WAS JOHN HINDERAKER DRUNK DURING DONALD J. TRUMP’S PRESIDENCY?

POSTED ON JUNE 13, 2022 BY JOHN HINDERAKER at PowerLine:

MOVE ON? PLEASE!

This morning Donald Trump emailed a “Statement” to his supporters about the Alabama Senate race. While nothing he said was surprising, I did find it clarifying:

Last year I endorsed Mo Brooks for the U.S. Senate because I thought he was a Fighter, especially when it came to the Rigged and Stolen Presidential Election of 2020. The evidence is irrefutable. Then, out of nowhere, and for seemingly no reason, Mo backtracked and made a big mistake by going Woke at our massive Cullman, Alabama Rally. Instead of denouncing the Voter Fraud in the Election, Mo lectured the crowd of 63,000 people saying, “Put that behind you, put that behind you,” meaning that, in effect, forget the Rigged Election and go on to the future.

In other words, the only thing Trump really cares about is re-fighting the 2020 election. If that isn’t your priority, you are “woke.” But Brooks is right. Voters want to look forward, not back.

The problem is, if you do that, it will happen again. Also, why do Republicans allow Democrats to get away with rigging and stealing elections?

Of course the Democrats will continue to try to steal elections, as they have been doing for decades. Whether they succeed in 2022 and 2024 depends not on Republicans endlessly replaying the 2020 election, but rather on practical election integrity measures that Republicans (not, notably, including Trump, as far as I have seen) have been working on implementing across the country.

Will we have perfectly secure elections in 2022? Absolutely not. Will the liberal press have its thumb on the scale, as it did in 2020? Of course. But that is nothing new. The overwhelming majority of votes cast in November, and in 2024, will be legal and valid. Prioritizing the relatively small number of illegal votes over making the strongest possible appeal to legal voters would be foolish. As Hugh Hewitt wrote some years ago, If it’s not close, they can’t cheat.

Mo was strongly booed by tens of thousands of Great Alabama Patriots for abandoning his constituents, and what they know to be true about the Election Fraud. He foolishly started listening to the wrong consultants and not to the people, and his 54-point lead evaporated overnight. Likewise, his words caused me to withdraw my Endorsement, and Mo has been wanting it back ever since—but I cannot give it to him!

Katie Britt, on the other hand, is a fearless America First Warrior. The opposition says Katie is close to Mitch McConnell, but actually, she is not—in fact, she believes that McConnell put Mike Durant in the race to stop her, which is very possibly true.

“Very possibly true” is a wonderful Trumpism. I know little about Katie Britt, and not much about Mo Brooks, although I once interviewed him on the radio and was impressed by him.

What I do know is that Republicans need to nominate candidates who will appeal to voters across a broad range of issues on which we conservatives have the advantage–a range which very much includes election integrity. What we do not need is candidates who are obsessed with righting the alleged (and to some extent imaginary) wrongs that Donald Trump suffered in 2020. I don’t blame Trump for being unhappy, but his emotional state cannot dictate the future of the Republican Party.

Further note from Glenn…..I have never met Donald Trump personally in my life. I’ll be 88 soon. It was around my fifties when one Saturday afternoon, rain time, I was forced to stay indoors! I turned on Fox TV news rather than go to work. Instead there appeared a young fellow from New York City reviewing his life’s experience.

A young Donald J. Trump amongst others, was talking about Trump life, family, especially working with his dad in his home town, New York City, rather than the New York Yankees. I was made aware of an exceptional brain in operation, but to this day do not know why young Mr. Trump was revealing his personal and family life.

I was a public school teacher for fourteen years earlier in life, five years at the University of Minnesota High School of the time. I taught Russian. I wound up in professional landscaping…..A LUCK OF A DRAW IN MY LIFE….as well as following the footsteps of this Donald J. Trump!

I had, have never in my life, come across a brain so complete with content, rhythm, solution, and brevity to a point of beautiful clarity than this young man, Donald J. Trump, from New York City. In more recent decades of this Trump life, I discovered his social and financial issues during his Atlantic City years, his loss of his first wife, married and divorced his second wife, and moved on with trouble and otherwise.

I learned he had lost his older brother via alcohol and suicide!

I have no idea why I was so captured by this Trump, captured as if he were a member of my own family. He was neither Dem or Rep politically when he announced that Fox Monday Republican night, that he was going to run for the American Presidency….”like it or not GOPs!”

This GOP of the day was filled with joy. I used to teach Senior Social Studies for years.

I KNEW HE’D WIN, but not in Minnesota. That Hillary was so corrupt had no meaning in Gopherland.

Donald Trump was a good President…..facing crooked Dems, and lousy GOPers.

I have never personally met John Hinderaker……beyond the telephone. I expect GOPers to be honest….Admittingly Donald J. Trump has never been a politician. HE’S BRIGHT AND LOVES HIS COUNTRY AS A GOOD AMERICAN WOULD.

NO ONE IN OUR AMERICAN WHITE HOUSE HAS HAD TO ENDURE THE DISTORTIONS, LIES, CONCOTIONS, AND ASSAULTS AS HAS REPUBLICAN, DONALD J. TRUMP…….(I used to teach senior social studies….but was an active Democrat then!

You seem to be a good man, John Hinderaker! What is it you like so much in the Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer crowd?

Greatest Human Murderer….Stalin or Mao? Or, Do We Know Nothing About OUR HUMAN PAST?

June 12, 2022

How Secret Soviet Killings Led to COVID Tyranny

By Janet Levy at American Thinker:

As the mournful notes of the cello brought the four minutes of The Dying Swan to a close at The Hague on January 24, 1931, the audience was in tears.  Throughout the performance, there had been no dancer — only a moving spotlight emphasizing the absence of Anna Pavlova, the ballerina the world loved.  She had died the day before, of a mysterious lung infection that began almost immediately after her train had left Paris.  She’d told doctors she suspected she’d been poisoned.  Unable to reach a diagnosis, they treated her symptoms but failed to save her.

For Soviet émigrés of the time, the empty stage, the melancholic music, and the spotlight sans performer were poignant symbols of the hundreds of thousands of “liternoye” killings — secret, disguised liquidations staged as natural deaths or suicides — ordered by Joseph Stalin.  His targets were not just rivals in the USSR, but also dissident writers, intellectuals, artists, and performers living abroad.  In fact, from the 1920s to the outbreak of World War II, while Stalin was carrying out purges in the USSR, the émigré community witnessed several mysterious deaths and disappearances.

Stalin worked by the dictum “communism must eliminate what it cannot control.”  “Liternoye” killings were different from the genocides and massacres he oversaw: the liquidation of kulaks, the Holodomor — deaths caused by famine-related decisions in Ukraine — and the purge of nationalities.  Unlike those, “liternoye” killings resulted in deaths from seemingly natural causes.  They would be followed by hasty disposal of bodies and either advantageous glorification (as for  Lenin, a presumed victim of Stalin) or damnatio memoriae (complete erasure from the records and history).  Quite often, hard-to-detect poisons and bioweapons were used for these murders.

In their fast-paced book, The Dancer and the Devil: Stalin, Pavlova and the Road to the Great Pandemic, authors John E. O’Neill and Sarah C. Wynne make the startling but plausible connection joining Pavlova’s death (note that it was from lung disease), communism’s century-old obsession with bioweapons, and the recent development of poisons and pathogens by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that culminated in the worldwide COVID pandemic.

The psychopathic Stalin’s fascination with torture and bioweapons can be gauged from two facts.  He set up Lubyanka as the headquarters of the secret police, with a prison and torture cells.  Lubyanka was also where the gulags and purges were planned.  Not far from it, he created Laboratory One, a sophisticated center for research in poisons and bioweapons.

Stalin’s rise to leadership was through conscienceless, expedient actions.  By 1922, he had become one of Lenin’s closest lieutenants, judged trustworthy and capable of carrying out the liquidation of rivals.  Eventually, after facing an assassination attempt, Lenin came to suspect Stalin of having targeted him, for Stalin was known for a talent in stealth and for betraying or killing friends without qualms.  So Lenin then favored Leon Trotsky.  He dictated a testament for his wife to share with the Communist Party.  It recommended Stalin’s removal.  But Stalin learned of it and had the document suppressed.  Shortly thereafter, Lenin died, and a little later, his family members, too.  It was widely suspected that Stalin had hastened their departure with poison.

The authors painstakingly build their case for the Stalinist ideological lineage of the COVID pandemic and how Pavlova’s death is surely (if tenuously) connected to it.  “Stalin” (translated as “man of steel”) was a self-given alias, modeled on his guru’s alias, “Lenin.”  The choice reflects, and perhaps influenced, his unbending materialism and heartless actions.

Marxism, a materialistic philosophy, is based on class warfare and control of the means of production.  But Stalin extended it into a dictatorial control by the party — meaning himself — of all aspects of people’s minds and existence.  Language, literature, music, art, history, culture — everything must be subservient to the state.  The Soviet state reduced the arts to agitprop and the glorification of the revolution.  Many intellectuals and artists went abroad to avoid persecution and find the freedom in which creativity thrives.  These émigrés — among them Pavlova and impresario producer Sergei Diaghilev — epitomized free, unbroken spirits.  This displeased Stalin immensely, and he ordered many of them killed by his secret police.  The book makes the death of the ethereal, swan-loving Pavlova as much a tragic icon of communism’s murder of the spiritual, artistic side of humankind as of Stalin’s “liternoye” killings.

About the same time as Pavlova was dying, Stalin planned the destruction of two cultural icons of pre-Bolshevik Russia: the Cathedral of Christ the Savior and the Gate of Resurrection.  For he had sworn he would kill G-d, end the Orthodox Church’s hold over the minds and souls of the Russian people, and firmly establish a materialistic worldview.  Thousands of clergymen and believers were shot or sent to gulags.

Meanwhile, Laboratory One and the Special Task Groups responsible for carrying out killings in and outside the USSR were perfecting a variety of methods using “untraceable” bacterial and viral material.  Stalin had the top security echelon, Laboratory One operatives and their families, and many others who knew of these secret ops eliminated, to be replaced with a fresh crop of executioners and scientists.  Despite all his paranoia, Stalin was poisoned in 1953, ending his plan for a nuclear strike on the West, a war that would have destroyed civilization.  It also halted many more purges he had planned.

But evil has a life of its own, and thrives in a world that rejects the spiritual.  Laboratory One grew in power, reach, and danger under newer generations of communist leaders.  Several bioweapons labs were opened, producing weapons capable of killing millions.  “Liternoye” killings were perfected, too, as demonstrated by the 1978 murder of dissident Bulgarian journalist Georgi Markov with a poisoned pellet shot from a pneumatic device rigged in an umbrella.  Though the Soviets pledged not to develop bioweapons under the 1972 Biological Warfare Convention, they spent billions on them through the 1970s to the 1990s.  President Vladimir Putin pursues the poisoning of opponents and the development of biological weapons of mass destruction with zeal.

When the CCP took over China in 1949 with Stalin’s help, a slow osmosis of Stalinism, and with it, the ideology driving Laboratory One, began.  Chairman Mao Zedong imitated the Soviet slaughters with his Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.  The People’s Republic of China, which worshiped Stalin, began a biowar program that has developed deadly toxins and viruses.  With Russian cooperation, the program was thriving by the 1960s.  Since then, China has weaponized Marburg fever and the Ebola and SARS viruses.

The world first became aware of China’s bioweapons capabilities in 2005, when it offered assistance to Iran’s bioweapons program.  Now, with at least fifteen identified facilities, it is believed to have the world’s largest and most sophisticated bioweapons capability.  Five months before the COVID outbreak, the Pentagon had warned that China had a vast chemical- and bio-warfare program.  The outbreaks of hemorrhagic fever and COVID have been characterized as inadvertent leaks, but who trusts China?  Or trusts its supreme leader, Xi Jinping, who, like Stalin and Putin, has initiated purges, has ordered genocides (of Falun Gong, Uyghurs, and Tibetans), has murdered dissidents, and won’t hesitate to use bioterror?

China’s COVID cover-up has included the destruction of forensic samples, the mysterious deaths or disappearances of scientists who exposed the Wuhan lab’s work, and an iron control of the narrative.  Xi joins the ranks of the greatest killers and cover-up artists in human history.  Stalinism inspires inhumanity in its worshipers, as it has in Putin and Xi.  The Dancer and the Devil traces the length of that dark and demonic reality — from Pavlova to the COVID pandemic.

As America Becomes MORE SAVAGE!

 JUNE 12, 2022 BY JOHN HINDERAKER at PowerLine:

SENATE GUN DEAL LOOKS OK [UPDATED]

A bipartisan group of senators have announced an agreement on gun legislation. I am not sure whether their deal has been reduced to legislative language, and I don’t know whether it will get through the Senate, or whether Democrats in the House will vote for it. (If I were a Democrat, I would think that the deal is extremely weak, and its main effect may be to take gun control off the table in November.)

As summarized by the senators’ press release (link above), the deal sounds pretty good to me. There is no foolishness about “assault weapons.” It includes a focus on mental health, recognizing the fact that our country is essentially without a mental health care system since the institutions were emptied and closed several decades ago:

Investment in Children and Family Mental Health Services

● National expansion of community behavioral health center model; major investments to increase access to mental health and suicide prevention programs; and other support services available in the community, including crisis and trauma intervention and recovery.

I don’t have much faith in this kind of government program, but at least it gestures in the right direction–mental health–rather than toward pointless gun control regulations.

And this, I think, is a great idea. It actually closes a genuine loophole:

Under 21 Enhanced Review Process

● For buyers under 21 years of age, requires an investigative period to review juvenile and mental health records, including checks with state databases and local law enforcement.

As I understand it, the NICS system currently does not have access to juvenile justice records. Thus an 18 or 19 year old will show up as having no record, and therefore no impediment to buying guns. And yet, juveniles commit a high percentage of violent crimes. This strikes me as a good step in the direction of not coddling juveniles to the extent we have in the past.

I am not sure what this next point means. Is it intended to incentivize states to enact “red flag” laws? Here we need to see the actual legislation:

Intervention Orders

● Provides resources to states and tribes to create and administer laws that help ensure deadly weapons are kept out of the hands of individuals whom a court has determined to be a significant danger to themselves or others, consistent with state and federal due process and constitutional protections.

The bill apparently will help to finance school safety officers. This is really a local function and “support[ing] school violence prevention efforts” probably just means putting more liberals on the public payroll. But still, to the extent that it means more armed guards in schools, it is a move in the right direction, not the wrong direction:

Funding for School Safety Resources

● Invests in programs to help institute safety measures in and around primary and secondary schools, support school violence prevention efforts and provide training to school personnel and students.

There is more to the bill, which you can see summarized at the link. The bottom line, based on the descriptions we have so far, is that it could have been a lot worse. In particular, bringing juvenile records into the NICS system is an excellent idea. And if “doing something” deflates the gun control issue politically, at least for the time being, this is not a bad price to pay.

STEVE adds: Everyone assumes that this bill is a lock to pass in the House, since there is no filibuster, etc. I’m not so sure. With the House so close, I could easily see five to 10 House Democrats in tough, semi-rural districts (like Virginia’s Abigail Spanberger) who will not want to cast a “gun control vote.” And some lefties like AOC might oppose the bill because it isn’t strong enough.

UPDATE: For what it’s worth, Maxine Waters says the House will quickly pass the Senate bill, and, per Waters, Nancy Pelosi believes the same. As Steve points out, it wouldn’t take many defectors to falsify that prediction. If the bill does pass the House, it seems to me that it will take the air out of the gun control balloon, as Democrats are desperate for accomplishments and will defend it as a positive compromise.