Category: Scratch a Lib-Find a Tyrant

Trudeau’s Dictatorial Crackdown on Protesters Is Popular Among One Group of US Voters

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s descent into dictatorship to rein in the Freedom Convoy protest has support from a majority of likely Democratic voters in America.

According to a survey conducted by Trafalgar Group and Convention of States Action, 55 percent of likely voters disapproved of Trudeau’s handling of the demonstration, while 35 percent approved.

When broken down by party affiliation, 65 percent of Democrats backed Trudeau’s heavy-handed response compared to 17 percent who disapproved, while 87 percent of likely Republican voters opposed the prime minister’s crackdown and 8 percent approved.

One hundred percent of young voters, meanwhile, (those 25 to 35-years-old), disapproved of Trudeau’s response.

On Feb. 14, the Canadian prime minister invoked the Emergencies Act to crack down on demonstrators who had been in Ottawa since late last month protesting the country’s vaccine mandates and other Covid-19 restrictions.

The government announced they would freeze bank accounts of those even loosely attached to the protest, while Ontario’s premier threatened to revoke driver’s licenses. Protesters’ pets weren’t even off-limits.

Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland also said the government would be broadening its “Terrorist Financing” rules to include cryptocurrencies and crowdfunding platforms as part of the Act.

The Canadian Parliament voted on Monday night to extend its emergency powers for another 30 days despite the blockade being over.

The survey of 1080 likely general election voters was conducted Feb. 18-20 and was provided exclusively to The Daily Wire.

Western Authoritarianism

The original question was: “What lies at the root of the authoritarianism that seems to be asserting itself in free societies in today’s West?”

Here’s my answer:

The same root that causes irritating busybodies to take over Home Owner Associations. Some people have a lust for power. Government is the ultimate well of power. Author Frank Herbert expressed it well:

“All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible.”

Also:

“When religion and politics travel in the same cart, the riders believe nothing can stand in their way. Their movements become headlong – faster and faster and faster.”

Leftism is itself a religion, complete with an Eden (Earth), an original sin (Capitalism), and a god (government – aka “power over others.”) Another quote I’m fond of by a gentleman by the name of Glenn Wishard:

“The rise and fall of the Marxist ideal is rather neatly contained in the Twentieth Century, and comprises its central political phenomenon. Fascism and democratic defeatism are its sun-dogs.
The common theme is politics as a theology of salvation, with a heroic transformation of the human condition (nothing less) promised to those who will agitate for it.
Political activity becomes the highest human vocation.
The various socialisms are only the most prominent manifestation of this delusion, which our future historian calls “politicism”.
In all its forms, it defines human beings as exclusively political animals, based on characteristics which are largely or entirely beyond human control: ethnicity, nationality, gender, and social class.
It claims universal relevance, and so divides the entire human race into heroes and enemies.
To be on the correct side of this equation is considered full moral justification in and of itself, while no courtesy or concession can be afforded to those on the other.
Therefore, politicism has no conscience whatsoever, no charity, and no mercy.”

When your quest is to drag the rest of the world, kicking and screaming, into your utopia, authoritarianism is the way to get there. Never mind that you’re enabling the most greedy, rapacious and psychopathic to grab the levers of power.

In short, it’s human nature.

When Boring People Turn Dangerous: Canada’s Insane Power Grab

On Christmas Eve, 2018, New York Times writer Andrew Ross Sorkin published, “How Banks Unwittingly Finance Mass Shootings.” Chronicling the credit card history of the man who killed 49 people at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida Sorkin noted Omar Mateen had not merely spent $26,532 on weapons and ammo in the eight months before the 2016 attack, but had wondered if his doing so had raised red flags:

Two days before Omar Mateen killed 49 people and wounded 53 more at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, he went on Google and typed “Credit card unusual spending…” His web browsing history chronicled his anxiety: “Credit card reports all three bureaus,” “FBI,” and “Why banks stop your purchases.”

He needn’t have worried. None of the banks, credit-card network operators or payment processors alerted law enforcement officials about the purchases he thought were so suspicious.

Sorkin’s piece ended up being an argument in favor of credit-card companies, payment processors, banks, and others working together to bring about a Minority Report-style panacea in which society’s dangerous folk could be cyber-identified and stopped before they commit horrific acts. At one point he quoted George Brauchler, the District Attorney who prosecuted the Century 16 movie shooter in Aurora Colorado, James Holmes:

“Do I wish someone from law enforcement had been able to go to his door and knock on his door and figure out a way to talk their way into it or to freak him out?” he said of Mr. Holmes. “Yeah, absolutely.”

I’ve never owned a gun and have been sympathetic to gun control ideas for as long as I can remember. Sorkin, however, was not talking about gun control. He was theorizing a quasi-privatized vision of social control that would bypass laws by merging surveillance capitalism and law enforcement.

In a rhetorical trick that’s since become common, he described how the failure of companies like Visa to block Mateen’s purchases made them “enablers of carnage.” Clearly, someone made the mistake of letting Sorkin see Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man, and Cliff Robertson now whispers from the beyond to him too. If those with power to act don’t stop wrongdoing, aren’t they just shirking their great responsibility?

By the way, this same Sorkin once suggested he wouldn’t stop at arresting Edward Snowden, but go after the reporter who broke his story, too. “I would arrest him and now I’d almost arrest Glenn Greenwald, the journalist… he wants to help him get to Ecuador,” he said, on CNBC’s Squawk Box. It’s amazing how selective one can be in one’s authoritarian leanings. After Goldman, Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein appeared to commit perjury in 2011 when he told the Senate, “We didn’t bet against our clients,” Sorkin rushed an apologia into print saying “Mr. Blankfein wasn’t lying,” failing to remind audiences that his Dealbook blog at the Times was sponsored by… Goldman, Sachs.

Sorkin’s Visa piece is suddenly relevant again, after fellow former finance reporter Chrystia Freeland — someone I’ve known since we were both expat journalists in Russia in the nineties — announced last week that her native Canada would be making Sorkin’s vision a reality. Freeland arouses strong feelings among old Russia hands. Before the Yeltsin era collapsed, she had consistent, remarkable access to gangster-oligarchs like Boris Berezovsky, who appeared in her Financial Times articles described as aw-shucks humans just doing their best to make sure “big capital” maintained its “necessary role” in Russia’s political life. “Berezovsky was one of several financiers who came together in a last-ditch attempt to keep the Communists out of the Kremlin” was typical Freeland fare in, say, 1998.

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The Neoliberal War on Dissent in the West
Those who most flamboyantly proclaim that they are fighting fascists continue to embrace and wield the defining weapons of despotism.

When it comes to distant and adversarial countries, we are taught to recognize tyranny through the use of telltale tactics of repression. Dissent from orthodoxies is censored. Protests against the state are outlawed. Dissenters are harshly punished with no due process. Long prison terms are doled out for political transgressions rather than crimes of violence. Journalists are treated as criminals and spies. Opposition to the policies of political leaders are recast as crimes against the state.

When a government that is adverse to the West engages in such conduct, it is not just easy but obligatory to malign it as despotic. Thus can one find, on a virtually daily basis, articles in the Western press citing the government’s use of those tactics in Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela and whatever other countries the West has an interest in disparaging (articles about identical tactics from regimes supported by the West — from Riyadh to Cairo — are much rarer). That the use of these repressive tactics render these countries and their populations subject to autocratic regimes is considered undebatable.

But when these weapons are wielded by Western governments, the precise opposite framework is imposed: describing them as despotic is no longer obligatory but virtually prohibited. That tyranny exists only in Western adversaries but never in the West itself is treated as a permanent axiom of international affairs, as if Western democracies are divinely shielded from the temptations of genuine repression. Indeed, to suggest that a Western democracy has descended to the same level of authoritarian repression as the West’s official enemies is to assert a proposition deemed intrinsically absurd or even vaguely treasonous.

The implicit guarantor of this comforting framework is democracy. Western countries, according to this mythology, can never be as repressive as their enemies because Western governments are at least elected democratically. This assurance, superficially appealing though it may be, completely collapses with the slightest critical scrutiny. The premise of the U.S. Constitution and others like it is that majoritarian despotism is dangerous in the extreme; the Bill of Rights consists of little more than limitations imposed on the tyrannical measures majorities might seek to democratically enact (the expression of ideas cannot be criminalized even if majorities want them to be; religious freedom cannot be abolished even if large majorities demand it; life and liberty cannot be deprived without due process even if nine of out ten citizens favor doing so, etc.). More inconveniently still, many of the foreign leaders we are instructed to view as despots are popular or even every bit as democratically elected as our own beloved freedom-safeguarding officials.

As potent as this mythological framework is, reinforced by large media corporations over so many decades, it cannot withstand the increasingly glaring use of precisely these despotic tactics in the West. Watching Justin Trudeau — the sweet, well-mannered, well-raised good-boy prince of one of the West’s nicest countries featuring such a pretty visage (even on the numerous occasions when marred by blackface) — invoke and then harshly impose dubious emergency, civil-liberties-denying powers is just the latest swing of the hammer causing this Western sculpture to crumble. In sum, you are required by Western propaganda to treat the two images below as fundamentally different; indeed, huge numbers of people in the West vehemently denounce the one on the left while enthusiastically applauding the one on the right. Such brittle mythology can be sustained only for so long:

Reuters, Aug. 8, 2019 (left); BBC, Feb. 15, 2022 (right)

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Canada’s Hoax of a Democracy & Tyrant Trudeau : #TruckersForFreedom protesters treated like animals.

  • An Ottawa gelato shop owner who was revealed to have donated to the Freedom Convoy claims she has since been doxxed and had her information posted online

  • Tammy Giuliani, who owns the Stella Luna Café, received constant abusive phone calls calling her a Nazi, and a sign saying ‘Tammy supports terrorists’

  • Giuliani spoke of the backlash she’s faced since news came to light of her donation to the group of Canadian truckers protesting against COVID mandates

  • ‘You know, we have been called terrorists. For the first 60 to 36 hours, we were inundated with hatred, with threats of violence,’ she said

  • Giuliani is among roughly 92,000 supporters of the Freedom Convoy that had their information hacked after donating to the cause through GiveSendGo

  • The crowdfunding website, which describes itself as the ‘number one Christian crowdfunding site,’ had raised more than $9 million of the $16 million goal

  • The website Distributed Denial of Secrets said it was given donor information that included including names, email addresses, ZIP codes and IP addresses.

Seven Great Truths [to emerge from the truckers’ protest]

Robert Gore:

The truckers’ rallying cry—Freedom!—inspires the many and thrusts greatness on a few.

Justin Trudeau and his globalist ilk are an unimpressive lot. Trudeau’s interminable Wikipedia profile is over 8000 words and has 324 references. Never has so much been said about so little except, perhaps, in other globalist profiles. Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, was, like Trudeau, one of Klaus Schwab’s Young Global Leaders, a finishing school for the Davos set.

Trudeau’s resumé lists bachelors’ degrees in literature and education, and studies but no degrees in engineering and environmental geography. He was a substitute and then a permanent teacher in secondary schools. Wikipedia says he gave his father, Pierre, prime minister from 1980 to 1984, a nice eulogy. He started a winter sports safety fund after his brother was killed in an avalanche, portrayed a distant relative in a CBC miniseries, started the Trudeau Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Toronto, fought a zinc mine in the Northwest Territories, and was master of ceremonies at an award show and a political rally. (That comprehensive summation took three sentences and 105 words.)

His featherweight resumé screams politics and government as an ultimate career. He’s a Canadian Barack Obama. See the fawning Wikipedia entry for thousands of words on his ascent up the political ladder. In 2015 he was elected Prime Minister, a position he holds to this day, but perhaps not much longer.

Ottawa, Washington, London, Paris, Berlin, and Brussels are filled with globalist politicians, functionaries, and toadies who differ from Trudeau only superficially. Power, their “right” to tell and force others how to live, is really a self-bestowed entitlement. They are the insiders, and outsiders are ignored or deplored. Whatever differences they have among themselves, they close ranks when fellow insiders are under attack. The Wikipedia profile mentions several Trudeau scandals, including blackface photos, that might have ended the career of an outsider politician, but from which he survived.

Once in a while something cuts through the muck of modern life with diamond-cutter precision and finality, yielding a moment of clarity. The juxtaposition of two images creates just such a moment. The one: thousands of Canadians braving the the bitter cold to cheer and succor 18-wheelers and their drivers rolling towards Ottawa. The other: the empty chair of an empty-suit prime minister who absented himself rather than face what his arrogant totalitarianism had wrought.

Revolutions dawn when an appreciable number of the ruled realize their rulers are intellectual and moral inferiors.

“Much More Than Trump,” Robert Gore, March 3, 2016

Justin Trudeau has done more to usher in that dawn than any other globalist. His invective and cowardice have rendered him contemptible in the eyes of millions of Canadians and others around the world despite the best efforts of the kept media to protect him. That he and his ilk are intellectual and moral inferiors is the first great truth to emerge from the truckers’ protest.

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‘2 weeks to flatten the curve’…………

WARMINGTON: Police horses trample demonstrators at Freedom Convoy protest in Ottawa

Turns out the lasting image of the Freedom Convoy protest at Parliament Hill will not be bouncy castles but that of a woman with a walker being trampled by a police horse.

The violence the Prime Minister has expressed concern about during the three-week protest in Ottawa didn’t unfold until Justin Trudeau’s Emergencies Act police army was sent in to disperse the crowd.

The three major incidents Friday, under a form of martial law, were grotesque.

Video of Toronto Police Mounted Unit officers charging into the crowd and at least one horse trampling multiple people — including an elderly woman with a walker — was disturbing.

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Cold War-era East Berlin had armed checkpoints — now Ottawa does too.

It has already been nicknamed Checkpoint Trudeau.

Actually, like Cold War East Berlin, there may be need for many checkpoint names.

“The secured area includes almost 100 checkpoints that will have police presence to ensure that those seeking entry to that secure area for a unlawful reason, such as joining a protest, cannot enter the downtown core,” acting Ottawa Police Chief Steve Bell said Thursday.

Canada’s capital, operating under the Emergencies Act, now has ‘no go zones” similar to a police state. Authorities set up checkpoints with armed police officers in downtown Ottawa on Thursday — from Highway 417 (Queensway) to Parliament Hill, where dozens of trucks have been parked for three weeks.

To get through the Berlin Wall under communism, people had to go through entry points known as Checkpoint Alpha, Checkpoint Bravo and, of course, Checkpoint Charlie. Now to get into through Ottawa’s police manned border points, people must produce papers to prove they live in the area or have a reason to be there.

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This author also makes a small mistake.
‘pro-government extremists’ should be ‘pro-authoritarian statists’
but whatever.

Our Greatest Domestic Threat: Pro-Government Extremists
Republican leaders should vow to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and commence a clean sweep of the swamp’s pro-government extremists.
By Thaddeus G. McCotter

Though alarming and depressing, we can no longer avoid recognizing that America’s greatest domestic threat is from pro-government extremists.

We rue that pro-government extremists caused immense destruction during their less-than-“peaceful protests” in 2020; and we witness the continuing damage caused by their neurotic, totalitarian response to a plethora of problems, such as the COVID-19 pandemic..

Indeed, what makes the pro-government extremists so dangerous is their far greater numbers than their anti-government extremist counterparts. Their noxious ideology that the citizen is subordinate to the omnipotent state is incessantly “normalized” and propagandized by their corporate media comrades. 

Worse, their pro-government extremism is being indoctrinated throughout American public and private institutions, including K-12 education, higher education, and the military. In fact, pro-government extremists have infiltrated the American government, and are weaponizing the powers of the state to wage war on dissenting citizens’ liberty and livelihoods.
In a nation that constitutionally recognizes and respects an individual citizen’s God-given rights, including free speech and the power to peaceably assemble to petition the government for the redress of grievances, only the infiltration of the Department of Homeland Security by pro-government extremists could explain Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ February 7 National Terrorism Advisory System Bulletin, which included the following “Summary of Terrorism Threat to the U.S. Homeland”:

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Just in case you didn’t know what this violent leftist demoncrap wanna-be tyrant looked like. And if this is called ‘increasingly hostile‘, they haven’t seen ‘hostile‘ yet.

Democratic strategist James Carville said Democrats "whine too much" (Munoz for ICSS  Livepic)

James Carville: I want to punch ‘piece of s–t’ unvaccinated people in the face
‘I just want to punch you in the god—-ed face’

Demoncrap strategist James Carville cursed out unvaccinated individuals on his podcast last week, saying anyone without a vaccine was a “piece of s–t” and he wanted to punch them in the face.

On Thursday’s “Politics War Room with James Carville & Al Hunt,” Carville and Hunt took a listener question wondering why President Biden would not pass a bill that bars unvaccinated citizens from interstate travel.

“I wouldn’t be against that at all. I’d be for it actually, as long as you put ‘or testing.’ Before you get on a plane or bus or interstate train, you want to be vaccinated or tested. I don’t think the Supreme Court would allow him to do that,” Hunt said.

“I don’t either,” Carville replied.

“I don’t think he should expend much capital trying to get something done that’s going to get knocked down,” Hunt said.

Carville continued by suggesting a law giving immunity to anyone for punching an unvaccinated person.

“I wish what they’d do is pass a law to make you immune from liability if you punch some unvaccinated person right in the face, which I’d really like to do. If you ask me what’s my first reaction to you if you’re not vaccinated, you don’t have any medical reason not to be, you’re a piece of s—, OK? I just want to punch you in the god—-ed face. That’s the way I look at these people,” Carville said.

“Agreed,” Hunt replied.

Media pundits and authorities have grown increasingly hostile against individuals who choose to remain unvaccinated for various reasons.

Quip O’ The Day
“I’ll believe Brooks’ “end of individualism” schtick when he gives up his NYT byline and replaces his name with “Staff Writer.” —Professor Reynolds

Comment O’ The Day
“We are a nation of individuals with unique dreams and liberties. Stop it.”–Brian Gutherman

DAVID BROOKS IS PARTYING LIKE IT’S 1919!

Flashback to a century ago, when attacks on individuality were all the rage among collectivist-obsessed “Progressives:”

[Woodrow] Wilson was merely one voice in the progressive chorus of the age. “[W]e must demand that the individual shall be willing to lose the sense of personal achievement, and shall be content to realize his activity only in connection to the activity of the many,” declared the progressive social activist Jane Addams.

“New forms of association must be created,” explained Walter Rauschenbusch, a leading progressive theologian of the Social Gospel movement, in 1896. “Our disorganized competitive life must pass into an organic cooperative life.” Elsewhere, Rauschenbusch put it more simply: “Individualism means tyranny.”

Or as Mies van der Rohe, the last director of Weimar Germany’s socialist-oriented Bauhaus design school said in 1924:

The individual is losing significance; his destiny is no longer what interests us. The decisive achievements in all fields are impersonal and their authors are for the most part unknown. They are part of the trend of our time toward anonymity. Our engineering structures are examples. Gigantic dams, great industrial installations and huge bridges are built as a matter of course, with no designer’s name attached to them. They point to the technology of the future.

Curiously, Mies would have no problem building for wealthy individuals who wished to commission his work — not to mention having his name firmly associated with his designs — after he fled the Weimar Republic’s much more punitive successors for America.

Exit question:

Some of its shakier proponents fell in love with fine trouser creases over substance. As did others who knew better, but hated missing out on all the best cocktail parties on both ends of the Northeast Corridor. Not to mention, the green room at MSNBC.

Truckers are starting a working-class revolution — and the left hates it.

So we’re finally seeing a genuine, bottom-up, working-class revolution. In Canada, and increasingly in the United States, truckers and others are refusing to follow government orders, telling the powerful that, in a popular lefty formulation, if there’s no justice, there’s no peace.

Naturally, the left hates it.

For more than a century, lefties have talked about such a revolt. But if you really paid attention, the actual role of the working class in their working-class revolution was not to call the shots — it was to do what it was told by the “intellectual vanguard” of the left.

A working-class revolution led by the working class is the left’s worst nightmare because the working class doesn’t want what the left wants. The working class wants jobs, a stable economy, safe streets, low inflation, schools that teach things and a conservative, non-adventurous foreign policy that won’t get a lot of working-class people killed. It’s not excited about gender fluidity, critical race theory, “modern monetary theory,” foreign adventures and defunding police.

Worse yet, a huge part of the lefty self-image revolves around feeling superior to the working class and openly expressing disdain for it. One need spend only a few minutes tuning into left media like NPR, CNN or MSNBC to hear the disdain for working-class Americans, inhabitants of “flyover country,” people who live in the middle of nowhere.

Trucker protest
The left has vilified the Canadian truckers protestors as Russian agents, Nazis and white supremacists.
REUTERS

So naturally, the idea that those people might be staging a revolution is intolerable.

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The number I’ve seen is that it is estimated that the lockdowns prevented on average  0.2%  – that’s “Maybe Two (2) out of a Thousand” – deaths in comparison with just trusting people to do the right thing.
Sorry, that small of a number is statistical noise, which means that there is no evidence the lockdowns did anything but disrupt our entire economy and empower the tyrant authoritarians. Which, to be frank is the silver lining because they’re now exposed to the world for future action.

Johns Hopkins Analysis: ‘Lockdowns Should be Rejected Out of Hand.’

The aura of “expert” has lost its luster during Covid, as our supposedly bigger brains have been proved wrong repeatedly.

Two of these have been Ezekiel Emanuel and Anthony Fauci. Both were enthusiastic proponents of societal lockdowns as a means of preventing deaths and the spread of Covid. We now know from a Johns Hopkins blockbuster meta-analysis that “shutting it down,” in Donald Trump’s awkward phrase, did very little to prevent deaths.

It’s a long, arcane, and detailed analysis, and I can’t present every nuance or statistic here. But I think these are the primary takeaways. From the study:

Overall, we conclude that lockdowns are not an effective way of reducing mortality rates during a pandemic, at least not during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our results are in line with the World Health Organization Writing Group (2006), who state, “Reports from the 1918 influenza pandemic indicate that social-distancing measures did not stop or appear to dramatically reduce transmission […]

In Edmonton, Canada, isolation and quarantine were instituted; public meetings were banned; schools, churches, colleges, theaters, and other public gathering places were closed; and business hours were restricted without obvious impact on the epidemic.” Our findings are also in line with Allen’s (2021) conclusion: “The most recent research has shown that lockdowns have had, at best, a marginal effect on the number of Covid 19 deaths.”

Why might that be?

Mandates only regulate a fraction of our potential contagious contacts and can hardly regulate nor enforce handwashing, coughing etiquette, distancing in supermarkets, etc. Countries like Denmark, Finland, and Norway that realized success in keeping COVID-19 mortality rates relatively low allowed people to go to work, use public transport, and meet privately at home during the first lockdown. In these countries, there were ample opportunities to legally meet with others.

Worse, the lockdowns caused tremendous harm:

Unintended consequences may play a larger role than recognized. We already pointed to the possible unintended consequence of SIPOs, which may isolate an infected person at home with his/her family where he/she risks infecting family members with a higher viral load, causing more severe illness. But often, lockdowns have limited peoples’ access to safe (outdoor) places such as beaches, parks, and zoos, or included outdoor mask mandates or strict outdoor gathering restrictions, pushing people to meet at less safe (indoor) places. Indeed, we do find some evidence that limiting gatherings was counterproductive and increased COVID-19 mortality

What lessons should be learned (my emphasis)?

The use of lockdowns is a unique feature of the COVID-19 pandemic. Lockdowns have not been used to such a large extent during any of the pandemics of the past century. However, lockdowns during the initial phase of the COVID-19 pandemic have had devastating effects. They have contributed to reducing economic activity, raising unemployment, reducing schooling, causing political unrest, contributing to domestic violence, and undermining liberal democracy. These costs to society must be compared to the benefits of lockdowns, which our meta-analysis has shown are marginal at best. Such a standard benefit-cost calculation leads to a strong conclusion: lockdowns should be rejected out of hand as a pandemic policy instrument.

To which I would add another: We can never squelch free discourse and debate on public-health issues again.

People who argued against the “scientific consensus” about the lockdowns were stifled, censored by Big Tech, denigrated by the media, and mocked by establishment scientists. That was essentially “anti-science.” The scientific method needs heterodox voices to speak freely if it is to function properly.

This subsequent look-back shows why. To a large degree, those with the officially disfavored views–such as the signers of the Great Barrington Declaration—were correct on this matter.

Will we learn the lesson? Yes, if our goal is to ably discern and apply the best policy options, which can be a messy process. No, if the point is to allow those in charge of institutional science to exert societal control.

Observation O’ The Day:
“I am aware that people can be removed from the transplant list for engaging in behavior that increases the rust of transplant failure, such as someone needing a liver transplant continuing to drink alcohol.

However, falling back on this justification to deny someone a transplant for refusing a highly contentious vaccine that may have no appreciable effect on the latest variant and may in face cause hear related issues in a patient with a bad heart, seems less about science and more about politics.

To be honest, so many people have been screaming for the unvaccinated to be killed or left to die from medical neglect that I can’t give a hospital the benefit of the doubt that they are making this decision based on a desire for the patient outcome and not partisanship.” –J.Kb.

Occupy Democrats applauds Boston hospital for removing father from heart transplant list because he hasn’t gotten the COVID vaccine

People concerned that COVID precautions have gotten out of control may have some reason to feel that way:

More:

An unvaccinated and gravely ill 31-year-old father-of-two has been taken off the donor list for a heart transplant by a Boston hospital because he ‘does not believe’ in the COVID vaccine.

DJ Ferguson, who has a hereditary heart condition that causes his lungs and heart to fill with blood and fluid, was denied the life-saving organ transplant by Boston Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School.

The hospital said it removed Ferguson from the donor list because all transplant recipients need to get the vaccine in order to ‘create both the best chance for successful operation and also the patient’s survival after transplantation.’

 

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The only thing really surprising is that the demoncraps feel ‘sporty’ enough to let what they’d like happen out in public.

COVID-19: Democratic Voters Support Harsh Measures Against Unvaccinated

While many voters have become skeptical toward the federal government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, a majority of Democrats embrace restrictive policies, including punitive measures against those who haven’t gotten the COVID-19 vaccine.

A new Heartland Institute and Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 48% of voters favor President Joe Biden’s plan to impose a COVID-19 vaccine mandate on the employees of large companies and government agencies. That includes 33% who Strongly Favor the mandate. Forty-eight percent (48%) are opposed to Biden’s vaccine mandate, including 40% who Strongly Oppose the mandate. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

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“The goal is to give leftist thugs free rein, while ensuring that the right is afraid to respond. It’s the sort of thing authoritarian governments do.”

BLUF:
The events of January 6, 2021, do not meet any legal definition of “insurrection.” But if Democrats and the mainstream media insist on the term, then the violence of the last two years has also been an insurrectionary force.

Insurrections and Double Standards
Reveling in the anniversary of the Capitol riot, Democrats and the media dubiously brand it a right-wing “insurrection”—while ignoring the urban anarchy that began in May 2020.

The disappointment was palpable. As the one-year anniversary of the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot approached, the Department of Homeland Security had warned state and local law enforcement officials that “domestic violent extremists” could strike again. Security forces were on guard and many people were on edge, reported the New York Times. Yet, as a CNN anchor morosely observed during the network’s saturation coverage of the anniversary celebration: “There’s been no violence at the Capitol today.”

The letdown was all the greater, coming after so many similar disappointments. Early in 2021, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Homeland Security predicted that white supremacists and militias would stage January 6-inspired attacks throughout the year. Fencing and bollards ringed the Capitol through July, protecting against the alleged white-supremacist threat. The Biden administration budgeted for attacks from domestic terrorists embedded within the military and law enforcement. In late spring, DHS issued an intelligence bulletin about coming domestic extremist attacks during the summer of 2021. A flurry of excitement broke out about possible violence in August 2021 from Trump plotters. College campuses were also at risk from those who feel “hostility toward higher education, intellectualism, and societal sectors seen as elite,” according to the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Barricades went back up around the Capitol in September 2021 and law enforcement was put on high alert, in preparation for unrest from right-wingers protesting the treatment of the January 6 rioters. The FBI doubled its investigations of white supremacists and militias, since extremists “advocating for the superiority of the white race” pose the greatest threat of mass-civilian attacks, the bureau has concluded.

None of those expected attacks materialized—not last week, on the one-year anniversary of January 6, or during the preceding year. The media’s Capitol riot anniversary celebration, however, was choreographed to underscore the fictional claim that white supremacy is the biggest impediment to civil order in the U.S. today. “White supremacy is a clear and present threat, and must be rooted out,” Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley said on MSNBC. If that threat was not realized at the Capitol over the last year, we are told, that is only because it has migrated elsewhere. “Domestic extremists are glomming on to other issues,” Oren Segal, vice president of the ADL Center on Extremism, told CNN on Thursday. “They need to focus locally to keep extremism going,” so they’re showing up at school board meetings, Segal said. MSNBC host Joy Reid seconded that assessment: The “MAGA insurrectionists have travelled to school boards” to fight the teaching of history. Those insurrectionists are worried that their “kids will identify with abolitionists,” Reid explained.

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No moderate utopia

A central theme that I often see in Idaho is to default to labels of extremism when discussing Idaho’s right spectrum.  It’s a regular occurrence to read op-eds suggesting that Idaho’s right has gone too far to the right and that what we really need is a broad center.  But studies from even left-leaning organizations like Pew consistently show that it is in fact the American left that has gone off of the rails. When billions in riot damage and dozens of murders by leftist organizations like Antifa and BLM are labeled mostly peaceful and downplayed, while January 6 is labeled tantamount to Pearl Harbor or September 11, Houston, we have a problem.

The primary issue with this assertion of extremism is who is making this assertion.  My friends, might I point out that it is the authoritarian spectrum that is making this assertion of extremism?

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BLUF:
I suppose we should be glad that between the existential threat of climate change, which is urgent, and the threat to democracy from the “insurrectionist” right that nearly toppled our Constitution on January 6, some liberals still have the bandwidth to worry about NORAD’s Santa tracker.

Must be a cheerful life.

LIBERALS ARE MISERABLE PEOPLE

They say misery loves company, and that may be why liberals always want to extend their control over everyone and everything—because they are miserable people. Thomas Byrne Edsall covers some of the survey evidence about the misery and unhappiness of liberals in a New York Times article back in October:

Two similarly titled papers with markedly disparate conclusions illustrate the range of disagreement on this subject. “Why Are Conservatives Happier Than Liberals?” by Jaime Napier of N.Y.U. in Abu Dhabi and John Jost of N.Y.U., and “Conservatives Are Happier Than Liberals, but Why?” by Barry R. Schlenker and John Chambers, both of the University of Florida, and Bonnie Le of the University of Rochester.

Using nationally representative samples from the United States and nine other countries, Napier and Jost note that they

consistently found conservatives (or right-wingers) are happier than liberals (or left-wingers). This ideological gap in happiness is not accounted for by demographic differences or by differences in cognitive style. We did find, however, that the rationalization of inequality — a core component of conservative ideology — helps to explain why conservatives are, on average, happier than liberals.

Napier and Jost contend that their determinations are “consistent with system justification theory, which posits that viewing the status quo (with its attendant degree of inequality) as fair and legitimate serves a palliative function.”

Need I point out that Napier and Jost are far-left? Thus we shouldn’t be surprised that the issue of “inequality” shows up for heavy work here. I suppose it makes some sense, given how the super rich are skewing left these days, and must be unhappy with guilt about this.

But let’s continue with a paper less enslaved (see what I did there?) to leftist ideology:

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