Timed to coincide with CPAC 2022, Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), current Chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, has unveiled his 11-Point Plan to Rescue America, and it is a heady combination of patriotism, order, and common sense. The plan calls to mind then-representatives Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey’s (best name ever) Contract with America, a plan that, once publicized, helped engineer the first Republican takeover of the House in 40 years.
Of course wokeness brings weakness. That’s why the left has been encouraging it in the West for decades, even as Russia and China have loudly eschewed it.
As freedom-lovers justifiably recoil at Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s crackdown, Americans worry it could happen here. They’re too late. It already has.
In a recent court motion, Joe Biden’s Justice Department changed the official name of its investigation into the protest at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Originally designated the “Capitol breach” probe, the department just replaced “breach” with a more sinister word: siege.
Markets: The US stock market is closed for Presidents Day today, but investors will certainly have the Monday Scaries due to unanswered questions around inflation and the Russia–Ukraine crisis. One asset that’s doing particularly well amid the tensions is gold, which is considered a hedge against geopolitical conflicts. The metal’s price has increased in 12 of the last 15 trading sessions, and is hovering at levels not seen since last June.
‘My parents escaped from Germany under the Nazis and Communists. I’ve seen real terrorism. Our freedoms are at stake here,’ military chaplain and decorated veteran Harold Ristau told The Federalist.
Harold Ristau was born in Kitchener, Ontario, and deployed several times to Iraq and Afghanistan in the Canadian armed forces as a military chaplain. He told a local paper he was motivated to join the military after helping Afghan refugees with asylum cases while he pastored an inner-city church in Montreal. In 2014, Canada awarded Ristau one of its highest military recognitions, the Chief of the Defense Staff Commendation, for “achievements beyond the line of duty.”
He wore that medal atop his veteran uniform when he visited the trucker Freedom Convoy in Ottawa on Feb. 12, he told The Federalist in a phone interview. There, smartphone cameras captured him leading other veterans in slowly dismantling a blockade around a war memorial, then cleaning and decorating the monument. Police stood by and watched.
Justin Trudeau’s ineffable Justice Minister David Lametti is on record threatening those who hold the wrong political views that they are liable to have their bank accounts seized. “If you are a member of a pro-Trump movement who is donating hundreds of thousands of dollars, and millions of dollars to this kind of thing,” he said, “then you ought to be worried.” The assumption that Trump has something to do with Canadian trucker donations seems particularly unhinged.
Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, who sits on the board of Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum—an obvious conflict of interest—has moved to freeze the bank accounts and other financial instruments of the “protesters” and private citizens who have donated to the trucker fund. Hacked documents revealed the names of these offenders, some of whom have been “interviewed” by news media like the CBC and The Washington Post. Others have been doxed and menaced.
No less distressing, a substantial majority of the Canadian public have approved of the government’s jackbooted and manifestly illegal handling of the situation, taken in by the prime minister’s bought-and-paid-for media’s slanted and mendacious coverage. They are, to adapt a phrase from Daniel Goldhagen, Canada’s willing executioners, a compliant and unthinking populace presiding over the extinction of a once-democratic country. It couldn’t get any worse—though it probably will, with the assistance of the people’s sodden parliamentary representatives and a morally bankrupt media fifth column.
Read the whole thing.
To repeat: The silence coming from the other Western capitals is deafening. They must be watching Canada as a test case for just how hard they can push their own people.
The black clad army of mercenaries and police brutalizing a peaceful protest in Ottawa this weekend has been planned for years. It is overkill for a reason. It is theatre. It is an othering, a willful flagrant statement on the future of the working class everywhere. It instructs them: you will die. If not now, then sometime in the next ten years. Your towns will be gutted, your jobs will evaporate, you will scramble for pennies until you fall over dead and your children will have nothing to look forward to. You are Tutsi, you are Jew, you are Kulak, you are compromador, you are Othered. You are headed for the slagheap of history. Fight back and you will be deemed domestic terrorists and encamped indefinitely.
It’s funny, the gradualistic approach was working but now they seem desperate, like a window is closing somewhere.
“As a parent, I speak to other parents,” he told the board members, “And there’s a few things we don’t want.”
“I’m biracial, I’m multilingual, I’m multicultural. The fact is in America and North Carolina, I can do anything I want — and I teach that to my children,” [Brian] Echevarria said forcefully. “And the person who tells my little pecan-color kids that they’re somehow oppressed based on the color of their skin would be absolutely wrong and absolutely at war with me.”
Echevarria closed out his remarks with a parting shot, stating that “What the masks showed us is the parents, the most powerful group in the country, are taking back the wheel.”
The first is the brittle, arrogant and defensive response of our ruling class to any kind of political opposition nowadays. What kind of mind turns parents complaining at a school-board meeting into some sort of “domestic terrorism” threat? (The same kind that turns peacefully protesting truckers into “insurrectionists,” I suppose.)
In what previous age of American history would secret targeting and federal investigations of people engaging in a bedrock institution of participatory democracy have been seen as appropriate? Who calls people racist for wanting their kids to learn?
In this age, alas, those things happen, and the people doing them — the people who are supposed to be our society’s leaders, the best and the brightest, the level-headed non-extremists of the establishment — are frankly more than a little bit crazy.
No sane person would respond this way, and yet respond this way they do, over and over again. (And every time they do, they label their opponents racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, Islamophobic, etc., wielding those adjectives like magic curse words, even though they’re pretty much always bogus.)
Will the people ever learn how false information was seeded throughout the government and media in a conspiratorial effort to destroy a sitting president?
Markets: The headlines that moved markets last week—the Fed’s response to inflation, corporate earnings, tensions in Ukraine—will remain top of mind for investors this coming week. Analysts predict that if Russia were to invade Ukraine, oil could top $100 a barrel for the first time since 2014, further thwarting President Biden’s attempts to bring down gas prices.
The new shocker relates to the data Mr. Joffe and friends were mining. According to Friday’s filing, as early as July 2016 Mr. Joffe was “exploit[ing]” his “access to non-public and/or proprietary Internet data,” including “Internet traffic pertaining to . . . the Executive Office of the President of the United States (“EOP”).”
The filing explains that Mr. Joffe’s employer “had come to access and maintain dedicated servers for the EOP as part of a sensitive arrangement whereby it provided [internet services]” to the White House. Mr. Joffe’s team also was monitoring internet traffic related to Trump Tower, and Mr. Trump’s apartment on Central Park West.
White House communications are supposed to be secure, and the notion that any contractor—much less one with ties to a presidential campaign—could access them is alarming enough. The implication that the data was exploited for a political purpose is a scandal that requires investigation under oath.
The filing suggests the data collection continued into the Trump Presidency. Mr. Durham says that on Feb. 9, 2017, Mr. Sussmann met with a second federal agency (“Agency-2”) to provide “an updated set of allegations,” and that these “allegations relied, in part, on the purported [internet traffic] that [Mr. Joffe] and others had assembled pertaining to Trump Tower, Donald Trump’s New York City apartment building, the EOP” and a healthcare provider. . . .
The disclosures raise troubling questions far beyond the Sussmann indictment. How long did this snooping last and who had access to what was found? Who approved the access to White House data, and who at the FBI and White House knew about it? Were Mrs. Clinton and senior campaign aides personally aware of this data-trolling operation?
Mr. Durham’s revelations take the 2016 collusion scam well beyond the Steele dossier, which was based on the unvetted claims of a Russian emigre working in Washington. Those claims and the Sussmann assertions were channeled to the highest levels of the government via contacts at the FBI, CIA and State Department. They became fodder for secret and unjustified warrants against a former Trump campaign official, and later for Robert Mueller’s two-year mole hunt that turned up no evidence of collusion.
Along the way the Clinton campaign fed these bogus claims to a willing and gullible media. And now we know its operatives used private tech researchers to monitor White House communications. If you made this up, you’d be laughed out of a Netflix story pitch.
Indeed. Joffe denies everything and insists that he’s apolitical, which I find . . . unpersuasive.
Markets: With all the focus on wild stock swings last week, we neglected to mention the big news that US oil prices topped $90 for the first time since 2014, despite attempts by the Biden administration to keep them down. Gas prices, in turn, are back up to their highest levels in more than seven years.
Covid: The US death toll from Covid-19 has now surpassed 900,000. Another crazy thing to think about: Omicron has gotten more people around the world sick at the same time than at any point since the 1918–1919 flu pandemic, the WSJ points out.
