Category: US Politics

Normally, scandals have no impact on elections or even public opinion. We saw that during the Clinton years with assorted sex, commodity futures and influence-peddling scandals, and worse still, in the great skating of the Obama administration, which spied on Americans, sicced the IRS on political dissidents, left a U.S. ambassador to die, and worst of all, tried to derail the next incumbent with a pile of Russian-generated chaos-inducing propaganda, a phonily premised impeachment, a string of riots, and a host of dirty political tricks. Water off a duck’s back. Nobody’s paid, and Joe Biden’s ahead in the polls. 

Scandals, it seems, excite the base of an opposing party, but they don’t sell among the broader electorate. They don’t affect elections. Or so the view would go of anyone who’s watched U.S. politics for the past 40 years.

But every once in awhile, there is one that takes off, changes the momentum. Watergate comes to mind. Now there’s Bidengate, exposed to great impact by the New York Post. A new poll shows it may just be having an effect:

Joe Biden’s polling edge over President Trump eroded this week amid The Post’s scandalous revelations about his son Hunter’s foreign dealings — but the Democratic candidate still maintains a substantial lead.

The IBD/TIPP national tracking poll, released Saturday, puts Biden at 50 percent in the head-to-head matchup, with Trump at 43 percent. The 7-point advantage is well outside the survey’s 3 percent margin of error.

But the poll of 1,009 likely voters saw Biden’s support slip by just over 2 percentage points since Monday — and found an increase of just under 1 percent for the incumbent.

The IBD/TIPP survey found strength for Biden among independent voters, who split their support between Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016, but now back the challenger by a 9-percent margin.

The poll caught my attention because it is the IBD/TIPP poll, which is the best in the business. They have a consistent history of calling elections correctly by the closest margins. (Full disclosure: I used to write editorials for IBD). If they are seeing a slide, a cracking, a wall crumbling down, you can bet it’s happening.

And that it is really shouldn’t be surprising. I can think offhand of five reasons why.

One, they aren’t the result of triangulation, or reaching conclusions by a series of chained events, they are naked and raw, quid pro quo – pay me up front and get the introduction, pay me in advance. They couldn’t be any more direct. Much corruption moves through the system through a series of codes but this was the holy grail, completely admitted corruption straight from a laptop. They are real.

Two, Biden portrays himself to voters as Mr. Decent, Mr. Nice. He obeys mask rules, he comes from Scranton. This Hunter Biden scandal reveals a very different creature: Emails and text messages from Biden’s recovered hard drive, left abandoned in a Maryland computer repair shop, show a greedy, grasping, rapacious mafia-like godfather, demanding his fifty percent cut. They show a man willing to use his office to enrich family members to the tune of millions of dollars, with impunity the rule. The show a greedy, grasping family empire of bagmen who orbit around the man as he relishes power, following him from international post, to international post, black bag outstretched. They show pay-to-play on a humongous, national-security-breaking level, with access and influence sold on the back of public office supposedly there to represent the people, but in reality, representing House Biden. The stark contrast between Mr. Decent, and the scary underhanded ‘Big Guy’ under the computer surface, signals fraud, and voters don’t like fraud.

Three, the scandal has a name — Bidengate — and is describe-able in a sentence or two, a key ingredient in making a scandal stick: Hunter Biden, despite his dissolute drug- and stripper-addled background, followed his dad the vice president around, got paid tens of thousands, if not millions, for “introductions” and made himself a pile. What’s more, he hasn’t been punished for it, any more than the Clinton Foundation’s pay-to-play show was, and his acts will undoubtedly carry on if Biden is elected president. National Security will be for sale. And you can just hear the world’s dictators rubbing their hands together with delight at the prospect of an easy mark like Biden junior being available for whatever they need for a price. China, of course, has endorse Joe Biden. Wonder why.

Third, the Bidens are attempting to cover it up, bad. Joe flew off the handle at a reporter here:

 

 

…yet he still has not stated that the emails are fake. He knows they are not fake, there is too much proof — former White House advisor Steve Bannon says he has emails from Biden junior’s lawyer demanding to get the hard drive back and will release them if necessary.

 

 

That’s desperate, indeed. 

 

 

Fifth, there’s the insane behavior of Twitter and Facebook social media baronies, literally attempting to supress the story. One reason may be her:

 

 

Such a coincidence. 

The effort to repress the news has triggered congressional hearings which may break up the duopoly or force it to be regulated as an edited publication. More important. it’s draw attention to the story in a way it may not have done had they not put their hamfisted efforts to censor in the mix. Knowing that something is censored and forbidden makes many people more interested in reading the story. That’s very bad news for Joe Biden.

The bottom line from IBD/TIPP is that the scandal has been turning the polls away from Biden’s advantage. Nobody wants to vote in a corruptus maximus whose corruption will start on day one. This scandal may well prove to be Joe Biden’s undoing, and if so, that will be a good thing. 

 

  Photo illustration by Monica Showalter with use of images by Gage Skidmore, via Flickr // CC BY-SA 2.0, Acaben, via Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 2.0, PxFuel public domain, ABC News YouTube screen shot, and Voice of America // public domain.

 

 

Normally, scandals have no impact on elections or even public opinion. We saw that during the Clinton years with assorted sex, commodity futures and influence-peddling scandals, and worse still, in the great skating of the Obama administration, which spied on Americans, sicced the IRS on political dissidents, left a U.S. ambassador to die, and worst of all, tried to derail the next incumbent with a pile of Russian-generated chaos-inducing propaganda, a phonily premised impeachment, a string of riots, and a host of dirty political tricks. Water off a duck’s back. Nobody’s paid, and Joe Biden’s ahead in the polls. 

Scandals, it seems, excite the base of an opposing party, but they don’t sell among the broader electorate. They don’t affect elections. Or so the view would go of anyone who’s watched U.S. politics for the past 40 years.

But every once in awhile, there is one that takes off, changes the momentum. Watergate comes to mind. Now there’s Bidengate, exposed to great impact by the New York Post. A new poll shows it may just be having an effect:

Joe Biden’s polling edge over President Trump eroded this week amid The Post’s scandalous revelations about his son Hunter’s foreign dealings — but the Democratic candidate still maintains a substantial lead.

The IBD/TIPP national tracking poll, released Saturday, puts Biden at 50 percent in the head-to-head matchup, with Trump at 43 percent. The 7-point advantage is well outside the survey’s 3 percent margin of error.

But the poll of 1,009 likely voters saw Biden’s support slip by just over 2 percentage points since Monday — and found an increase of just under 1 percent for the incumbent.

The IBD/TIPP survey found strength for Biden among independent voters, who split their support between Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016, but now back the challenger by a 9-percent margin.

The poll caught my attention because it is the IBD/TIPP poll, which is the best in the business. They have a consistent history of calling elections correctly by the closest margins. (Full disclosure: I used to write editorials for IBD). If they are seeing a slide, a cracking, a wall crumbling down, you can bet it’s happening.

And that it is really shouldn’t be surprising. I can think offhand of five reasons why.

One, they aren’t the result of triangulation, or reaching conclusions by a series of chained events, they are naked and raw, quid pro quo – pay me up front and get the introduction, pay me in advance. They couldn’t be any more direct. Much corruption moves through the system through a series of codes but this was the holy grail, completely admitted corruption straight from a laptop. They are real.

Two, Biden portrays himself to voters as Mr. Decent, Mr. Nice. He obeys mask rules, he comes from Scranton. This Hunter Biden scandal reveals a very different creature: Emails and text messages from Biden’s recovered hard drive, left abandoned in a Maryland computer repair shop, show a greedy, grasping, rapacious mafia-like godfather, demanding his fifty percent cut. They show a man willing to use his office to enrich family members to the tune of millions of dollars, with impunity the rule. The show a greedy, grasping family empire of bagmen who orbit around the man as he relishes power, following him from international post, to international post, black bag outstretched. They show pay-to-play on a humongous, national-security-breaking level, with access and influence sold on the back of public office supposedly there to represent the people, but in reality, representing House Biden. The stark contrast between Mr. Decent, and the scary underhanded ‘Big Guy’ under the computer surface, signals fraud, and voters don’t like fraud.

Three, the scandal has a name — Bidengate — and is describe-able in a sentence or two, a key ingredient in making a scandal stick: Hunter Biden, despite his dissolute drug- and stripper-addled background, followed his dad the vice president around, got paid tens of thousands, if not millions, for “introductions” and made himself a pile. What’s more, he hasn’t been punished for it, any more than the Clinton Foundation’s pay-to-play show was, and his acts will undoubtedly carry on if Biden is elected president. National Security will be for sale. And you can just hear the world’s dictators rubbing their hands together with delight at the prospect of an easy mark like Biden junior being available for whatever they need for a price. China, of course, has endorse Joe Biden. Wonder why.

Third, the Bidens are attempting to cover it up, bad. Joe flew off the handle at a reporter here:

 

 

…yet he still has not stated that the emails are fake. He knows they are not fake, there is too much proof — former White House advisor Steve Bannon says he has emails from Biden junior’s lawyer demanding to get the hard drive back and will release them if necessary.

 

 

That’s desperate, indeed. 

 

 

Fifth, there’s the insane behavior of Twitter and Facebook social media baronies, literally attempting to supress the story. One reason may be her:

 

 

Such a coincidence. 

The effort to repress the news has triggered congressional hearings which may break up the duopoly or force it to be regulated as an edited publication. More important. it’s draw attention to the story in a way it may not have done had they not put their hamfisted efforts to censor in the mix. Knowing that something is censored and forbidden makes many people more interested in reading the story. That’s very bad news for Joe Biden.

The bottom line from IBD/TIPP is that the scandal has been turning the polls away from Biden’s advantage. Nobody wants to vote in a corruptus maximus whose corruption will start on day one. This scandal may well prove to be Joe Biden’s undoing, and if so, that will be a good thing. 

 

  Photo illustration by Monica Showalter with use of images by Gage Skidmore, via Flickr // CC BY-SA 2.0, Acaben, via Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 2.0, PxFuel public domain, ABC News YouTube screen shot, and Voice of America // public domain.

 

 

The evidence establishing a shocking pattern is now clear: Hunter Biden and his busines partners sold access to Joe Biden when he was the Obama administration’s point man on China. This took place during the period when US jobs were being exported to China by the millions. Hunter earned many millions of dollars and funneled a share of that money to his father, in return for selling out American workers.

An entirely new source – a business partner of Hunter Biden who has “flipped” and granted full access (i.e., his username password) to years of his Gmail email account – reveals that access to then-VP Biden in the White House was granted in 2011 to a high level group of member of the Chinese Communist Party with a keen interest in US trade policy, as that policy was being formulated.

Breitbart has an exclusive story, co-authored by Peter Schweizer, who received access to the email trove of Bevan Cooney, formerly Hunter Biden’s partner in crime, and now serving time in federal prison for a fraud that he claims he was the fall guy for, taking the heat for Hunter.

Moreover, the MacBook hard drive emails have been authenticated by at least two people whose emails were found on it and who verify that the hard drive contains their true communications.  

The long and detailed Breitbart article should be read in full to understand the magnitude of the email records. The 23,000 emails on it are still being reviewed, and more will be released in the days ahead. Here are few words of context from it:

From prison, Cooney provided Schweizer with written authorization, his email account name, and password to his Gmail account to retrieve these emails. He authorized, in writing, the publication of these emails— notable because it is the first time a close associate has publicly confirmed Hunter’s trading on his father’s influence.

The emails offer a unique window into just how the Biden universe conducted business during the Obama-Biden Administration. These associates sought to trade on Hunter Biden’s relationship with, and access to, his father and the Obama-Biden White House in order to generate business.

For instance, on November 5, 2011, one of Archer’s business contacts forwarded him an email teasing an opportunity to gain “potentially outstanding new clients” by helping to arrange White House meetings for a group of Chinese executives and government officials. The group was the China Entrepreneur Club (CEC) and the delegation included Chinese billionaires, Chinese Communist Party loyalists, and at least one “respected diplomat” from Beijing. Despite its benign name, CEC has been called “a second foreign ministry” for the People’s Republic of China—a communist government that closely controls most businesses in its country. CEC was established in 2006 by a group of businessmen and Chinese government diplomats.

CEC’s leadership boasts numerous senior members of the Chinese Communist Party, including Wang Zhongyu (“vice chairman of the 10th CPPCC National Committee and deputy secretary of the Party group”), Ma Weihua (director of multiple Chinese Communist Party offices), and Jiang Xipei (member of the Chinese Communist Party and representative of the 16^th National Congress), among others.

 

The visit was logged in at the White House, but thegroup’s meeting with VP Biden was concealed. However, proof that it took place was found on the internet because a member of the group boasted about it:

 

Curiously, the Obama-Biden visitor logs do not mention any meeting with Vice President Joe Biden. But the Vice President’s off-the-books meeting was revealed by one of the core founders of the CEC. In an obscure document listing the CEC members’ biographies, CEC Secretary General Maggie Cheng alleges that she facilitated the CEC delegation meetings in Washington in 2011 and boasts of the Washington establishment figures that CEC met with. The first name she dropped was that of Vice President Joe Biden.

YouTube screengrab

The relationships established during that visit may have benefited Hunter Biden and Devon Archer down the road. Two years later, they famously helped to form the Chinese government funded Bohai Harvest RST (BHR) investment fund. One of BHR’s first major portfolio investments was a ride-sharing company like Uber called Didi Dache—now called Didi Chuxing Technology Co. That company is closely connected to Liu Chuanzhi, the chairman of the China Entrepreneur Club (CEC) and the founder of Legend Holdings—the parent company of Lenovo, one of the world’s largest computer companies. Liu is a former Chinese Communist Party delegate and was a leader of the 2011 CEC delegation to the White House. His daughter was the President of Didi.

On his Fox News program last night – the highest rated program on cable news – Tucker Carlson provided an excellent summary of the meaning of all this.

 And in the hour that followed, on Hannity, Peter Schweizer himself explained how the pay-to-play system worked. Key excerpt:

A wide net of using the Biden name, using access to the White House, Hunter serving a pipeline to the administration as a means to help their clients and gain clients. The names that come up in this are the Chinese, the Russians, the Ukrainians, the Kazakhs – it’s a veritable United Nations of corruption, and what it demonstrates is that Joe Biden as Vice President of the United States of America was a center point –  it was almost the planet around which these business activities moved.

President Trump is already speaking about the “Biden Crime Family” in his campaign rallies, and will share a stage with Biden in the scheduled debate moderated by NBC’s Kristen Welker. More and more evidence will be coming out each day, and quite notably, Biden and his lawyers are not contesting the veracity of the emails from Hunter’s MacBook and they have not yet been asked about the Cooney email account, which is readily verifiable.  

The social media cofferdam around distribution of the stories of Biden corruption will not hold. Not only does the Streisand effect serve as an impetus, but the week and half left before the election are focusing the nation’s attention on Joe Biden and Donald Trump.

The evidence establishing a shocking pattern is now clear: Hunter Biden and his busines partners sold access to Joe Biden when he was the Obama administration’s point man on China. This took place during the period when US jobs were being exported to China by the millions. Hunter earned many millions of dollars and funneled a share of that money to his father, in return for selling out American workers.

An entirely new source – a business partner of Hunter Biden who has “flipped” and granted full access (i.e., his username password) to years of his Gmail email account – reveals that access to then-VP Biden in the White House was granted in 2011 to a high level group of member of the Chinese Communist Party with a keen interest in US trade policy, as that policy was being formulated.

Breitbart has an exclusive story, co-authored by Peter Schweizer, who received access to the email trove of Bevan Cooney, formerly Hunter Biden’s partner in crime, and now serving time in federal prison for a fraud that he claims he was the fall guy for, taking the heat for Hunter.

Moreover, the MacBook hard drive emails have been authenticated by at least two people whose emails were found on it and who verify that the hard drive contains their true communications.  

The long and detailed Breitbart article should be read in full to understand the magnitude of the email records. The 23,000 emails on it are still being reviewed, and more will be released in the days ahead. Here are few words of context from it:

From prison, Cooney provided Schweizer with written authorization, his email account name, and password to his Gmail account to retrieve these emails. He authorized, in writing, the publication of these emails— notable because it is the first time a close associate has publicly confirmed Hunter’s trading on his father’s influence.

The emails offer a unique window into just how the Biden universe conducted business during the Obama-Biden Administration. These associates sought to trade on Hunter Biden’s relationship with, and access to, his father and the Obama-Biden White House in order to generate business.

For instance, on November 5, 2011, one of Archer’s business contacts forwarded him an email teasing an opportunity to gain “potentially outstanding new clients” by helping to arrange White House meetings for a group of Chinese executives and government officials. The group was the China Entrepreneur Club (CEC) and the delegation included Chinese billionaires, Chinese Communist Party loyalists, and at least one “respected diplomat” from Beijing. Despite its benign name, CEC has been called “a second foreign ministry” for the People’s Republic of China—a communist government that closely controls most businesses in its country. CEC was established in 2006 by a group of businessmen and Chinese government diplomats.

CEC’s leadership boasts numerous senior members of the Chinese Communist Party, including Wang Zhongyu (“vice chairman of the 10th CPPCC National Committee and deputy secretary of the Party group”), Ma Weihua (director of multiple Chinese Communist Party offices), and Jiang Xipei (member of the Chinese Communist Party and representative of the 16^th National Congress), among others.

 

The visit was logged in at the White House, but thegroup’s meeting with VP Biden was concealed. However, proof that it took place was found on the internet because a member of the group boasted about it:

 

Curiously, the Obama-Biden visitor logs do not mention any meeting with Vice President Joe Biden. But the Vice President’s off-the-books meeting was revealed by one of the core founders of the CEC. In an obscure document listing the CEC members’ biographies, CEC Secretary General Maggie Cheng alleges that she facilitated the CEC delegation meetings in Washington in 2011 and boasts of the Washington establishment figures that CEC met with. The first name she dropped was that of Vice President Joe Biden.

YouTube screengrab

The relationships established during that visit may have benefited Hunter Biden and Devon Archer down the road. Two years later, they famously helped to form the Chinese government funded Bohai Harvest RST (BHR) investment fund. One of BHR’s first major portfolio investments was a ride-sharing company like Uber called Didi Dache—now called Didi Chuxing Technology Co. That company is closely connected to Liu Chuanzhi, the chairman of the China Entrepreneur Club (CEC) and the founder of Legend Holdings—the parent company of Lenovo, one of the world’s largest computer companies. Liu is a former Chinese Communist Party delegate and was a leader of the 2011 CEC delegation to the White House. His daughter was the President of Didi.

On his Fox News program last night – the highest rated program on cable news – Tucker Carlson provided an excellent summary of the meaning of all this.

 And in the hour that followed, on Hannity, Peter Schweizer himself explained how the pay-to-play system worked. Key excerpt:

A wide net of using the Biden name, using access to the White House, Hunter serving a pipeline to the administration as a means to help their clients and gain clients. The names that come up in this are the Chinese, the Russians, the Ukrainians, the Kazakhs – it’s a veritable United Nations of corruption, and what it demonstrates is that Joe Biden as Vice President of the United States of America was a center point –  it was almost the planet around which these business activities moved.

President Trump is already speaking about the “Biden Crime Family” in his campaign rallies, and will share a stage with Biden in the scheduled debate moderated by NBC’s Kristen Welker. More and more evidence will be coming out each day, and quite notably, Biden and his lawyers are not contesting the veracity of the emails from Hunter’s MacBook and they have not yet been asked about the Cooney email account, which is readily verifiable.  

The social media cofferdam around distribution of the stories of Biden corruption will not hold. Not only does the Streisand effect serve as an impetus, but the week and half left before the election are focusing the nation’s attention on Joe Biden and Donald Trump.

There were some good reasons we were scared, indeed, petrified, of the Chinese Virus. But we panicked mostly because we were set up to do so.

First, there had been weeks of reporting describing the crazed goings-on in Wuhan. Wuhan suddenly materialized on the viewscreens of our lives: a large city that no one had ever heard of. The actions of the  communist government made it appear that an apocalypse had begun. Bridges cordoned off, roads blocked, streets emptied. Culminating in those poor souls being boarded up by the authorities in their apartment and left to die.

Then, for what at the time were reasons unknown, the virus attacked a region in Europe. No one, it seemed, could fathom why, why there, which was scary in itself. But later we learned that the Chinese had allowed flights from Wuhan to Northern Italy, where, it turns out, around a hundred thousand Chinese from Wuhan labor in Chinese-owned factories.

The Italian hospitals filled up. Italy seemed overwhelmed. People were being turned away and left to die. The Italian government completely shut down the entire country, something which never had been done before, ever. 

We can be forgiven for thinking all of this would happen here, in America.

(We were wrong. In fact, two otherwise very similar regions in Italy had very different outcomes because of differing responses. Part of the problem was the limited numbers of ICU beds available in Italy’s socialized medical facilities. This problem never occurred in the U.S.: everyone who needed a ventilator got one, everyone who needed an ICU bed received one.)

We could have resisted the urge to panic. Already in early March it was clear the situation in Northern Italy was anomalous: the average age of those killed by the virus was 80, and Taiwan and South Korea had both contained its spread.

But when the thrice-damned British Imperial College scientist Neil Ferguson came out with his nightmarish predictions of an overwhelming pandemic, we went full Chicken Little. (Ferguson has retracted his fake predictions: here and here). We could have believed other scientists, such as those of Oxford University. Or even in our own common sense.

We didn’t do so.

We didn’t do so because we’d been programmed to panic. Primed and made ready to believe anything and everything. To believe the fantastical. To embrace it.

Heck, even Sean Ono Lennon thinks we’re being programmed.

Of course, we are talking about a kind of collective “us” here, a collective narrative, a public consensus. The kind that used to obtain, back when, when the media was not an instrument of the radical Left.

At the present time, this “we” still encompasses many; it includes the radicals, the radicalized, and a large mass still under the influence of the mad media. In regard to the Chinese virus, the collective “we” included many others as well who for a time bought into the narrative. In other words, us.

The programmers have been busy making us, or enough of us, believe not that truth is optional, but that there is no truth, in the manner Pilate iterated. There is only the convenience of the moment.

Who can doubt that we are being taught the truth no longer exists?

Examples are legion. Let’s take one. A president denounces white supremacy dozens of times. But the “truth” – the fake truth de jour – is that he has not.

How convenient!

Another beauty: many American cities were recently devastated by riots. But the “truth” is that the rioters were “mostly peaceful.”

How convenient!

It’s not that the collective “we” are dumb. “We” have been made to be dumb. And they are trying to make us ever more dumb.

They require that we believe their fake “truth.” If we don’t, we are deplorables. At best. Some now call for our physical destruction.

In other countries, similar things have occurred. Perhaps even worse. They are actively jailing people who express incorrect feelings.

But that is not the main reason many of us succumb. There is a limit to the number of times one, or at least many, of us can say “no.” The tidal wave of propaganda does eventually affect many, and to no surprise. If anyone can be broken in a torture chamber, many can be broken by a giant bullhorn/echo chamber if the exposure lasts long enough.

And it is not the fault of many who succumb. Many of us have good friends who just have been swept away. 

The other part of it is that it’s all phrased in a doublespeak do-gooder manner. It’s always pro-something. Like “pro-choice.” Or free-something. Like free health care.

So if you go along, you are helping the agenda, and you feel good about it.

And anyone that doesn’t is a bad person.

One can see how this readily lends itself to collectivism. Since we are all agreed, we are all on the march. Anyone not on the march is an enemy.

So when we were told to be scared we were primed and ready.

The story would not be complete without considering the enormity of what was proposed and the novelty to most people of the subject matter.

Rarely has someone been forced to act out someone else’s fears. But this is what happened. We were all constrained to act as if the sky were falling. No dissenting views allowed.

When you act something out, it gains a life of its own. When you see others do it, it gets scarier and more real. Let’s not forget, being scared is fun for some people. Roller coaster rides. Horror movies.

And this acting out was and remains collective, which tickles all the fancy of every Karen, and Karens are legion. Many are governors.

Organizing this kind of thing, we tend to forget, is a lot of fun for people.  Some people, at least. The Karen governors, for one. A do-gooding power trip.

Constitutional rights? Hah! This is for your own good. Ingrate!

The difficulty in counter-argument is that we are indeed dealing with a virus. It has killed some people, as do many viruses, including the flu. It is true that the further away people are from one another, the lesser the chance that one will infect the other. It is true that many things are possible regarding viruses, such as that an asymptomatic carrier might conceivably infect someone (although it is extremely unlikely and is not the driver of outbreaks).

It’s safer, the Quarantine Karens say, to wear a mask, to “socially” distance. Then they say it’s imperative.

Safer, in a way, but only in an exaggerated and half-blind manner, and most certainly not imperative. The rationality is never questioned (“my science beats your science”). And most especially, the negative aspects, including the negative effects on one’s health, are ignored. They don’t exist for Quarantine Karens.

Look, either we pull out of this or we will be sucked in to it like into a black hole. (Half of Great Britain is being locked down again; Germany is doing much the same; all this with a decreasing death rate.)

We’ve got to pull out now, because they’ve got something ready and it’s coming down the pike. (They had to come up with something new because the vaccine is nearly ready and even without the vaccine we have fabulous treatments (like the one that restored the stricken president in a few days).

They’re saying the lockdowns and restrictions are here forever – not because of the Chinese virus – but because of … wait for this … the flu.

During a speech at the U.S. Army’s annual conference, Bruce Jette, assistant secretary of the Army for acquisition, logistics and technology, said that measures implemented across the country will remain in place …  [h]e also suggested that the restrictions should remain in place for the general public.

“I would say we don’t back off of the COVID-19 standards because it will also reduce the impact of flu and other illnesses,” he added.

The panic must stop.

 

Tadas Klimas is a former FBI agent, awarded the National Intelligence Medal of Achievement (NIMA). He is also a former law professor and former Chief Legal Counsel to the Speaker of the Lithuanian parliament Prof. Vytautas Landsbergis.

Photo illustration by Monica Showalter with use of images from 

 

There were some good reasons we were scared, indeed, petrified, of the Chinese Virus. But we panicked mostly because we were set up to do so.

First, there had been weeks of reporting describing the crazed goings-on in Wuhan. Wuhan suddenly materialized on the viewscreens of our lives: a large city that no one had ever heard of. The actions of the  communist government made it appear that an apocalypse had begun. Bridges cordoned off, roads blocked, streets emptied. Culminating in those poor souls being boarded up by the authorities in their apartment and left to die.

Then, for what at the time were reasons unknown, the virus attacked a region in Europe. No one, it seemed, could fathom why, why there, which was scary in itself. But later we learned that the Chinese had allowed flights from Wuhan to Northern Italy, where, it turns out, around a hundred thousand Chinese from Wuhan labor in Chinese-owned factories.

The Italian hospitals filled up. Italy seemed overwhelmed. People were being turned away and left to die. The Italian government completely shut down the entire country, something which never had been done before, ever. 

We can be forgiven for thinking all of this would happen here, in America.

(We were wrong. In fact, two otherwise very similar regions in Italy had very different outcomes because of differing responses. Part of the problem was the limited numbers of ICU beds available in Italy’s socialized medical facilities. This problem never occurred in the U.S.: everyone who needed a ventilator got one, everyone who needed an ICU bed received one.)

We could have resisted the urge to panic. Already in early March it was clear the situation in Northern Italy was anomalous: the average age of those killed by the virus was 80, and Taiwan and South Korea had both contained its spread.

But when the thrice-damned British Imperial College scientist Neil Ferguson came out with his nightmarish predictions of an overwhelming pandemic, we went full Chicken Little. (Ferguson has retracted his fake predictions: here and here). We could have believed other scientists, such as those of Oxford University. Or even in our own common sense.

We didn’t do so.

We didn’t do so because we’d been programmed to panic. Primed and made ready to believe anything and everything. To believe the fantastical. To embrace it.

Heck, even Sean Ono Lennon thinks we’re being programmed.

Of course, we are talking about a kind of collective “us” here, a collective narrative, a public consensus. The kind that used to obtain, back when, when the media was not an instrument of the radical Left.

At the present time, this “we” still encompasses many; it includes the radicals, the radicalized, and a large mass still under the influence of the mad media. In regard to the Chinese virus, the collective “we” included many others as well who for a time bought into the narrative. In other words, us.

The programmers have been busy making us, or enough of us, believe not that truth is optional, but that there is no truth, in the manner Pilate iterated. There is only the convenience of the moment.

Who can doubt that we are being taught the truth no longer exists?

Examples are legion. Let’s take one. A president denounces white supremacy dozens of times. But the “truth” – the fake truth de jour – is that he has not.

How convenient!

Another beauty: many American cities were recently devastated by riots. But the “truth” is that the rioters were “mostly peaceful.”

How convenient!

It’s not that the collective “we” are dumb. “We” have been made to be dumb. And they are trying to make us ever more dumb.

They require that we believe their fake “truth.” If we don’t, we are deplorables. At best. Some now call for our physical destruction.

In other countries, similar things have occurred. Perhaps even worse. They are actively jailing people who express incorrect feelings.

But that is not the main reason many of us succumb. There is a limit to the number of times one, or at least many, of us can say “no.” The tidal wave of propaganda does eventually affect many, and to no surprise. If anyone can be broken in a torture chamber, many can be broken by a giant bullhorn/echo chamber if the exposure lasts long enough.

And it is not the fault of many who succumb. Many of us have good friends who just have been swept away. 

The other part of it is that it’s all phrased in a doublespeak do-gooder manner. It’s always pro-something. Like “pro-choice.” Or free-something. Like free health care.

So if you go along, you are helping the agenda, and you feel good about it.

And anyone that doesn’t is a bad person.

One can see how this readily lends itself to collectivism. Since we are all agreed, we are all on the march. Anyone not on the march is an enemy.

So when we were told to be scared we were primed and ready.

The story would not be complete without considering the enormity of what was proposed and the novelty to most people of the subject matter.

Rarely has someone been forced to act out someone else’s fears. But this is what happened. We were all constrained to act as if the sky were falling. No dissenting views allowed.

When you act something out, it gains a life of its own. When you see others do it, it gets scarier and more real. Let’s not forget, being scared is fun for some people. Roller coaster rides. Horror movies.

And this acting out was and remains collective, which tickles all the fancy of every Karen, and Karens are legion. Many are governors.

Organizing this kind of thing, we tend to forget, is a lot of fun for people.  Some people, at least. The Karen governors, for one. A do-gooding power trip.

Constitutional rights? Hah! This is for your own good. Ingrate!

The difficulty in counter-argument is that we are indeed dealing with a virus. It has killed some people, as do many viruses, including the flu. It is true that the further away people are from one another, the lesser the chance that one will infect the other. It is true that many things are possible regarding viruses, such as that an asymptomatic carrier might conceivably infect someone (although it is extremely unlikely and is not the driver of outbreaks).

It’s safer, the Quarantine Karens say, to wear a mask, to “socially” distance. Then they say it’s imperative.

Safer, in a way, but only in an exaggerated and half-blind manner, and most certainly not imperative. The rationality is never questioned (“my science beats your science”). And most especially, the negative aspects, including the negative effects on one’s health, are ignored. They don’t exist for Quarantine Karens.

Look, either we pull out of this or we will be sucked in to it like into a black hole. (Half of Great Britain is being locked down again; Germany is doing much the same; all this with a decreasing death rate.)

We’ve got to pull out now, because they’ve got something ready and it’s coming down the pike. (They had to come up with something new because the vaccine is nearly ready and even without the vaccine we have fabulous treatments (like the one that restored the stricken president in a few days).

They’re saying the lockdowns and restrictions are here forever – not because of the Chinese virus – but because of … wait for this … the flu.

During a speech at the U.S. Army’s annual conference, Bruce Jette, assistant secretary of the Army for acquisition, logistics and technology, said that measures implemented across the country will remain in place …  [h]e also suggested that the restrictions should remain in place for the general public.

“I would say we don’t back off of the COVID-19 standards because it will also reduce the impact of flu and other illnesses,” he added.

The panic must stop.

 

Tadas Klimas is a former FBI agent, awarded the National Intelligence Medal of Achievement (NIMA). He is also a former law professor and former Chief Legal Counsel to the Speaker of the Lithuanian parliament Prof. Vytautas Landsbergis.

Photo illustration by Monica Showalter with use of images from 

 

The Republican National Committee (RNC) on Friday filed a complaint to the Federal Election Commission (FEC) claiming that Twitter’s censorship of a New York Post story amounted to an “illegal corporate in-kind contribution” to the Joe Biden presidential campaign.

Facebook and Twitter decided to censor a New York Post article saying that, contrary to Biden’s claims, Biden allegedly met with an executive at Burisma when he was vice president. Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s son, reportedly arranged the meeting while he was working as a lobbyist for the company.

Fox News obtained the FEC complaint in which the RNC wrote that “Twitter has violated FECA and the Commission’s Regulations by making corporate in-kind contributions to Biden for President.”

The RNC charged that Twitter “is a partisan actor, run by partisan Democrats” and is “using its corporate resources to provide active support for Joe Biden’s campaign in violation of federal law.” The GOP group demanded that the FEC conduct an investigation into Twitter’s “illegal in-kind contributions to the Biden campaign” and “impose the maximum penalty allowed under the law.”

The RNC’s complaint follows as Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) urged the FEC Acting General Counsel Lisa Stevenson to investigate Twitter’s impression of the New York Post story. Hawley and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) moved to subpoena Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey through the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The Biden campaign claimed on Thursday that the New York Post story is “false” because Twitter censored it.

Jamal Brown, the national press secretary for the Biden campaign, said, “Twitter’s response to the actual article itself makes clear that these purported allegations are false and are not true.”

Dorsey admitted on Friday that blocking links to the New York Post story was “wrong.”

“Straight blocking of URLs was wrong, and we updated our policy and enforcement to fix. Our goal is to attempt to add context, and now we have capabilities to do that,” he said.

Sean Moran is a congressional reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @SeanMoran3.