Isn’t It Time To Counter AND Expose the DAMAGE Caused by the Dishonest Pelosi-Schumer-Biden-Sanders FASCISTS? OR IS IT TOO LATE?

Conservative boycotts can work

By Matt Rowe at American Thinker:

Boycotts have always tended to be a leftist phenomenon.  They work because the nature of leftism is collectivism — i.e., herd activity — so that individual leftists quickly respond to orders to boycott one company or another.  Conservatives, being independent free thinkers, have yet to master the art of the boycott.  However, as woke corporations ally with the hard-left Biden administration, conservatives are going to have to learn the art of the boycott.  Thankfully, if they’re “SMART,” they can do it.

If you search for “conservative boycotts” on the internet, you get leftist results like “16 Ridiculous Reasons Why Trump Supporters Have Boycotted Companies,” which, if you bother to read it, has disingenuous obfuscations, such as using the word “refugees” in place of “illegal aliens.”  You also find another titled “Why half-hearted conservative boycotts rarely take root,” which is really a story about some of the silly things Trump may or may not have called for boycotting (I don’t know).  And again, you find stories like my favorite titled story, “A brief history of bats— conservative boycotts,” which is both funny and sad.  What conservatives lack in boycotts is clear objectives, staying power, and organization.  This is something that could be remedied quickly if there were a leader or group of leaders whom conservatives respected.

First, let’s discuss objectives.  As a business improvement consultant, I use the keyword “SMART” for developing an objective — Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timebound.

“Specific” implies choosing the right target for the right reasons.  For example, I would never choose to boycott a company simply because it supported a particular candidate, but I would choose one that exhibited a specific behavior or value I strongly disagree with.

For example, Major League Baseball is taking action over the Georgia voting law that is actually hurting the 30% minority-owned businesses in Atlanta.  The MLB commissioner lives in New York, which has even stricter voting laws!  That fully justifies a boycott.

Well? There Was That Barack Hussein Obama Who Trained Joe, or did we forget?

Biden is the Most anti-American President in US History

By Patricia McCarthy….at American Thinker:

Barack Obama made it abundantly clear that he not only loathed these United States, but he was also embarrassed by his own nation and its citizens.  He did tremendous damage over his eight years in office.  He treated our enemies like allies and our allies like enemies.  He set race relations back at least fifty years having been indoctrinated in the odious Jeremiah Wright brand of anti-Americanism.  

But who among us could have predicted how much damage a Biden administration could and would do in just a few months?  All of us who revered President Trump and the tremendous strides he made on the economy, unemployment, Middle East peace, border security, and trade issues with China are gobsmacked by the destructive record of the Biden administration in just over two months.  Trump was pro-American, an America-first modern day Founding Father.  Trump loves this nation like the Founders did; they hoped their Constitution would prevail.  Donald Trump was and is determined that it will remain the reigning document, the prescription for a free nation’s survival even when under attack by the totalitarian left that means to remake it into something resembling China.  

The ruling left of today is actively undermining every aspect of our founding. We no longer enjoy free speech.  We no longer are allowed the freedom of assembly or religion.  The conservative embrace of Judeo-Christian values enrages the Democrats.  From the Frankfurt School to Black Lives Matter, Western values are anathema to the left.  

It did not use to be this way.  There was a time when the Democrat party was pro-America.  JFK loved his country.  LBJ was as corrupt as Joe Biden but Jimmy Carter loved America.  Even the careless and womanizing Bill Clinton did not set out to destroy the country.  

But Obama set the left on a new and insidious course, the Cloward-Piven, Alinskyite path to totalitarianism.  The Democrat party of today is overtly anti-American and having captured our educational system decades ago, has indoctrinated several generations who now believe that hating their own country is synonymous with virtue, with being sufficiently woke. 

Will the Fascists At BIG TECH Ever Be Punished for Their Crimes, Their EVILS?

Clarence Thomas Shows the Path Forward on Big Tech

Thomas implied that Section 230 immunity for Big Tech firms may itself be constitutionally problematic and in conflict with the First Amendment.By Josh Hammer at American Greatness:

Arealignment, as many have observed, is now unfolding in American politics. The Republican Party and its conservatism is now the home for the “Somewheres,” to borrow the term from David Goodhart’s 2017 book, The Road to Somewhere, which refers to the more traditionalist, hardscrabble patriots of the American heartland. The Democratic Party and its increasingly hard-left progressivism, by contrast, is the home for the “Anywheres”—those highly educated, mobile, “woke” elites comprising the bicoastal ruling class.

The Big Tech issue is the tip of the spear of the realignment. As has been made painfully obvious the last few years, with last October’s collusive Big Tech assault on the New York Post for its election-season reporting on Hunter Biden’s overseas travails serving as an eye-opening pinnacle, Big Tech is now the ruling class’s catspaw. These modern-day robber barons are willing and able to lend their censorious assistance to the ruling class’s ruthless entrenchment of its ideological and political hegemony. Big Tech, in short, is the leading private-sector appendage with which the Anywheres cow into submission and subjugate the Somewheres.

This emergent reality has caused no shortage of heart palpitations among some of the more “liberal” elements of the American conservative firmament. Conservatives, many were taught, stand for unadulterated laissez-faire and a staunch commitment to deregulating corporate America. What to do, then, when those unshackled big corporations turn around and come after us?

The answer, for many, has been to carefully reassess what exactly it is we stand for as conservatives—especially as it pertains to unaccountable, concentrated corporate titans who control the 21st-century equivalents of the old public square. To wit, there is nothing particularly “conservative” about a zealous, dogmatic refusal to countenance state actions that might better channel the content curation and moderation decisions of a behemoth such as Amazon—which has at least an 80 percent market share in digital books—toward the common good of the American polity. Ditto Google, which has a nearly 90 percent market share in online search.

But the historical bromance between the GOP and chamber of commerce-style corporatism has been an obstinate hindrance to reform. Big Tech-skeptical, pro-realignment conservatives have all too often had their legal and policy arguments on such issues as antitrust enforcement and Section 230 reform thrown back in their faces by doctrinaire, limited-government enthusiasts who insist that True Conservatism is synonymous with hands-off private-sector fundamentalism. “Build your own Google!” the corporatists and libertarians have scowled.

On Monday, the most important conservative lawyer in the nation, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, came out swinging on the side of the reformers.

In his concurrence in Biden v. Knight First Amendment Institute, Thomas opined: “Today’s digital platforms provide avenues for historically unprecedented amounts of speech, including speech by government actors. Also unprecedented, however, is the concentrated control of so much speech in the hands of a few private parties.”

Later, after a discussion of the centuries-long history of “common carrier” regulation—in modern times, most often applied to transportation networks like rail and communications networks like telephony—and places of “public accommodation,” Thomas wrote: “There is a fair argument that some digital platforms are sufficiently akin to common carriers or places of accommodation to be regulated in this manner.”

Seemingly speaking directly to regulators and legislators at both the federal and state level, Thomas also added, “If the analogy between common carriers and digital platforms is correct, then an answer may arise for dissatisfied platform users who would appreciate not being blocked: laws that restrict the platform’s right to exclude.” Seldom is a Supreme Court justice clearer and more forthright than that. Finally, in a footnote toward the end of his concurrence, Thomas implied that Section 230 immunity may itself be constitutionally problematic and in conflict with the First Amendment.

With the imprimatur of America’s greatest living conservative—who happens to be one of the greatest Supreme Court justices ever—the path forward for the Big Tech-skeptical right is clear. We can and must use all tools necessary in our policy and legal arsenal to rein in the Big Tech oligarchs before it is too late. Section 230 reform and antitrust enforcement against the most egregious offenders of concentrated power, such as Google and Amazon, are fine places to begin.

But as Thomas urges, and as many of us have argued at least since the New York Post hullabaloo last October, we should think even bigger than that. It’s time to get serious about applying “common carrier” regulatory frameworks and “public accommodation” Civil Rights Act statutory frameworks, and to reclaim our self-governing democracy from the Silicon Valley technocracy before it is too late.

Turns Out Black Lives Matter is a Fascist, Feminist, Black Racist TRIO MARXISM!

BY JOHN HINDERAKER IN BLACK LIVES MATTER

BLM FOUNDER CASHES IN

Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors calls herself a “trained Marxist” and is a bitter enemy of free enterprise, but that doesn’t mean that she can’t enjoy the finer things in life. The Daily Mail reports that she has bought herself a $1.4 million home in an exclusive section of Los Angeles that is almost entirely white:

A Black Lives Matter co-founder and self-professed ‘trained Marxist’ has raised eyebrows by purchasing a $1.4 million Los Angeles home, in a largely white district.

Patrisse Cullors, a 37-year-old ‘artist, organizer, and freedom fighter’, has bought a three bedroom, three bathroom house in Topanga Canyon, complete with a separate guest house and expansive back yard.

“Freedom fighting” pays very well these days.

The AP reported that Black Lives Matter took in $90 million in donations last year. It’s not clear if or how Cullors is paid by the organization, as its finances are opaque.

That last observation is very true. But with $90 million rattling around in BLM’s coffers, it is not surprising that its leaders have cashed in. More on the house and its environs:

In her new zip code, 88 per cent of residents are white and 1.8 per cent black, according to the census.

This is what it looks like. The main house, not the guest lodge:

It has been obvious from the beginning that BLM is a hustle, much like the Southern “Poverty” Law Center. Nevertheless, as you would expect, the social media titans are running interference for Cullors and her fellow scammers:

Jason Whitlock, a sports journalist, tweeted that: ‘She had a lot of options on where to live. She chose one of the whitest places in California. She’ll have her pick of white cops and white people to complain about. That’s a choice, bro.’

So Whitlock’s account was blocked by Twitter. Some truths are just too inconvenient.

Don’t Hold Your Breath America!..Joe Biden Is TOO Senile & Evil LEFTIST to Plot Uncle Sam’s Features to the GOOD!

For Hating Trump So Much, Biden Sure Is Cloning A Bunch Of His Successful Policies

Here are some of the ways the Biden administration is embracing Trump’s policies despite their professed vehement opposition to the former administration.

By Jordan Davidson at the Federalist:

President Joe Biden ran on a platform that condemned former President Donald Trump as unfit, embarrassing, and reckless, but while Biden might complain that Trump will “go down in history as being one of the most irresponsible presidents,” his administration appears to be using the Republican’s decisions, policies, and stances to inform their own.https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?creatorScreenName=FDRLST&dnt=true&embedId=twitter-widget-0&features=eyJ0ZndfZXhwZXJpbWVudHNfY29va2llX2V4cGlyYXRpb24iOnsiYnVja2V0IjoxMjA5NjAwLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X2hvcml6b25fdHdlZXRfZW1iZWRfOTU1NSI6eyJidWNrZXQiOiJodGUiLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfX0%3D&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1379897794920603652&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fthefederalist.com%2F2021%2F04%2F09%2Ffor-hating-trump-so-much-biden-sure-is-cloning-a-bunch-of-his-successful-policies%2F&sessionId=b57e35c13c160ba1a8cb47031fd6d421fa9c890c&siteScreenName=FDRLST&theme=light&widgetsVersion=1ead0c7%3A1617660954974&width=550px

COVID Vaccines

Biden’s chief of staff Ron Klain was quick to claim the Democratic administration was “inheriting a huge mess” when it came to the COVID-19 vaccine rollout, but that didn’t stop the president from relying on the campaign created for him by Trump’s Operation Warp Speed to ensure he reached his goal of distributing 100 million doses in his first 100 days in office.

Trump had similar vaccination goals and implementation plans regarding states, but the Republican’s efforts to popularize and facilitate the vaccine rollout was booed and written off by the corporate media as “disastrous,” “a mess,” and a “dismal failure.” Biden’s efforts, however, were hailed as “ambitious” and a “big goal” even though the United States was well on its way to accomplishing millions of doses distributed before he was inaugurated. Shortly after Biden assumed office, the country was administering more than a million vaccine doses a day.

As of Thursday, 940,000 shots a day were administered on average over a seven-day period, according to data from the Bloomberg Vaccine Tracker. The most recent two days topped a million doses.

Border Wall

Biden was quick to pull back some of Trump’s biggest immigration reforms including issuing an executive order on his first day in office that terminated funding for a border wall. Now that the border crisis created by Biden’s rhetoric and policies is growing at rapid, record-breaking rates, the president’s administration is reconsidering some of his predecessor’s approaches to curb illegal crossings, including finishing parts of the border wall.

Despite the White House’s promises to handle the “border challenge” differently than Trump, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas signaled that the Biden administration is considering resuming border wall construction to address “gaps,” “gates,” and even areas “where the wall has been completed but the technology has not been implemented.”

Building a border wall was a big part of Trump’s campaign platform and was quickly made a priority on his list of things to do while in office. Just five days after he arrived at White House in 2017, the Republican issued an executive order directing the construction of a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.

China and Foreign Policy

It was long after Biden assumed office that his Secretary of State Antony Blinken admitted to the Senate that Trump was right to crack down on China. While Blinken said he “disagreed” with how the Republican president handled some things, he also acknowledged that a “tougher approach to China” was the “right one” for American foreign policy.

He also praised the president for orchestrating peace between Israel and other countries in the Middle East, despite his own office’s downplaying of it later.

“I think there are a number of things, from where I sat, that the Trump administration did beyond our borders that I would applaud,” Blinken said.

Tariffs

While some Democrats frowned on the Trump administration’s use of tariffs, especially those imposed on China, Biden’s Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo recently told reporters that some of Trump’s tariffs “have in fact helped save American jobs in steel and aluminum industries.”

“What do we do with tariffs? We have to level the playing field,” Raimondo said. “China’s actions are uncompetitive, coercive, underhanded — they’ve proven they’ll do whatever it takes.”

The Biden administration also defended Trump’s tariffs in March after some corporations argued they “illegally increased the number of Chinese goods subject to duties under Section 301 of the U.S. Trade Act of 1974.”

“The Court should not interpose” on the issue, the Biden administration stated in a legal brief.

Jordan Davidson is a staff writer at The Federalist. She graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism.

Is Moscow’s Bernie Sanders, or Twit American’s Biden Running the Dems’ U.S.A. Fascist Show?

The Left’s Idea of a Happy Future

By Jeffrey Folks at American Thinker:

Liberals are fond of predicting the future, and their predictions, which are always dire, then become the pretext for more government.  Otherwise, they say, we’ll all starve, a class war will break out, or the Earth will come to an end.

Liberals are wrong about the future because their theories are based on ideology, not on the facts.  Unlike conservatives, whose ideas are grounded on prudence and a clear view of human nature, liberals really have no conception of what drives human beings: their thinking is built on a handful of fixed ideas that can be traced to a number of shallow-minded philosophers including Rousseau, Malthus, Marx, Dewey, and Gore.  What all of these thinkers have in common is the misconception that a centralized, planned economy can transform society into a utopia.

In every case, they’ve been wrong.  The Earth’s population did not starve (Malthus); capitalism was not replaced with a socialist utopia (Marx); the earth has not been consumed by storm, drought, and rising seas (Gore).

Collectivist ideology has produced poverty, starvation, enslavement, and mass murder.  The Soviet Union sent at least 18 million to the gulags, and few returned from the worst of these camps.  Stalin practiced a crude form of authoritarian rule based on Marxist ideology.  He believed that, given supreme power, the State (in the person of Stalin himself) could transform a backward and inefficient economy into a world leader.  The key to this process was a ruthless and inhuman exercise of power.

As Richard Pipes and others have stressed, Stalin was not a highly intelligent or subtle human being, but he did have one quality that distinguished him from others: the willingness to employ unlimited cruelty in the service of an idea.  There are others today, including Chairman Xi in China, who appear willing to employ violence and coercion in support of the utopian goal.  

Like Stalin, Biden has sat patiently in the background, awaiting his chance to rule, and now that he has power, he and those around him are determined to “transform” America to correspond with their idea of the future.  Biden is not Stalin, and there are not yet gulags in America’s far north (though perhaps some along our southern border), but he shares Stalin’s devotion to liberal ideology.  And like Stalin, Biden believes he has been called to transform society.

Like all liberal utopias, Biden’s vision is that of a perfect society created by the planning and control of an authoritarian state.  And like all liberal thought, Biden’s thinking is based on an ideology that promises a totally ordered and efficient future with the State regulating and directing the means of production and controlling the private lives of its population.

While we have no gulag or death camps as yet, we do have a dangerous new instrument of state control — a national system of censorship and virtual “re-education” in support of the progressive state.  This system appears to control the traditional media of television and print journalism and the newer forms of social media.  Like Stalinist censorship of books and newspapers, its purpose is to ensure permanent power for the progressive regime.

A good example is last week’s 60 Minutes hit job on Ron DeSantis.  This is nothing new for 60 Minutes (recall their use of unsubstantiated documents in Dan Rather’s 2004 “reporting” on George W. Bush’s National Guard service, just ahead of the 2004 election), but what is new is the breadth of today’s censorship.  Everything from daily newspapers to evening news, internet news, search results, Twitter, Facebook, and thousands of other venues is working to advance a collectivist, authoritarian idea of the future.

It would be interesting to know why this progressive ideology is so widely shared by those in the media.  Is it the appeal of a bright, new future that relieves the tedium of our daily lives?  Or is it the allure of a society of perfect order, with billions of human beings laboring like robots and passively accepting what they are told?  Is it the superior status that those in the media expect to acquire in a society ruled by censorship and force?  Or is it simply a matter of pride — the smug assurance that they, the self-appointed clerisy of the secular state, are smarter and more “woke” than any one of their readers or listeners?

Whatever the motive, the liberal media are leading us toward enslavement and destruction.  It is terrifying to think that America may become the ally of Russia and Communist China in the service of global tyranny — and that a majority of Americans may have voted in favor of their own enslavement.

That is the future toward which we are headed.  In doing so, we are losing contact with the fundamental truths of human nature: the fact that human beings seek security, freedom, improvement in living standards, and meaning in their lives.  Those who still cherish these fundamental truths are the enemies of the totalitarian state and of the media that support it.  Like Ayn Rand’s John Galt, they know that the promise of collectivist utopia is a lie set forth to enslave us, and they know they must preserve their own integrity and the knowledge of human nature upon which it rests.

We are now seeing the worst assault on liberty in our nation’s history — broader, more ruthless, and more determined than anything we have seen in the past.  Sleepy Joe Biden plays the fool, but he is a ruthless practitioner of progressivism.  The happy future that he promises is an illusion; the reality is regimentation and control.  That future will steer the country toward global alliances with collectivist states that oppress their people as ruthlessly as Stalin did in the 20th century.  Xi Jinping has reportedly detained 1.5 million people in “re-education” camps.  How long will it be until America’s progressive state detains white Christians for re-education?  Compulsory workplace sensitivity training is only just the beginning.

This is not the America I grew up in or that I believe in, and the censorship, the voter fraud, the fake news, the corruption of public education, the assault on life and on the Second Amendment now taking place seem irreversible.  We may awaken in some dark future with Big Brother monitoring our every thought and with only a dim memory of the land of liberty and opportunity that we once knew.  We may already have awakened there.

Perhaps, by some miracle, our children and grandchildren will regain the truth that man has always sought liberty, opportunity, and security, and that a God exists to redeem us and instill meaning.  The truth that life requires courage, and that individuals in a free society have the obligation to contribute to the good of all.

We have arrived at that crucial point where we must choose between democratic capitalism — a system based on the human desire for freedom and opportunity — and the false promise of a communist utopia based on state control.  Biden seeks to expand the size of government beyond anything we have known in the past, and with it the power that government has over our lives.  That sort of control does not suggest a happy future.  The left is determined to enslave us.  Peacefully but resolute, we must resist.

Note from Glenn: I am old enough to have seen on American television Communist Bernie Sanders of fascist Dem Vermont celebrating his wedding with his Communist allies in Moscow on American television before it became so fascist ala CNN and MSNBC, PBS and so on.

Joe Biden is too stupid, even as a crook whether in Delaware as a thug in Washington as a Senator or Vice President bowing to his love, Communist oriented Barack Obama for eight years, to do much more than pick his nose and flip his tongue for OTHER FASCISTS including ditsy Nancy Pelosi to play President.

DON’T FORGET SLEAZY BERNIE SANDERS AROUND THE DEMS FOREVER AS AMERICA’S TOP STALINIST UP TO DATE!

Most Americans UNDER AGE 45 of today have no idea who Joseph Stalin or George Washington and Abraham Lincoln were…..for our schools are too far Pelosi feminized to know. So many Dems of that age group seem to like to play BLACK LIVES MATTER AND ANTIFA SUMMER GAMES, the rape, pillage, and burn ones for joy!

Biden’s Vaccine Passport Movement

Federal Government at the Heart of ‘Vaccine Passport’ Development

By Ben Barteehttps://a43f2df690c6e926810e263b16733257.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html

The Biden administration — arguably the most extremist executive regime in terms of its threat to civil liberties in recent history — is currently engaged in a coordinated effort to develop and introduce “vaccine passports” to the American public:

[The Biden administration is] currently working with a range of companies on the standards, including non-profits and tech companies[.] … Multiple government agencies are engaged in conversations and planning, coordinated by the White House, as this kind of system will play a role in multiple aspects of life.

Specifically, the federal Department of Health and Human Services has been at the helm of the coordination of the “vaccine passport” program:

The administration’s initiative has been driven largely by arms of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, including an office devoted to health information technology, said five officials who spoke to the Post on the condition of anonymity.

Suffice it to say, the federal bureaucracy has been less than forthcoming regarding its role in the creation of vaccine passports.  In late 2020 and early 2021, when the concept of looming vaccine passports first began to enter the public consciousness, insiders in the Trump administration assured the public that the U.S. government would not be involved in their creation:

The United States will not participate [in the coordinated global effort to create vaccine passports], in part because the White House does not want to work with the WHO, which President Trump has criticized over what he characterized as its “China-centric” response to the pandemic.

This means one of three things: a) the federal government officials who spoke to the media were lying or ignorant to the true nature of federal involvement in the creation of vaccine passports, b) the policy orientation changed from administration to administration, or c) opportunistic government bureaucracies sensed the benefits of these types of documents for social control and changed course.

Regardless, in no way does involvement in the creation of “vaccine passports” fall within the purview of the United States government.  This is uncharted territory from a civil liberties perspective.  Accordingly, constraint on the government’s ability to install such regimes of surveillance is prudent.

The Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution, the supreme law of the land and the font from which American protections against government overreach spring, clearly reads:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Let’s clearly delineate between private companies — which, under the law, have the right to write their own (voluntary) rules regarding the behavior of their employees and customers — and the federal, state, or local government.

Vaccine passports, in the initial stages of their rollout, were cleverly pitched as requirements by private companies and, therefore, outside the purview of conventional civil liberties.  This concept of private business rights is accepted by a wide portion of Americans.  In fact, it is in the best traditions of American society and economy.

Unfortunately, the growing evidence now suggests that that pitch was dishonest or, at best, misleading — a way to legitimize government efforts to foist vaccine passports on the public under the auspices of private business mandates.

For a possible glimpse of the future of government surveillance if we do not correct course, we look to Israel, the European Union, and other Western government around the world:

The European Commission will present a proposal in March on creating an EU-wide digital vaccination passport, an issue that has divided member states, Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen said on Monday.

In addition to being privacy violations in and of themselves, vaccine passports are also goldmines for hacks by nefarious actors, state and non-state alike.  The Israeli “green pass” model, for example — already in effect for the Israeli population and directed by the Israeli government — is ripe for abuse of privacy, according to the I.T. experts who have studied it:

The green pass is also a potential privacy nightmare[.] … [T]he pass reveals information that those checking credentials don’t need to know, such as the date a user recovered from covid or got a vaccine.

The extent to which personal data mined from these vaccine passports can be used for nefarious purposes is, at this early stage of rollout, speculative fiction: the sky is the limit.

If the U.S. government mandates proof of vaccination to access government services as the Israeli government and other regimes around the world have already done or proposed to do, this new power is nearly certain to be abused.

The PATRIOT Act, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), and other post-9/11 surveillance regimes advanced by the national security state — already burdensome and arguably unconstitutional themselves — have been wildly abused beyond even their original Orwellian scope.

Supposing civil liberties proponents were to concede the urgent need and constitutionality of vaccine passports — a huge leap indeed and a potentially fatal mistake for the American way of life — the federal government simply cannot be trusted to adhere to the rules and laws surrounding these “passports” as written.

A very similar, even parallel, dynamic of problem-reaction-solution can be seen in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, a national tragedy that was immediately seized upon by the national security apparatus to justify widespread new powers for itself.  The new surveillance capabilities granted via the post-9/11 acts listed above were immediately abused at scale.

Questioned under oath before Congress, one of the highest authorities in the land, James Clapper, former director of national intelligence, offered blatantly false (and perjurious) testimony during the Obama administration:

Clapper appeared before the Senate to discuss surveillance programs in the midst of a controversy over warrantless surveillance of the American public.  He was asked directly, “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions, or hundreds of millions of Americans?”  There was no ambiguity or confusion and Clapper responded, “No, sir. … Not wittingly.” That was a lie and Clapper knew it when he said it.

The takeaway from Clapper’s unprosecuted perjury is that, far from an anomaly here or there, the government abuses each new power it is granted as a matter of routine —  knowingly and at the highest levels.

We must say no to placing new vaccine passport powers into the hands of dishonest D.C. bureaucracies and agencies.  Our already crumbled civil liberties, those that we have left, depend on it.

Ben Bartee is a Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.  Contact him via his portfolio or on LinkedIn.  Support his independent journalism via Patron.

Mask-Wearing Captures the MINDLESS WELL!

Mask-Wearing Represents Fear and Blind Obedience, Not Science

Tue, Apr 6, 2021  •  Prager’s Column

When I see people walking outside, often alone with no one anywhere near them, wearing a mask, my primary reactions are disappointment and sadness.

I am disappointed because I expected better from my fellow Americans. I never thought most Americans would be governed by irrational fears and unquestioning obedience to authority. I have come to realize that I had a somewhat romanticized view of my countrymen.

Had you told me a year ago that nearly every American in nearly every metropolitan area would cover their faces for over a year because one man, one political party and the media told them to, I would have responded that you underestimate the strength of the American character.

But here we are, over a year later, and where I live (the Los Angeles area), I am usually the only person on the street not wearing a mask. (For the record, I wear a mask in stores and when entering the building in which I work, out of courtesy to those who think a person not wearing a mask poses a lethal threat.)

On the rare occasions I pass people not wearing a mask, I thank and praise them. They are invariably enthused by my reaction.

You do not need medical or scientific expertise to understand the foolishness of outdoor mask-wearing. Common sense, that great unused guide to life, suffices.

If you wear a mask, you do so in the belief that you are protecting yourself (and others) from COVID-19. So, then, why do you care if I don’t wear a mask? Doesn’t your mask protect you? If it does, my not wearing a mask may irritate you because you resent my assertion of freedom, my obvious lack of respect for government and medical authorities, and my alleged selfishness, but there would be no rational medical — that is, “science-based” — reason for your objecting to my not wearing a mask.

And if masks protect us and others, why have people been refused the right to visit a loved one as he or she lay dying alone? Why couldn’t a person — wearing the same mask a doctor, nurse or any health care worker wears when entering your parent’s room — enter that room? There are two possible answers: One is it’s a tacit admission that masks are essentially useless. You were prevented from visiting your dying father because the hospital believes your loved one or others in the hospital might contract the virus from you, even though you were wearing a mask. Which means those running the hospital don’t believe masks actually work. The other is that the medical establishment and lay authorities have abandoned elementary human decency in the name of AOC, or “Abundance of Caution.” Forcing hundreds of thousands of people to die alone will go down as one of the cruelest policies ever adopted by American medical and political authorities.

The problem is most Americans who went to college learned to unquestioningly obey “experts.” This is why common sense, logic and reason mean little to the well-educated — and, increasingly, to everyone else, because everyone is taught by the well-educated. All we need to know is what the “experts” say. That plus a fanatical adherence to the rule of AOC have crushed logic and reason.

The irony, however, is that “the science” doesn’t justify the fanatical commitment to mask-wearing. There are plenty of experts with evidence-based views to the contrary. Here are but a few examples:

Dr. Anthony Fauci himself told the truth about the uselessness of mask-wearing on “60 Minutes” on March 8, 2020: “Right now, in the United States, people should not be walking around with masks. … There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better, and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And, often, there are unintended consequences: People keep fiddling with the mask, and they keep touching their face.”

Dr. Ramin Oskoui, a cardiologist in Washington at a Senate hearing in December 2020, testified under oath: “Masks do not work.” (The New York Times, Dec. 8, 2020.)

The Wall Street Journal reported on Nov. 11, 2020: “The projected number of lives saved, and the implied case for a mask mandate, are based on a faulty statistic.”

Dr. Paul E. Alexander, a Canadian epidemiologist, wrote: “Surgical and cloth masks, used as they currently are, have absolutely no impact on controlling the transmission of Covid-19 virus, and current evidence implies that face masks can be actually harmful.” (American Institute for Economic Research, Feb. 11, 2021.)

Roger W. Koops, who has a doctorate in chemistry from the University of California, Riverside, wrote: “A ‘mask,’ and that term usually refers to either a SURGICAL mask or N95 mask, has no benefit in the general population and is only useful in controlled clinical settings. Further, it has been considered a greater transmission risk than a benefit in the general population. … In the open environment, no one should be wearing face coverings.” (American Institute for Economic Research, Oct. 16, 2020.)

Finally, a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine on May 21, 2020, concluded: “We know that wearing a mask outside health care facilities offers little, if any, protection from infection. Public health authorities define a significant exposure to Covid-19 as face-to-face contact within 6 feet with a patient with symptomatic Covid-19 that is sustained for at least a few minutes (and some say more than 10 minutes or even 30 minutes). The chance of catching Covid-19 from a passing interaction in a public space is therefore minimal. In many cases, the desire for widespread masking is a reflexive reaction to anxiety over the pandemic.”

Contrary to mainstream media misinformation, the doctors who wrote that report did not later retract anything they wrote.

People say they “follow the science.” They rarely do. They follow the scientists the media tell them to follow.This column was originally posted on Townhall.com.

What Wasn’t in Creepy Biden’s Book? The one he claims ‘may not’ be his, BUT IS!!!

EXCLUSIVE: What WASN’T in Hunter Biden’s book: How he got unauthorized Secret Service protection, begged Joe to run for WH to salvage his own reputation and made porn films with prostitutes. Forensic experts prove laptop IS President’s son’s

• Hunter Biden released his ‘tell-all’ memoir Beautiful Things on Tuesday, but left out shocking details 
• DailyMail.com can reveal those secrets after contents of his abandoned laptop – including a cache of 103,000 text messages, 154,000 emails, more than 2,000 photos – were verified by top forensics experts
• Hunter left his MacBook Pro laptop at a Wilmington, Delaware computer repair shop in April 2019 and never returned for it
• In texts from 2019, Hunter begged his father to run for president to salvage Hunter’s own reputation 
• Hunter repeatedly dodged police action against him, despite constantly dealing with drug dealers and prostitutes and having multiple run-ins with the law
• The president’s son was guarded by a Secret Service agent while on a 2018 drug and prostitute binge in Hollywood, despite not being entitled to protection at the time 
• Hunter appeared to be obsessed with making porn films with prostitutes, videos and photos on his laptop show
•  Texts also show Joe Biden was afraid his conversations with Hunter were being hacked even as they discussed his White House bid 

By JOSH BOSWELL FOR DAILYMAIL.COM

Yet Another Major Election in Israel!

Netanyahu’s Unexpected Legacy

By Ronnie Olesker at realclearworld:

Israel experienced a tectonic shift in its politics last month. For the first time in its history, an Arab party is considered as a legitimate partner in forming a governing coalition. And the shift came from the most unlikely direction—Benjamin Netanyahu.

Netanyahu wants his legacy to focus on peace agreements with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco, or having the entire population vaccinated against COVID-19. He will already be remembered as the longest-serving Israeli prime minister, and its most corrupt. But in the end, Netanyahu’s legacy is also an unlikely one. He is the leader who legitimized the Arab vote in Israel.

Last Thursday, Israelis were glued to their TVs to listen to Mansour Abbas, a politician who was anonymous to most Israelis until a few months ago. His speech was broadcast in primetime on all Israeli networks, a vision not seen since Egyptian President Anwar Sadat gave a historic speech in the Israeli Knesset in 1977, which paved the way for Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty two years later. Could this speech be similar?

Abbas, who has the ability to determine who will be able to form Israel’s next government, did not speak of his Palestinian identity, nor the Palestinian cause. He did not invoke the controversial Nation State Law, which Arab parties and the Israeli left have sought to repeal. He did not speak of Israel’s continued occupation and settlement building.

Rather, Abbas spoke of Jews and Arabs in Israel. He spoke about understanding the other, learning about each other, and looking for a future of coexistence. “What we have in common is greater than what separates us,” he said.

Abbas is the leader of Ra’am party, which represents the Islamic movement in Israel. Winning four seats in Israel’s election last week, Ra’am can break the deadlock between the two blocks in Israeli politics: those who want to continue to see Netanyahu govern the state and those who oppose him.

Abbas broke away from the other Arab parties to run on his own. He campaigned on the issue of integration into Israeli politics, and signaled his willingness to sit in a Netanyahu-led coalition. He repeated that he would join any coalition that supported the issue his constituents care about: investment in the Arab sector in Israel.

Abbas is in a position to join a governing coalition in Israel. The closest Arab parties have gotten to such a position was in 1992 under Itzhak Rabin. That government, which did not have a required majority in the Knesset without the support of the Arab parties, relied on them to survive, though they were never invited to join the coalition. It was also the government that went on the sign the historic Oslo Accords.

Until recently seen as illegitimate members of any governing coalition, Abbas and his Arab colleagues are positioned to be kingmakers in Israeli politics. Whoever he joins will have the best chance of forming the next government.

In 2015, Netanyahu warned his base that “Arabs were coming in droves to the ballot.” He completely delegitimized his political opponent, Benny Gantz, claiming he was sacrificing Israel’s security, for trying to form a coalition with Arab parties after Israel’s third round of elections in April 2019.

Last week, Netanyahu did the impossible—he validated the exact same move, in order to add Ra’am to his coalition. Jewish religious parties, who are not nationalists, have noted that they have a lot in common with Abbas’s Islamic party and share similar religious conservative views.

But Netanyahu is in a political bind. His far-right partners, especially those from the Religious Zionist party, which include Jewish supremacists, have made it clear that they will not sit in any coalition that is supported by Arab parties. Netanyahu can’t afford to lose the far-right vote if he wants to have a majority in the Knesset.

Perhaps ironically, however, the conservative right has confirmed what Israelis all know: only they can make radical changes in Israeli politics. This was true when Begin signed a peace treaty with Sadat in 1979, and it is true 40 years later asNetanyahu makes it kosher to include Arab parties in government.

His love-fest with Abbas will not last, but Netanyahu cannot turn back the tide. In Israel’s next round of elections, possibly as soon as this summer, all Arab parties will be valid partners for any governing coalition.

More importantly, Jews and Arabs in Israel are, perhaps for the first time in their history, paving a way for political cooperation at the highest levels of government. And that too, will be Netanyahu’s legacy.

Ronnie Olesker, associate professor of government at St. Lawrence University, is author of the forthcoming book, “Israel’s Securitization Dilemma: BDS and the Battle for the Legitimacy of the Jewish State.”  The views expressed are the author’s own.