face financial ruin.

Game-Changer: Trump Releases Plan to Free Americans Stuck in the House Due to COVID-19

In the two-page letter he outlined to the nation's governor's what their plans are to get America moving again:"In furtherance of this shared goal, my Administration is working to publish new guidelines for State and local policy makers to use in making decisions about maintaining, increasing or relaxing social distancing and other mitigation measures they have put in place.

This is what we envision: Our expanded testing capabilities will quickly enable us to publish criteria, developed in close coordination with the Nation's public health officials and scientists to help classify counties with respect to continued risks posed by the virus. This will incorporate robust surveillance testing, which allows us to monitor the spread of the virus throughout the country. Under these data driven criteria, we will suggest guidelines categorizing counties as high-risk, medium-risk or low-risk.

How will the governors react?  Depends on how Democrat they are and how much pleasure they get out of abusing their power.   Keep in mind we have the worst ruling class in memory.

Why is there panic over the latest brand of flu?

Coronavirus is roughly similar to the flu that recurs annually, like the seasons. 

Why the panic? 

Part of it is driven by a press that thrives and makes money out of scaring us.  But there's another reason.

A lot of the fear comes directly from the loss of trust in institutions. The press, WHO, the official authorities are no longer implicitly believed by everyone. This is the cost of deceit. When you finally tell the truth your cred is gone.

— wretchardthecat (@wretchardthecat) February 27, 2020

The institutions that once had credibility have squandered it by lying to us for too long.   Our Ruling Class is the worst in history.

For Whom the New Rules?

So egregious have been the ruling class’s attacks on Donald Trump, so shameless has been the sanctimony with which men such as William Webster have defended their biased governing rules, that the rest of us are well nigh compelled to give it a double dose of its own medicine.

Let's examine the 2020 Democratic field

Consider: To what extent do South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s father’s extensive Communist contacts continue to influence his son? Mayor Pete grew up among ideas and persons hostile to America. These need to be identified, and questions need to be examined about whether and to what extent any continue to influence this presidential candidate.

Mayor Pete also has a history of illegal drug use. Who have his suppliers been? Tied to which cartels? What sort of leverage might they have on him? People need to be identified and examined under oath. Discrepancies in testimony need to be prosecuted. So do whatever crimes they may have committed. The anti-Trump investigations turned related persons’ “process crimes” into indictments of Trump. Democratic candidates should experience no less.

And then, of course, there's the Biden family corruption

On their face, the Biden family’s financial profiting from the several offices Joe Biden has held involves the violation of numerous ordinary laws. Detailing the manner and extent to which the family’s enrichment have paralleled its access to power seems to be part of federal law enforcement’s core duties.