An American Awakening:Identity Politics and Other Aflictions

An American Awakening:Identity Politics and Other Aflictions 

Conservatives who have battled the incomplete religions of the French Revolution and Marxism have little understanding of what is now upon them. Their weapons are useless against this new enemy.

By Joshua Mitchell

December 30, 2022

FBI Had Agents in Proud Boys Prior to Jan 6

 FBI Had Agents in Proud Boys Prior to Jan 6

If Republicans eke out a win in the House of Representatives—which now seems likely—GOP leaders have promised to investigate numerous government scandals, including the irredeemably corrupt Federal Bureau of Investigation. One path of inquiry is how the bureau manufactures data to promote the phony narrative that “domestic violent extremists,” i.e., supporters of Donald Trump, pose a security threat to the country.

Sudden Change of Tune - Is Something Big Coming?

 Sudden Change of Tune - Is Something Big Coming?

Whoa: FiveThirtyEight projection in PA Senate race dramatically shifts to Oz -- and GOP overall

How the Democrats lost their way - Selena Zito

 How the Democrats lost their way

By 

Salena Zito, National Political Reporter

 

November 07, 2022 

NORMALVILLE, Pennsylvania — If there were a way to illustrate the beginning, middle, and end of this election cycle in four powerful moments, I’d start with the faces of the men and women working on the construction of the Keystone pipeline, and the owners of the small businesses who supported them, that I witnessed days after President Joe Biden terminated their livelihoods.

These are people who work with their hands in the harshest of weather conditions digging trenches, cleaning feeder pipes, laying concrete, ensuring the proper fittings on the connecting pipes, and loading and unloading heavy materials by hand. That's not including the faces of the people who run the motels, diners, machine shops, and barber shops and the mechanics who make sure they are fed, housed, cleaned, and able to get home when the job is done.

 The next image in my coverage of these first two years of the Biden administration captured the true beginning of his descent away from the public. It happened while I was driving past the town square in Independence, Missouri , and saw 13 empty chairs sitting in a semicircle at the base of the lowered American flag in front of the Old Jackson County Courthouse, with each chair bearing the name of one of the 13 soldiers lost in Afghanistan during Biden's bug-out from that country.

It was in the days and weeks after Aug. 26, 2021, when the nation lost those service members during Biden's botched withdrawal, that the media and the Democratic Party as a whole failed to understand the mark that moment had on the American psyche. It was a shift away from the party in power and the president, whose credibility since then has never stopped slipping away.

 Almost exactly one year later, at Philadelphia's Independence Hall on Sept. 1, 2022, Biden gave a very dark speech, with two Marines flanked on either side of him, about how half of this country is racist, extremist, and wants to upend democracy as we know it. That speech was a turning point against the Democrats, negating any advantage they hoped to gain in response to the Supreme Court's anti- abortion Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision.

In between, I’ve covered families struggling to make ends meet to pay for gas for their cars, maintain their farms, keep their businesses open as costs crush their profits, or find anyone willing to work for them.

I’ve watched parents distraught and ultimately bullied by education -union members for their concerns about their children’s curriculum or books in the library; I’ve seen them struggle along with their children as they try to catch up in school or listened to them talk about their college-age children who are adrift and without purpose.

What is about to happen on Tuesday never needed to happen to the Democratic Party. Oh, yes, they would have lost a few seats, maybe, but if they had stuck to their promise to be a party of unity and compromise and brought the political temperature down, they would have enjoyed some semblance of a chance to hold a majority together.

 Instead, they spend their time, day in and day out, constantly saying you or your family members, neighbors, co-workers, employees, or employer who voted for Donald Trump once or twice is an ultra-, mega-, extremist-MAGA insurrectionist fascist out to strip your rights and votes away.

And they wonder why people have turned on them!

The final image of this election happened last week when someone snapped an iPhone photo of Michael McGuire, who just got off of work at the local coal mine and rushed to Rupp Arena at the University of Kentucky so he could watch an event with his son.

 McGuire was covered in dirt from work. He said afterward he hadn’t had time to shower after his shift. It was a moment that moved Kentucky men's basketball coach John Calipari to say in a press conference after he was sent the photo that it hit him “right between the eyes.”

Calipari said, "My family's American dream started in a Clarksburg, West Virginia, coal mine, so this picture hits home.”

It was a moment that hit home for a lot of voters — middle-of-the-road folks — who may have never worked with their hands a day in their lives but know their parents and grandparents did and respect what that work ethic did for the betterment of their family’s legacy. In that photo, they see themselves or who they’d think they’d be had they been in that same situation as McGuire, and they would have done it with as much pride as he did.

 The Democratic Party and the cultural curators in this country that run our institutions, academia, national media, corporations, Hollywood , and our sports entities have forgotten that these people vote — no matter how much pressure you place on them, no matter how much you look down on them or call them names or believe you know better than them or think they should just deal with high prices or accept dangerous crime in their communities.

They feel much more connected to the values and work ethic of the McGuires in this world than the Hollywood actors sent out in droves to bring the votes home for the Democratic Party.

The Democrats need a much better message to appeal to voters the next time a big election is held — one that is aspirational, nondivisive, and truly inclusive.

That wasn't their message this year.

Deep Swamp - FBI (Following Red Wave 2022)

 BREAK UP THE FBI:

 Roger Kimball: The FBI will not be forgiven after Tuesday: The House Republicans’ bruising report is a statement of intent.

People are not about to forget what the politicians and their bureaucrats just did to them. And if they do not forget, neither will they forgive.

Nor are they going to forget what the FBI has done and is doing to us. The dawn raids against non-violent political rivals of the regime and pro-life activists, the nationwide dragnets to nab people who protested against the 2020 election, the spying on Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, manufacture of forged evidence in order to mobilize the awesome surveillance apparatus of the state against American citizens and undermine Trump’s presidency. The bill of indictment is long and damning. How long? More than a thousand pages in its first iteration, which GOP members of House Judiciary Committee dropped on Friday under the title “FBI Whistleblowers: What Their Disclosures Indicate About the Politicization of the FBI and Justice Department.”

What they indicate is an agency that has gone rogue and should be dismantled. This has been a theme sounding for more than a years now. Roger L. Simon, writing for the Epoch Times, said that the FBI, like ancient Carthage, must be destroyed. Holman Jenkins, writing for theWall Street Journal, said that the agency to be abolished. I’ve argued the same case several times, here, for example, and here. In my column for the December Speccie, I suggest that FBI be relocated to Kansas City and have its budget cut by 75 percent. “Then,” I write, “it should be taken apart altogether,” not least because “a national police is probably unconstitutional certainly un-American”

With few exceptions, the consensus is that the Bureau is beyond reformation or reclamation. Friday’s lengthy J’Accuse underscores the moral bankruptcy and corruption of the FBI.

Examples need to be made. Painful ones, that will discourage this sort of conduct in the future.

102Posted at 7:08 am by Glenn Reynolds   

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Today's Democrats

 Today's Democrats: Tulsi Gabbard

Gabbard: Today's Democrats "an elitist cabal of warmongers driven by cowardly wokeness"

Republican Target Points for 2022 Campaigns

 PJ MEDIA VIP ROUNDUP: Don’t forget that VODKAPUNDIT promo code if you’ve been thinking of 

joining us.

Matt Margolis: Biden’s Student Loan Forgiveness Scheme is a Winning Issue for Republicans. Here’s Why. “No other issue this cycle has enraged middle and working class voters more than this.”

Stacey Lennox: It’s Time for Republicans to Give Democrats a Taste of Their Own Medicine. “To help our feckless Congressional Republicans, here are some obvious strategic moves.”

Yours Truly: Trans Madness: Start With Grooming Children for Stripping, End With Surgically Mutilated Teens. “Thanks — if that’s the right word — to City Journal’s Christopher Rufo, I learned this week that the city government of Boise, Idaho is ‘hosting a festival featuring child drag queens as young as 11 years old.’ The events are sponsored by Citibank, Hewlett-Packard, Target, and Wells Fargo.”

86Posted at 10:10 am by Stephen Green   

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The Covid Reckoning Is Coming.

The Covid Reckoning Is Coming.

If Republicans retake the House next year, they should dedicate themselves to a full accounting of where this money went. Much of it did not find its way to the people who needed it. This spring, the Labor Department estimated that “at least” $163 billion in “overpayments” went to both legitimate recipients of unemployment benefits and fraudsters. The Paycheck Protection Act, which provided forgivable loans to businesses adversely affected by the pandemic, was described by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz as an “invitation” to defraud the government. “What didn’t happen was even minimal checks to make sure that the money was getting to the right people at the right time,” he said. That program has disbursed roughly $800 billion, about half of which has been forgiven.

And that’s just the unintended misuse of pandemic-related relief. What about the intended squandering of this taxpayer-funded largess? The Republican Study Committee’s review of where some of these funds were supposed to go is just as enraging as the abuse of those funds: “tree equity work,” environmental justice “boot camps,” “safe smoking kits,” and syringes for using illicit narcotics, refurbishing a minor-league baseball stadium in New York, upping the prize money at Arizona horse-racing tracks, and providing public-school staff with instruction in “high-need topics” like “implicit bias” training and “restorative practices.” As a Department of Education document averred, the pandemic was a perfect time to engineer a “culture shift” in America’s schools.

This investigative work is only one element of a comprehensive retrospective on the pandemic. Americans should confront the impulses that led governments to close houses of worship, abrogate the rights of property owners, and draft private enterprise into the work of law enforcement in what were patently obvious violations of the Constitution. There should be hearings into the conduct of teachers’ unions and into school boards in the major metropolitan areas that clung to school closures long after the terrible consequences for young people’s mental health and educational advancementwere known. And what connection was there between the engineered breakdown of society and the eruption of social tensions culminating in some of the costliest rioting the country has ever seen?

The public health apparatus’s reluctance, throughout this miserable event, to meet the public where it lives has become a cliché. They won’t budge, and the country is moving on without them. But moving on is impossible in the absence of a thorough reckoning. The Covid pandemic already seems unlikely to be “forgotten” by history like the outbreak of Spanish Influenza a century ago. Unlike our forebears, we marinate in our trauma. It’s incumbent on this generation to establish for posterity what went wrong over the last two and a half years, if only so that we will never do this again.

Indeed. Much more like this, please: The Elite Panic of 2022.

126Posted at 8:22 am by Ed Driscoll   

Dems in TROUBLE & They know It

 Dems in TROUBLE & They know It

NEW YORK POST: 

Dems’ happy talk can’t hide havoc inflation wreaking on working Americans.

Democrats’ latest Hail Mary effort to sell themselves in advance of November’s election turns on claiming the US economy is doing great, with employment up 6.5 million this last year. It’s doomed to fail, for two big reasons.

First, everyone knows these are still overwhelmingly just jobs recovered post-pandemic (with the recovery slowest in Democratic-controlled, heavy-lockdown states).

Second, and more important: Working Americans are all too aware how rampant inflation is setting them back.

Indeed, prices are soaring higher for the working class than for better-off Americans: Inflation in the year through March was 9.4 percent for them, per the Labor Department’s CPI-W measure (Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers), vs. 8.5% in the “headline” CPI number.

It’s even worse over the last six months, with annualized CPI of 10.1% but CPI-W of 11.1%.

These are the widest gaps ever recorded.

That’s because working-class Americans spend more of their incomes on food and gas, which have seen by far the stiffest increases in prices.

Related: Don’t pretend that high prices and American suffering are a ‘bug’ for the establishment — it’s a historic feature.

Plus: Flashback: Democrats’ war on suburban women includes inflation-fueling reckless spending.

67Posted at 5:38 pm by Glenn Reynolds   

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GOP Onward to 2022 Midterms

 ‘IMMIGRATION IS WAR:’ an interview with Éric Zemmour.

For Zemmour, the most craven expression of this hyper-individualism is militant political correctness — “le wokeisme.” He calls it “hypersensitivity to the rights of the individual, a generalized offensive against French and western culture, against the white heterosexual man. These people want above all to make the French and all westerners feel guilty, ashamed of their history, so that they amputate themselves, destroy themselves, abandon their culture, their civilization, simply so that they no longer feel guilty.”

This wokeness, he argues, is a kind of Trojan horse for the Islamification of formerly Christian nations. “It is by destroying our cultures, our history, that they make a clean sweep of all that and allow a foreign culture, history and civilization to come and replace it.”

Such talk — echoing as it does “the great replacement theory” of Renaud Camus — causes consternation in progressive circles. Somebody, probably David Aaronovitch, will no doubt accuse The Spectator of giving a platform to nativism or white supremacism merely by speaking to him. Yet Zemmour is utterly unabashed about his views and he’s currently second or third in the presidential election polls.

Might his preoccupations with national characteristics, the greatness of French literature and the collapse of western civilization have something to do with the fact that he is himself an immigrant child? His parents were Berber Jews from Algeria. His grandfather spoke better Arabic than French. His father drove an ambulance.

“What my family has done in terms of assimilating French culture should be an example,” he says, proudly. “I am a product of French colonialization. I am not one of these people who condemn the French colonizer. I say thank you.

Earlier:

● Jared Bernstein, member of Biden’s Council of Economic Advisors: “One thing we learned in the 1990s was that a surefire way to reconnect the fortunes of working people at all skill levels, immigrant and native-born alike, to the growing economy is to let the job market tighten up. A tight job market pressures employers to boost wage offers to get and keep the workers they need. One equally surefire way to sort-circuit this useful dynamic is to turn on the immigrant spigot every time some group’s wages go up.”

● Former Trump administration senior adviser Stephen Miller: Biden’s Immigration Plan Would “Erase America’s Nationhood.”

● “Labour wanted mass immigration to make UK more multicultural, says former adviser. Labour threw open Britain’s borders to mass immigration to help socially engineer a ‘truly multicultural’ country, a former Government adviser has revealed.”

● 69 Percent of Hispanics Disapprove of Biden’s Handling of Immigration.

● Tom Cotton’s Response to Kamala Harris’ Border Failures Should Be the Default for All Republicans: “‘You know, Laura, Kamala Harris didn’t have to go all the way to Guatemala and Mexico to find the root causes of this border crisis because they’re not there,’ Cotton told Fox News host Laura Ingraham earlier this week. ‘The root causes are in the White House.’ He further explained that it ‘happened on January 20th when Joe Biden took office, and he essentially opened our borders, reversing very effective policies that had our borders under control.’”

A core theme of the midterm and presidential elections won’t be too hard to figure out:

 Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll   

‘‘Power to the People:’ The GOP Bloodbath Has Begun.

 ROGER SIMON: 

‘Power to the People:’ The GOP Bloodbath Has Begun.

It’s not just the terminally Deep State Mitch McConnell—excoriated in an entirely justifiable statement from Donald Trump—but Kevin McCarthy and a host of other Beltway Republicans who must somehow either lose their positions of authority, that is be sidelined and rendered either impotent or inconsequential, and/or be primaried out before the election of 2022.

Otherwise the Republican Party will likely lose in 22 and again in 24 because the rank-and-file is completely out of synch with these putative party elites.

This easily could happen even given the traditional advantage of the opposition party and the moronic policies of the Biden administration. (Keystone pipeline anyone…? Brrr….)

Republican voters mostly despise their current leadership and favor Trump by large margins, if we are to believe the polls and, more importantly, our own eyes.

Many of the rank-and-file will not participate in the election, sitting it out, if these old school “leaders” and their similarly-inclined colleagues are not removed and still wield power.

Either that, or those millions known as the “deplorables” will attempt to establish a third party. Some already are. Almost all have seriously considered it.

Many previously well thought of Republican leaders incredibly remain clueless about this or deliberately have their heads in the sand. Why, for example, has Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton made an alliance with Mitt Romney, of all people, to promote minimum wage legislation?

The weeding out of these, sadly many, Deep State uniparty figures must begin immediately because 2022 will be upon us before we know it.

As reported here at The Epoch Times, the process has already begun with many in the grassroots suddenly stepping forward to volunteer for Republican Party positions at the local level.

As we used to say in the sixties, “Power to the People”—only this time, coming from the heartland of America, it may have more of a reality to it than it did then, even be more long-lasting and healing, if it succeeds.

Related: Ron DeSantis Gets 2024 ‘Tier One’ Designation From Party Insiders.

74Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll   

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