How America works!

Congratulations to Fox News for hiring Mike Rowe to talk about How America works! This episode is about inflation.

Wake up to cronyism and central planning - a sure route to Orwellian tyranny!

Janet Levy brings to our attention a book by Carol Roth entitled, The War on Small Business.

Roth points out several biased inconsistencies in lockdown rules. Large corporations never shuttered; in fact, they prospered during the year. The government allowed large-box retailers to remain open, while smaller stores – possibly environs of lesser infectivity – were penalized for opening. The book reports on fighters like Shelley Luther, of Dallas, TX, who went to jail for keeping her salon open, though she maintained strict safety protocols. Driven to desperation, she and her staff had decided to work. “Feeding my kids is not selfish,” she told the judge. “If you think the law is more important than getting kids fed, please go ahead with your decision but I’m not going to shut the salon.”

Through examples like Luther’s, the book raises many questions. Why should a large pet store that grooms dogs be open while nail salons were ordered shut? How could businesses that sold alcohol and marijuana be declared “essential”? Why close houses of worship (or limit the number of worshippers) when more people could gather in large grocery stores? How could left-wing, Antifa and BLM protests, where demonstrators violated masking and social-distancing rules and turned violent, be granted permission? Why did police hold back when these protestors looted, vandalized or set fire to small businesses? What began as government “helping society” became a power grab that enforced arbitrary standards.

During the pandemic shutdown, says Roth, there was an attempt to destabilize independent economic entities. Polices favored large companies and many businesses were made dependent on government handouts. Relief programs were heavily slanted towards big business, while small businesses were ordered closed, sending their customers to bigger companies. The CARES (Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security) Act, a $2.2 trillion economic stimulus bill, was based on past income, not on need. Small businesses received less than 20% of the overall relief package even though they account for half of the economy and were disproportionately forced to shut down. Of the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) allocation of $521 billion, 75% was garnered by the largest 13.5% applicants.

Roth’s analysis justifies her claim that the pandemic was opportunistically used. She warns Americans to wake up to cronyism and central planning – a sure route to Orwellian tyranny.

Read more here: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/05/the_real_black_swan_of_2020_the_assault_on_small_business.html

Resistance!

Bruce Thornton writes,

All this hypocrisy of the “woke” Democrats, all the lunatic policies, all the encroachment on our Constitutional rights, all the politically driven destructive covid protocols, all the economic damage caused by the insane war on cheap energy and the drunken-sailor spending, all the smug and arrogant virtue-signaling and moral preening have produced nothing but failure at the cost of our freedom and the integrity of our language and history.

But over the last several months the signs of resistance to this degradation of our country have been multiplying, most recently by Elon Musk’s buyout of Twitter and his stout defense of genuine free speech that respects the only diversity that really counts: that of ideas and opinions whose expression is sanctioned by the First Amendment.

Read more here: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/05/high-noon-usa-bruce-thornton/

Lose the people, then change the rules!

Victor Davis Hanson writes,

Recently, a rough draft of an opinion purportedly overturning the Roe v. Wade decision that had legalized abortion in all 50 states was leaked to the media by someone inside the court.

The leaker either intended to create a preemptive public backlash against the purported court majority in the hope that one or two justices might cave and switch under pressure—or to gin up the progressive base to fend off a likely disaster in the November midterm elections.

The hard Left has detoured from the mainstream of American voters onto a radical trajectory. So it will never find 51 percent public approval for any of its current extremist and crackpot initiatives.

Instead, it sees success only through altering the rules of governance or changing the demography of the electorate—or both.

Still, leftists should be careful about what they wish for.

Latinos are historically transforming en masse into conservative voters.

Leftists are also greenlighting powerful precedents for the next Republican president. He may follow their lead by simply changing any rules, laws, customs, and traditions anytime he deems them inconvenient.

Read more here: https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/04/losing-the-people-then-change-the-rules/

The Supreme Court leak

Michael Goodwin writes,

The shocking leak of the Supreme Court draft decision that overturns the constitutional right to abortion is already achieving its main objective. It is giving Democrats something to run on this fall besides President Biden’s lousy record.

The widely respected SCOTUSblog writes that “This leak is the gravest, most unforgivable sin” and will destroy trust among the justices and the staff.

All true — but you’re not likely to see a single Dem denounce the leak or the leaker. Quite the opposite. Desperate times lead to desperate actions and, without batting an eye, they embraced the draft’s contents as an opportunity to rally their dejected supporters around a new flag.

Majority Leader Chuck Schumer had a bounce in his step as he vowed to force the Senate to vote on turning the gist of Roe into federal law. “We will vote to protect a woman’s right to choose, and every American is going to see which side every senator stands on,” Schumer said, then added that the “rights of 100 million women are now on the ballot.”

Republicans are almost universally opposed, while “safe, legal and rare” would get Clinton drummed out of his party today because absolutist Dems now demand nothing short of the unfettered right to infanticide.

Medical science also has worked against the absolutists as the time when a newborn is able to survive outside the womb marches forward. One result is that 26 states have asked the court to overrule Roe, with the Mississippi law at the center of the battle forbidding most abortions after 15 weeks except for medical emergencies or severe fetal abnormality.

There he goes, exaggerating again. Many women oppose abortion, and Schumer probably can’t get a majority of senators, let alone 60 votes needed to break the filibuster, to support his plan.

Moreover, the procedure would remain legal in many states because of existing state laws, which is exactly the point of the draft opinion — that abortion rights always should have been decided by voters in each state and their representatives.

Read more here: https://nypost.com/2022/05/03/democrats-dirty-supreme-may-surprise/

The catastrophic consequences of a stolen election!

Patricia McCarthy reports,

Beyond the mules; the illegally harvested ballots; fake ballots that were never folded, mailed, or signed; the finagling of people like Republican Gov. Kemp and sec. of state Raffensperger of Georgia and the NeverTrump powers that be in Colorado, Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan and probably numerous other states, the 2020 election was the most dishonest, the most unscrupulous in American history. Unable to accept her defeat in 2016, Hillary Clinton fabricated the notion that Russia facilitated Trump's win, which gave birth to the entirely phony Mueller investigation, the trumped-up impeachments based on nothing, and the equally fabricated "insurrection" charges about January 6.

The Biden regime has embraced the tactics of Marx and Mao and the prescient fantasies of George Orwell to gain and maintain control over the American population, all the while importing millions of migrants from around the world into the country. Biden seems intent on ruining the country by any means possible. He's rendered us energy-dependent again so that Americans are paying $6+ for gas. Inflation is soaring, dragging us into a recession, likely depression. This sad state of affairs was fodder for comedy at the WHCD; Biden heartily laughed at the misery he has stoked.

Biden and the military-industrial complex wanted this war in Ukraine and are escalating it. The Ukrainian people are cannon fodder in a dangerously misguided attempt to take down Putin. The warmongers are at it again, briefly interrupted by President Trump, and the arms dealers want a war. Now the administration is depleting the American defensive arms inventory by shipping them to Ukraine and sending billions of taxpayer dollars that simply do not exist — money that, if it did exist, could be spent on protecting our southern border, not Ukraine's eastern border. Ukraine is a European problem, not an American responsibility.

All this chaos and destruction is due to the catastrophic consequences of a stolen election. Purposeful? Indeed. The Biden administration's agenda is the destruction of America, its middle and working classes, and the power of its currency. Biden is bowing to China and Russia, and, for inexplicable reasons, intent on letting Iran have nukes. Each of those countries is a mortal enemy of the U.S., and each has leverage over this terrible president. He has sold out his country for unearned wealth. There are volumes of evidence, proof, actually, that the 2020 election was grossly fraudulent. Who among our numerous law enforcement agencies will go to bat for the American people? Someone has got to go to prison. Every American needs to see 2000 Mules.

Read more here: https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/05/the_consequences_of_the_stolen_2020_election_are_increasingly_catastrophic.html

Not so fast! You don't get America back as if nothing happened!

Naomi Wolf writes,

To be healing, there has to be justice.

I am angry that beautiful America is mostly back, mostly free again, overnight, just because a shameless creature who should never have had the power to suspend our liberties in the first place - said so; just because the whiny-voiced evildoers of the last two years, now that evidence of their fraud and coercion emerges irrevocably to light, want to tiptoe away from the scenes of their massive crimes.

I say: Not so fast.

Don’t rest too easy, leaders who did wrong, in this bright American sunlight. You don’t get America back as if nothing happened.

Read more here: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/05/oh-ok-its-over-dr-naomi-wolf/

Ukrainian bio-lab conspiracy theories

Dylan Houseman writes about

the Biden administration’s handling of Ukrainian biolab conspiracy theories, which began to spread last month after Russia accused the U.S. of developing biological weapons in Ukrainian facilities.

The man who heads up the Pentagon’s Cooperative Threat Reduction Program (CTR), Dr. Robert Pope, told the Daily Caller none of that is the case.

“We did not find biological weapons when we first started our work with Ukraine, and have not found any since then,” he said.

CTR falls under the umbrella of the Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA). This is the government agency responsible for coordinating with researchers and laboratories in foreign countries, including some ex-Soviet republics, to eliminate the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), including those left behind by the Soviet Union.

Read more here: https://dailycaller.com/2022/05/02/ukraine-biolabs-bioweapons-russia-pentagon-conspiracy-theory/

Cutting the roots

A former police chief named Maurice Richards writes,

The leftist elites’ pro-criminal, anti-victim, and anti-police policies have undermined the rule of law and unleashed an unprecedented wave of violence and murder. In addition to shootings and homicides, organized robberies and lootings of large stores have spread from San Francisco and Los Angeles to Minneapolis and Chicago and even into the suburbs. All are jurisdictions dominated by Democrats, controlled by radical leftist prosecutors, and patrolled by police departments that have virtually abandoned proactive law enforcement.

In cities where Democrats hold sway, the Left has already inflicted devastating, long-term damage.

They have done this in three ways.

First, Democrats, working with Black Lives Matter and the corporate left-wing media, have undermined community trust in the police by perpetuating the big lie of “systemic police racism.” Delegitimizing the police has made it almost impossible to build community partnerships.

Demonizing the police as racist oppressors and murderers also stirs up hate, putting a target on the back of every cop in America. In 2021, 73 police officers were “feloniously killed,” 346 were shot, and ambush shootings of police increased by 115 percent—the deadliest year on record. This was a deeply disturbing increase from 2020, with 311 officers shot and 47 killed by gunfire.

The first three months of 2022 have been even more horrific. Seventeen police officers have been killed by gunfire and 101 have been shot, a 46 percent increase from 2021. Shockingly, ambush-style attacks are up 36 percent from last year’s historic 115 percent increase from 2020.

Second, police morale has been crushed. Thousands of veteran officers have retired early or quit, and recruiting enough new officers has proven impossible. Lacking support from political leaders and community members, officers have pulled back from proactive policing.

How dysfunctional is the Portland Police Bureau? In October, a mob of 100 Antifa thugs laid waste to downtown Portland, causing $500,000 in damage to banks, stores, and shops. Eerily similar to the mayor of Baltimore’s orders to her police department to give the mob “space to destroy” during the riots of 2015, Portland’s woke police leadership directed officers to be spectators. Not one rioter was arrested. The Portland Police Bureau is broken. Leftist Democrats are working to do the same across the country.

Third, the infestation of George Soros-funded state’s attorneys in big-city jurisdictions has sabotaged crime-fighting and justice. Well financed by the anti-American, globalist billionaire, these rogue prosecutors in jurisdictions such as Los Angeles County, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Cook County, Illinois, “reimagine” the criminal justice system by dropping thousands of felony cases, failing to charge violent criminals, refusing to prosecute many categories of crime, and letting dangerous offenders out of jail.

The Soros plan is extremely effective in dismantling the rule of law. Hard-left prosecutors simply nullify the hard work of police officers who arrest dangerous criminals by refusing to indict them and putting them back on the street. As I have observed elsewhere, the objective of the Left is not to reform policing—but to destroy it.

The key Marxist theoreticians were Antonio Gramsci, an Italian communist, and a group of German Marxist intellectuals who became known as the Frankfurt School. They concluded that a socialist overthrow of the capitalist democracies could not happen while the working class still believed in the legitimacy of their society and supported its traditional values. Because the primary social institutions—education, media, law, family, and religion—taught and reinforced these values, such institutions would have to be captured or destroyed before political overthrow was possible. This new take on the theory of communist revolution became known as “Cultural Marxism.”

Communists seek to exploit a society’s most vulnerable weaknesses. They identified the fault line in the United States as race and, almost a century ago, made fomenting conflict between blacks and whites their primary strategy. Traditional Marxist theory was revised, replacing its original class-based framework of capitalist/exploiter versus worker/exploited with a race-based framework of white-oppressor versus black victim. The New York Times’ “1619 Project” is just the latest manifestation of this schema. Critical race ideology identifies blacks as perpetual victims of white supremacy who lack the agency to change their status and cannot be held personally accountable for their behavior. Celebration of imaginary victimhood and evasion of responsibility perpetuate social pathology by preventing the correction of the actual root causes of crime and disparities, including fatherless families and dysfunctional cultural values.

The traditional nuclear family has been decimated. Forty percent of all children are now born into families without a father in the home, including 70 percent of blacks, 52 percent of Hispanics, and 28 percent of whites. Children’s innocence is being corrupted through perverse sexualization in school curricula, the Internet, and popular culture. Hollywood and mass entertainment are almost exclusively leftist. Even professional sports are under leftist control.

Not only did Barack Obama do more to divide Americans by race than any president in our lifetimes, he was also the most anti-police president in history.

Obama’s self-righteous anti-police rhetoric and bogus claims of systemic racism fueled hatred of the police and prepared the groundwork for the war on cops. He legitimized Black Lives Matter in the public consciousness—excusing their mob violence and inviting BLM leaders to the White House, even though they had regularly chanted for the murders of police officers. Race-based demonization and anti-police propaganda has only accelerated with Joe Biden in office, even as Biden has made a show of walking back the “defund the police” rhetoric.

They prevent an honest evaluation and response to black crime. Critical race theory falsely maintains that racial disparity is proof of racism. But arrests are the result of criminal behavior—not race. Blacks commit 52 percent of all homicides in the United States while constituting only 13 percent of the population. When crime is committed disproportionately, arrests will also be disproportionate.

We already have a pretty good idea of what the elites will do if they can convert 700,000 sworn police officers and sheriff’s deputies into a de facto or bona fide federal police force. The partisan manner in which the Justice Department has responded to the January 6 protest compared to six months of infinitely more destructive 2020 riots says it all.

A leftist takeover of local law enforcement would nationalize the kind of depraved political partisanship we have witnessed with the Justice Department’s decision to ignore the sadistic beatings of peaceful political protesters on January 6 by D.C. Metro Police and the whitewash of the unjustified ambush shooting and killing of Ashli Babbitt. Federal police would be used as political, speech, and thought police—just as a corrupt FBI is being misused to crack down on American parents for protesting the teaching of racism, pornography, and pedophilia to their children.

Admittedly, some of this will be difficult to accomplish in cities dominated by Democrats. But we have no choice but to fight. Nothing is impossible. How many people would have thought a year ago that critical race theory and its offshoot curricula would be banned in school districts throughout the country—including in deep blue states?

Read more here: https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/30/a-cops-eye-view-of-the-federal-takeover-of-the-police/

Would-be Nazis of the 21st century.

Rabbi Michael Barclay writes,

A criminal is wrongfully killed, and “peaceful demonstrations,” which are actually violent riots, break out nationwide. The flag of a radical and violent group is placed next to the national flag on government buildings. Out of fear of being canceled and losing business, individuals and corporations succumb to publicly supporting this violent organization. Mandated behavior is compelled upon threat of arrest by the political elite and leadership. Despite objections from parents, schools begin teaching an alternative “history” and embrace prejudice, anti-Semitism, and sexual permissiveness as part of the school curriculum.

A President overreaches and takes on “emergency powers,” which create an authoritarian regime that demands supportive behavior and calls any criticism “disinformation.” A new agency of the government is created to “fight this disinformation”… an agency that even has access to armed personnel. This new agency is led by a fanatic who is arguably delusional in their own self-perception and fully committed to stopping the dissemination of any information that is not part of the authoritarian narrative. And through it all the media is a willing accomplice, even striking against other media outlets that try to present opposing views.

Like the death of George Floyd, Horst Wessel was the spark that Goebbels and Hitler used to motivate “peaceful demonstrations” that were in actuality violent riots funded and planned with the intention of gaining national power through violence and fear. In the same way that the Nazis pressured the German government to fly the Nazi flag next to the German tri-color flag, our State Department has done the same with the acceptance of the BLM flag being flown over federal buildings.

Read more here: https://pjmedia.com/columns/rabbi-michael-barclay/2022/04/30/nazi-comparisons-n1594179

If they went outside, someone might catch a flu!

Rabbi Chananya Weissman writes,

There's a horrific video of the residents of Shanghai screaming from their buildings where they are imprisoned. 23 million people are under indefinite house arrest, slowly going mad and literally starving to death – for their own good, of course. You know, if they went outside someone might catch a flu.

First, I wonder how many of these people have thought to scream to God in this darkest of times. It's difficult to expect this of them, being that the state religion of China is the Communist government, and believing in an even higher authority is extremely dangerous. I'm not here to judge the victims. But if 23 million people cried out to God, instead of just to the dark emptiness ... I don't know what He would do, but it would be powerful.

This is what happens when people are totally controlled, degraded, defeated, and conditioned to be obedient no matter what. If they are told to dig their own graves and stay there until they starve to death, or else, they will obey. They will complain about it, or scream, but in the moment of truth they will submit to the voice of authority.

Read more here: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/05/shanghai-model-rabbi-chananya-weissman/

Who is being sanctioned, who is not, and why!

Ace of Spades reports,

Joe Biden's Sanctioning Russian Oligarchs Close to Putin. Except the Ones Who Are Business Partners With Crackhead Whoremonger "International Energy Expert" Hunter Biden, Of Course.

How come Hunter's business partners and donors aren't being sanctioned? They're among the most mobbed-up gangsters in Putin's Russia.

The master disinformationists

Victor Davis Hanson writes,

When things turn south for the administration, Barack Obama—a sagging Netflix’s $50-million “idea man”—usually emerges from one of his three mansions in Hawaii, Martha’s Vineyard, or Kalorama to lecture clingers and deplorables on various threats they pose to the anointed.

Projection is a left-wing trademark. What it accuses in others reveals what it seeks to hide within itself. So when we hear Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announcing this war on disinformation, we suspect he is our master disinformationist. Is it not his agency that is airlifting illegal aliens in the dead of night to regional airports rather than transparently, in the light of day? Is that “disinformation dies in darkness”?

This erosion of our culture reflects the growing political discontent in insidious ways: the fall-off of Netflix subscribers, the utter corruption of Black Lives Matter, the humiliation of Disney, the rapid collapse of CNN+, the grassroots revolt against critical race theory and transgender tyranny.

As good Orwellians, they will try to convince us that high gas prices are welcome; negative growth is good; borders are ossified ideas; unaffordable housing aids the economy; inflation can prove useful; a declining stock market is encouraging; crime is a mere construct in the eye of the beholder.

Third, the Democratic Party no longer exists. It is now hard-left, as sanctimonious as it is shrill. Such zealots will not discard their ideology. Rather they would prefer to embrace dogma and stay unpopular than adopt and gain public approval.

Do not expect a suddenly closed border, an abrupt resumption of the Keystone XL Pipeline, or a tough new federal crime bill. Do anticipate more wild conspiracy theories, more Russian disinformation, and more Pravda-like ministries.

Read more here: https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/01/the-new-disinformationists/

More government assault on freedom!

Roger Kimball is one of many people writing about Biden's new

“Disinformation Governance Board.”

Suppressing ideas the regime doesn’t like is only one part of the job. The other part is disseminating narratives pleasing to those in power. One hand is busy pulling out and poisoning what they regard as weeds. The other hand is nurturing the delicate shoots of the approved narrative.

Hillary Clinton and her myrmidons in the media, the FBI, and the intelligence services did a fine job with the Russia collusion hoax. But think how much more effective an official, government-sanctioned service will be. No more amateur-hour stuff, no more wiping servers “with a cloth,” no more lying lawyers, no more leaked fabrications. Now the people in charge will have the full coercive power of the state behind them.

Tucker Carlson said that the creation of this new chamber of the government’s department of anti-freedom drew “a line in the sand.” I hope he is right. The Biden Administration’s Orwellian assault on individual freedom is patent as daylight. It is critical that we stand up to and forthrightly reject this unconscionable assault on freedom.

Read more here: https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/30/the-disinformation-governance-machine/

From Norm Chomsky!

Noam Chomsky, in an interview this week, says "fortunately" there is "one Western statesman of stature" who is pushing for a diplomatic solution to the war in Ukraine rather than looking for ways to fuel and prolong it.

"His name is Donald J. Trump," Chomsky says.

WATCH: pic.twitter.com/z3Cug8kFHS

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) May 1, 2022

Whom do we choose?

Elon Musk clarifies where he stands politically

Jeff Bezos' very bad day

Cecile Vannucci and Jill Shah report that Jeff Bezos

saw $20.5 billion of his fortune melt away after Amazon.com Inc.’s results left investors disappointed, helping fuel the worst month for technology stocks in years. Read more at: https://www.bloombergquint.com/onweb/bezos-loses-13-billion-in-hours-as-amazon-shares-slump Copyright © BloombergQuint

The F.B.I. has been busy!

Ardun Singh reports,

The FBI conducted as many as 3.4 million searches of data in the U.S. without a warrant over the year 2021, according to a new government report.

The figure represented a 260 percent increase from the previous coverage year, 2020, where the FBI had conducted around 1.3 million searches.

Read more here: https://www.nationalreview.com/news/fbi-conducted-3-4-million-data-record-searches-in-2021-according-to-report/

He's really shy, don't you know?