Category: Enemies Domestic

Judge Napolitano is too kind. Actually she doesn’t have blinders on. She’s just another wanna-be tyrant who complains about the Constitutional restrictions on goobermint like they all do.

BLUF:
The governor has blinders on. She complains of too much freedom. In New York, there is too little.

Blaming the Constitution

Within hours of the tragic killings of 10 Americans — nine Black and one white — in a Buffalo supermarket by a deranged white racist last week, the governor of New York began calling for infringements upon personal liberty. First, she argued that social media platforms were somehow liable for these killings since they provided a platform from which the killer could reinforce his hatreds and on which he could manifest them.

Then, she argued that hate speech and incendiary speech should be prosecuted. Finally, she attacked the U.S. Supreme Court, which is about to rule on a challenge to New York’s restrictive concealed carry laws. She said twice that “New York is ready for you.” It is unclear just what she meant, but the implication was that she’d find a way around whatever the court rules.

She uttered a bitter constitutional mouthful.

From the writings and mental history of the gunman, we know that he was and is deeply disturbed. Police brought him to a mental hospital after he made threats at school, and his hatreds were posted on dark websites. Nevertheless, New York gun laws — among the strictest in the country — did not stop him from lawfully purchasing a rifle and the ammunition with which to use it.

The gun control crowd, personified by the governor, makes critical errors in its arguments and shows material misunderstandings of fundamental liberties.

Its critical error is a mistaken belief that someone willing to commit mass murder will somehow comply with gun regulations. It doesn’t matter to the killer what the gun laws are; he will find a way to attempt to kill. What matters is a set of laws with which law-abiding folks do comply, the effect of which is to neuter their ability to defend themselves.

This column has steadfastly maintained that the only language mass murderers respect is their own — violence. Only violence against them, or its serious imminent threat, will stop them.

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BLUF:
So from this quarter, while you can surely be dismayed and irritated at the stupidity emanating from Team Biden, the advice is this: just know that they’re showing their hand — and it’s a weak one.

But be on your guard, because the drowning man will pull others under if he can. And Team Biden is drowning. Make no mistake about it.

POTATUS Speaks, A Nation Groans
A shot and a chaser from a drowning man.

It’s hard to single out just one thing which came out of the Biden administration this past week which best illustrates how transformationally awful it is.

We’ll have to settle on two of them, which together made up a one-two punch to the gut of American morale.

First was his hyperbolic bromide against MAGA/revivalist conservatism. The president, showing off his status as a thoroughgoing nincompoop, thought it would be a good idea to verbally assault some 75 million Americans by predicting that since “this MAGA crowd is really the most extreme political organization that’s existed in American history,” that red-state legislatures will pass laws segregating gay and “trans” kids from their classmates in schools.

No, Joe. Maybe just the bathrooms, though — there seem to be fewer rapes that way.

That was the shot. The chaser was a day later, when after several Supreme Court justices were set upon by angry mobs protesting at their residences and a speaking engagement scheduled for Associate Justice Samuel Alito, the author of the draft majority opinion in the Dobbs case, had to be canceled due to violent threats, the administration refused to condemn the behavior of the pro-abortion extremists.

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BLUF:
“Get them into private schools if you can afford it,” she said. “Get them into homeschool co-ops or homeschool them yourself.”

As Parents Resisted Transgender Push, Teacher Suggested Sending in Child Services

Epoch Times Photo

If Erin Lee had known what her 12-year-old daughter would be exposed to during an afterschool “art club” last May, she would have never allowed her to go.

It began innocently enough. Lee received a text from her daughter asking if she could stay late for an “art club” at Wellington Middle School near Fort Collins, Colorado.

What happened next, though, would change their lives forever.

The “art club” was actually a meeting of the school’s Genders & Sexualities Alliance (GSA) club, a group dedicated to supporting homosexuality, transgenderism, and other nontraditional ideas about gender and sexuality.

When the leader told Amanda (name changed to protect the minor) she must be “queer” if she didn’t feel sexually attracted to anybody, and that she must be “transgender” if she didn’t feel fully comfortable in her own body, the shy little girl suspected something wasn’t right.

According to Amanda, that same leader told her not to tell her parents about what would be discussed that day.

The woman in charge, Kimberly Chambers, who works as a “health equity initiatives coordinator” for Larimer County and director of the pro-LGBT organization SPLASH Youth of Northern Colorado, also handed out her personal contact information to the children and urged them to contact her anytime.

Chambers’s organization has boasted of teaching children ages 12 to 16 about “polyamory”—relationships with multiple sexual partners simultaneously—and other controversial ideas.

During the afterschool GSA club, according to Amanda, Chambers explained to the children that their family homes may not be a “safe space,” but that there were “resources” available. She also handed out transgender flags and stickers that Amanda understood were supposed to represent the children in the club.

As soon as Lee picked up her daughter at school, it was clear that something was “off,” the mother told The Epoch Times in a series of interviews about the incident.

Amanda, looking confused, showed her mother the transgender paraphernalia she had received from Chambers. The transgender flag represented her, Amanda told her mom.

“My heart started racing and my mind blacked out,” Lee recounted. “I was in so much shock that I struggled to get out any words.”

Even though the GSA leader at school had told Amanda it was OK to lie to her parents, Amanda knew better. Over the days that followed, she told her parents everything, Lee said.

Amanda’s parents could hardly believe what they were hearing. Lee, who has described herself as an “ally of the LGBTQ community” and said she has a history of voting “pretty progressively on social issues,” was appalled.

But that would be just the beginning of an ordeal that continues to haunt the family.

Amanda never went back to the school after that. Instead, her parents put her in a local Christian school, even though it meant Lee would have to work nights to afford it. But as Lee and her husband saw it, there was no other choice.

Despite that Amanda was pulled out of Wellington Middle School, the family’s difficulties grew.

After the lesson, Amanda began to wonder whether she might truly be queer and transgender. Her mental state began to rapidly deteriorate, her mother said.

Multiple family members confirmed to The Epoch Times that prior to what Lee describes as the “grooming” of her daughter at school, Amanda never showed any signs of “gender dysphoria,” the term used by psychiatrists to describe discomfort with one’s biological sex.

Afterward, though, it was hard for the girl to shake the idea.

Lee and her husband, who was outraged by the ordeal, struggled for months with how to talk to their daughter about what had happened.

“We didn’t want to say something that would push her further into this dark hole or further into this transgender label,” Lee said. “And we did exactly what the trusted adults who indoctrinated her told her we would do. We played right into their narrative.”

Weeks after the incident, as her mental state got worse, the parents decided to take Amanda to a therapist. The therapist also ended up being “queer” and sought to affirm the young girl’s confusion about her gender.

By December, between the COVID isolation and the questions surrounding her gender, Amanda’s mental state was spiraling downward, Lee said.

The pediatrician immediately prescribed powerful psychotropic drugs for depression—medications that Amanda has since been weaned from—in an attempt to deal with the crisis.

“I don’t know if that fear will ever go away,” Lee said about her own concerns. “I don’t expect to ever stop being struck with sadness about what happened.”

Fighting Back
The more she thought about the whole ordeal, the more Lee realized she had to do something.

First, she contacted Chambers, the woman who Lee says “groomed” her daughter and who also sometimes works as a substitute teacher for the district. “Her response was alarming,” Lee said. “It was delusional. She doubled down on her actions.”

Next, she contacted the principal, who seemed empathetic but confirmed that secret GSA meetings with children were an intentional part of creating a “safe space” at school.

There are more than two dozen self-proclaimed LGBT children in the small middle school, according to social media posts by SPLASH. And the district is determined that they be “affirmed” without parental involvement, Lee said.

After all that, Lee spoke out at a school board meeting and contacted all its members by email. None responded. When she was finally able to sit down with two of them, they both “supported everything that transpired and refused to address any of my concerns.”

Finally, exasperated and realizing her first call would have been to the police if this had occurred on a playground or any other setting, Lee contacted the sheriff’s office.

While law enforcement was deeply sympathetic to her plight, and urged her to speak out loudly, there was nothing they could do from a legal perspective, Lee said.

District officials, meanwhile, saw nothing wrong with what had occurred, she said. Indeed, some expressed shock that a parent would be upset over the incident.

As Lee fought back, school officials were working on their next move.

Among other tactics, documents and communications obtained by The Epoch Times revealed a discussion about the possibility of reporting the parents to child-welfare authorities.

When Chambers was informed by the art teacher that Amanda’s parents had not been sending her to school since the incident, Chambers wrote back urging her to consider filing a report and have child-protection officials visit the home.

“If that persists, you’ll want to talk to admin about doing a well-child check or whatever is within the policies of the school,” Chambers wrote, describing upset parents as “barriers” and citing an “extreme case” in which a family did not allow their transgender child to leave the home unsupervised.

Lee was flabbergasted after receiving the documents.

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BLUF:
It’s time for the U.S. to quit the Programme of Action. And while we’re at it, we should quit the U.N. ammo group and make it clear that, no matter what the U.N. does about bullets, we won’t try to apply its foolish ideas here.

UN Gun Control Program Runs Amok Again

More than two decades ago, the United Nations created a program to curb the trafficking of small arms. It’s done nothing but fire blanks. So now, the U.N. wants to control bullets.

In 2001, the United Nations started the Programme of Action to Prevent, Combat, and Eradicate the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons in All Its Aspects. Its next meeting will be held in New York from June 27 to July 1.

The Programme isn’t a treaty. It’s a political gathering that’s meant to encourage voluntary cooperation. It meets every other year to produce an outcome document that’s politically (but not legally) binding.

It’s supposed to work by unanimous consent.

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The Programme has achieved very little, if anything. That’s not just my view. The U.N. secretary-general said so in 2008. New Zealand said so in 2012. Its supporters said it was “firing blanks” in 2014. In 2018, the Red Cross said that governments in the Programme talk a lot, but do nothing.

In practice, that suits most of the U.N. fine: All the nations get credit for participating in the Programme while actually doing nothing, while the Programme focuses on peripheral issues, such as 3D-printed guns.

This year, the rumor is that the Programme’s president wants it to focus on banning toy guns. (No more water pistols for your kids, says the U.N.)

If the nations in the Programme genuinely wanted to help control the illicit trade in small arms, it could in theory be modestly useful.

For example, it could seek to eliminate the “Chinese exemption,” under which Beijing is exempt from the requirement to put serial numbers on its firearms, which makes Chinese guns difficult to trace.

But instead, the Programme focuses on irrelevant distractions—and on breaking its own promises.

In 2018, the Programme broke its rule of unanimity to approve an outcome document that added ammo over U.S. protests. The Programme wasn’t supposed to include ammunition. And adding it serves no useful purpose.

The idea of putting numbers on, and trying to trace, individual rounds of ammunition is nonsensical. The resulting database would have trillions of entries.

Most of the Programme’s member nations can’t and don’t even meet their existing commitments. But that didn’t stop the United Nations from adding ammo.

The U.S. does most of the work of running traces on firearms, providing expertise, and giving aid to upgrade foreign recordkeeping through the Programme.

But if the U.S. is going to do most of the work and simultaneously going to have the Programme’s rules broken against it, there’s no reason for us to continue to participate in it.

There are now more good reasons than ever to quit. When the Programme voted to include ammo in 2018, it lined itself up with a U.N. working group. That group’s report came out late last year, and it’s a bureaucrat’s fantasy.

It calls for the negotiation of “a set of political commitments” to “concentrate on through-life ammunition management.” In other words, an entirely new Programme of Action, focused just on ammo.

“Through-life” ammo management may sound innocuous, but isn’t. Here’s what it means, in the U.N.’s own words:

States would reduce security risks by encouraging ammunition producers, where feasible, practicable and consistent with national legislation, to maintain effective accounting and record-keeping systems that permit the retrieval (by serial, batch, or lot number) of detailed sales and transfer records. Ideally, such records should be digital, easily retrievable, and held for as long as feasible.

Translation: The U.N. wants manufacturers of ammo to number their bullets. Then the U.N. wants to track where and to whom every bullet in the world is sold or sent. The U.N. also wants to track who sells to whom. And it wants all those records digitized, easily accessed, and kept forever.

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Well, he’s always been known as a liar

Actually, no, they’re targeting – exactly – who they want to, their political enemies.

Crime is soaring. The Biden administration targets the wrong culprit

In a country (and my home state) that is run under the Democrats’ one-party rule, civilians are being caught in the crossfire of soaring crime. Shootings of police officers have increased 63% compared to this time in 2020, and over 100 officers have been shot on duty so far in 2022. Last year, more police officers were killed in the line of duty than in any year since 1995, a 59% increase from 2020. In 2021, over a dozen Democrat-run “blue” cities across America set new homicide records. Defunding and demonizing police has dangerous consequences; crime is soaring.

Instead of addressing these shocking statistics, some of my more “progressive” colleagues continue to call to defund the police, while simultaneously spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on private security. They are benefiting from law and order themselves and leaving the people who voted them into office in danger due to their backward ideologies.

These deadly statistics prove an uptick in serious crime, committed by dangerous individuals and usually committed with illegal or stolen weapons. Unfortunately, President Joe Biden isn’t going after them. He’s turned his attention yet again to law-abiding citizens who wish to exercise their Second Amendment rights. Biden wants the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives to ban privately made firearms, so-called “ghost guns.” These are predominantly a hobbyist option and require extensive time, special tooling, and dedication to craftsmanship to make them operate correctly — far more effort than criminals are willing to invest. A review of FBI statistics shows criminals typically steal firearms or get their weapons illegally on the black market. Adding more restrictions on responsible gun owners and hobbyists won’t prevent criminals from breaking the law.

The Biden administration has a record of going after law-abiding citizens instead of dangerous criminals.

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Comment O’ The Day
The gun-buying spree was a RESULT of the murder spike and a reaction to the demonstrated knowledge that if mostly peaceful pink-haired Antifa Zombies came crawling through your window, the police would not only be unable to help, but would refuse to do so if the opportunity arose.

The New York Times Uses a CDC Report on Homicides As an Excuse To Attack Private Gun Ownership

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) yesterday issued a report on the recent surge in the U.S. gun homicide rate, which rose by a third between 2019 and 2020, from 4.6 to 6.1 per 100,000 residents. The article, which was published in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, notes that “several explanations have been proposed,” including “increased stressors (e.g., economic, social, and psychological) and disruptions in health, social, and emergency services during the COVID-19 pandemic; strains in law enforcement-community relations reflected in protests over law enforcement use of lethal force; increases in firearm purchases; and intimate partner violence.”

The New York Times predictably plays up that passing reference to “increases in firearm purchases.” The rise in gun homicides, the Times says, “corresponded to accelerated sales of firearms as the pandemic spread and lockdowns became the norm.” The Times explains that “Americans went on a gun-buying spree in 2020 that continued into 2021,” although sales have since returned to their usual level. It cites an estimate by gun violence researcher Garen Wintemute that “there remain roughly 15 million more guns in circulation than there would be without the pandemic.”

In 2017, according to the Small Arms Survey, American civilians owned more than 393 million firearms. Purchases in 2018 and 2019 added an estimated 27 million guns to that stock of weapons. If sales in 2020 had been similar to sales in the two previous years, they would have added another 13 million or so. Assuming Wintemute’s estimate is in the right ballpark, the “gun-buying spree” that worries the Times amounted to a further increase of about 3.5 percent. Although Times reporters Roni Caryn Rabin and Tim Arango seem to think that’s a plausible explanation for a 33 percent increase in the gun homicide rate, it’s not clear why.

It is demonstrably not true that more guns in circulation automatically results in more homicides. The number of guns owned by Americans rose steadily throughout the period, beginning in the early 1990s, when the U.S. homicide rate fell precipitously, a downward trend that has only recently abated. As the CDC notes, the reasons for the 2020 jump are unclear, although it is widely assumed that the massive disruptions associated with the COVID-19 pandemic had something to do with it.

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The Trace is pushing to create a database of all gun owners nationwide.
For ‘gun violence’ research…yeah right

The NRA Knows It’s Impeding Gun Research

AS WELL IT SHOULD FOR THIS TYPE OF RESEARCH INTIMIDATION!

A year before gun rights groups sued to stop California from collecting information on firearms ownership, the NRA’s chief researcher acknowledged that its advocacy prevents accurate studies.

This story was published in partnership with the Los Angeles Times.

NICE OF THEM TO PROVIDE POSITIVE IDENTIFICATION FOR FUTURE USE

California has long played a pivotal role in the study of gun violence, maintaining a unique repository of detailed information on gun owners that it shares with researchers.
The National Rifle Association and other gun rights groups have filed lawsuits challenging that established practice. The lawsuits come as researchers confront an uptick in gun-related deaths, driven by a surge in homicides. They were filed a year after the NRA’s research director acknowledged at a private meeting that the group’s opposition to gathering such data has severely hampered gun violence research in the United States.
With narrow exceptions, all firearms transactions in California must go through licensed dealers, who relay information on purchasers that includes name, address, and date of birth to the California Department of Justice.
For over 30 years, the DOJ has shared this data with public health researchers, who have used it to try to untangle the connections between gun ownership and homicides, suicides, and other violence. They say this baseline information is key to understanding the risks and benefits of having a gun and, ultimately, to reducing injuries and deaths.
“California is special,” said David Studdert, a professor and gun researcher at Stanford Law School who focuses on the intersection of law and public health. “It’s not possible to do this kind of work elsewhere in the country. You need to be at the individual and household level to make the connection between the gun and a violent outcome. You can’t measure what you can’t see.”

THE REST OF THE ARTICLE IS STANDARD OPERATIONAL ANTI-GUN/ANTI CIVIL RIGHTS BS AND DOESN’T MERIT THE RESPECT TO POST IT.

Question O’ The Day:
Having found out how weak, unprepared and frankly defenseless the Soviet Union was — i.e. driving trucks with long tubes around to pretend to have a lot more missiles — I’ve begun to wonder if anything — any story ever told by international media — was ever true?–Sarah Hoyt

Now the smoke is dissipating, and the mirrors are broken. What comes next?

Former Kremlin mercenary: Russian army was not prepared for a real war; Kremlin propaganda’s Janus face.

I’m traveling for work, with limited internet access. A couple things though:

(a) A former mercenary with the Kremlin-linked Wagner Group, quoted on the Telegraph’s live blog today:

Russian forces were “caught by surprise” by the fierce resistance of the Ukrainian army, according to a former mercenary who fought with the Kremlin-linked Wagner Group.

Marat Gabidullin took part in Wagner Group missions on the Kremlin’s behalf in Syria and in a previous conflict in Ukraine, before quitting the group in 2019.

“They were caught completely by surprise that the Ukrainian army resisted so fiercely and that they faced the actual army,” Mr Gabidullin said about Russia’s setbacks in Ukraine.

He said people he spoke to on the Russian side had told him they expected to face rag-tag militias when they invaded Ukraine, not well-drilled regular troops.

“I told them: ‘Guys, that’s a mistake’,” said Mr Gabidullin, who refused a call from a recruiter inviting him to go back to fighting as a mercenary in Ukraine several months before Russia launched its invasion.

(b) The head of GCHQ, the British equivalent of the NSA (and the successor organization to the GCCS which cracked Enigma) says out loud what has been obvious for weeks: Western SIGINT [signals intelligence .ed] agencies like GCHQ are passing tactically relevant info to Ukraine in real time.

(c) Russian vlogger Roman, who has fled to Georgia, calls himself a “Bernie Bro” in US political terms (most unlike this blogger here — OK, he has the excuse he’s young enough to be my son ;)), and used to think Russian propaganda abroad only panders to “the right-wingers”. Then he discovered that Russian propaganda efforts actually are Janus-faced: different propaganda trolls pander to left-wing and right-wing audiences. The former carp on again Western imperialism, “Palestine”, social “justice”, a… and sandwich their Russian propaganda ham between slices of that; the latter instead put the ham between slices of anti-woke, anti-CRT, pro-nationalism,… bread.

Pro-Abortion Domestic Terrorists Firebomb Wisconsin Pro-Life Non-Profit.

I’m so glad we all know what the theme of this summer’s riots will be and can finally start our shopping and planning! To no one’s surprise, Leftist brownshirts have quickly spasmed from caterwauling to committing terrorism in their quest to interfere with the official business of the Supreme Court. And anyone else who dares to hold pro-life views had better watch their back, too.

On Mother’s Day Sunday, a violent incident occured in Madison, the capital of Wisconsin. (You may recall Madison earned its place on the Leftist extremism map in 2011 when union thugs, students, and assorted radicals occupied the state house for over a month in an attempt to derail Gov. Walker’s public union reforms. The goons ultimately failed, the reforms passed, and Walker was re-elected, lol.)

Madison police and fire departments were called to the office of Wisconsin Family Action (WFA) around 6 a.m. on Sunday after a passer-by reported smoke coming from the building. The flames were extinguished and thankfully, no one was injured. Investigators found a smashed window and at least one molotov cocktail that had failed to ignite. A fire inside the office burned books and damaged furnishings. Additionally, the building exterior was covered with spray-painted graffiti, including the anarchy symbol (an A inside a circle, also used by Antifa), the anti-police tag “1312” (which stands for ACAB — All Cops Are Bastards), and the threatening phrase, “If abortions aren’t safe then you aren’t either.”

“We condemn violence and hatred in all forms, including the actions at Wisconsin Family Action in Madison last night,” said Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, and “We reject violence against any person for disagreeing with another’s view.” But Evers also felt the need to say, “We will work against overturning Roe and attacks on reproductive rights by leading with empathy and compassion. We will defend what we believe in with our words and our voices — in the streets, in halls of government, and at the ballot box.”

Madison Police Chief Shon Barnes also issued a mealy-mouthed statement. “The Madison Police Department understands members of our community are feeling deep emotions due to the recent news involving the United States Supreme Court,” read the very first line. So, you know — if WFA didn’t want to get firebombed and vandalized, it shouldn’t have worn that short pro-life skirt.

“Early Sunday morning, our team began investigating a suspicious fire inside an office building on the city’s north side,” the statement continues. “It appears a specific non-profit that supports anti-abortion measures was targeted. Our department has and continues to support people being able to speak freely and openly about their beliefs. But we feel that any acts of violence, including the destruction of property, do not aid in any cause.” Is this the weakest law enforcement statement ever?

“The irony of this happening on Mother’s Day is very poignant,” said WFA President Juliane Appling, who was at a Mother’s Day event at her church when she received word of the damage to her organization’s offices. “I pray that this doesn’t happen to anyone else. This needs to stop right now.” Too bad she’s not the police chief.

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Russian warship Admiral Makarov ‘on fire after being hit by Ukrainian missile.’

Russia’s massive Admiral Makarov warship has reportedly been hit by Ukrainian missiles causing it to burst into flames.

The Admiral Grigorovich-class frigate was on fire this morning in what would be a fresh blow for warmonger Vladimir Putin, a number of unconfirmed reports suggest.

It was said to be close to Snake Island in the Black Sea, where a rescue operation was underway involving multiple aircrafts and rescue boats.

Ukrainian MP Oleksiy Goncharenko took to his Telegram channel to report the ship had been hit by Ukrainian neptune missiles.

He said that the ship had been hit by Ukrainian attacks and was “badly damaged”, but remained afloat for now.

In his post, he wrote: “Yes, yes, you understood everything correctly! The God of the seas takes revenge on the offenders of Ukraine.

The Russian Navy's frigate Admiral Makarov

The Russian Navy’s frigate Admiral Makarov (  Image: REUTERS)

“The Admiral Makarov frigate was laid down in February 2012 at the Yantar shipyard in Kaliningrad, launched in September 2015. And in 2022- oh, when he took part in the murder of Ukrainians, he went towards the cruiser “Moskva”, where he was supposed to!”

His reports were backed up by Ukrainian official Anton Gerashchenko who said: “Admiral Makarov frigate is on fire off the coast of Snake Island.

“According to preliminary data, the ship was hit by Ukrainian Neptune missiles.

“Now enemy aviation is operating in the ship’s disaster zone, and ships of the Russian Navy have come out of the temporarily occupied Crimea to help the sinking ship.”

Alongside that, a number of unconfirmed reports said the warship was hit by Ukrainian missiles near the Sevastopol naval plant in Crimea, on the Black Sea.

The General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine added a ‘+1’ to their boats column in their daily report on Russian losses this morning, which they tweeted out.

Early reports suggest these images show the burning frigate

Early reports suggest these images show the burning frigate  ( Image: Twitter)

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“Rachel” Levine is a sick, twisted man who wants people to believe that there is a medical consensus for transitioning kids so that more people will do it. This is what a predator looks like.

The Brewing Myth of Medical ‘Consensus’ on Transitioning Children

We’ve all heard the oft-repeated myth that 97% of climate scientists agree that manmade climate change is real. This claim has been the go-to response by climate alarmists and activists for years.

If you’re a regular reader of this site, you know that this claim is pure garbage and has been debunked for a long time. Yet the myth prevails. Barack Obama once tried to up the number to 99.5%, but that didn’t catch on. I guess 97% just sounds cooler?

Truthfully, the number itself isn’t important—and not just because it’s phony—because the critical takeaway is that the fake statistic has been used by climate alarmists as proof that, save for a few on the fringe, there is “consensus” that climate change is real, that it is caused by humanity, and that we need to spend billions and billions of dollars on so-called green energy alternatives; otherwise, we’re all going to die yesterday.

Never mind that literally no apocalyptic climate prediction of the past century has ever panned out. New York City isn’t underwater (though sometimes the idea doesn’t bother me), and the only reason food is less available is because of supply chain problems—not massive droughts.

But the myth of consensus is a vital tool of the left to bring more people into their cause and justify all these billions of dollars being spent on green energy technology companies run by their donors. We know how compelling this argument has been; we’ve seen world leaders cite it repeatedly as fact.

So I am more than just a bit concerned that the radical left is now pushing the myth of “consensus” to justify transgender treatments for children.

During a recent interview with NPR, Rachel Levine, the Assistant Secretary of Health, claimed that “there is no argument” about “gender-affirming care” among pediatricians and doctors who specialize in adolescents.

Really? There’s “no argument” at all? None? Zero? Zilch? Nada? There’s 100% agreement? Not a mere 97%?

That’s what he said.

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And I have a bridge in New York to sell you.

Relax: Mayorkas Says His New Thought Police Won’t Monitor U.S. Citizens

DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas made the rounds of the talking head shows on Sunday to do some damage control and address concerns that the Biden administration’s new Disinformation Governance Board within the Department of Homeland Security signifies an all-out war against the freedom of speech. Those concerns were only exacerbated by the revelation that the chief of Old Joe’s Thought Police, Nina Jankowicz, is an enthusiastic fascist who is so excited about censorship that she sings musical comedy numbers about it in an affected English accent. Mayorkas, however, is telling us now that there is really nothing, nothing whatsoever, to worry about. But his soothing claims show some signs of being yet more of that disinformation he claims he wants to fight.

We’ve already gotten disinformation about the Disinformation Governance Board. Jen Psaki claimed Friday that it wasn’t the sainted President Dementia at all, but the hated Trump, who set up the Board. There doesn’t appear to be a shred of truth to this, as even Mayorkas had announced the Board as “new,” and on Sunday, CNN’s Dana Bash asked Mayorkas, “Would you be okay if Donald Trump were president, if he created this Disinformation Governance Board or if it is in place in 2024, that he’s in charge of such a thing?” Mayorkas didn’t echo Psaki and answer that Trump had actually created the Board. Instead, he insisted “that we’re safeguarding the right of free speech, that we’re safeguarding civil liberties.” Sure they are.

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“There’s a bigger problem here about how we’re going to control the channels of communications in this country.”

Bingo.

That’s what this is all really about. All of the leftist demoncraps sitting there aren’t concerned about ‘online harassment’ or ‘disinformation’.
This is about who controls the narrative.

Biden Administration Tops Orwell with ‘Disinformation Governance Board.’

Communism comes in various stripes.

The Soviets had their version, the Chinese have theirs—these days quaintly called “Socialism with Chinese characteristics.” The North Koreans have “Juche!” The Cambodian Khmer Rouge had theirs (thankfully short-lived) and the Cubans a pretty traditional Marxist-Leninist state with the creepy addition—they have long embedded secret police in the neighborhoods to keep an eye on everybody.

But they all have in common what they most loathe: freedom of speech.

Joining them in this abhorrence of the cornerstone of democracies is now the current U.S. administration that is about to install, through its Department of Homeland Security, a “Disinformation Governance Board.”

How Orwellian can you get!

But to call that Orwellian is both an understatement and an insult to the great George Orwell whose “Ministry of Truth” was a far more clever construction that contained the ironic overtone intended by the author.

There’s nothing ironic about the bureaucratic Biden era locution that seems thought up by the totalitarian dullards of our Deep State as a warning lest we peons get out of line and think for ourselves. It owes more to Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels than to the author of “Animal Farm” and “1984.”

We could also call it—using Chinese rhetoric, since it is their form of communism ours most now resembles—“Socialism with American Characteristics.”

As in China, this allows for an oligarchic class to continue to enrich itself without untoward intrusions from the lowly serfs.

That this comes from Homeland Security and its chief Alejandro Mayorkas is more than slightly ominous. Adding to the threatening intent of the initiative is his choice to lead this assault on the First Amendment, Nina Jankowicz.

Jankowicz was such an “expert” in the field of “disinformation” that she was one of those most loudly calling the Hunter Biden laptop story Russian disinformation, which makes her either an idiot or a liar. I’ll go with the latter.

She was also involved in “strategic communications” (“Deep Statish” for propaganda) in Ukraine during the days all the hanky-panky was going on with Burisma.

But it’s worse still. Via Breitbart, we learn that the “talented” Ms. Jankowicz recorded a song on YouTube with the lyrics “Who do I have to [world’s most well-known expletive deleted] to be rich, famous and powerful?”

Well, we now know the answer: the American people. Second answer: the Bill of Rights.

Eric Swalwell Deploys More Lies About the Lies He’s Been Telling About Gun Control for Years

A repeated ploy of the gun control movement is to loudly proclaim law-abiding Second Amendment supporters are using “scare tactics” while opposing proposed gun control.

U.S. Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), the “Honey Pot Congressman,” isn’t new to this charade. His record is one of support for strict gun control. That includes a failed presidential campaign playing second fiddle to Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke to carry the gun control water.

Rep. Swalwell published an op-ed in Newsweek and deployed the ruse.

“For decades, one of the most tried and true scare tactics by the gun lobby is that the government—specifically Democrats—are coming for your guns,” the Congressman wrote. “These misinformation campaigns have been used for years to scare law-abiding Americans into thinking they are going to be put under government surveillance to confiscate their guns.”

Lies About Lies

The thrust of Rep. Swalwell’s anti-Second Amendment screed is that President Joe Biden isn’t interested in confiscating lawfully-owned firearms.

“Let’s be crystal clear—the Biden administration has no secret plan to take away your guns,” he claimed.

He’s right, though – President Biden’s gun control plans aren’t secret. They’re very public and repeated often.

President Biden has on multiple occasions called the lawful firearm industry “the enemy.” A major selling point of his gun control agenda is that he claims he’s, “the only one to have taken on the industry and won.” “I’ve done it before and I’ll do it again,” he’s said.

The president was speaking about his ability to pass a ban on Modern Sporting Rifles (MSRs), which he incorrectly and pejoratively terms as “assault weapons.” President Biden, in the 1990s, when he was in the U.S. Senate, voted to ban America’s most popular selling centerfire semiautomatic rifle. He continues to push for a new ban today on the commonly-owned firearm. He claims the ban will drive down crime, but data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says the, “Assault Weapons Ban (AWB)…did not reduce crime rates.” In fact, when the ban expired, violent crime rates continued to drop even as MSR ownership skyrocketed to more than 20 million rifles in circulation.

The president has also repeated his favorite lie that the firearm industry is “the only outfit in the country that is immune,” from liability. This lie has been fact-checked into oblivion, with media saying, “Gun manufacturers can certainly be sued…Biden is wrong to say gun manufacturers are alone.”

The president lies about his wishes to ban certain lawfully-manufactured and legally-purchased firearms, as well as his wishes to shut down an entire industry that supports the ability of Americans to exercise their Second Amendment rights. That would certainly qualify as, “taking away guns.”

Twisting Truth

Rep. Swalwell would ban MSRs as well and he’s not alone. He’d go even further, telling Fox News’s Tucker Carlson he’d implement a forced government buyback scheme of the firearms and even, “criminally prosecute any who choose to defy it by keeping their weapons.” Rep. Swalwell went so far as to absurdly suggest if Americans still refused to give up their firearms to a government confiscation scheme, the U.S. government would use nukes against holdouts.

Rep. Swalwell would make confiscation easier, if he had his way, by requiring a national firearm registry. That’s the only way a universal background check could work, a policy that both Rep. Swalwell and President Biden support. Universal background checks (UBCs) are unenforceable without mandatory registration – which is illegal under the 1986 Gun Control Act and 1993 Brady Act.

In his op-ed, Rep. Swalwell says claims about a national gun registry are “conspiracy theories,” and that, “The simple truth is that a gun registry does not exist and is not even being contemplated to illegally track law-abiding individuals who exercise their Second Amendment rights.” He even twists one of my tweets to suggest the firearm industry agrees with his bogus claims.

It’s true – the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) does not currently maintain a searchable national firearm registry. It does, however, keep an Out-of-business Records (OBR) database to trace firearms when they are used in a crime. That collection of records doesn’t allow anyone to run a search for how many and what kind of firearms are owned by any one individual.

About 30 percent of all firearm traces involve searching OBR data. The most recent ATF trace data shows that the average time between when a firearm was originally sold lawfully after a background check and before it was recovered by law enforcement has been close to 10 years as recently as 2017. Searching very old records rarely yields actionable intelligence to law enforcement. That’s why NSSF has long supported requiring ATF to purge records that are older than 20 years to save taxpayer money and to use those dollars to put more agents on the streets to stop crime from occurring in the first place.

Rep. Swalwell knowingly took the tweet out of context in order to lie again about what would be required if a universal background check were to be adopted.

President Biden is clearly doing the bidding of his gun control donors. After repeating his lies about the firearm industry and what his policies would do to law-abiding Americans, there is no doubt that President Biden would indeed go after lawful gun owners and dismantle the industry that provides for the exercise of the Second Amendment. Rep. Swalwell is simply carrying the president’s gun control water because he would do the same exact thing.

The author barely gives any notice about ‘internal’ dissent, but that’s almost certainly a big part of this, as there’s too much going on in too many different places, that are far from the border, and covert infiltration in non-permissive areas is extremely difficult to pull off.

BLUF:
….it’s the nature of wars that were meant to be limited to spin out of control.

What the Hell Is Going On in Russia?

“What the hell is going on in Russia?” is the kind of headline you write when there’s so much weird stuff going on that it’s impossible to summarize it cleverly.

Maybe you’ll find this catchier: There’s a lot of stuff getting blown up in Russia, and it might not just be the Ukrainians blowing it up.

The weirdness got going in a normal way, with reports earlier this week of Ukraine’s “embrace of the British special forces model” to strike targets inside Russia that the regular Army (or even Ukraine’s inadequate Air Force) could never reach.

The Washington Examiner’s Tom Rogan reported that a major oil depot was hit on Monday in Bryansk, more than 60 miles inside Russia’s border with Ukraine. That’s outside the range of most of Ukraine’s drones.

While interesting, it isn’t exactly a “what the hell?” moment. British troops have been training Ukraine’s special operators since Russia annexed Ukraine and armed insurgents in Ukraine’s Donbas region back in 2014.

Two more such attacks were reported the next day:

Two explosions were reported in Voronezh, nearly 200 miles from Ukraine, and a Ukrainian drone was reportedly shot down over Kursk, about 70 miles from the border.

The attacks in Kursk and Voronezh, where air-defense systems were reportedly activated, raised the specter of a wider war, as they were farther inside Russia than previous targets.

If you had asked me last week if Ukraine could hit a target 200 miles inside Russia, I’d have been doubtful.

Actually, it’s still a bit hard to believe.

But maybe you’ll join me in asking “What the hell is going on in Russia?” after these next few items.

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You Can’t Have a Functioning Nation without Free Speech.

A dozen of us were seated on either side of the long dining table.  Present were writers gathered from across the nation and around the world.  Beside me was a lady from Nigeria.  Facing me was a Romanian.  The woman next to her had flown in from Sydney, Australia.  This was a celebratory supper after a long day of book signings at the Los Angeles Times Book Festival — a major literary event.

The conversation among this group of lively intellects was a sparkling delight — light-hearted and witty.  Only for a brief while did it turn to the fashionable liberal topic of the moment: the benefits of censoring free speech.  I said nothing.  Why spoil the celebration?

It is odd that the notion that speech must be censored is the current fashion of people who call themselves liberal.  Liberalism is supposed to be the philosophy of individual freedom and free speech.  Well, language evolves, and true liberals are much more likely to be found in the ranks of conservatives than those left of center.

There really are true liberals on the left.  The people seated around me certainly were.  Unfortunately, they live in an almost impenetrable fortress of specious certainty.  Conservatives swim in a sea of progressivism, so they are well aware of the thinking of the left.  The converse is not the case.  In my experience, people left of center have a fantastically distorted concept of conservative ideas.  I suppose this is because they mostly listen to one another, to the progressive media, and to their thought masters, not to real conservatives.  Perhaps, too, they fear they might like conservative ideas and so become outcasts.

The current leading thought master is Barack Obama.  Despite his pretensions of being a liberal, he is not — he is something dangerously different.  “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America,” he so famously said in the last days of his presidential campaign.  You do not fundamentally transform something you love; you fundamentally change what you despise.

Obama later realized that he had given the game away.  In a subsequent interview with Bill O’Reilly, he said, “I don’t think we have to fundamentally transform the nation.”  But then he immediately changed the subject.  Now, once again, he is at it.

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