About that insurrection at the Capital

Everything Is Broken

... beginning in the 1970s, the economic ground underneath this landscape began to come apart. Michael Lind explains this better than anyone else:

The strategy of American business, encouraged by neoliberal Democrats and libertarian conservative Republicans alike, has been to lower labor costs in the United States, not by substituting labor-saving technology for workers, but by schemes of labor arbitrage: Offshoring jobs when possible to poorly paid workers in other countries and substituting unskilled immigrants willing to work for low wages in some sectors, like meatpacking and construction and farm labor. American business has also driven down wages by smashing unions in the private sector, which now have fewer members—a little more than 6% of the private sector workforce—than they did under Herbert Hoover.

This was the tinder. The tech revolution was the match—one-upping the ’70s economy by demanding more efficiency and more speed and more boundarylessness, and demanding it everywhere. They introduced not only a host of inhuman wage-suppressing tactics, like replacing full-time employees with benefits with gig workers with lower wages and no benefits, but also a whole new aesthetic that has come to dominate every aspect of our lives—a set of principles that collectively might be thought of as flatness.

Flatness is the reason the three jobs with the most projected growth in your country all earn less than $27,000 a year, and it is also the reason that all the secondary institutions that once gave structure and meaning to hundreds of millions of American lives—jobs and unions but also local newspapers, churches, Rotary Clubs, main streets—have been decimated. And flatness is the mechanism by which, over the past decade and with increasing velocity over the last three years, a single ideologically driven cohort captured the entire interlocking infrastructure of American cultural and intellectual life. It is how the Long March went from a punchline to reality, as one institution after another fell and then entire sectors, like journalism, succumbed to control by narrow bands of sneering elitists who arrogated to themselves the license to judge and control the lives of their perceived inferiors....

LITTLE PEOPLE

Life in the Cancel Culture

 

Life in the Cancel Culture

To appropriate an old phrase, I never thought I would see the day.

 I never thought I would see the day that the tech giants of social media would shut down free speech in the United States of America. Thankfully the watchdog press and Congress are up in arms over this and are demanding accountability.  Oh, that’s not what’s happening? They aren’t up in arms? Shut Up!!!!!

Big tech oligarchs isolated the President of the United States and cut him off from communicating freely with the American people thru social media and instead of officialdom being irate, they applaud or remain silent. Seemingly Big Tech isn’t worried about repercussions. If that doesn’t scare you, it should.

The 2020 election is one for the books. It was a whirlwind with COVID changing the rules of everything. President Trump held massive airport rallies while Biden/Harris had few appearances with few in attendance. On election night, the President built up comfortable leads in several key battleground states, and then for unknown reasons these states stopped counting votes only to start again in the wee hours of the morning. When we woke up those leads were gone as thousands of votes were added for Biden and only handfuls for Trump. The numbers were so overwhelming that experts said they were statistically impossible. In Georgia, hand counted military ballots went overwhelmingly to Biden; mail in ballots were found to have no folds, no record of postage. Video shows election workers feeding the same stack of ballots through a tabulator several times. Poll workers  complained of voting irregularities and inability to effectively observe the process. Many people signed affidavits swearing under penalty of perjury to witnessing voter fraud. These witnesses were mocked and maligned.  In Wayne County the Republican canvassers voted to not certify but were intimidated into changing their vote and so our state canvassers certified the vote in Michigan.

If the suspicions of fraud were false, if the voting machines were not corrupted, wouldn’t examination be welcomed to prove that all was well? If this election was as free, open, and honest as we have been told by officials and Joe Biden really did get more votes than Barack Obama, wouldn’t he be demanding it be proven? Instead of the light of day, there are threats from the Michigan Attorney General to investigate anyone who dares challenge the results. If that doesn’t worry you, it should.

January the 6^th was the day that the Congress was to count the electoral votes to decide the presidency.  Thousands and thousands of people made the trip to DC on their own dime and own time to show support for the president as Senators and Representatives determined how to proceed.  Here was the opportunity to decide whether to hear evidence of voter fraud. The constitution says that the State Legislatures are the ones responsible for election law and they decide which set of electors to accept. The several states that sent two sets of electoral votes could potentially go back and decide which set of votes they want to submit.

Not so fast.  On this day when every Congressman was in the Capital building, when hundreds of thousands of Trump supporters were in DC, when Antifa and BLM were at the ready, it seems security at the Capital would be rock solid. But it wasn’t. More and more information is being reported about who was at the Capital building, who scaled the walls and who brought tools to break windows. A few trained instigators know to how stir up a crowd.  The purpose of the debate in Congress was effectively thwarted and the final vote was a forgone conclusion.  Coincidence?  You decide.

Several people died that day:  a young woman shot, a policeman bludgeoned, a stroke, a heart attack,  one person was crushed.  All tragic. Also tragic is the fact that the integrity of the vote was forgotten as the focus shifted to condemnation. After downplaying rampaging destruction across America for months, euphemistically known as mostly peaceful protests, the media now focuses on the riot at the Capital and voter fraud is a phrase that can get you cancelled.

Joe Biden claims he ran for president because of Trumps remarks at Charlottesville, remarks which Trump didn’t make.  Trump is accused of riling up this crowd with his speech; except he didn’t. The weather was cold; the speech was long as he reiterated examples of voter irregularities. Play the tape and see. That doesn’t stop people like Representative Hank Johnson from spreading lies. Maybe you remember Johnson as the man who feared Guam would tip over if too many Marines were stationed there. For some reason Johnson, representing DeKalb County, Georgia, was sure if the mob had gotten to the third floor he would have been swinging from the balcony like fruit on a tree. These people write our laws, and if that doesn’t scare you, it should.

From the party espousing a new spirit of unity, Senator Josh Hawley lost his book deal, Trump supporters on a plane chanting USA USA are threatened by the pilot with setting the plane down and going on without them, in another instance people were kicked off a plane before it even took off. A Forbes executive stated that unless Trump supporters repent of their sins of working for him, they’ll never work again. If this doesn’t scare you, it should.

Testing for voter fraud

 John Lott has now produced a statistical analysis that suggests substantial voter fraud in Fulton County, Georgia and Allegheny County, Pennsylvania.  For the entire study, go HERE.

Here's the introduction and the reason why few countries allow the kind of mail-in ballots that were used to potentially steal the 2020 election:

Courts have frequently rejected Republican challenges to the 2020 presidential vote because they want evidence that a case involves enough fraud to alter the vote’s outcome in a particular state. Republicans argue that since their observers couldn’t watch the vote count, they can’t provide that evidence and have asked for discovery. Still, while the courts have agreed that irregularities have occurred, they weren’t willing to grant discovery unless Republicans first present enough evidence of fraud to overturn the election. Republicans thus faced a kind of Catch 22.

This paper’s approach allows us to quantify how large a potential problem vote fraud and other abnormalities might be in the 2020 election. The process is applicable to other states where precinct-level data is available on voting by absentee and in-person voting. Concerns over fraud with absentee ballots is not something limited to Republicans in the United States. Indeed, many European countries have voting rules stricter to prevent fraud than what we have in the United States.  

For example, 74% entirely ban absentee voting for citizens who live in their country. Another 6% allow it, but have very restrictive rules, such as limiting it to those in the military or are in a hospital, and they require evidence that those conditions are met. Another 15% allow absentee ballots but require that one has to present a photo voter ID to acquire it. Thirty-five percent of European countries completely ban absentee ballots for even those living outside their country.

The pattern is similar for developed countries. Many of these countries have learned the hard way about what happens when mail-in ballots aren’t secured. They have also discovered how hard it is to detect vote buying when both those buying and selling the votes have an incentive to hide the exchange.

DID THE DEMOCRATS STEAL THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION?

 Democrats are making extraordinary efforts to suppress all discussion of whether Joe Biden actually won the 2020 presidential election. In fact, they go even farther: they want to suppress all discussion of the extent to which voter fraud occurred. That naturally makes me want to write about voter fraud, and who really won the election.

First, this question: why are the Democrats so hysterical in their insistence that fraud not be mentioned? One reason is obvious. Joe Biden will take office under a cloud, since close to half of all Americans doubt that he really won the election. The Democrats want to stamp out such doubts to preserve Biden’s authority as president.

But there is a second reason that may be more important. The Democrats want the lax voting procedures that prevailed in 2020 to continue in the future. They know that efforts will be made in many states to improve ballot integrity, and they want those efforts to fail. By rendering all discussion of voter fraud out of bounds, they hope to forestall reforms that would make it harder for them to cheat, or enable cheating, in the future.

So, did the Democrats steal the presidential election, or not? I don’t know the answer to that question. No one does. A number of statistical analyses have been done, which on their face suggest large irregularities. I wrote about one such analysis, by John Lott, here.

Twitter is very dangerous

 Retired Chicago Firefighter Accused Of Participating In Capitol Riot. He Was 600 Miles Away

And Twitter made it all possible.

Retired Chicago firefighter David Quintavalle had a pretty normal Wednesday last week. He went grocery shopping at Aldi in the morning, and spent the evening celebrating his wife’s birthday with home-cooked lobster and steak. His son, a Chicago police officer, celebrated as well. The next day, Quintavalle went to Home Depot.

None of this should be news, because these are things that normal people do regularly. But for Quintavalle, an otherwise normal day was shattered when he was publicly and falsely accused of being the man who attacked a U.S. Capitol Police officer with a fire extinguisher. That officer, Brian Sicknick, later died from his injuries.

“Some woman from British Columbia showed the [surveillance] picture of the guy wearing CFD stocking cap and a beard like I’ve had, and file footage when I was protesting the city inappropriately scoring the fire lieutenants exam, and said, ‘This is the guy.’ And the ball started rolling. Everybody started saying, ‘Here’s the guy,'” he added.

Within hours of the false identification, Quintavalle started receiving phone calls from strangers calling him a “f***ing murderer.” Reporters camped out in front of his house....

“Social media has killed David Quintavalle. This has been an absolute disaster to him personally and his family. There’s a cop car outside his house. It’s over a picture that kind of looks like him because people sitting behind a keyboard with no proof or evidence are throwing out these tweets, and they’re wrong. Holy smokes, it’s eye-opening how terrifying social media can be when something like this happens,”

Question: what liability does Twitter have for destroying this man's life?  Jack Dorsey and his band of punks made it possible for him to be attacked.  Dorsey already makes editorial decisions about what gets posted on Twitter.  David Quintavalle should file a very, very large lawsuit against Dorsey, Twitter, and the goons working for him.  

Golman Sachs guy empties gym owner's bank account

 

Defiant NJ Gym Has Bank Account Wiped by Democratic Governor

Atilis Gym co-owner Ian Smith has made a name for himself for standing up to New Jersey’s COVID-19 restrictions on businesses, despite Governor Phil Murphy’s repeated attempts to shut him down through citations, fines, arrests, having their business license stripped, and their doors locked and barricaded. 

This week, Murphy escalated the fight.

“As of this morning, without warning, and without permission, and in the middle of litigation, Governor Murphy took it upon himself to empty our bank account entirely, to the tune of $165,000,” explained Smith on a video posted to social media. 

He said it still wouldn’t stop him. 

“We will continue to fight this fight because we know, based upon what is outlined in the Constitution, that when we get to the right courts and in front of a judge who respects the Constitution, we will win this case,” he continued. “And we will make sure that no governor, or no government official, will ever wield these powers ever again."

Murphy's partner is crime is  Judith Persichilli at the NJ Health Department

Definition of a free society

 Quote of the Day: “My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.” – Adlai Stevenson II (born 120 years ago today)

Two conclusions:

1. We are not living in a free society.
2. Adlai Stevenson could not be nominated for president by the Democrat Party today. 

I Saw Provocateurs At The Capitol Riot On Jan. 6

 The deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol bore the markings of an organized operation planned well in advance of the Jan. 6 joint session of Congress.

A small number of cadre appeared to use the cover of a huge rally to stage its attack. Before it began, I saw from my vantage point on the West Front of the Capitol what appeared to be four separate cells or units:

1. Plainclothes militants. Militant, aggressive men in Donald Trump and MAGA gear at a front police line at the base of the temporary presidential inaugural platform;
2. Agents-provocateurs. Scattered groups of men exhorting the marchers to gather closely and tightly toward the center of the outside of the Capitol building and prevent them from leaving;
3. Fake Trump protesters. A few young men wearing Trump or MAGA hats backwards and who did not fit in with the rest of the crowd in terms of their actions and demeanor, whom I presumed to be Antifa or other leftist agitators; and
4. Disciplined, uniformed column of attackers. A column of organized, disciplined men, wearing similar but not identical camouflage uniforms and black gear, some with helmets and GoPro cameras or wearing subdued Punisher skull patches.

Read the whole thing.

"Reality control", they called it.

Mark Steyn is reading us Orwell's 1984.  

 In tonight's episode, Winston Smith reflects on an aspect of his job - which is to rewrite the past to eliminate aspects that are inconvenient to the Party:

If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, IT NEVER HAPPENED--that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death?

The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia. He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed--if all records told the same tale--then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.' And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. 'Reality control', they called it.

The Democrat/Media/Tech complex has turned 1984 into a How-To manual. 

FBI Report Warned Of ‘War’ At Capitol, Contradicting Claims There Was No Indication Of Looming Violence

 A day before rioters stormed Congress, an FBI office in Virginia issued an explicit internal warning that extremists were preparing to travel to Washington to commit violence and “war,” according to an internal document reviewed by The Washington Post that contradicts a senior official’s declaration the bureau had no intelligence indicating anyone at last week’s pro-Trump protest planned to do harm.

Today the House of Representatives is busy impeaching Donald Trump for the crime of inciting violence via a speech he gave to demonstrators in Washington DC who were there to show their support.

15 Signs That You Might Be In An Abusive Relationship

 

Seen around the internet – it’s real, from a workplace mental health organization. I checked, because it was so on the nose that I thought it might be a clever fake. Save it before it’s inevitably purged, or definitions conveniently change.

These racist are your new overlords.

 Kristen Clarke, Biden's choice to lead the DOJ's Civil Rights Division, has some truly wild theories about racial differences:

"Melanin endows blacks with greater mental, physical, and spiritual abilities — something which cannot be measured by Eurocentric standards."

Meanwhile:

1.  Nancy Pelosi declares that "whiteness" is violence.
2. Illegal immigrant, MS-13 gang member released in sanctuary city kills girlfriend in front of daughter
3. "New York Times writer who gained fame for blasting 'dumbass f—king white people' targets 'dangerous' conservative reporter Andy Ngo" after Trump's social media ban.
4. Bruce Willis kicked out of pharmacy for refusing to wear a mask.
5. Chris Cuomo, Don Lemon Claim BLM Riots More Justified Than Capitol Hill Riot 
6. If our justice system were as biased and reflexively punitive as Biden and Harris claim, the people whose wanton destruction of their communities led to numerous deaths and billions of dollars in property damage wouldn’t have walked free.
7. Let's not forget who gave Twitter, Facebook, and Google the power to do what they are doing....The United States Congress
8. I still think the most ominous and consequential moment was when FB and Twitter united to ban reporting about the Bidens in the weeks before the election. Twitter mostly expressed regret. FB did not. Liberals & **journalists** overwhelmingly cheered. That showed what was coming.
9. State Rep. Randy Fine, a Republican serving in the Florida House of Representatives, asked Gov. Ron DeSantis to redirect funds currently going to Amazon, Twitter, Apple, Google, Facebook. "Big Tech may get to decide who they do business with.  So do we."

Self-awareness fail: Twitter condemns Ugandan internet shutdowns

 Tuesday, Twitter Public Policy tweeted in response to reports that Ugandan internet service providers were blocking social media and messaging apps.

“We strongly condemn internet shutdowns,” tweeted Twitter Public Policy, “they are hugely harmful, violate basic human rights and the principles of the #OpenInternet.”

And in the very NEXT tweet, they talk about how they worked with their “peers” to suspend a whole bunch of accounts “targeting” the election.

 You absolute balloon headed narcissistic goblins who lack anything even remotely resembling self-awareness!

The Salt That Has Lost Its Savor: The Woke Church and the Undoing of America

 

As C. S. Lewis noted, men in the Western world have largely been emasculated, and men in the Church are seldom an exception to this decades-long trend. To stand strong for one’s faith in Jesus Christ and push back at a culture that, in the words of Isaiah 5:20, “call[s] evil good and good evil” is today seen to be “divisive,” “unloving,” “bigoted,” and “intolerant.”

This is because evangelicals in the English-speaking world have confused Christ’s command to love others with being civil as if that were an attribute of God. (It isn’t.) As a consequence, a superficial, self-righteous, good-for-nothing pietism that prefers tone to truth and style to substance has displaced authentic Christianity in many of the roughly four hundred thousand churches in America. This doctrinal malpractice has given us a generation of men, Christian and otherwise, who are what Lewis called “men without chests.”

Donald Trump’s ‘they’re after you’ tweet says it all: Goodwin

 

Michael Goodwin from December 21, 2019.  He was more right than he knew.

On its face, a tweet President Trump sent last week is fairly benign. It doesn’t mock anyone, isn’t personally nasty and hasn’t caused any hair-on-fire controversy.

Yet it is powerful in its own way, for it artfully sums up the Trump era from the perspective of the president and his supporters. With a likeness to the Uncle Sam “I want you” poster, the disrupter-in-chief reaffirms in 14 words the belief of Trump Nation that the political establishment, the media, the permanent bureaucracy and yes, the deep state are trying to crush him and them.

The president tweeted the image the day House Democrats voted to impeach him, and hours after his raucous rally in Michigan that evening.

The tweet included no added comment because none was needed. The message is clear: I am all that stands between you and the barbarians at the gate. If I fall, you are next.

Nineteen Eighty Four - It's a How-to-manual for the Left

 

The programmes of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure... Somewhere or other he was still alive and hatching his conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the sea, under the protection of his foreign paymasters, perhaps even--so it was occasionally rumoured--in some hiding-place in Oceania itself...

Goldstein was delivering his usual venomous attack upon the doctrines of the Party--an attack so exaggerated and perverse that a child should have been able to see through it, and yet just plausible enough to fill one with an alarmed feeling that other people, less level-headed than oneself, might be taken in by it...

The sight or even the thought of Goldstein produced fear and anger automatically... But what was strange was that although Goldstein was hated and despised by everybody, although every day and a thousand times a day, on platforms, on the telescreen, in newspapers, in books, his theories were refuted, smashed, ridiculed, held up to the general gaze for the pitiful rubbish that they were--in spite of all this, his influence never seemed to grow less. Always there were fresh dupes waiting to be seduced by him. A day never passed when spies and saboteurs acting under his directions were not unmasked by the Thought Police.

Today's Virginian Pilot Two minutes of Hate

 The programmes of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure... 

The sight or even the thought of Goldstein produced fear and anger automatically... But what was strange was that although Goldstein was hated and despised by everybody, although every day and a thousand times a day, on platforms, on the telescreen, in newspapers, in books, his theories were refuted, smashed, ridiculed, held up to the general gaze for the pitiful rubbish that they were--in spite of all this, his influence never seemed to grow less. Always there were fresh dupes waiting to be seduced by him. A day never passed when spies and saboteurs acting under his directions were not unmasked by the Thought Police.

So today, Emmanuel Goldstein Donald Trump is hatching a plot to attack the capital of every state on inauguration day.  But never fear, The FBI (and Ralph Northam) is on the case and unmasked the nefarious plot by Trump's supporters. 

Because the real danger was not Trump, but the 70 to 80 million people that support him.  They must be crushed, humiliated, and exposed for the wreckers that they are.

The All-Purpose Enemy

 Mark Steyn has a new audio recording out of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The  book recounts the "two minutes of hate."

The programmes of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure... Somewhere or other he was still alive and hatching his conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the sea, under the protection of his foreign paymasters, perhaps even--so it was occasionally rumoured--in some hiding-place in Oceania itself...

Goldstein was delivering his usual venomous attack upon the doctrines of the Party--an attack so exaggerated and perverse that a child should have been able to see through it, and yet just plausible enough to fill one with an alarmed feeling that other people, less level-headed than oneself, might be taken in by it...

The sight or even the thought of Goldstein produced fear and anger automatically... But what was strange was that although Goldstein was hated and despised by everybody, although every day and a thousand times a day, on platforms, on the telescreen, in newspapers, in books, his theories were refuted, smashed, ridiculed, held up to the general gaze for the pitiful rubbish that they were--in spite of all this, his influence never seemed to grow less. Always there were fresh dupes waiting to be seduced by him. A day never passed when spies and saboteurs acting under his directions were not unmasked by the Thought Police.

It is not necessary, though, for the All-Purpose Enemy to be that real. The Deep State decided five years ago that "Russia" was behind anything that advantaged Trump: The Kremlin had bought a hundred grand's worth of Facebook ads and a bunch of "Macedonian content farmers" and loosed them on the presidential election to devastating effect. An entire election cycle later, the Democrats and the media declared as one that they would not be addressing the matter of Hunter Biden's laptop because it was "Russian disinformation". Which is, in Orwell's very well-chosen words:

...an attack so exaggerated and perverse that a child should have been able to see through it, and yet just plausible enough to fill one with an alarmed feeling that other people, less level-headed than oneself, might be taken in by it.

And so tens of millions of apparently sane Americans believe Trump is a Russian agent and that Putin somehow dropped off a fake laptop at a Delaware computer shop.