Lawyers: Chelsea Manning attempts suicide in Va. jail
Chelsea Manning’s legal team says the former intelligence analyst tried to take her own life Wednesday, but was transported to a hospital where she is recovering.
Amateur. It needs some motivational inspiration.
“If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.”– Thomas H. Palmer
Is Tucker Carlson prescient, or what?
Virginia’s Model for Both Sides of Gun Debate
As Democrats advance anti-Second Amendment measures, Patriots fight back.
Like all would-be tyrants, as soon as Virginia Democrats took power following the last election, they began an all-out assault on the right to keep and bear arms, unleashing a package of gun-control measures intended to strip Virginians of their right to defend themselves.
The newest proposed measures include a ban on “assault weapons” such as the AR-15 and AK-47 rifles, magazines holding more than 12 rounds, and sound suppressors (“silencers”). That bill passed the House of Delegates yesterday.
As a means of reducing mass shootings, such measures are worthless. According to the FBI, in 2018, just 297 of the 6,603 gun-related murders (4%) nationwide involved a rifle of any kind. In fact, knives (1,604) and fists/kicking (656) were used to kill far more often.
The “progressive” obsession with the AR-15 is rooted in abject ignorance of all things gun related. Though they refer to AR-15s as “assault weapons” and “weapons of war,” they are neither.
“AR” stands for “ArmaLite Rifle,” after the company that designed it. Furthermore, the Department of Defense defines an assault rifle as a “selective fire” rifle that can alternate between semi- (one shot fired per trigger pull) and full-auto (continuous fire). The AR-15 is semiautomatic, firing a .223 (or 5.56) round, which is smaller and less powerful than many hunting rifles. If we ban AR-15s, why not all hunting rifles and handguns? They are functionally equivalent.
Gun grabbers claim the AR-15 is especially “dangerous and unusual,” attempting to get around the Supreme Court ruling in DC v. Heller, which found the Second Amendment protects weapons “in common use by law-abiding citizens.” But the AR-15 is the very definition of “common use” — more than 15 million AR-style rifles are currently in the hands of American citizens, and more than a million more are sold each year. In fact, one in five new firearms sold in the U.S. is an AR-style rifle.
Yet far from America turning into the Wild West, as anti-gun hysterics claim, America has become more peaceful with the proliferation of firearms. Gun crimes fell to historic lows after the expiration of the 1994 ban on “assault weapons.”
In reality, full-auto weapons have been effectively banned for civilian use since the National Firearms Act of 1934, and there have been only two deaths by full-auto weapons in the last 40 years.
But in the grand scheme of things, this is all just semantics and details. The Constitution protects our right to keep and bear arms, period, regardless of arguments and statistics.
Yet Socialist Democrats reject the meaning of “shall not be infringed.” For decades, Democrats have sought to erode or eliminate this most fundamental of human and American rights. They couch their assaults in terms like “public safety” and “commonsense gun control,” insisting that no one needs certain types of weapons for hunting and sport shooting. Untrue, but irrelevant. The Second Amendment has nothing to do with hunting and everything to do with providing a firm check against the rise of tyrannical government.
In 1787, Thomas Jefferson warned of the dangers of conspiring men and asked, “What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. … The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”
Is it any surprise the state seal for Virginia is an image of a robed Virtus (Virtue) standing, spear in hand, over the body of Tyranny? The state motto is “sic semper tyrannis,” meaning “thus always to tyrants.”
Jefferson was a native of Virginia, and it seems many of his fellow Virginians still have the fire of Liberty, and resistance to tyranny, burning in their breasts, judging by the 22,000 gun owners protesting at the state capitol recently. Or the fact that 141 counties and cities have declared themselves “gun sanctuaries.”
After the announcement of the proposed gun-control laws, Virginia gun sales nearly doubled, with nearly 70,000 gun background checks in a single month. Gun owners continue to show up at rallies, chanting “We will not comply!”
Gun owners are by nature peaceful and law-abiding. They seek peace, but are prepared to defend themselves and their families, whether from armed intruders or a tyrannical government. That is a fact that Democrat Gov. Ralph Northam and the Democrats in the state legislature would do well to remember.
Number of Professors Allegedly in Cahoots With Communist China Quickly Mounts
In recent months, U.S. authorities have discovered Chinese operatives scheming to compromise American interests through the university system, including plots to steal missile technology and cancer research.
Ye Yanqing used to be a student at Boston University until she chose to flee the country last month. The reason for her departure: an FBI investigation regarding her position as a Lieutenant in the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA), according to the Washington Times.
According to investigators, Ye was taking orders to gather intelligence from “senior leaders of the PLA while conducting research at Boston University,” according to the Washington Times. In addition to committing espionage, she also failed to disclose her position as an active-duty PLA officer, earning her charges of visa fraud in addition to charges of acting as a foreign government agent, making false statements to investigators, and conspiracy.
This sort of collusion isn’t limited to Chinese-born student-spies. Charles Lieber, the chair of Harvard’s chemistry department was taken into custody and charged Jan. 28 for making false statements to investigators about his financial ties to China.
Why the Left Really Wants to Kill America
The century-long attempt to kill capitalism in America gained a dramatic head of steam in the 1960s with the rapid ascendency of progressivism, a Marxist movement that would quietly seize control of the Democratic Party over the last half-century.
Which was something different. For most of America’s 244-year history, the dominant political parties that evolved had a common goal constantly working to improve the country they both loved. In the 1860s, a Republican president went to war to end slavery. A century later, a Democratic president launched another well-intentioned war, a war on poverty. Democrats and Republicans alike largely saw their country as a force for good, both at home and abroad. Beginning in the 1960s, that widely- shared view began to show cracks as the progressive movement began tightening its grip on the modern Democratic Party. Democrat icons of the 1960s — Adlai Stevenson, Henry “Scoop” Jackson, Sam Nunn, Hubert Humphrey and JFK, to name a few — were genuine patriots who loved their country, a sentiment that was shared by a large majority of that era’s rank and file Democrats. Such is no longer the case. Here are four ways Democrats are looking to end the idea of America altogether:
Killing America by replacing patriotism with socialism
In October 2018, The New York Times reported that 69% of progressive Democrats are ashamed of being American. Increasingly influenced by the progressive wing of their party, Democrats as a whole have moved sharply away from that love of country, and veered toward socialism that sounded like communism: In February 2019, Public Opinion Strategies found that an astounding 77% of Democrats who plan to vote in 2020 self-identify as socialists. Aided and abetted by the complicit mainstream media, the modern Democratic Party has been remarkably successful at driving down patriotism: Gallup found that less than a third of Democrats are extremely proud of their country. That’s less than a third, and trending sharply downward.
Killing America by making citizenship meaningless
Why has the modern Democratic Party worked so diligently to erode patriotism? Because love of country is a major impediment to convincing voters to support what they really want, which is yielding their nation’s sovereignty to an international governing body, ultimately the United Nations. With patriotism marginalized, a society’s populace can more easily be led to no longer see themselves as citizens of their country, but as “citizens of the world.” (In his July 2008 speech in Berlin, progressive presidential candidate Barack Obama told an adoring crowd of 200,000 cheering Europeans, “I come to you as a Citizen of the World.”)
In Europe, the long-standing national identity of every progressive-run nation is already being intentionally erased, and it stands as a sort of bellwether of things to come over here.
Government-encouraged mass migration is its instrument, and the same thing is being attempted in America by the modern Democratic Party. This particular phenomenon is particularly associated with billionaire globalist George Soros. The Hungarian-born “stateless statesman” is the most prolific financier of the progressive push for a world without borders.
In his anti-capitalist best-seller, The Crisis of Global Capitalism, Soros sets out the progressive strategy. Complaining bitterly about “the sway of sovereign nations,” Soros has advocated for, and since spent immense sums each year fostering “open society alliances” among sovereign nations. The goal of these alliances is to indoctrinate citizens of western nations to accept the high-mindedness of doing away with national identities in favor of a collectivist world identity. With national identities erased, people no longer see themselves as patriotic citizens of their countries, but as united citizens of an enlightened global society. People who oppose the unfettered influx of migrants and refugees are shouted down as racists and xenophobes. Once open-border alliances have been solidified, the last obstacle is cleared for a borderless world governed by the UN. For global governance to become a reality, the sovereignty of every western nation, including America, must be eliminated, Soros believes.
When the election of Donald Trump dealt a calamitous setback to the near-term realization of fundamentally transforming America, Soros penned an angry rant comparing Trump to Hitler, and calling him a racist and a xenophobe. Known as “the puppet master” because of the enormous influence he exerts on Democratic Party hierarchy, Soros’s foremost target in taking down sovereign western democracies is the crown jewel of them all: the United States of America. In working toward the culmination of that takedown, the billionaire globalist mastermind has powerful allies at the highest levels of the modern Democratic Party.
Killing America through identity politics
To overthrow a capitalist society, The Communist Manifesto calls for fomenting a titanic struggle by pitting an alleged victim class against an alleged oppressor class. In the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Bolsheviks rose to power by pitting the proletariat against the bourgeoisie.
Over the last half-century, the Democratic Party has taken the concept of Marxist/Leninist dialectical struggle to new heights through its use of identity politics. The term refers to politically subdividing the electorate into multiple factions (voting blocks), whose members are told they are singled out for persecution by a bigoted and unjust society. To wit: People of color are persecuted by racists & white supremacists, women by sexists & misogynists, refugees & illegal immigrants by nativists & xenophobes, Muslims by Islamophobes, gays & lesbians by homophobes & religious bigots, the 99% by the 1%, and so on. The goal of identity politics is to turn a majority of the American electorate against their country.
The self-serving narrative of identity politics is that caring, inclusive and tolerant Democrats will righteously defend the members (voters) of each identity group from the constant onslaught of outrages inflicted on them by an oppressive society. Identity politics is used as a political bludgeon to deceive Americans into believing their country is an incurably unjust place where things can be set straight only by killing off its existing economic and governing systems.
That is the observed pattern and it’s important. It tells us why the 2020 elections will determine whether our free market Republic survives, or falls from within to single-party socialist rule.
‘GOV. RALPH NORTHAM SHOULD APOLOGIZE TO VIRGINIA GUN OWNERS,’ SAYS CCRKBA
BELLEVUE, WA – Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam should apologize to the thousands of gun owners who turned out Monday for their annual, and peaceful, Second Amendment rally, and to the thousands more his hysteria kept away, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms said today.
“Following a peaceful gathering of law-abiding gun owners protesting the gun control extremism of Northam and his Democrat colleagues in the General Assembly,” said CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb,” Gov. Northam should beg forgiveness from every Virginia resident his Chicken Little drama both offended and demonized over the past several days.
“Northam’s paranoid emergency disarmament order ignored years of peaceful tradition and treated Commonwealth gun owners as common criminals,” he continued. “It appears to us that his true motive was not public safety, but discouraging as many angry Virginia grassroots activists as he could from participating in Monday’s rally.
“How many more thousands of Virginia citizens did not attend Monday’s peaceful rally because of the governor’s alarmist rhetoric about possible violence,” Gottlieb wondered. “We will likely never know the answer, but what we do know is that this anti-rights governor and his Democrat cronies now in control of the Assembly are worried about the hornet’s nest their gun control crusade has kicked repeatedly since the November election.
“Today’s huge turnout in Richmond, and last Friday’s rally in Olympia, Washington sent a message that America’s law-abiding firearms owners are not about to just go quietly in the night,” he observed. “After months of demonization by Democrat presidential candidates, and a winter’s worth of gun control threats from Virginia’s new Democrat majority, the wrath of citizen activists has been sparked.
“Ralph Northam owes his citizens an apology,” Gottlieb stated. “His gun-hating hysteria has spawned a remarkable Second Amendment Sanctuary movement that we support and hope to see expand in the months ahead. Grassroots gun enthusiasts are fed up. We are tired of being treated like second-class citizens because we defend the Second Amendment that Northam would like to destroy.”
U.S. service member, 2 contractors killed in attack on base in Kenya
This bunch is Sunni moslem, as opposed to the Iranians being Shite moslem, so it’s hard to say if this was a coordinated attack, or was something already planned. That being said, there’s the old thing about them considering the U.S. a common enemy. Of course, the solution for one sect is the same for all of them.
Al-Shabab, a Somali terror group linked to al-Qaeda, attacked a military base Sunday morning in Kenya, killing one U.S. service member and two Defense Department contractors, and wounding two others, U.S. African Command said.
Al-Shabab is a Sunni Muslim group and is not linked to Shiite Iran. Last Friday, a U.S. drone strike killed Iran’s top military commander, and Iran has vowed to retaliate.
Six civilian aircraft were damaged at Manda Bay Airfield, which is on an island in the coastal region of Lamu near the border with Somalia, AFRICOM said.
Initially, the U.S.-led coalition said there were no casualties in the attack but several hours later AFRICOM released an updated statement.
https://twitter.com/USAfricaCommand/status/1213780265560092679
Former CIA Officer Sentenced to 19 Years for Conspiring With Chinese Spies
“Chinese spies are being found out, abroad and in the United States, in surprising numbers. That means there are even more of them out and about, of course. But for the Chinese, it raises the question of how many we knew about before, and how many we fed bogus information to.”
A former CIA case officer was sentenced Friday to 19 years in prison for conspiring to provide American intelligence secrets to the Chinese government, in an espionage case that some current and former officials say dealt a devastating blow to U.S. intelligence operations.
Jerry Chun Shing Lee, 55, served 13 years as a Central Intelligence Agency case officer in several locations overseas, including China, where prosecutors said he had firsthand knowledge of some of the agency’s most sensitive secrets, including the names of covert CIA officers and clandestine human sources in China.
Know the Opposition: Everytown for Gun Safety
New York City/United States – -(AmmoLand.com)
The one group at the forefront of trying to take away our right to keep and bear arms today is perhaps the best-funded such group in history. Despite the attempt to have a grass-roots name, this is a group largely funded by Michael Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor currently running for president.The Everytown group, which counts Moms Demand Action as its force of grass-roots activists, is proving to be very potent. It’s not hard. Bloomberg’s money has been able to provide a sustained grassroots force that past groups like the Brady Campaign and the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence haven’t been able to really build.
Backed by Bloomberg’s billions, Everytown simply will flood a state with wall-to-wall TV advertising. In addition, Bloomberg’s group has a director of “cultural engagement.” In short, if you want to know why the social stigmatization of gun ownership and support for the Second Amendment has taken off, this is the group to thank for it. The fact of the matter is that Bloomberg’s gun-control empire is re-shaping the political landscape – and not in favor of those who support liberty.
Bloomberg’s resources have been a huge game-changer. For the longest time, the biggest strength that pro-Second Amendment groups had was the NRA’s ability to mobilize thousands of grass-roots supporters in a Congressional district to do all of the little things – really, Democracy 101 stuff – that either supported candidates or who helped educate the public in the legislative and political arenas.
The fight is now a full-spectrum fight. Bloomberg has managed to fuse an offensive on not just the political and legislative fronts, but he also leverages Hollywood, and he leverages “research” into gun violence as a public health problem. While the Violence Policy Center long pushed that, Bloomberg has again packaged it in a form that is delivered by Moms Demand Action.
It should be noted that this full-spectrum fight is also being waged with a long-term plan in mind. He is not only an incredibly wealthy anti-Second Amendment extremist, he also is very strategically and tactically astute – far more so than we’ve seen from other anti-Second Amendment groups in the past. Just how good is Everytown’s strategic acuity?
Well, let’s put it this way, the Brady Campaign was dangerous because it used emotional stories well, and it sought to separate gun owners from the NRA – it passed legislation, it made gains, but it was primarily media-driven. The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence had more of a religious fervor, but it wasn’t as effective, given its past push for outright gun bans. The Violence Policy Center was too extreme, even as it provided the intellectual underpinnings for the “public health” push for gun control. None had real grassroots strength.
Everytown doesn’t just unite those three “legs” of the stool, it has also shown a cold ruthlessness not seen from other groups. Bloomberg’s group has set in motion a chain of events that poses an existential threat to all pro-Second Amendment groups.
According to court filings, Everytown was involved in pushing Andrew Cuomo’s regime to engage in the politically-motivated abuse of financial regulations to financially blacklist the NRA. The resulting legal battle has since crippled the organization, touching off the infighting that we see today, and the needs of the NRA to fight the lawsuit ended up destroying the NRA/Ackerman-McQueen partnership in a very ugly way. Meanwhile, Bloomberg and Cuomo have taken advantage of the infighting they stirred up to win elections.
How can Everytown be beaten? The first step is unity. The infighting has to stop – and the NRA and other pro-Second Amendment groups need to get their act together. Second Amendment supporters must hang together, or Bloomberg will pick off pro-Second Amendment groups one by one and leave us isolated. Once isolated, our rights will be gone.
The second step is to hit Bloomberg – and his group – where it is vulnerable. There are three areas: One is Bloomberg’s nanny-state tendencies in general, ranging from the size of one’s soda to his environmental agenda. The other is the fact that he is an out-of-touch billionaire who is more than little hypocritical on some of these issues. The third is that his group peddles phony caricatures about gun owners – and those who support the Second Amendment.
The third step is to begin a long-term effort of our own. The fact is, we must build a pro-Second Amendment culture in this country, to make the thought of punishing millions of Americans for crimes and acts of madness they did not commit repulsive. We must work every day to prove Bloomberg is a liar about us, through how we address Americans we are trying to persuade to support our battle for freedom, through the approach we take in defending our rights, and being mindful about how we come across.
If we fail, Bloomberg may well succeed where Sarah Brady, Pete Shields, and others have failed.
