THE DEM FBI!

August 29, 2022

The FBI: A Campaign Arm of the Democrat Party

By Brian C. Joondeph at American Thinker:

“Fidelity, Bravery, and Integrity” is the FBI motto. According to the FBI website, this motto, “Succinctly describes the motivating force behind the men and women of the FBI.”

The motto may have been accurate in the 1965-1974 TV series, “The FBI”, where Efrem Zimbalist Jr epitomized those words every Sunday night on prime-time television. But today the FBI has morphed into a campaign arm of the Democrat Party, attempting to influence elections in favor of their preferred candidates, acting more like the East German Stasi or Soviet KGB rather than the premier law enforcement agency in the world.

Perhaps a new motto of “Funny Business Incorporated” or “Friendly to Biden Interests” would be more appropriate to their apparent new mission. When did the FBI, the largest and most heavily armed law enforcement agency in America, now inserting itself unconstitutionally into American politics, pivot from fidelity and integrity to partisanship and dishonesty?

Start with the 2016 presidential election. Many are already familiar with Spygate. According to Jeff Carlson:

Efforts by high-ranking officials in the CIA, FBI, Department of Justice (DOJ), and State Department to portray President Donald Trump as having colluded with Russia were the culmination of years of bias and politicization under the Obama administration.

The weaponization of the intelligence community and other government agencies created an environment that allowed for obstruction in the investigation into Hillary Clinton and the relentless pursuit of a manufactured collusion narrative against Trump.
A willing and complicit media spread unsubstantiated leaks as facts in an effort to promote the Russia-collusion narrative.
The Spygate scandal also raises a bigger question: Was the 2016 election a one-time aberration, or was it symptomatic of decades of institutional political corruption?
The FBI was in the middle of this true insurrection, meant to derail a presidential campaign, election, transition, and administration with fabricated claims of collusion, lying to Congress and the American people, and then attempting to cover everything up via the Muller/Weissman investigation, including a recent raid on Mar-a-Lago to possibly confiscate incriminating Spygate documents in President Trump’s possession.
Other Obama administration agencies and officials were also involved but the FBI was in the thick of it, with Director James Comey and Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. Other familiar names include Deputy Assistant Director of Counterintelligence Peter Strzok and his girlfriend FBI attorney Lisa Page.

Don’t forget another FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith who knowingly lied on a FISA warrant application about Carter Page’s work for the CIA. Despite pleading guilty to a felony false statement charge, Clinesmith is once again free to practice law. Are any of the January 6 detainees recipients of such judicial largess?
There has been little or no reckoning for these Spygate players and rather than being punished for their criminal and seditious activity, they have been rewarded with university teaching gigs, book deals, and frequent appearances on left-wing cable news shows. Perhaps Special Counsel John Durham will eventually hold the FBI bad actors to account, but Spygate is now six years in the past and it is looking increasingly likely that the FBI will skate.
Jeff Carlson raised the interesting question of whether Spygate was a one-off event or part of a larger and more systemic corruption of the FBI and other three-letter agencies. Despite not derailing candidate or President Donald Trump in 2016, they certainly tried again in 2020, this time succeeding. And they are already working on 2024, before a single candidate has announced his or her candidacy.
The FBI obtained Hunter Biden’s laptop in December 2019, a full year before the presidential election. Rather than investigating and reporting on what they found, they slow rolled the laptop as it revealed knowledge of and involvement in foreign business deals with candidate Joe “Big Guy” Biden and his son Hunter, in a manner that could be construed as a quid pro quo of selling the office of the president to foreign interests.
A letter from Senator Ron Johnson to Justice Department Inspector Michael Horowitz spelled out the FBI’s role in again “campaigning” for the Democrat candidate. Senator Johnson asserted the following,
Whistleblowers have come forward to Congress alleging that FBI officials intentionally undermined efforts to investigate Hunter Biden.
After the FBI obtained the Hunter Biden laptop from the Wilmington, DE computer shop, these whistleblowers stated that local FBI leadership told employees, “You will not look at that Hunter Biden laptop” and that the FBI is “not going to change the outcome of the election again.” Further, these whistleblowers allege that the FBI did not begin to examine the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop until after the 2020 presidential election — potentially a year after the FBI obtained the laptop in December 2019.

And influence an election they did. Media Research Center conducted a poll of 1,750 voters in seven swing states and learned that, “One of every six Biden voters (17%) said they would not have voted for him had they known the facts about several of the news stories the national media refused to investigate thoroughly because they might have hurt his candidacy.”

Jesse Watters noted that the 2020 presidential election was decided by 44,000 votes in Georgia, Wisconsin, and Arizona. The FBI suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story would have been more than enough to account for this margin if the above survey was reflective of voter sentiment, demonstrating how the FBI interfered with and likely altered the outcome the election.

Not only did the FBI interfere directly, they also urged social media to do the same, the government suppressing the right to free speech by proxy. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained to Joe Rogan recently,

Speaking on an episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, Zuckerberg explained, “The FBI, I think, basically came to us — some folks on our team — and was like, ‘Hey, just so you know, like, you should be on high alert…  We thought that there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election. We have it on notice that, basically, there’s about to be some kind of dump of that’s similar to that. So just be vigilant.’”

Zuckerberg acknowledged that “the distribution on Facebook was decreased” of the New York Post’s story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, noting, “fewer people saw it than would’ve otherwise.”

The FBI had the laptop for almost a year and right before the election conveniently declared it Russian propaganda, a falsehood parroted by “51 former intelligence officials.” The FBI, and Big Tech under FBI encouragement, fabricated and spread Russian propaganda in 2016 when it could hurt the Republican candidate and suppressed and censored a real story in 2020 when it could hurt the Democrat candidate. That certainly sounds like election interference.

The Mar-a-Lago raid is a shot across the bow for any GOP presidential candidates for 2024, Trump being the presumptive nominee at this point. Will the FBI ask the DoJ to indict Trump on nonsensical declassification accusations? While they gave candidate Hillary Clinton a pass despite her using an unsecured server and personal email account to traffic highly classified emails? The FBI is delivering a warning to Trump. Will Governor Ron DeSantis be the next one to have his home raided by the FBI?

We expect this type of behavior from the corporate media, academia, Hollywood, big finance, big pharma, big tech, and other Democrat party constituent groups, but not the FBI and other government agencies.

This is a true insurrection, not the nonsense “soon to be former” representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger are bloviating over. And where are congressional Republicans? Most are voicing support for the FBI, ignoring this blatant subversion of democracy and the Constitution.

Perhaps most Republicans support the new FBI mission — stopping Donald Trump at all costs, ignoring the weaponization of the federal government against political enemies. Will voters reward milquetoast Republicans, most of whom are no better than their Democrat colleagues across the aisle, or will many say “why vote Republican,” throwing up their hands on election day, not wasting time on meaningless elections? Such a strategy may not lead to an expected red wave.

Is a weaponized national police force something the Founding Fathers wrote into the Constitution? Or just another example of America sliding from a representative republic into a totalitarian state?

Brian C Joondeph, MD, is a physician and writer.

Fascist Dems Call President Trump ‘Semi-Fascist’?

The Strangest Thing About ‘Semi-Fascist’ Trump

Of the last three presidents, Trump was either the most indifferent or the most obstructed when it came to using government agencies for his own partisan political advantages or to neuter his enemies.

By Victor Davis Hanson at American Greatness:

August 28, 2022

For the Left, Donald Trump is synonymous with “fascism” (or “semi-fascism,” as Joe Biden put it the other day). And for Liz Cheney and most of the NeverTrumpers, he remains an existential threat to democracy. 

But to quantify those charges, what exactly has Trump done extralegally—as opposed to his bombast and braggadocio about what he might have wished to have done? 

And what are the standards by which to judge this supposed menace? Did Trump illegally and with a mere signature nullify over $300 billion of contracted student loans—to firm up his college-student and college-graduate base nine weeks before the midterm elections?

Did Donald Trump weaponize the feared IRS, the logical place to find fascistic tendencies of any president bent on using government to punish his enemies? Did he push through a plan to add 87,000 new IRS investigative agents at a time of national discord?

For the last five years, Trump was rumored to be under investigation by the IRS. Currently, his accountant is facing felony sentencing for advising improper write-offs. 

Certainly, from the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop and the remarks of Hunter’s associates like Tony Bobulinksi, the Biden family raked in millions of foreign dollars. Evidence so far suggests Joe Biden was a recipient (as the “Big Guy”) of 10 percent of these quid pro quo payments. At times, Bobulinksi may have sent a strapped and broke Hunter thousands of dollars in cash gifts. Were any of these stealthy transactions taxed? Does the recently heavily Biden-endowed IRS care?

If Trump wished to abuse his power over the IRS, he would have followed the Obama model of weaponizing it during a reelection year to go after his ideological enemies. 

In Obama’s case, the tax agency slow-walked or denied nonprofit status for groups whose ideology was deemed not helpful to Obama’s campaign in 2012. There was a reason Lois Lerner invoked the Fifth Amendment, and it was not to protect Donald Trump.

Politicized National Security

Did Trump blatantly use the national security apparatus of the government to enhance his own reelection bid in 2020? That is, did he do anything analogous to Obama’s gambit with Vladimir Putin in 2011? 

Was Trump ever caught on a hot mic promising a Russian president that he would try to ease Russian worries about Eastern European missile defense if only the Russians would give him space during his 2012 campaign for president against Mitt Romney?  

What we forget about the 2011 Seoul, South Korea hot-mic Obama exchange with then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev was that all the conditions outlined in their hushed 2011 recap were adhered to by both parties: Obama did dismantle plans for a joint U.S.-Eastern European long-range missile defense—a system that might be now of advantage to the U.S. and its allies. Putin did stay quiet during the Obama campaign cycle. Obama did get reelected. And Putin did invade Ukraine and Crimea only after Obama was elected (or, a cynic might put it, because Obama was reelected). 

A current Trump “collusion” critic, mutatis mutandis, might have surmised that a colluding Barack Obama put the national security of the United States and its allies at risk in order to use his office to massage campaign advantages over Mitt Romney in 2012. And the ultimate result of such machinations was a loss of U.S. deterrence that in part explained Russian aggression in 2014.

Weaponizing Justice

Did Trump weaponize the FBI? That is, did the FBI go after journalists, former Obama officials, or Democratic Party activists who variously were attacking Don Jr. or Ivanka on the pretenses of retrieving one of their lost laptops or diaries? 

Did Trump use Republican National Committee firewalls to transfer money to private lobbyists and law firms to find dirt on Hillary Clinton in 2016, and then turn it all over to the FBI to launch a Crossfire Hurricane investigation of Clinton, centered around a Trump-hired ex-spy who became a paid FBI informant? 

Are there texts of Trump-era FBI agents talking about how to “stop” Hillary Clinton’s or Biden’s election bid?

Did Trump’s FBI, in the predawn hours, burst into the homes of New York Times reporters—in James O’Keefe -style—and march them outside in their underwear, all for the possible “crime” of receiving a stolen draft of the Supreme Court early draft of the Dobbs decision? Which is the greater “crime”—trafficking in clearly stolen confidential Supreme Court papers or looking at the abandoned, lost, and lurid diary of a wayward presidential daughter?

Did the Trump Justice Department start an investigation of the suspected illegal lobbying of Joe Biden and Hunter Biden, who used the former’s political connections to win large cash payments from foreign governments? Were there Trump officials in the permanent Justice Department who went after his various political opponents on the pretexts of the Logan Act?  Or did the Trump Administration help spread the allegations of any hired anti-Clinton ex-spies and salt them around the bureaucracies?

Speaking of Trump and threats to the democratic order, did any Trump attorney general refuse a congressional subpoena, as former Attorney General Eric Holder did? Was anyone held in contempt of Congress, as Holder was? Did any simply refuse to honor subpoenas and withhold requested documents from Congress, as the Obama Administration did time and again?

Did Trump order an FBI raid on the Obama home, on rumors that there were thousands of documents under dispute with the National Archives in his possession, especially given the Obama record of fiercely fighting any Freedom of Information Act lawsuits to release his documents? 

Was a John Podesta put in leg irons by the FBI? Was Robbie Mook’s house stormed to learn of what he knew about Hillary Clinton’s missing emails? 

Was Jake Sullivan’s phone grabbed by the FBI at an airport to determine his role in the Russian collusion hoax? 

Or, with a look ahead to his own reelection, did Trump in 2018 order a raid on the Biden home, in search of “lost” Biden vice presidential documents, supposedly improperly removed after Biden’s tenure that might have shed light on the Biden family’s extracurricular foreign lobbying?

Where Is Trump’s Deep State?

Are there now any former Trump loyalists who, as “anonymous” officials in cabinet agencies or obstructionists on the National Security Council, are writing op-eds about their stealthy daily efforts to undermine Biden’s executive orders or his administration’s action? Is anyone listening to Biden’s phone calls with foreign leaders while working with Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee and while prepping a “whistleblower” to find grounds for impeachment based on some of the things Biden has allegedly said to foreign leaders? 

Did Pfizer rush prematurely to announce a viable COVID-19 vaccination to aid Trump’s reelection—or in contrast, did it slow walk a viable vaccination’s rollout until after the election to massage the result?

Are there now “50 former intelligence officials” who signed affidavits in support of Trump’s allegations about the authenticity of Hunter’s laptop? Are there dozens of retired four-stars now opportunely blasting Joe Biden’s historic humiliation of the United States in Kabul? Have any retired admirals mocked the Uniform Code of Military Justice to write New York Times op-eds suggesting a befuddled Biden leave office “the sooner, the better”?

Are there former Trump officials writing in Foreign Policy that Biden is a disaster who could be removed by impeachment or the 25th Amendment—or more rapidly by a military coup? Are retired officers writing to General Mark Milley urging him to act should he feel in the next election that a likely Republican loss seems suspicious?

Election Interference and Denial? 

Between 2017 and 2020, did Trump’s team systematically seek to change the voting laws in key states to radically transform traditional balloting, in a mail-in or early voting revolution, in which only 30 percent of the electorate would vote on Election Day?

If Trump improperly questioned the ballot result of the 2020 election, then he sinned in the long tradition of presidential ballot objectors, including former U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), January 6 committee chairman himself Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), and Hillary Clinton, who claimed Trump was an illegitimately elected president and advised Biden not to concede if he lost the 2020 popular vote. A defeated Stacey Abrams toured the country claiming she was the “real” governor of Georgia, yet nobody smears her as an “election truther.”

Was there any “dark money” effort analogous to the efforts of corporate and tech money along with DNC activists and Biden operators in what Time magazine’s Molly Ball described as a “conspiracy” to ensure the defeat of Trump’s opponent? 

Did Trump’s team coordinate with right-wing billionaires to infuse hundreds of billions of dollars to modulate street protests, to absorb the work of state and local registrars in key precincts, and to censor unfavorable stories on social media? 

Trump impotently railed and bayed to the wind about the “fake news” reporters at his rallies. By contrast, the Left, both private elites and public officials, kept quiet and injected half a billion dollars to alter the way people voted and effectively to censor the way people produced and consumed the news.

Restoring Our Norms?

How about Trump’s efforts to revolutionize the very system of government? Did he promote a court-packing scheme to ensure he might not just get a 5-4 majority, but perhaps an 11-4 conservative advantage in a new 15-justice Supreme Court? 

Did he keep mum while right-wing demonstrators swarmed the homes of Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan? Did his attorney general ignore the obvious felonies involved in such threatening tactics? Did Trump work with his Republican Congress in 2017 to end the filibuster to ensure his legislation would not be stonewalled? Did he dream up ways of getting rid of the Electoral College so the “blue wall” might never return? 

It’s alleged that Trump was insincere when he approved the request for thousands of federal troops to be available to local law enforcement on January 6, or that he did not really mean it when he instructed pro-Trump demonstrators on January 6 to “Peacefully and patriotically march to the Capitol.” 

Perhaps even the hint of encouraging any type of protest was reckless in such partisan times. But just days after violent protestors attacked Secret Service agents manning barricades and had sought to storm onto the White House grounds, did Trump boast to the nation of the ongoing demonstrations, as did Kamala Harris, soon to be a vice presidential candidate?

They’re not going to stop. And everyone beware, because they’re not going to stop. They’re not going to stop before Election Day in November, and they’re not going to stop after Election Day. And that should be—everyone should take note of that, on both levels, that they’re not going to let up, and they should not, and we should not.

Was that a sober or insurrectionary thing to advise in a summer of rioting that saw 120 days of violence, $2 billion in damage, 35 dead, and hundreds of police officers injured?

Did Trump as president meet with CIA and FBI directors who, in their weekly and daily briefings, apprised him of efforts to monitor, spy, and infiltrate the campaign of Joe Biden?

Was there, after 2017, a Republican majority committee investigating the former Obama role in launching Operation Crossfire Hurricane, or Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s secret meeting with Bill Clinton while she was investigating Hillary Clinton? And if there were, would Obama loyalists in the House be excluded by the Republican speaker from participating in House investigations that also would allow no hostile or even neutral witnesses, no general counsel’s report, and no cross-examinations?

The strange thing about Trump was that he did not use extraordinary powers to investigate anyone unlawfully. He boasted, he railed, he screamed, he whined, he became at times crude and obnoxious. But he did not use the FBI, the CIA, the Justice Department, or the IRS to go after the Obamas, the Clintons, or the Bidens. 

Instead, he became the most investigated, probed, smeared, and autopsied president in modern history. Trump’s legislative agenda did not include revolutionary changes in the Electoral College or the filibuster, or radical changes to the Supreme Court.

In fact, of the last three presidents, Trump was either the most inept or indifferent, or the most obstructed concerning any issue of using government agencies for his own partisan political advantages or to neuter his enemies. 

In truth, the entire apparatus of permanent government—the Pentagon hierarchy, the Washington elites at the FBI and CIA, the permanently entrenched at the Justice Department, and the apparat at the IRS all despised Donald Trump. And they did not just hate him but acted on their antipathy by using their powers of government to destroy his campaign in 2016, to undermine his transition, to either obstruct or sabotage his initiatives while president, and to hound him as an ex-president. As ex-felon and FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith put it of his own illegal effort to destroy a president, “Viva le [sic] resistance.” Is that the sort of FBI we want—a cadre of self-described revolutionaries?

Donald Trump was impeached for raising the question of Biden family corruption in Ukraine with the Ukrainian president and delaying offensive military aid that had never been approved by a Democratic president.

Evidence since Trump’s impeachment suggests he was prescient in his warning to the Kyiv government to stay out of domestic American politics. Everything thing we know since that 2021 impeachment vote solidifies—not contradicts—Trump’s point that the Biden family was corrupt, and Hunter Biden was receiving large sums of money from Ukraine and China solely because Joe Biden had been vice president and was seen as a possible or even likely future president worthy of such corrupt investment. Or to put it another way, why would those with contacts with the Ukrainian government ever pay millions to an incompetent, drug-addicted miscreant like Hunter Biden, if not for pay-for-play influence?

In that context, Joe Biden’s early boast that he got a Ukrainian attorney general fired, most likely for probing too deeply matters involving his family, gives credence to Trump’s instincts. So does the fact that both Obama and Biden for a time stopped shipments of offensive weapons to Ukraine, while Trump for a time only delayed them but eventually gave them what they wished.

The result of this unprecedented effort to accuse Trump of using government fascistically while fascistically using government to destroy a president is all too clear in the destroyed careers who sought to undermine constitutional government. What John Brennan, James Clapper, Kevin Clinesmith, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Bruce Ohr, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, and a host of retired flag officers and intelligence operatives share is not just their venomous antipathy toward an elected president and their efforts rhetorically and often concretely to neuter him, but their subsequent disgrace even among those who once cheered them on.

Most Of Today’s Adult Americans Under Fifty ARE GODLESS AND EMPTY AS THEY WERE TAUGHT!

The Short Life (And Amazingly Fast Death) Of The FBI’s Mar-A-Lago Play

BY: CHRISTOPHER BEDFORD at the Federalist:

AUGUST 29, 2022

Our country is far from healthy today, but a collective laugh at the FBI’s joke of an affidavit is a long-needed step in the right direction.

CHRISTOPHER BEDFORD

The FBI’s news cycle just ain’t the same as it once was.

Mere moments after the Department of Justice and FBI released the near-completely redacted affidavit they used to justify raiding former President Donald Trump’s home, their super-dooper-secrecy was the subject of widespread ridicule.

They didn’t even catch a full minute’s peace. No Republican senators rushed to their defense (though a few were notably quiet). There was no “let’s wait and see” from the usual deep state apologists.

Instead, both Republican politicians and center-right media were quick to hit back against what they correctly viewed as a middle finger to both the court that ordered the affidavit’s release, and the American people who expect transparency when the state raids its political opponents.

It’s good to see. It’s strong and healthy that not all Americans nod along when the FBI targets former presidents, murmuring that he must have done something wrong. This wasn’t always the case, though.

Just a few short years ago, the Department of Justice would enjoy the benefit of the doubt, from voters and politicians alike. Seven short years ago, we would have wondered what Trump had done that was so bad the straight-shooters at the DOJ couldn’t even tell us.

Today, a plurality of independent voters, a strong majority of Republican voters, and 20 percent of Democrats believe the DOJ and FBI “are too political, corrupt, and not to be trusted,” according to Trafalgar Group polling.

The impact of this shift — and the boost it brings to the republic’s health — is measurable in the speed of the news cycles covering the latest twists and turns. When the attacks on then-candidate Trump began, with articles the FBI placed in Mother Jones and Yahoo! News (before using those articles to “corroborate” and justify an FBI investigation), Republicans squirmed and called for more time; center-right reporters and pundits cringed and wondered; and the American people worried that Trump might have a dangerous relationship with the Kremlin.

As the years wore on and the Trump administration came into office, the scandal expanded. General and National Security Adviser Michael Flynn resigned under a cloud of FBI-induced suspicion. A year later, he was framed for allegedly lying to now-disgraced FBI agent Peter Strzok. (It would take two years before transcripts were made public that showed Special Investigator Robert Mueller’s team had lied to the public about the very basis of the FBI’s investigation into the general.)

Weeks after Flynn resigned, the FBI-, Democrat- and media-driven Russian narrative took another head, when Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from the case. Sessions was “a good Republican.” He trusted the FBI and the reporting he’d read in the media. He even wondered if he’d fallen afoul of the law by speaking to the Russian ambassador in a D.C. handshake line.

The following month, Sessions’ deputy appointed Special Counsel Mueller to lead the investigation of just how treasonous President Donald J. Trump really was.

His investigation would eventually come to naught (because there was no Russian collusion to be found). But while it went on — while the Steele dossier was exposed as a laughable hoax, while FBI informant Stefan Halper’s lies fell apart, while media report by media report were proven false — the majority of “good Republicans” (and a good number of center-right reporters and pundits) remained silent.

“Let the investigation run its course!” they said, because they believed the investigators. A decent number among them who hated their new president even hoped the investigators were right.

The shadow of Mueller hung over the president for two full years before the big day, when the man America had trusted to expose all the evil doings of the president was exposed on national television as a clueless man with no evidence for the charges (and early symptoms of dementia).

“Let the investigation run its course!” the Republicans (and a good number of center-right reporters and pundits) had said again because they had believed the investigators — and the decent number among them who’d hated their new president had even hoped the investigators were right.

Neither the Democrats nor their media friends were done, however; and less than two months after the final collapse of the Mueller probe, they launched a new round of investigations, this time into the president’s dealings with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

For months, the investigations dragged on, while leakers and Democrat politicians rotated through the media dropping false accusations and making terrible predictions.

“Let the investigation run its course!” a smaller-but-still-prominent number of Republicans and center-right pundits said because once again they believed the investigators. Once again, those among them who hated the president even hoped the investigators were right.

But five years in, the spell was breaking. In the end, it came down to a vote, where Nancy Pelosi’s Democratic House impeached the president on partisan lines and the Republican Senate acquitted him, with only Republican Mitt Romney joining the Democrats in their guilty votes. Ever-loyal Mitt was still a “good Republican.”

Along the way, lie after lie and hoax after hoax was thrown Republicans’ way. Justice Brett Kavanaugh was a gang rapist; Trump was ignoring Russian murder bounties on American soldiers; and on and on. Each time, fewer and fewer Republicans and center-right pundits went along.

Each time, the “good Republicans” made more of a mockery of themselves and their much-cited “principles.”

Each time, the movie was a little shorter. The years the Democrats and the FBI had once had to peddle their lies had turned to mere months.

The suspicion didn’t stop the lies, of course, but when the FBI finally raided the president’s home, they found those months had turned to mere hours. While Republican leaders who hated Trump, like Sen. Mitch McConnell, were still willing to give the feds a few days, within hours of the raid Republicans as mainstream as Sen. Marco Rubio and as pro-FBI as Sen. Lindsey Graham were denouncing the FBI.

In this new atmosphere, the movie played in fast-forward. When the DOJ’s accusations of misplaced records met broad scrutiny, they became accusations of nuclear danger. When even those met broad skepticism, they morphed into accusations of active Russian treason. No one was buying a ticket this time, though, and by the time a judge forced the FBI to release the affidavit they’d used to justify the raid, expectations were low.

When the FBI finally released its joke-of-an-affidavit, its antics had become a full-blown internet meme.

It’s generally a dangerous thing for a public to distrust its institutions, but in this case, it’s just the opposite. The reality is while the FBI has indeed accomplished a thing or two in the near-century it’s existed in its modern form, it’s always been highly politicized.

More than 70 years ago, then-Congressman Richard Nixon didn’t trust them with the damning evidence he’d gathered to indict top State Department official Alger Hiss as a Communist spy, because he knew they’d bury the embarrassing facts to protect the administration.

More than 50 years ago, the FBI bugged Sen. Barry Goldwater’s campaign phones and placed a spy on the team he’d built to defeat President Lyndon Johnson. That same year, they sent a letter to Dr. Martin Luther King and his wife, seemingly implying he should commit suicide within 34 days — and threatening to expose tape-recordings of his multiple sexual affairs if he did not.

By 1975, the FBI had become so politicized, and its use of power so abusive, the Senate launched the bipartisan Church Committee to investigate it and other American intelligence community abuses. Among the FBI’s investigators: Goldwater, and fellow conservative icon Sen. John Tower.

In the years that followed, a chastised FBI would shift its focus to law enforcement over intelligence gathering — a transformation that was rapidly reversed after the 9/11 attacks. The FBI of today carries the institutional distortion this change brought down on the institution.

Politicians such as former Vice President Mike Pence might still believe the public’s skepticism of long-politicized law enforcement is a threat to our country, but neither history nor more recent facts bear them out.

Republican midwits can cite law and order to justify their servility and their ambitions all they like. In a healthy country, the people are deeply skeptical of opaque power — especially when it’s repeatedly used to lie and persecute political opponents. We’re far from healthy today, but a collective laugh at the FBI’s joke of an affidavit is a long-needed step in the right direction.

Can You Still Remember What A Dime Is?

AUGUST 29, 2022 BY SCOTT JOHNSON at Power Line:

CANCEL THIS

This past Thursday President Biden announced his unconstitutional plan to “forgive” student loans in some massive cumulative amount. The White House has posted a transcript of Biden’s remarks here.

According to Biden, it won’t cost you a dime: “The point is this: There is plenty of deficit reduction to pay for the programs — cumulative deficit reduction — to pay for the programs many times over.” I’d like to get a fact-check on that whopper.

I decried the scheme in “The cancelations.” To say the least, It is of dubious legality, to say the least. It is cynical beyond belief. It is also incredibly unfair to citizens who have foregone college or paid their debts. Making honest citizens feel like chumps should be beyond the bounds. That was my take.

I’d also like to see a fair poll on the politics of the scheme. When a patent phony like Ohio Democratic Senatorial candidate Tim Ryan declines to sign on, I infer it must be a loser on this score as well. That is a dead giveaway.

When it comes to talking the talk, Ryan is a human weathervane. I’m not much on the nuts and bolts of politics, but I infer that Republicans ought to hammer the blatant cynicism and injustice of the cancelation scheme.

Trump? An American Hero!

The Strangest Thing About ‘Semi-Fascist’ Trump

Of the last three presidents, Trump was either the most indifferent or the most obstructed when it came to using government agencies for his own partisan political advantages or to neuter his enemies.

By Victor Davis Hanson at American Greatness:

August 28, 2022

For the Left, Donald Trump is synonymous with “fascism” (or “semi-fascism,” as Joe Biden put it the other day). And for Liz Cheney and most of the NeverTrumpers, he remains an existential threat to democracy. 

But to quantify those charges, what exactly has Trump done extralegally—as opposed to his bombast and braggadocio about what he might have wished to have done? 

And what are the standards by which to judge this supposed menace? Did Trump illegally and with a mere signature nullify over $300 billion of contracted student loans—to firm up his college-student and college-graduate base nine weeks before the midterm elections?

Did Donald Trump weaponize the feared IRS, the logical place to find fascistic tendencies of any president bent on using government to punish his enemies? Did he push through a plan to add 87,000 new IRS investigative agents at a time of national discord?

For the last five years, Trump was rumored to be under investigation by the IRS. Currently, his accountant is facing felony sentencing for advising improper write-offs. 

Certainly, from the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop and the remarks of Hunter’s associates like Tony Bobulinksi, the Biden family raked in millions of foreign dollars. Evidence so far suggests Joe Biden was a recipient (as the “Big Guy”) of 10 percent of these quid pro quo payments. At times, Bobulinksi may have sent a strapped and broke Hunter thousands of dollars in cash gifts. Were any of these stealthy transactions taxed? Does the recently heavily Biden-endowed IRS care?

If Trump wished to abuse his power over the IRS, he would have followed the Obama model of weaponizing it during a reelection year to go after his ideological enemies. 

In Obama’s case, the tax agency slow-walked or denied nonprofit status for groups whose ideology was deemed not helpful to Obama’s campaign in 2012. There was a reason Lois Lerner invoked the Fifth Amendment, and it was not to protect Donald Trump.

Politicized National Security

Did Trump blatantly use the national security apparatus of the government to enhance his own reelection bid in 2020? That is, did he do anything analogous to Obama’s gambit with Vladimir Putin in 2011? 

Was Trump ever caught on a hot mic promising a Russian president that he would try to ease Russian worries about Eastern European missile defense if only the Russians would give him space during his 2012 campaign for president against Mitt Romney?  

What we forget about the 2011 Seoul, South Korea hot-mic Obama exchange with then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev was that all the conditions outlined in their hushed 2011 recap were adhered to by both parties: Obama did dismantle plans for a joint U.S.-Eastern European long-range missile defense—a system that might be now of advantage to the U.S. and its allies. Putin did stay quiet during the Obama campaign cycle. Obama did get reelected. And Putin did invade Ukraine and Crimea only after Obama was elected (or, a cynic might put it, because Obama was reelected). 

A current Trump “collusion” critic, mutatis mutandis, might have surmised that a colluding Barack Obama put the national security of the United States and its allies at risk in order to use his office to massage campaign advantages over Mitt Romney in 2012. And the ultimate result of such machinations was a loss of U.S. deterrence that in part explained Russian aggression in 2014.

Weaponizing Justice

Did Trump weaponize the FBI? That is, did the FBI go after journalists, former Obama officials, or Democratic Party activists who variously were attacking Don Jr. or Ivanka on the pretenses of retrieving one of their lost laptops or diaries? 

Did Trump use Republican National Committee firewalls to transfer money to private lobbyists and law firms to find dirt on Hillary Clinton in 2016, and then turn it all over to the FBI to launch a Crossfire Hurricane investigation of Clinton, centered around a Trump-hired ex-spy who became a paid FBI informant? 

Are there texts of Trump-era FBI agents talking about how to “stop” Hillary Clinton’s or Biden’s election bid?

Did Trump’s FBI, in the predawn hours, burst into the homes of New York Times reporters—in James O’Keefe -style—and march them outside in their underwear, all for the possible “crime” of receiving a stolen draft of the Supreme Court early draft of the Dobbs decision? Which is the greater “crime”—trafficking in clearly stolen confidential Supreme Court papers or looking at the abandoned, lost, and lurid diary of a wayward presidential daughter?

Did the Trump Justice Department start an investigation of the suspected illegal lobbying of Joe Biden and Hunter Biden, who used the former’s political connections to win large cash payments from foreign governments? Were there Trump officials in the permanent Justice Department who went after his various political opponents on the pretexts of the Logan Act?  Or did the Trump Administration help spread the allegations of any hired anti-Clinton ex-spies and salt them around the bureaucracies?

Speaking of Trump and threats to the democratic order, did any Trump attorney general refuse a congressional subpoena, as former Attorney General Eric Holder did? Was anyone held in contempt of Congress, as Holder was? Did any simply refuse to honor subpoenas and withhold requested documents from Congress, as the Obama Administration did time and again?

Did Trump order an FBI raid on the Obama home, on rumors that there were thousands of documents under dispute with the National Archives in his possession, especially given the Obama record of fiercely fighting any Freedom of Information Act lawsuits to release his documents? 

Was a John Podesta put in leg irons by the FBI? Was Robbie Mook’s house stormed to learn of what he knew about Hillary Clinton’s missing emails? 

Was Jake Sullivan’s phone grabbed by the FBI at an airport to determine his role in the Russian collusion hoax? 

Or, with a look ahead to his own reelection, did Trump in 2018 order a raid on the Biden home, in search of “lost” Biden vice presidential documents, supposedly improperly removed after Biden’s tenure that might have shed light on the Biden family’s extracurricular foreign lobbying?

Where Is Trump’s Deep State?

Are there now any former Trump loyalists who, as “anonymous” officials in cabinet agencies or obstructionists on the National Security Council, are writing op-eds about their stealthy daily efforts to undermine Biden’s executive orders or his administration’s action? Is anyone listening to Biden’s phone calls with foreign leaders while working with Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee and while prepping a “whistleblower” to find grounds for impeachment based on some of the things Biden has allegedly said to foreign leaders? 

Did Pfizer rush prematurely to announce a viable COVID-19 vaccination to aid Trump’s reelection—or in contrast, did it slow walk a viable vaccination’s rollout until after the election to massage the result?

Are there now “50 former intelligence officials” who signed affidavits in support of Trump’s allegations about the authenticity of Hunter’s laptop? Are there dozens of retired four-stars now opportunely blasting Joe Biden’s historic humiliation of the United States in Kabul? Have any retired admirals mocked the Uniform Code of Military Justice to write New York Times op-eds suggesting a befuddled Biden leave office “the sooner, the better”?

Are there former Trump officials writing in Foreign Policy that Biden is a disaster who could be removed by impeachment or the 25th Amendment—or more rapidly by a military coup? Are retired officers writing to General Mark Milley urging him to act should he feel in the next election that a likely Republican loss seems suspicious?

Election Interference and Denial? 

Between 2017 and 2020, did Trump’s team systematically seek to change the voting laws in key states to radically transform traditional balloting, in a mail-in or early voting revolution, in which only 30 percent of the electorate would vote on Election Day?

If Trump improperly questioned the ballot result of the 2020 election, then he sinned in the long tradition of presidential ballot objectors, including former U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), January 6 committee chairman himself Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), and Hillary Clinton, who claimed Trump was an illegitimately elected president and advised Biden not to concede if he lost the 2020 popular vote. A defeated Stacey Abrams toured the country claiming she was the “real” governor of Georgia, yet nobody smears her as an “election truther.”

Was there any “dark money” effort analogous to the efforts of corporate and tech money along with DNC activists and Biden operators in what Time magazine’s Molly Ball described as a “conspiracy” to ensure the defeat of Trump’s opponent? 

Did Trump’s team coordinate with right-wing billionaires to infuse hundreds of billions of dollars to modulate street protests, to absorb the work of state and local registrars in key precincts, and to censor unfavorable stories on social media? 

Trump impotently railed and bayed to the wind about the “fake news” reporters at his rallies. By contrast, the Left, both private elites and public officials, kept quiet and injected half a billion dollars to alter the way people voted and effectively to censor the way people produced and consumed the news.

Restoring Our Norms?

How about Trump’s efforts to revolutionize the very system of government? Did he promote a court-packing scheme to ensure he might not just get a 5-4 majority, but perhaps an 11-4 conservative advantage in a new 15-justice Supreme Court? 

Did he keep mum while right-wing demonstrators swarmed the homes of Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan? Did his attorney general ignore the obvious felonies involved in such threatening tactics? Did Trump work with his Republican Congress in 2017 to end the filibuster to ensure his legislation would not be stonewalled? Did he dream up ways of getting rid of the Electoral College so the “blue wall” might never return? 

It’s alleged that Trump was insincere when he approved the request for thousands of federal troops to be available to local law enforcement on January 6, or that he did not really mean it when he instructed pro-Trump demonstrators on January 6 to “Peacefully and patriotically march to the Capitol.” 

Perhaps even the hint of encouraging any type of protest was reckless in such partisan times. But just days after violent protestors attacked Secret Service agents manning barricades and had sought to storm onto the White House grounds, did Trump boast to the nation of the ongoing demonstrations, as did Kamala Harris, soon to be a vice presidential candidate?

They’re not going to stop. And everyone beware, because they’re not going to stop. They’re not going to stop before Election Day in November, and they’re not going to stop after Election Day. And that should be—everyone should take note of that, on both levels, that they’re not going to let up, and they should not, and we should not.

Was that a sober or insurrectionary thing to advise in a summer of rioting that saw 120 days of violence, $2 billion in damage, 35 dead, and hundreds of police officers injured?

Did Trump as president meet with CIA and FBI directors who, in their weekly and daily briefings, apprised him of efforts to monitor, spy, and infiltrate the campaign of Joe Biden?

Was there, after 2017, a Republican majority committee investigating the former Obama role in launching Operation Crossfire Hurricane, or Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s secret meeting with Bill Clinton while she was investigating Hillary Clinton? And if there were, would Obama loyalists in the House be excluded by the Republican speaker from participating in House investigations that also would allow no hostile or even neutral witnesses, no general counsel’s report, and no cross-examinations?

The strange thing about Trump was that he did not use extraordinary powers to investigate anyone unlawfully. He boasted, he railed, he screamed, he whined, he became at times crude and obnoxious. But he did not use the FBI, the CIA, the Justice Department, or the IRS to go after the Obamas, the Clintons, or the Bidens. 

Instead, he became the most investigated, probed, smeared, and autopsied president in modern history. Trump’s legislative agenda did not include revolutionary changes in the Electoral College or the filibuster, or radical changes to the Supreme Court.

In fact, of the last three presidents, Trump was either the most inept or indifferent, or the most obstructed concerning any issue of using government agencies for his own partisan political advantages or to neuter his enemies. 

In truth, the entire apparatus of permanent government—the Pentagon hierarchy, the Washington elites at the FBI and CIA, the permanently entrenched at the Justice Department, and the apparat at the IRS all despised Donald Trump. And they did not just hate him but acted on their antipathy by using their powers of government to destroy his campaign in 2016, to undermine his transition, to either obstruct or sabotage his initiatives while president, and to hound him as an ex-president. As ex-felon and FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith put it of his own illegal effort to destroy a president, “Viva le [sic] resistance.” Is that the sort of FBI we want—a cadre of self-described revolutionaries?

Donald Trump was impeached for raising the question of Biden family corruption in Ukraine with the Ukrainian president and delaying offensive military aid that had never been approved by a Democratic president.

Evidence since Trump’s impeachment suggests he was prescient in his warning to the Kyiv government to stay out of domestic American politics. Everything thing we know since that 2021 impeachment vote solidifies—not contradicts—Trump’s point that the Biden family was corrupt, and Hunter Biden was receiving large sums of money from Ukraine and China solely because Joe Biden had been vice president and was seen as a possible or even likely future president worthy of such corrupt investment. Or to put it another way, why would those with contacts with the Ukrainian government ever pay millions to an incompetent, drug-addicted miscreant like Hunter Biden, if not for pay-for-play influence?

In that context, Joe Biden’s early boast that he got a Ukrainian attorney general fired, most likely for probing too deeply matters involving his family, gives credence to Trump’s instincts. So does the fact that both Obama and Biden for a time stopped shipments of offensive weapons to Ukraine, while Trump for a time only delayed them but eventually gave them what they wished.

The result of this unprecedented effort to accuse Trump of using government fascistically while fascistically using government to destroy a president is all too clear in the destroyed careers who sought to undermine constitutional government. What John Brennan, James Clapper, Kevin Clinesmith, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Bruce Ohr, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, and a host of retired flag officers and intelligence operatives share is not just their venomous antipathy toward an elected president and their efforts rhetorically and often concretely to neuter him, but their subsequent disgrace even among those who once cheered them on.

CNN…America’s Enemy?!

CNN: We’re really trying to be less of a Democratic mouthpiece

JAZZ SHAW Aug 29, 2022 at HotAir:

Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP

When CNN dumped Brian Stelter, many wondered if that was a sign of things to come now that the network is under the direction of Warner Discovery and Chris Licht. There was more downsizing to come, but Stelter was one of the bigger names to get the ax, as well as being one of the most blatantly partisan liberal voices in their stable. They are reportedly trying to “inject more balance” into their programming while becoming “less radioactive to Republicans.” These recent announcements and projected change of course are the closest we’ve seen CNN come to admitting that they had evolved into a liberal cheerleading squad for Democrats, leading to a precipitous decline in their ratings. But as this report from the Associated Press admits, “how and whether that can be accomplished remains a mystery.” You can say that again.

The news network, now under the Warner Discovery corporate banner and led since spring by CNN Worldwide Chairman Chris Licht, is trying to inject more balance into its programming and become less radioactive to Republicans. How and whether that can be accomplished remains a mystery.

“CNN has to figure out what it wants to be,” said Carol Costello, a former anchor there and now a journalism instructor at Loyola Marymount University.

Former President Donald Trump portrayed CNN as an enemy, and a Pew Research Center study illustrated the impact that had with his followers. In 2014, Pew found that one-third of people who identify or lean Republican said they distrusted CNN as a source for political news. By 2019, that number had shot up to 58 percent — higher distrust than The New York Times, The Washington Post or MSNBC.

Former CNN anchor and journalism professor Carol Costello is quoted in the linked report. She admits that Donald Trump pretty much broke quite a bit of the mainstream media and during his presidency, “our reporting was kind of hysterical.” I’m sure many conservatives would agree, but whether you take the word to mean “tending toward hysterics” or simply “hilarious” remains in the eye of the beholder.

Other changes have been showing up without any sort of official announcement. Brianna Keilar, CNN’s morning anchor, used to regularly feature segments from Fox News which she would criticize for a variety of reasons. (Stelter used to show more footage of Fox News than Fox News did on some days.) But for many weeks now, Keillar’s air time has not included a single clip from Fox.

Part of Licht’s new plan involves tempting some Republicans to start coming back on the network. He wants his hosts to reach out and assure them that they are not just being invited to act as pincushions for liberal attacks. I generally have CNN on my television (with the sound muted) while I’m working in the morning and I’ve seen a few signs of progress on that front. CNN has welcomed Tim Scott and Dan Crenshaw recently, and neither of them seemed to require any bandages after their segments finished.

CNN sold itself for decades as the home of straightforward journalism. And in the beginning, they seemed to accomplish that. Most of their stories focused on the old-school principle of “who, what, where, when,” with a lot less emphasis on “why.” I’m not sure when that began to seriously change, but it was already happening before Trump came down that golden escalator. Trump’s presidency really drove everyone at CNN off the deep end, however.

CNN was never going to do well trying to act as a liberal counterweight to Fox. MSNBC was already filling that role and they’ve never taken their foot off the gas. Meanwhile, Fox swept the cable news ratings once again in July and Tucker Carlson is the most watched cable news host in the country. His audience is more than double the size of CNN’s Anderson Cooper and MSNBC’s Chris Hayes combined.

So can CNN pull off this sort of devolution back toward being a “hard news” outlet and not a liberal opinion factory? It would be a pleasant change, and it would probably allow more Republicans to have their views heard by people who are not part of the locked-in Fox News viewership.

“lawless society where the monkey’s rule”

August 29, 2022

Three Signs We’re in a Banana Republic

By J.B. Shurk at American Thinker:

Satirist Sol Luckman defines “banana republic” in his irreverent glossary, The Angel’s Dictionary, as a “lawless society where the monkeys rule.”  

Looking around the United States today, it’s hard to say we don’t fit his meaning.  Nearly 80% of Americans believe we live under a two-tiered system of justice.  Likewise, in Gallup’s recent survey of Americans’ confidence in U.S. institutions, it notes, “This year’s poll marks new lows in confidence for all three branches of the federal government — the Supreme Court (25%), the presidency (23%) and Congress.”  Of sixteen institutions tested, confidence in the U.S. Congress sits at the very bottom with a scant 7%!  Even though there is now “record-low confidence across all institutions,” confidence in the Office of the Presidency suffered the largest year-over-year drop in 2022 — cratering 15%!  In other words, not only do Americans believe the country is lawless, they’re also convinced that it is being run by a barrel of monkeys!  Clearly, Americans “get” that we’re living in a “banana republic” today.  

Just consider these three telltale signs:  

(1) Manipulation of language and mandatory leftist religion:

The political Left’s most potent weapon is its penchant for undermining the meaning of words.  For decades Democrats have branded anything antithetical to their worldview as “hateful” and banned “offending” viewpoints from civic culture altogether.  When “authorities” deconstruct biological sex so preposterously that they can’t even tell the difference between boys and girls, though, they’ve lost the plot.  One school board in Wisconsin is so fearful of the language police crashing through its doors that it has replaced all references to “girls” with sterilized language concerning a “person with a vulva.”  When “teachers” are afraid to say “girl” out loud, it’s banana republic time!  

Joe Biden and his communist brigades have tanked the economy and unleashed torrential inflation upon the country.  In a less banana-y time, that would have huge political consequences.  But now his regime enforcers and media propagandists simply redefine the meaning of an economic recession in order to proclaim — à la North Korea — that Americans have never been so well off!  

In our topsy-turvy, upside-down world, where the government insists on establishing its own Ministry of Truth, words don’t mean squat!  How can aborting a baby be called “reproductive healthcare” when it ends with at least one death?  How can discrimination on the basis of a person’s skin color be defended as “equitable,” when it perpetuates racial inequality?  Why do Leftists describe transgender body mutilation, illegal immigration, abortion, and even mRNA vaccination as “acts of love,” while regularly condemning Christians as “bigots” and “extremists”?  Why do Democrats fret that “democracy” is under attack (when we don’t live in one) while saying nothing of attacks on Americans’ free speech, right to self-defense, and other individual rights (all supposedly guaranteed by the Bill of Rights)?  Why is every ordinary weather event now dressed up as evidence for human-created “climate change”?  

The answer is simple: manipulative language perverts rational discussion of ideas and short-circuits reasonable debate. Propaganda distorts reality until nothing can be known as truth at all — unless it is officially sanctioned and blessed by the State.  When government destroys objective meaning, it makes itself a New Age god.

(2) Selective prosecution and political persecution:

The federal Leviathan has two standing orders today: (1) Get Trump!, and (2) protect the Establishment Uniparty and permanent bureaucratic Deep State at all costs.  When the Intelligence Community isn’t busy framing President Trump as a Russian spy, the FBI and DOJ are committed to slapping him with imaginary process crimes they’d never dare try against a Clinton, Biden, Bush, or Obama.  That’s one hell of a way to thank a president who took no salary, while using his time in office to increase middle class Americans’ wealth, security, and future prospects!  

In the summer before the 2016 presidential election, FBI Director James Comey publicly articulated Hillary Clinton’s criminal culpability for storing classified emails on a private, unsecured server kept in a spare bathroom before declaring imperiously that “no reasonable prosecutor” would bring a case against her.  Obama’s IRS got caught targeting conservatives for their political beliefs, but the president assured the nation that the obvious scandal revealed “not even a smidgeon of corruption” within his administration.  Attorney General Eric Holder, Obama’s self-anointed “wingman,” was held in contempt of Congress for refusing to hand over documents relating to the Fast and Furious gun-running conspiracy, yet his Department of Justice unsurprisingly declined to pursue criminal charges.  

In contrast, Americans have watched for six years as President Trump and his associates (including Steve Bannon, who was recently convicted for the same crime Eric Holder effortlessly eluded) have been hounded by an irredeemably corrupt DOJ and FBI, malicious state prosecutors, and a petty, Machiavellian Congress running shameless show trials devoid of due process, impartiality, or fairness.  When Democrats routinely get a slap on the wrist (see Nancy Pelosi’s drunk-driving-get-out-of-jail-free husband as just the latest proof) and MAGA Republicans get a never-ending clown show of Soviet “justice,” impeachment theater, and Star Chamber persecution all rolled up into one rotten twist, two-tiered justice is shockingly visible for all to see.

(3) Forced citizen compliance and increased government dependence:

Obedience + financial dependence = enslavement to the State.  

This is the only math our Leviathan knows.  Wealthy lawmakers don’t mind bankrupting America if it means their control over us increases.  Racial provocateurs don’t mind burning cities to the ground if Antifa and Black Lives Matter shock troops can intimidate Americans into docility.  Medical mercenaries don’t mind issuing unscientific orders arbitrarily enforcing experimental “vaccine,” mask, and travel restrictions if their perceived “authority” over Americans is permanently established.  The religious zealots who worship “climate change” as a false idol do not mind if their aberrant worldview requires Americans to relinquish free will, pray to false gods, and descend into the depths of both physical and spiritual poverty.  The more Americans feel impoverished, the more they become dependent on handouts from the State.  Welfare is hardly “fair” because it always takes more from the soul than it gives.

“Because I said so” is not a reasonable governing policy for any nation purporting to be free, but it does seem to encapsulate the Biden administration’s obsessions with illegal mandates and policing thoughts and language.  Between the government’s COVID-1984 authoritarianism, its attacks on speech it dislikes as “misinformation” deserving of censorship, and its farcical “climate change” alarmism unleashing skyrocketing food and fuel prices today, rule by government fiat has quickly become the new norm.  Totalitarianism, however, is neither new nor normal.  

The World Economic Forum notoriously declared that Westerners would “own nothing and be happy.”  Democrats’ embrace of those wicked oligarchs’ “build back better” buffoonery in the guises of tax and spend “climate change” legislation, Marxist redistribution of wealth, and a militarized IRS takes the WEF’s plan for widespread indentured servitude to heart.  

When things fall apart, as they always do when communism is recycled into a “progressive,” trendy, “we’re all in this together” new form, the D.C. despots will watch their intentional destruction of society unfold without feeling the slightest remorse.  Their bureaucratic unaccountability, after all, is fueled by rampant narcissism.  Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama will never apologize for their Russia hoax.  High Priest Fauci will never apologize for nationwide mandates that destroyed livelihoods and took lives.  That’s just not who they are.

So, remember this: when the feds give you a banana republic, make banana daiquiris.  Never miss an opportunity to point out how corrupt, vindictive, and illegitimate Washington, D.C.’s monkey class has become.  Republicans, Democrats — I say a pox on both their houses!  I think Lord Fauci and his medical mandators might even have a vaccine for that!