ESSE SINE METU IN FACIE INIMICI TUI. TUENDAM INOPS ET FACERE NON MALI.
Category: Enemies Foreign and Domestic
“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.
Jody Lyneé Madeira
Professor of Law and Louis F. Niezer Faculty Fellow, Co-Director, Center for Law, Society & Culture, University of Indiana, Bloomington.
It is – again – so thoughtful of them to provide such definite means of positive identification.
“The ways in which we talk about the Second Amendment are also changing, becoming more uncompromising. Many advocates hang their arguments upon the feeble nail of “shall not be infringed,” and maintain that that phrase literally means what it says – that the right to bear arms is absolute, that it cannot be compromised, that it encompasses all or means nothing.
‘[F]eeble nail‘? ‘means what it says‘? If she thinks so little of one enumerated right, what might she think about other rights?
The Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA), codified at 15 U.S.C. § 7901 et seq., has nearly banished the specter of civil liability for covered gun industry entities. PLCAA was predicated on the claim that gun industry actors, including firearm manufacturers and sellers, were under siege from baseless lawsuits founded on novel legal theories. Prior to its passage, several state courts had held that these entities could be held responsible for knowingly or recklessly distributing their products through sketchy sellers, essentially turning a blind eye to business practices that contributed to gun violence.
In addition to its legal consequences, however, PLCAA had other social and cultural effects. It has helped to establish and reinforce a new narrative supporting contemporary gun rights state legislation. The claim that the firearms industry is under siege has now morphed into the assertion that the Second Amendment itself is under assault, that firearms are disfavored, and that those who own, carry, or use firearms are targets of discrimination.
The breadth and assumptions of PLCAA have also influenced recent state gun rights legislative advocacy, incentivizing measures like permitless carry. To personalize the narrative of gun rights “under siege,” gun rights advocates mobilize citizens to testify in legislatures across the country about how state law schemes infringe on their Second Amendment rights. Many of these laws have been on the books for years but were not questioned until recently. Nearly all are based on traditional doctrinal premises such as home rule and the “longstanding regulations” and “sensitive places” distinctions substantiated in Heller. For example, several state legislatures have assumed the mantle of regulating firearms and ammunition, lifting it from the shoulders of municipalities and cities.
One of the advantages that clairvoyants and eminences grises have is the ability to remind us of the accuracy of their forecasts. Barack Obama took advantage of that Wednesday at the University of Chicago, discussing his prescient alarms over the threat that Vladimir Putin posed to world order. It’s a couple of days old but worth watching to recall his brilliance at the time:
Oh, wait — sorry, that wasn’t the correct clip, was it? My bad. I seem to have had a mix-up in my Official Barack Obama Brilliance Media Catalog. That was from 2012, when Obama lectured Mitt Romney on the dangers of al-Qaeda shortly after bailing out of Iraq and allowing the AQ affiliate there to turn into ISIS and necessitating a return of our military in 2014.
Let me look again. I think this is the one where Obama explains how tough he was on Putin:
Doggone it — I clearly need an intern to go back through my indices and reorganize. I’m pretty sure that this is the one that demonstrates Obama’s firm resolve to deal with Putin and his allies, especially when committing atrocities:
Ahem. Sorry, dear readers, I’m just having one hell of a time finding where Barack Obama ever took Putin seriously as a threat … at least while in office. The New York Post finally helps out with this clip of Obama lecturing Jeffrey Goldberg about his leadership in dealing with the Russian tyrant. Ironically, one of the themes of this event was — wait for it — “disinformation”:
Psaki again confirms she’s nothing more than a political hack that will say anything if the pay is good enough.
Trying to wrap my head around this level of insanity only brings me to the conclusion that since abortion is becoming increasingly more difficult to get in some states (and maybe soon nationwide), these pagans are still trying their best to sacrifice their children to their gods, and this goobermint is trying its best to aid and assist them.
If you were in a coma for the last decade and suddenly woke up, there’s likely nothing that would shock you more than how quickly radical transgender ideology has overtaken society.
Imagine hearing arguments in 2012 that children should not only be able to “choose” their “gender,” but that they have a civil right to physically mutilate themselves in response. Yet, that’s exactly where we are. As RedState has reported recently, calls for “gender-affirming care” have moved out of the fringe and firmly into mainstream Democrat politics.
But things are now shifting into an even more dangerous place, if one can even imagine that’s possible. While Republican-led states are seeking to limit the physical abuse of children through the use of “gender-affirming” surgeries which cut off the genitalia or breasts of minors, the White House is now threatening legal action in response.
Psaki Says Sex Reassignment Surgery, Puberty Blockers for Kids Is ‘Best Practice,’ States Preventing It Will Be Held Accountable pic.twitter.com/ZmboFDFIYx
“Today, in Alabama, instead of focusing on critical kitchen table issues like the economy, Covid or addressing the country’s mental health crisis, Republican lawmakers are currently debating legislation that, among many things, would target trans youths with tactics that threatens to put pediatricians in prison if they provide medically necessary life-saving health care for the kids they serve”…
…”But Alabama’s lawmakers and other legislators who are contemplating these discriminatory bills have been put on notice by the Department of Justice and the Department of Health and Human Services that laws and policies preventing care that health care professionals recommend for transgender minors may violate the Constitution and the federal law.”
Understand what this means. Yes, it’s couched as the targeting of anti-child abuse laws in states like Texas and Alabama, which is crazy enough on its own. A state absolutely has the right to disallow certain medical procedures it deems demonstratively harmful and abusive (including abortion, by the way). But the implications here go much further.
If it is somehow illegal for a state to say that children can’t be given “gender-affirming care,” specifically in regards to the mutilation of their bodies, because those children have a “civil right” to such care, that means that parents who refuse to take such steps can be held liable as well. Recall that several years ago in Texas, we witnessed a high-profile case involving a father who not only lost custody of his son but was forced to help pay for the “transition.” The legal system is not going to protect parents as these precedents become more and more common.
This kind of thing can not stand. Republicans lost a lot of ground over the last several decades because they felt they could float above the fray and not get into the trenches of the culture war. But we’ve now moved past disagreements about adult behavior. These are children we are talking about, and the Democrat establishment is now wholesale endorsing the destruction of their bodies, not just in the womb, but throughout adolescence.
Remember when some Republicans argued that we must get rid of Donald Trump because he broke “norms and traditions.” Meanwhile, the White House is proclaiming it possibly illegal to not mutilate kids based on childhood confusion. Does that sound normal or traditional to you? Elections do have consequences, and there’s a big one coming up in November. Perhaps more importantly, right-thinking individuals (i.e. those who object to child abuse) have a chance in 2024 to retake this lost ground and solidify the ability of states to protect children.
If there’s one issue that animates voters for the next three years of elections, this should be this. Do not forget. Do not relent. Make them pay at the ballot box.
Democrats love mass shootings. It’s their best chance at taking away our guns. We saw it happen in Australia back in 1996 when some wackjob killed 35 people and Australians HANDED OVER THEIR firearms — 700,000 or so to be exact, because, you know, safety, I guess…?
As you have probably heard, a mass shooting in Sacramento, Calif., left six people dead and 15 more wounded. The story isn’t getting a ton of traction because the shooter is most likely not Muslim or white. The media loves when the shooter is a Muslim because terror attacks keep people focused on the news. Lefty media will drag out a mass shooting when the shooter is white because it backs up the lie that most mass shooters are angry, drooling white guys in NRA hats.
That’s right, a lie. As I’ve reported, 67% of mass shooters are black. Most people don’t realize that fact because the Pravda press perpetuates the myth that mass shooters are white dudes who got fired from Denny’s. When people hear “mass shooting,” they assume a white guy flipped out and blazed up a McDonald’s. Democrats want you to believe that. Sure, you heard about the Sacramento shooting, but did you hear about the 11 people who were shot the day before at rapper Big Boogie’s concert in Texas? I didn’t until just now. I’ve never even heard of Big Boogie. I wonder why the media ignored that story? Awww, we know! Let’s put it this way, no MAGA hats were recovered at the crime scene.
FACT-O-RAMA! Stalin, Castro, Mao, and Pol Pot took guns away from their people before slaughtering them. Biden wants to take your guns too. Why? Because he’s a communist and that’s what commies do.
This is how it works: the Democrats let criminals out of jail and then got rid of bail laws to keep them out. They defunded police departments nationwide. Criminals do what criminals do: they shoot people. When there is a mass shooting, Democrats say, “Look! Another mass shooting! Let’s take guns from law-abiding people!”
President Biden’s administration has released a series of documents encouraging gender-reassignment surgery and hormone treatments for minors.
The Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Population Affairs released a document Thursday titled “Gender Affirming Care and Young People.” The same day, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s National Child Traumatic Stress Network – another subset of the HHS – released a parallel document titled, “Gender-Affirming Care Is Trauma-Informed Care.”
The HHS documents describe what it calls appropriate treatments for transgender adolescents, including: “‘Top’ surgery – to create male-typical chest shape or enhance breasts;” and “‘Bottom’ surgery – surgery on genitals or reproductive organs, facial feminization or other procedures.”
“Medical and psychosocial gender affirming healthcare practices have been demonstrated to yield lower rates of adverse mental health outcomes, build self-esteem, and improve overall quality of life for transgender and gender diverse youth,” the OPA release states.
The NCTSN document is far longer than the brief outline provided by the OPA, but reiterates the same thought process and explanation for minors receiving alterations to their genitalia.
“For transgender and nonbinary children and adolescents, early gender-affirming care is crucial to overall health and well-being as it allows the child or adolescent to focus on social transitions and can increase their confidence while navigating the healthcare system,” the NCTSN wrote in their release. “It may include evidence-based interventions such as puberty blockers and gender-affirming hormones.”
The NCTSN document goes out of its way to assure the public that the use of gender-affirming methods such as surgery and hormone replacement are not child abuse – most likely in response to recent policy decision in Texas that made such treatments illegal.
“Providing gender-affirming care is neither child maltreatment nor malpractice. The child welfare system in the US, charged with “improv(ing) the overall health and well-being of our nation’s children and families,” should not be used to deny care or separate families working to make the best decisions for their children’s well-being. There is no scientifically sound research showing negative impacts from providing gender-affirming care,” the NCTSN added.
The White House released a video to coincide with the new policies featuring President Biden speaking on the issue of transgender children.
Biden told the parents of transgender children that “affirming your child’s identity is one of the most powerful things you can do to keep them safe.”
Biden also indicated that his administration would fight state laws that limit how transgender athletes may compete, after transgender University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas drew national attention at the NCAA championships.
Such state laws are “simply wrong” and “hateful,” Biden said, adding that his administration is “standing up for transgender equality in the classroom, on the playing field, at work, in our military, in our housing and health care systems – everywhere.”
A Texas judge earlier this month blocked the state from investigating parents who provide medical treatments to help their transgender children transition, according to reports.
Gov. Greg Abbott has called gender-affirming treatments “child abuse” and ordered Texas Child Protective Services to investigate any reported cases. Attorney General Ken Paxton also issued a legal opinion coming to the same conclusion, according to Houston Public Media.
In ordering the temporary injunction, District Court Judge Amy Clark Meachum said the investigations exceeded Abbott’s constitutional authority, noting that such instances had never been investigated before his order.
