ESSE SINE METU IN FACIE INIMICI TUI. TUENDAM INOPS ET FACERE NON MALI.
Category: Enemies Foreign and Domestic
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?
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.
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.
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( 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 ( Image: Twitter)
“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.
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%?
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.
“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.
CNN's David Zurawik: "Dangerous" with Elon Musk buying Twitter, we need to look to Europe.
"You need regulation. You cannot let these guys control discourse in this country or we are headed to hell. We are there. Trump opened the gates of hell and now they’re chasing us down." pic.twitter.com/QubyKZwVCQ
Biden is just a front man. Obama, April 21: social media censors “don’t go far enough,” so the government needs to step in to do the job. Six days later, Homeland Security rolls out the 'Ministry of Truth' (aka Disinformation Governance Board). pic.twitter.com/CHOD4mbE0B
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.
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?” 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 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.
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.
A study identifying anti-intellectualism as a growing part of rural identities has sparked a discussion about the best ways of encouraging rural communities to engage with scientific expertise.
The study, which originally appeared in the January 2022 issue of Political Behavior, found that people with a rural social identification are more likely to view experts and intellectuals as outsiders, according to its author, Kristin Lunz Trujillo, a post-doctoral candidate at the Covid States Project of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and Northeastern University.
It’s always been about control, whether it’s free speech, a free press, or the right to keep and bear arms. We may see more people waking up to this.
BLUF:
In the end, the battle over Elon Musk controlling Twitter has nothing to do with oligarchs or online safety, just as the Cambridge Analytica controversy had nothing to do with a technical distinction between contractors and employees. Instead, it is merely the latest chapter in the battle over who controls the digital public square – and which political party determines its rules.
The reaction among the press and tech communities to Elon Musk’s efforts to purchase Twitter has been nothing short of apocalyptic. A common theme has been that democracy itself would be under threat if unelected billionaire oligarchs controlled what was allowed online. Yet this is precisely how social media works today. The Musk controversy, like the Cambridge Analytica story before it, highlights the real issue: the fight over content moderation is less about online safety and more about who controls the digital public square.
Only a year ago, the media cheered the unilateral decisions by a handful of billionaires to effectively banish then-President Donald Trump from the digital public square. Lawmakers and media outlets alike proclaimed the societal benefits of private companies controlling the digital public square beyond the reach of government. In contrast, the possibility of a libertarian-leaning billionaire like Musk wielding that same power has been presented as nothing short of an attack on democracy itself.
In January, the Washington Post argued that oligarchs banning Trump wasn’t censorship; now it warns of the “risks of social media ownership.” Former Facebook chief security officer Alex Stamos argued, “If you want people to be able to interact, you need to have basic rules” for speech. Former FCC chair Tom Wheeler went further, proposing a “First Amendment-respecting process in which the government doesn’t dictate content but does cause there to be an acceptable behavioral code.” In short, tech billionaires enforcing speech rules that align with Democratic Party priorities is a benefit to society; Republicans or libertarians wielding that same power is a threat.
This double standard has been in place for some time. Consider how it played out a few years ago, in the Cambridge Analytica “scandal” involving the Trump campaign.
BLUF:
Either we are witnessing a cascade of unlikely events within a 60-day timeframe, or the institutions upon which Putin depends to stay in power–the security services, the military, and the oligarchs–are shaken by Putin’s War in Ukraine. The actions he is taking will either stiffen the resolve of those institutions…or it won’t.
Very few parts of Russian society have drawn more interest than the so-called “oligarchs.” These are incredibly wealthy men with political connections to Putin’s inner circle because, in the totalitarian kleptocracy that is Russia under Vladimir Putin, if you don’t have political ties to Putin’s inner circle, wealth doesn’t bring you power; it brings you a one-way trip to a Siberian labor camp.
“It’s troubling that a Biden administration official would break down in tears because of a law that protects parental rights,” Pushaw said. “Why is it so important to her for teachers to instruct children in grades k-3 about transgenderism and sexuality?”
Why?
It’s not ‘education’, but indoctrination and these people are simply grooming children for use in their pagan rites. As I see it, the worship of Baal, and all that goes with it, was never eradicated, but went underground. And today, it’s never been easier to determine who the worshippers are.
Democrats still haven’t figured out why they took such a shellacking in Virginia and why the culture war is not going their way.
First, it was critical race theory. Now, liberal Democratic politicians seem to think that American parents want their very young children to be force-fed classroom instruction about sex and all kinds of radical leftist thought. But if they want another wedge issue that is going to alienate them from the American public, they’ve certainly found it here. Because if there’s anything that will rile up parents more, it’s trying to do things to indoctrinate their kids.
So when White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki embraces the wrong side of the issue, it’s another big red flag for those parents as to where Joe Biden and the Democrats are lining up. Not to mention that Psaki seems to be going over the slide as we count down her final days in the White House — she’s lying and losing it more. She loses it big time over this issue — or at least she pretends to, breaking down crying during Jessica Yellin’s “News Not Noise” podcast over parental rights laws, like the one passed in Florida.
Psaki railed against the law, saying that it was not a reflection of the direction in which the country is going, calling the laws “political games” and “harsh and cruel.”
Psaki says it's "cruel" to not instruct K-3 students on woke sex and gender theory. pic.twitter.com/3X2IhaepEo
“This is a political wedge issue and an attempt to win a culture war,” Psaki claimed. “And they’re doing that in a way that is harsh and cruel to a community of kids…I’m going to get emotional about this issue because it’s horrible,” she said, crying (or fake crying). “This is an issue that makes me completely crazy…It’s like kids who are bullied and then all these leaders are taking steps to hurt them and hurt their lives and hurt their families,” Psaki said, claiming that the laws were going after parents and it was “outrageous.”
She’s crazy, alright, and needs some help, quickly, because this has nothing to do with any kind of reality. But, of course, I suspect she knows that and this is all performance art. She’s a horrible actress.
Just a reminder of what the Florida law that she’s crying over and claims is so horrible says:
The legislative text of the House version of the bill reads, ‘Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.’
That’s what Psaki is purportedly crying over. That’s what she claims is somehow attacking kids. Sorry, I have no patience with this when it’s both ignorant of what the law says and, I suspect, insincere.
DeSantis press secretary Christina Pushaw pointed out how “troubling” Psaki’s reaction was. “It’s troubling that a Biden administration official would break down in tears because of a law that protects parental rights,” Pushaw said. “Why is it so important to her for teachers to instruct children in grades k-3 about transgenderism and sexuality?” Democrats have also lied about the law, falsely naming it the “Don’t Say Gay” bill when it says no such thing.
She claims: “It isn’t a reflection of where the country is.” On that, she is very wrong. 52 percent of likely voters in the Democratic primary say that they are also against the kind of teaching that the bill prohibits. It is most certainly a reflection of where the country is — tired of woke liberal and radical thought. Tired of people taking the power out of the hands of the parents to direct the upbringing of their children. Tired of Democrats who think they have more say in the lives of kids than do their parents.
BLUF:
Elon Musk will not save free speech online. Even if his intentions really are good ones, the scale of the problem goes beyond one platform. And free speech online is too important to rely on the benevolence of billionaires. But his attempted takeover of Twitter has already done us a great service, in revealing how important censorship now is to America’s permanently hysterical elites. (Just call them what they are: wanna-be tyrants)
We stand here on the edge of tyranny… Elon Musk wants to buy Twitter. That, roughly speaking, has been the commentariat reaction in recent days as the world’s richest man has launched a takeover attempt of the social-media giant, citing his concerns about its censorious policies as his main motivation.
Musk revealed last week that he had become Twitter’s largest shareholder, with a 9.2 per cent stake. Now he’s offered to buy the whole company for a cool $43 billion, a nice premium on its current worth. As it stands, Twitter’s board is resisting and America’s great and good have gone berserk.
The Washington Post’s Max Boot was swift out of the blocks. ‘I am frightened by the impact on society and politics if Elon Musk acquires Twitter’, Boot tweeted. ‘He seems to believe that on social media anything goes. For democracy to survive, we need more content moderation, not less.’
On an even more demented note, Robert Reich, veteran of the Clinton and Obama administrations, essentially argued that Musk buying Twitter would put us on a fast track to fascism; that Musk’s vision for an ‘uncontrolled’ internet was ‘the dream of every dictator, strongman, demagogue and modern-day robber baron’.
Reich wasn’t the only one gripped by this interesting idea that dictators love free speech and that more of it online will bring the Third Reich back. New York University journalism professor Jeff Jarvis had this poetic response to Musk’s bid: ‘Today on Twitter feels like the last evening in a Berlin nightclub at the twilight of Weimar Germany.’
Listen close.
Sometimes their mouths overrun their brains and they speak the truth.
The author of the tweet is wrong about it being about Musk. They’re talking about President Trump. But the actual point is correct.
I haven’t seen anyone else mention this, but subway shooter Frank James’s decision to shoot up a train in Sunset Park, Brooklyn likely wasn’t random. Check out the racial background of the neighborhood:
35.6% – Hispanic
34.8% – Asian
23.7% – white
3.9% – black
Until recently, you could see shooter Frank James spewing his black supremacy and hatred, but YouTube has now removed his channel. For those who didn’t see the videos, they were brimming with racial loathing for Asian, Hispanic, and white people.
You can see here that many of Frank James’s victims are Asian. For a “crazy” guy, he seems to have known what he was doing.
FACT-O-RAMA! In one if his videos, Frank James actually sobs upon hearing the news that Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is married to a white man.
The problem is this: Frank James sees himself — and all black people — as victims. In one of his now-deleted videos, James tells other black folks that white people hate them, and that black people will be exterminated like the Jews were in Europe. This, despite the fact that America is bending over backward to keep black people out of jail. Shoplifting is all but legal now. Lefty cities have decriminalized certain driving laws that black people are more likely to break seem to affect black people more. Let’s not even get started on the surge of Soros-funded DAs who refuse to send black criminals — even violent miscreants — to jail. New York’s commie District Attorney, Alvin Braggs, is now actually allowing people to have their convictions “reviewed.”
I lived for very many years in rural Vermont. I’d bought a long-abandoned, post-and-beam farmhouse on a third-class dirt road. The realtor was a German immigrant who’d come to Vermont with his wife and infant children just after the war. He suggested that I call a local builder, Bob, to inspect the house, which was superficially in dreadful shape, but the farm and basement were sound. Bob said he’d be glad to put it right, and he and his brother-in-law restored it to its 1805 perfection.
Bob’s family had lived through the war in Germany, and through the famine afterward, and through relocation in America, ignorant of the language. Bob taught himself carpentry and all the building trades, and became a much-respected member of the small town, where all of his contemporary men had fought against the Axis in World War II. His brother-in-law, Eric, had been in the Hitler Youth, and Bob was a glider commando in the Luftwaffe—the equivalent, today, of Delta Force, or the Navy Seals.
My family became friends with Bob, and his wife, Ilse, became a surrogate grandmother—or better, great-aunt—to my kids. His family was my first encounter with the German national character—hard working, honest, and uncomplaining.
Of course I was seldom unaware that the regime he had fought for was dedicated to the destruction of my people and my race (if Jews are a race … in any case, to my like). I asked Eric about the Hitler Youth, and he said that he’d missed one meeting, and was told by his group leader that, should he miss another, he’d be shot. And, Bob, and every other man of fighting age and ability, was conscripted, and what were they to do?
Just as Eric explained, and perhaps apologized for, his membership in the Hitler Youth, Bob would tell me that his father had risked his life saving a Jew of his acquaintance.
To both cases: perhaps, and perhaps not. I never met a German who had lived through that wartime period who did not share with me the history of his family helping the Jews. Putting aside the question of the stories’ truth, I was struck by their seeming necessity for the teller. The current self-protective rationale of the Nazi era invokes an occupation by the forces of evil, which they were mostly too powerless to fight. Most of the people who lived through it are gone, and their descendants are entitled to imagine a history with which they can live—neither absolutely false nor true, but one in which someone tried to act.
Over the last two years in America, I’ve witnessed our own forces of evil with incredulity, despair, and rage. Corruption, blasphemy, and absurdity have been accepted by one-half of the electorate as the cost of doing business; as has the fear this acceptance generates. Does anyone actually believe that men change into women and women into men who can give birth, that the Earth is burning, the seas are rising, and we’ll all perish unless we cover our faces with strips of cotton?
No one does. These proclamations are an act of faith, in a new, as yet unnamed religion, and the vehemence with which one proclaims allegiance to these untruths is an exercise no different from any other ecstatic religious oath. They become the Apostles’ Creed of the left, their proclamation committing the adherent physically to their strictures, exactly as the oath taken on induction to the armed services. The inductee is told to “take one step forward,” and once they do he or she can no longer claim, “I misunderstood the instruction.”
Those currently in power insist on masking, but don’t wear masks. They claim the seas are rising and build mansions on the shore. They abhor the expenditure of fossil fuels and fly exclusively in private jets. And all the while half of the country will not name the disease. Why?
Because the cost of challenging this oppressive orthodoxy has, for them, become too high. Upon a possible awakening, they—or more likely their children—might say that the country was occupied. And they would be right.
