"One day we gonna meet back again!"

The innocence of our children needs to be protected at all cost. pic.twitter.com/MGQu1JeSAo

— samanthamarika (@samanthamarika1) August 22, 2020

Some early tweets I liked today

Chuck Ross tweeted,

Biden and his campaign getting so salty over questions if he’s had a Covid test is beyond weird.

Sean Davis tweeted,

Actually, the most remarkable fact of the entire Russia affair is that the FBI deliberately framed innocent people, fabricated evidence, and defrauded federal courts in order to spy on their political foes for the crime of not voting for Hillary Clinton.

Dan Bongino tweeted,

ANTIFA is a fascist terror-group committed to eliminating free speech and ushering in fascism in the United States. This is an indisputable FACT.

Clay Travis tweeted,

Florida update: percent positive today is 4.89%. This means the “outbreak” is officially over in FL with a fraction of NY & NJ’s death rate. Should be top story in country after months of FL fear porn. But most in media will completely ignore it.

Victoria Toensing tweeted,

Why did
@FoxNewsSunday
Wallace constantly talk over
@MarkMeadows
and only once, very gently, interrupt Dem. Sen Chris Coons? Coons ignored
@JoeBiden
calling
@realDonaldTrump
xenophobe for China travel ban and saying China not threat to US. Also, China $$$for Hunter. #MAGA2020

Another country that has had it with communist rule

Belarus! We support your courage and fight. https://t.co/UMD8ir4Up5

— Richard Grenell (@RichardGrenell) August 23, 2020

Rapidly rising

"You know the rapidly rising umm uh in with uh with I don't know." - Joe Biden. pic.twitter.com/WQMkgISM1D

— Francis Brennan (@FrancisBrennan) June 11, 2020

Salmon feast

Homecoming salmon @KatmaiNPS weigh an average of 5-7 lbs and contain about 4,500 calories. The bears that feast on these salmon receive vital nutrients and turn into the celebrities of the #FatBearWeek #Alaska pic.twitter.com/uUvai3i9mw

— US Department of the Interior (@Interior) August 23, 2020

"climate science is a fraud, a hoax, and a scam."

Buck Throckmorton tells us in the Ace of Spades blog that

Glacier National Park is removing "glaciers will be gone by 2020" signs

The glaciers were supposed to be gone by now, based on the most super-scientific models according to infallible scientists. It was such a scientific fact - based on their climate “models” - that they put up these signs at Glacier National Park stating that the glaciers would be gone by the year 2020. Of course they were wrong, because climate science is a fraud, a hoax, and a scam. But anyone who didn’t believe the glaciers would be gone by 2020 was a “science denier.”

Rather than manually remove their apocalyptic signs, maybe they should have manually removed the glaciers instead, so that their prophecy would come true.

Is it time to reopen?

"Under a Harris administration, we could expect further expansion of the de-platforming and censorship of those caught not “right-thinking.”

Joel Kotkin knows California. He also knows Kamala Harris's record there. He writes in part in City Journal,

...California today boasts a fabulously rich technology elite; it’s also home to the highest poverty rate among the states, adjusted for costs, according to the U.S. Census. Under its largely one-party regime, notes liberal economist James Galbraith, California has seen inequality grow at among the fastest rates in the country. The state endures the widest gap between middle and upper incomes in the country—72 percent, compared with a national average of 57 percent. The Golden State may see itself as a standard-bearer among advanced economies, but it suffers a level of inequality worse than Mexico. According to a recent United Way study, close to one in three families in the state are barely able to pay their bills.

California’s one-party system revolves around well-organized and well-funded interests, including tech moguls, Hollywood executives, green nonprofits, and unions. These interests have all been enthusiastic Harris backers and funders, and the senator and vice presidential nominee has also won over Wall Street, which appreciates her hands-off approach to regulation.

Any claim to populism—in the sense of overturning the current order—is fanciful when it comes to Harris. Her ties to the tech sector, including major backers of her failed presidential campaign, are particularly tight.

...Harris is unlikely to push antitrust enforcement or defend free speech in ways that might inconvenience her backers.

...Yet closeness to Silicon Valley and Hollywood does not mean that Harris’s ascent will be good for businesses outside the charmed circle of tech and media conglomerates. Harris has backed a state tax and regulatory regime that has devastated the state’s middle and working classes. Once in the White House, she would presumably push similar policies ruinous for business—particularly small businesses unable to cope with high taxes, restrictive labor laws, and ever-more draconian environmental regulation.

Harris emerged last year as an early supporter of the Green New Deal, which roughly follows California’s hard-core environmental regime. Unlike Joe Biden, she favors banning all fracking. As California attorney general, she vigorously fought to use climate change-driven laws to force Californians out of their cars and homes for the supposed pleasures of public transit and apartment living.

...A future Harris administration would likely impose California’s green mandates on the nation. These measures have burdened California with electricity rates that since 2011 have increased five times as rapidly as the national average. They’ve also been linked to wildfires and, seemingly every summer, rolling blackouts. The state’s purposeful closing of nuclear and gas plants, notes environmental author Michael Shellenberger, means that “the tens of billions that Californians have spent on renewables come with high human, economic, and environmental costs.”

...Over the last decade, California has fallen to the bottom half of states in terms of manufacturing employment growth, last year ranking 44th, with a new job-creation rate one-third to one-quarter that of prime competitors, such as Texas, Virginia, Arizona, Nevada, and Florida.

Though making up less than one-fifth of the state’s population, the Bay Area—the base for Harris, former governor Jerry Brown, current governor Gavin Newsom, Senator Dianne Feinstein, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi—dominates California politics. With a large edge in Democratic registration, the area has been a fount of green and social-justice proposals cloaked in notionally progressive idealism but devastating to the middle and working classes.

...As California’s attorney general, Harris was criticized by reformers for putting petty miscreants, like pot smokers, in jail, even while joking about her own use, and for being too deferential to law enforcement. In the post-George Floyd era, Harris has turned hard in the other direction, with nods towards support for “defunding” the police and other policies fueling a new urban crime wave. But we can expect Harris to embrace her tough-prosecutor mode in going after political enemies; she joined lawsuits against fossil-fuel executives for voicing doubts about climate change. Under a Harris administration, we could expect further expansion of the de-platforming and censorship of those caught not “right-thinking.”

The bottom line: don’t underestimate Kamala Harris. She is a savvy political operator. She will be hailed by the compliant media as a progressive egalitarian and an ideal promoter of the American dream —but if her past performance is any guide, she will be neither.

Read more here.

The permanent coup

"Russiagate," the Mueller investigation, impeachment, the "weaponization" of coronavirus, & now the riots—they all have a common purpose: to remove from office the man who obstructed plans to radically transform America, argues @LeeSmithDC.

WATCH FULL 👉 https://t.co/zXgVQkbZFO pic.twitter.com/YrZ2mNVW34

— American Thought Leaders with Jan Jekielek (@AmThoughtLeader) August 23, 2020

Liberals will have to choose...

In Quillette, Yoram Hazony continues his essay on the challenges of Marxism

Why, then, do liberal societies produce a rapid movement toward Marxist ideas, and not an ever-greater belief in liberalism?

...the conflict between liberalism and its Marxist critics is one between a dominant class or group wishing to conserve its traditions (liberals), and a revolutionary group (Marxists) combining criticial reasoning with a willingness to jettison all inherited constraints to overthrow these traditions.

...VI. The Marxist endgame and democracy’s end
...the entire purpose of democratic government, with its plurality of legitimate parties, is to avoid the violent reconstitution of society that Marxist political theory regards as the only reasonable aim of politics.

...the very idea that a dissenting opinion—one that is not “Progressive” or “Anti-Racist”—could be considered legitimate has disappeared from liberal institutions as Marxists have gained power. At first, liberals capitulated to their Marxist colleagues’ demand that conservative viewpoints be considered illegitimate (because conservatives are “authoritarian” or “fascist”). This was the dynamic that brought about the elimination of conservatives from most of the leading universities and media outlets in America.

...But by the summer of 2020, this arrangement had run its course. In the United States, Marxists were now strong enough to demand that liberals fall into line on virtually any issue they considered pressing. In what were recently liberal institutions, a liberal point of view has likewise ceased to be legitimate. This is the meaning of the expulsion of liberal journalists from the New York Times and other news organisations. It is the reason that Woodrow Wilson’s name was removed from buildings at Princeton University, and for similar acts at other universities and schools. These expulsions and renamings are the equivalent of raising a Marxist flag over each university, newspaper, and corporation in turn, as the legitimacy of the old liberalism is revoked.

Until 2016, America sill had two legitimate political parties. But when Donald Trump was elected president, the talk of his being “authoritarian” or “fascist” was used to discredit the traditional liberal point of view, according to which a duly elected president, the candidate chosen by half the public through constitutional procedures, should be accorded legitimacy. Instead a “resistance” was declared, whose purpose was to delegitimize the president, those who worked with him, and those who voted for him.

I know that many liberals believe that this rejection of Trump’s legitimacy was directed only at him, personally. They believe, as a liberal friend wrote to me recently, that when this particular president is removed from office, America will be able to return to normal.

But nothing of the sort is going to happen. The Marxists who have seized control of the means of producing and disseminating ideas in America cannot, without betraying their cause, confer legitimacy on any conservative government. And they cannot grant legitimacy to any form of liberalism that is not supine before them. This means that whatever President Trump’s electoral fortunes, the “resistance” is not going to end. It is just beginning.

I know that many liberals are confused, and that they still suppose there are various alternatives before them. But it isn’t true. At this point, most of the alternatives that existed a few years ago are gone. Liberals will have to choose between two alternatives: either they will submit to the Marxists, and help them bring democracy in America to an end. Or they will assemble a pro-democracy alliance with conservatives. There aren’t any other choices.

Read more here.

The dance of Marxism and liberalism

In Quillette, Yoram Hazony writes about the challenge of Marxism.

I. The collapse of institutional liberalism

For a generation after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, most Americans and Europeans regarded Marxism as an enemy that had been defeated once and for all. But they were wrong. A mere 30 years later, Marxism is back, and making an astonishingly successful bid to seize control of the most important American media companies, universities and schools, major corporations and philanthropic organizations, and even the courts, the government bureaucracy, and some churches. As American cities succumb to rioting, arson, and looting, it appears as though the liberal custodians of many of these institutions—from the New York Times to Princeton University—have despaired of regaining control of them, and are instead adopting a policy of accommodation. That is, they are attempting to appease their Marxist employees by giving in to some of their demands in the hope of not being swept away entirely.

...This means that some brave liberals will soon be waging war on the very institutions they so recently controlled. They will try to build up alternative educational and media platforms in the shadow of the prestigious, wealthy, powerful institutions they have lost. Meanwhile, others will continue to work in the mainstream media, universities, tech companies, philanthropies, and government bureaucracy, learning to keep their liberalism to themselves and to let their colleagues believe that they too are Marxists—just as many conservatives learned long ago how to keep their conservatism to themselves and let their colleagues believe they are liberals.

In this essay, I would like to offer some initial remarks about the new Marxist victories in America—about what has happened and what’s likely to happen next.

II. The Marxist framework

Anti-Marxist liberals have labored under numerous disadvantages in the recent struggles to maintain control of liberal organizations. One is that they are often not confident they can use the term “Marxist” in good faith to describe those seeking to overthrow them. This is because their tormentors do not follow the precedent of the Communist Party, the Nazis, and various other political movements that branded themselves using a particular party name and issued an explicit manifesto to define it. Instead, they disorient their opponents by referring to their beliefs with a shifting vocabulary of terms, including “the Left,” “Progressivism,” “Social Justice,” “Anti-Racism,” “Anti-Fascism,” “Black Lives Matter,” “Critical Race Theory,” “Identity Politics,” “Political Correctness,” “Wokeness,” and more. When liberals try to use these terms they often find themselves deplored for not using them correctly, and this itself becomes a weapon in the hands of those who wish to humiliate and ultimately destroy them.

Marx's political framework
1. Oppressor and oppressed

2. False consciousness
Marx recognizes that the liberal businessmen, politicians, lawyers, and intellectuals who keep this system in place are unaware that they are the oppressors, and that what they think of as progress has only established new conditions of oppression. Indeed, even the working class may not know that they are exploited and oppressed. This is because they all think in terms of liberal categories (e.g., the individual’s right to freely sell his labor) which obscure the systematic oppression that is taking place. This ignorance of the fact that one is an oppressor or oppressed is called the ruling ideology (Engels later coined the phrase false consciousness to describe it), and it is only overcome when one is awakened to what is happening and learns to recognize reality using true categories.

3. Revolutionary reconstitution of society
There is a period of “more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution” and the “violent overthrow” of the liberal oppressors. At this point, the oppressed seize control of the state.

4. Total disappearance of class antagonisms


III. The attraction and power of Marxism
For example, despite decades of experimentation with vouchers and charter schools, the dominant form of American liberalism remains strongly committed to the public school system. In most places, this is a monopolistic system that requires children of all backgrounds to receive what is, in effect, an atheistic education stripped clean of references to God or the Bible. Although liberals sincerely believe that this policy is justified by the theory of “separation of church and state,” or by the argument that society needs schools that are “for everyone,” the fact is that these theories justify what really is a system aimed at inculcating their own Enlightenment liberalism. Seen from a conservative perspective, this amounts to a quiet persecution of religious families. Similarly, the pornography industry is nothing but a horrific instrument for exploiting poor women, although it is justified by liberal elites on grounds of “free speech” and other freedoms reserved to “consenting adults.” And in the same way, indiscriminate offshoring of manufacturing capacity is considered to be an expression of property rights by liberal elites, who benefit from cheap Chinese labor at the expense of their own working-class neighbors.

...We must understand the enduring attraction and strength of Marxism. And we will never understand it unless we recognize that Marxism captures certain aspects of the truth that are missing from Enlightenment liberalism.

Which aspects of the truth?

Marx’s principal insight is the recognition that the categories liberals use to construct their theory of political reality (liberty, equality, rights, and consent) are insufficient for understanding the political domain. They are insufficient because the liberal picture of the political world leaves out two phenomena that are, according to Marx, absolutely central to human political experience: The fact that people invariably form cohesive classes or groups; and the fact that these classes or groups invariably oppress or exploit one another, with the state itself functioning as an instrument of the oppressor class.

IV. The flaws that make Marxism fatal

We’ve looked at what Marxist political theory gets right and why it’s such a powerful doctrine. But there are also plenty of problems with the Marxist framework, a number of them fatal.

The first of these is that while Marxism proposes an empirical investigation of the power relations among classes or groups, it simply assumes that wherever one discovers a relationship between a more powerful group and a weaker one, that relation will be one of oppressor and oppressed.

The fact that the Marxist framework presupposes a relationship of oppressor and oppressed leads to the second great difficulty, which is the assumption that every society is so exploitative that it must be heading toward the overthrow of the dominant class or group. But if it is possible for weaker groups to benefit from their position, and not just to be oppressed by it, then we have arrived at the possibility of a conservative society: One in which there is a dominant class or loyalty group (or coalition of groups), which seeks to balance the benefits and the burdens of the existing order so as to avoid actual oppression.

...When liberals and conservatives talk about Marxism being “nothing but a big lie,” this is what they mean. The Marxist goal of seizing the state and using it to eliminate all oppression is an empty promise. Marx did not know how the state could actually bring this about, and neither have any of his followers. In fact, we now have many historical cases in which Marxists have seized the state: In Russia and Eastern Europe, China, North Korea, and Cambodia, Cuba and Venezuela. But nowhere has the Marxists’ attempt at a “revolutionary reconstitution of society” by the state been anything other than a parade of horrors. In every case, the Marxists themselves form a new class or group, using the power of the state to exploit and oppress other classes in the most extreme ways—up to and including repeated recourse to murdering millions of their own people. Yet for all this, utopia never comes and oppression never ends.

...But the aim of reconstituting society and the assertion that the state is responsible for achieving this feat makes the Marxist state much more aggressive, and more willing to resort to coercion and bloodshed, than the liberal regime it seeks to replace.

V. The dance of liberalism and Marxism
Thus the endless dance of liberalism and Marxism, which goes like this:

1. Liberals declare that henceforth all will be free and equal, emphasizing that reason (not tradition) will determine the content of each individual’s rights.

2. Marxists, exercising reason, point to many genuine instances of unfreedom and inequality in society, decrying them as oppression and demanding new rights.

3. Liberals, embarrassed by the presence of unfreedom and inequality after having declared that all would be free and equal, adopt some of the Marxists’ demands for new rights.

4. Return to #1 above and repeat.

...Liberals progressively adopt the critical theories of the Marxists over time, whether the subject is God and religion, man and woman, honor and duty, family, nation, or anything else.

More to come later today.

We support you, Mr. President

The most anti-American nation in Europe

In National Review, Victor Davis Hanson asks,

Why should America anchor Germany's defense? It cuts deals with Russia, has never met its NATO commitment, and is the most anti-American nation in Europe.

Read more here.

Well, it is one of the fundamental issues

James Woods tweeted,

The fundamental issue of this election. #ChinaJoeBiden pic.twitter.com/q3yJ1RpXBq

— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) August 22, 2020

Good day!

via KT

Tonight's last two tweets

Secretary Pompeo tweeted,

I notified the
@UN
Secretary-General and the Security Council President that the U.S. is initiating the restoration of virtually all sanctions on Iran lifted under UN Security Council Resolution 2231. Those sanctions will go back into effect in 30 days. America will not appease.

The Daily Caller tweeted,

DNC Included ‘Criminal Justice Reform Advocate’ Who Was Convicted For Kidnapping And Murder https://dailycaller.com/2020/08/21/democratic-national-convention-donna-hylton-convicted-murderer-kidnapping-thomas-vigliarolo/

Trey Gowdy: Brennan was either inaccurate or incompetent!"

What was the most important event to happen today? John Brennan was interviewed today by John Durham. Gowdy: "My suspicion is that John Brennan knew exactly what was happening exactly when it was happening!"

hydroxychloroquine — HCQ, for short

In the Washington Times, Jenny Beth Martin and James Todaro summarize what has been happening regarding the hydroxychloroquine debate of 2020.

Trofim Lysenko, Stalin’s director of biology, is best remembered for blocking the science of Mendelian genetics because the science was stubbornly resistant to Marxist ideology. Consequently, the entire field of genetics was banned in the USSR. Politics-driven science — what could possibly go wrong?

Unlike citizens of the former Soviet Union, Westerners are much less familiar with seeing science fully subordinate to political agendas. But with the hydroxychloroquine debate of 2020, we are getting a taste of it.

Hydroxychloroquine has been in use worldwide for more than 65 years. It’s been prescribed safely billions of times. And yet, for political reasons — and, more specifically, for anti-Trump reasons — there is a lobbying campaign to block hydroxychloroquine from patients with COVID-19.

Based on the best evidence available today, hydroxychloroquine — HCQ, for short — has been shown to be effective in early-stage treatment of COVID-19, the illness brought on by the novel coronavirus. Because of hyper-politization, however, this evidence is being ignored. After all, if there’s an effective treatment for COVID-19, then maybe the shutdowns and distance learning for our children and mask mandates and social distancing requirements aren’t necessary, from a medical standpoint.

And if they’re not necessary from a medical standpoint, then what excuse could we use to keep the schools closed for in-person learning, and to keep the businesses shuttered, and to keep the rest of society under the government’s thumb?

It was way back in March when President Trump first touted the benefits of HCQ as a potential therapy in treating COVID-19. On March 19, he announced that the FDA would fast-track approval of several treatments, including HCQ. He said the drug “has been around for a long time so we know if things don’t go as planned it’s not going to kill anybody.”

Three days later, The Wall Street Journal published a piece extolling the virtues of HCQ in combination with azithromycin, more commonly known as Zithromax (Z-Pak). The authors — Dr. Jeff Colyer, chairman of the National Advisory Commission on Rural Health, and Dr. Daniel Hinthorn, director of the Division of Infectious Disease at the University of Kansas Medical Center — argued that, based on their experiences treating patients, the HCQ-Z Pack treatment can be quite effective in early applications.

The tide turned in May with The Lancet, which published a study saying HCQ treatment for COVID-19 was ineffective. The left pounced, using the study to trash Mr. Trump for having promoted use of the drug.

But then, just a few weeks later, the authors of the study were forced to ask The Lancet to retract the study, because the research firm on whose data the authors had relied could not or would not confirm their data. All of a sudden, it was the anti-HCQ crowd that was left with mud on its face.

Then, the FDA issued a statement revoking the emergency use authorization it had granted in March — a revocation which, paradoxically, allowed doctors once again to prescribe HCQ “off label” for COVID-19 patients.

Then, on July 2, a new study published by the Henry Ford Health System declared that treatment with HCQ cut the death rate in half in sick patients hospitalized with COVID-19 — and, critically, without the heart-related side effects that some studies had shown.

This was the background to the press conference held on July 27 by America’s Frontline Doctors, an ad hoc group of physicians who have been dealing with COVID-19 patients for months. At that press conference, several of them spoke of the virtues of using HCQ as a treatment for early-stage COVID patients. Video clips of the event went viral, logging more than 20 million views; President Trump and his son, Don Jr., tweeted and retweeted the clips. And then Facebook, Twitter and YouTube removed the video clips for spreading what the tech giants called “misinformation” about COVID-19.

Asked at a White House press briefing the following day what he thought about the use of HCQ to treat COVID-19, the president acknowledged the politicization of the process when he responded, “[P]olitically, it doesn’t seem to be too popular. You know why? Because I recommend it. When I recommend something, they like to say, ‘Don’t use it.’”

Ironically, even as the tech giants were patting themselves on the back for having “saved” their public audiences from having received “misinformation,” two days after they removed the clips, FDA chief Stephen Hahn acknowledged that the choice to use HCQ as a treatment for COVID-19 was not properly a question for government regulation, but a choice to be made by a doctor and patient.

Science is at its best when its aims are scientific advancement and truth, and its method is rigorous scientific research. Political agendas and biases toward certain outcomes are unseemly in the field of science, and do nothing to advance medicine or patients’ interests.

The Lysenko approach to science is best left to totalitarian regimes. Americans deserve better.

The knee-taker

But he does take a knee... 💅 https://t.co/3roDExCI6a

— Kimberly Guilfoyle (@kimguilfoyle) August 21, 2020

Jesse is always worth listening to

Democrats know this is a low turn out election and they don't perform well in low turnout elections- so this is what they are doing- WATCH #TheFive pic.twitter.com/5wHGIlYBRo

— Jesse Watters (@JesseBWatters) August 21, 2020