18th Anniversary of My First Post for No Pasarán

A few weeks after the founding of No Pasarán, 18 years ago, I was invited to join as the blog's fourth blogger (after Douglas, Jonathan, and Liminal aka U*2, and prior to N Joe).

The blog's inaugural pledge was that we

 "will commentate on current events with all the psychotic calm and serenity of a Palestinian father who explains that he can't wait for his 2 surviving sons to become martyrs"

Of the more than 13,000 posts that have been written since 2004 (13,687, to be exact, as of today), I consider the following couple of posts to be two of the most important:

• The Era of the Drama Queens: Every Crisis Is a Triumph

• The Leftist Worldview in a Nutshell: A world of Deserving Dreamers Vs. Despicable Deplorables

Today is the anniversary of my first contribution, which related how I attended a conference in Normandy (at a museum linked to the D-Day landings, no less!) with some of France's best-known journalist VIPs and how I rose to challenge the group on the French media's coverage of the Iraq conflict.

Wednesday, March 24, 2004

Growling for Colombani

Any of you who have seen me over the past 10 days knows how furious I get anytime I read or hear the French media trying to stuff down our throats their self-serving lying charges (those against Aznar, Bush, and Blair, i.e., anybody whom they don't feel any sympathy with).

So when I read that the Mémorial de Caen was organizing a conference with Jean-Marie Colombani, among others ("QUELLE LIBERTÉ POUR L'INFORMATION DANS UN MONDE INQUIÉTANT ?" [What freedom for information in a distressing world?], organized in tandem with Les Amis de l'hebdomadaire La Vie and Reporters sans Frontières), I knew I had to attend. I wanted to give Le Monde's director a piece of my mind (in a diplomatic manner, natch). Three hours before it started at 7 pm on March 23, 2004, I jumped into my trusty jalopy, and drove the 260 km to Caen, arriving just in the nick of time.

And sure enough, the first thing any of the five intervenants did (with a constant wry smile on his face) was to attack the lies of politicians, ridicule the partisanship of the media, and bemoan the jingoism of the population (meaning those of the US, the UK, and Aznar's Spain exclusively, bien sûr). It was Jean-Marie Charon, "Sociologue des médias" (whatever that means), who opened the débat — the others being (left to right on the admittedly unclear photo) Colombani, Walter Wells, Directeur de l'International Herald Tribune (beard), Jean-Jacques Lerosier, Grand reporter à Ouest-France, and Jacqueline Papet, Rédactrice-en-chef de RFI, with the moderators answering to the names of Daniel Junqua, Journaliste et Vice-président de RSF, and Jean-Claude Escaffit, Journaliste à La Vie et Directeur des Amis de La Vie.

Before I left Paris, I'd reviewed and written down (in telegraph-style) a handful of arguments: these ranged from the Iraqis quoted in Reason, on Iraq the Model, and in Le Monde itself, to Doug's post on Le Monde's partisan mistranslation of Michael Ignatieff's piece in the New York Times.

The only problem was a rather big one, I learned as a I headed for my seat: questions would not be permitted, except in written form on small pieces of paper handed over to one of the animators. So I knew I had to pay close attention if I wanted to find an appropriate moment when to jump in. And I would obviously not have time to develop any of the arguments (especially since Eskaffit seemed to be a control freak).

It happened towards the end. There was a brief lull as Wells was about to make his last extensive remarks. Suddenly everybody turned to me as I let out : "Je pense que nous devons tous remercier les médias français pour leur admirable abilité à détecter les mensonges. Mais je ne comprends pas pourquoi ces spécialistes en la matière ignorent des sujets qui ont été traités dans le Herald Tribune, par exemple." (This was punctuated by Eskaffit's protests on his mike, you realize.) "Nous avons pu y lire des articles détaillant ce qu'on pourrait taxer de mensonges dans le camp de la paix, comme le fait que les Allemands, les Russes, et les Français avaient pas mal d'affaires avec les autorités baasistes, et que Total devait avoir un contrat exclusif avec Saddam Hussein. Pourquoi les médias français n'en font-ils pas autant état que de ce qui concerne les Ricains, les Rosbifs, et les Espagnols?"

[Translation: "I think we should all be grateful to the French media for their admirable ability to detect lies. But I do not understand why these experts in the field are ignorant of topics that have been covered in the Herald Tribune, for example." (This was punctuated by Eskaffit's protests on his mike, you realize.) "We have read articles detailing what could be taxed as lies from the peace camp, such as the fact that the Germans, the Russians, and the French had quite a lot of business dealings with the Baathist authorities, and that Total had an exclusive contract with Saddam Hussein. Why don't the French media make as much fuss about that as about the Yanks, the Limeys, and the Spaniards?"]

Eskaffit was growing increasingly more vocal in asking/telling me to keep quiet (shades of Chirac?) — he claimed that "de toutes façons", nobody could hear me — so seeing the end approaching (and having a hard time competing against a microphone), I pulled out my final ace — the final ace being a book, which I held above my head. (Yes, there did seem to be a somewhat theatrical element to this scene; why do you ask?) "Et en matière de mensonges, il y a ce livre d'un rédacteur de La Croix, qui a été licencié pour l'avoir publié, qui s'appelle Comment la presse nous a désinformés sur l'Irak. Et qui raconte les partis pris des Français pour diaboliser Bush, pour sanctifier Chirac, et pour communier avec les partis de la 'paix'."

[Translation: "And in terms of lies, there is this book by an editor of La Croix, which is called How the Press Disinformed Us on Iraq, and who indeed was fired for publishing it. And who details the bias of the French to demonize Bush, to sanctify Chirac, and to commune with the 'peace' parties."]

Even a few audience members had by now started to tell me to keep quiet, but that seemed an appropriate place to end anyway, so with that I sat down.

As for Eskaffit, he went on talking to the intervenants… ignoring completely what I had said. (While a couple of people behind me asked to see the book.) Well, I felt I had done my blogger's duty, so to speak, so I sat back, pretty content with myself.

Then, as Junqua made his last remarks, I understood that some people had heard me; the RSF moderator surprised me by pulling out his own copy of Alain Hertoghe's book (which he had in his briefcase), and explained that it provided a negative view of the French media during the Iraq war. But then he added that there was another book, detailing the French press's doings during the first Gulf war, with a positive slant, and that one could not read the first book without comparing it to the second. He tried to conclude that Hertoghe's book was a partisan "brûlot" that was not very friendly to his colleagues. (This from a colloque which had just declared that, happily, the old tradition in the press of refusing to criticize one's colleagues had now become "caduc"!)

I wasn't going to let him get away with that as the final word, so I let out another comment: "Les médias ont complètement censuré ce livre!" (But Eskaffit immediately started interrupting again.)

 [Translation: "The media thoroughly censored this book!"]

Afterwards, I went up to speak to some of the intervenants. Wells asked to see Hertoghe's book, which he wanted to check out. As for Junqua, he admitted it was news to him that the La Croix editor had been fired as a result of the book's publication.

So, all in all, a satisfying 10 minutes. (But hardly worth doing again, not at that distance. At least not without a couple of chums to have a drink with, afterwards.)

P.S. This is my first post for ¡No Pasarán! Muchas gracias, amigos, for inviting me to participar.

Posted by Erik at 20:03

No Pasarán at 18: We "will commentate on current events with all the psychotic calm and serenity of a Palestinian father who explains that he can't wait for his 2 surviving sons to become martyrs"

Eighteen years ago, after enduring months of unceasing tirades of criticism and venom from Europe (and especially France) linked to George W Bush's 2003 invasion of Saddam Hussein's Iraq, a handful of independent bloggers (Douglas, Jonathan, and Liminal aka U*2) made good on their vow to unite their efforts and create a single, common weblog, one by the name of No Pasarán! (I would join five weeks later, and N Joe a year or two later.)

Of the more than 13,650 posts that have been written since 2004, I consider the following couple of posts to be two of the most important:

• The Era of the Drama Queens: Every Crisis Is a Triumph

• The Leftist Worldview in a Nutshell: A world of Deserving Dreamers Vs. Despicable Deplorables

Below are the first two days of No Pasarán!

Update: Many thanks for the greetings, Ed Driscoll; we couldn't have survived as a blog this long had it not been for you and your fellow bloggers' daily endeavors at Instapundit…

Friday, February 20, 2004

Let's cool off	Il faut décompresser
Being a tad worried about my reputation [over at the blog Merde in France] I have decided to not write any controversial posts on this blog. Therefore, I will commentate on France's current events with all the psychotic calm and serenity of a Palestinian father who explains that he can't wait for his two surviving sons to become martyrs. How's that?	Etant un tant soit peu soucieux de ma réputation, je tâcherai de me limiter à des postes qui ne provoquent point de polémiques sur ce blog. Donc, je vous relaterai la situation en Fwance avec tout le calme et toute la sérenité psychotiques normalement employés par un père palestinien qui vous explique qu'il a hâte de voir ses deux fils survivants se transformer en martyres. Ça vous va?

United States

Le Monde's website is advertising a "lexicon for better understanding the United States" on the right-hand side of its front page. Although you have to pay in order to access the dictionary that contains over 400 "words of America," the advertisement is telling. If you click on the ad, a slide show opens with the following definitions:

(1) Sex: Sodomy remains illegal in a number of American states, and Bush promotes abstinence.
(2) Botox: 7.4 million Americans spent 7.7 billion euros on plastic surgery in 2000.
(3) Televangelists: The successors of nineteenth century traveling preachers, televangelists are television stars.

It's comforting to know that Le Monde is doing its part to break down misunderstandings and stereotypes between French and Americans. Now we just need Conan O'Brien to come up with a dictionary for Americans to understand France.

International Law:

Last month, the ship, Bugaled Breizh, sunk off of southern England. Five Frenchmen died. The culprit was allegedly a Philippine-registered vessel called the Seattle Trader, which may have collided with the Bugaled Breizh. Although the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea indicates that vessels are under the jurisdiction of the country in which they are registered and therefore any action with respect to the Seattle Trader should be authorized by the Philippine government, France is bringing justice to the alleged culprits and is hunting them down. Philippine President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has denounced France's actions as "gun-boat diplomacy."

International Law:

Three years after the Convention was created, France has ratified the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, which restricts production of certain pesticides, industrial chemicals and unintended byproducts of combustion such as DDT, PCBs and dioxin. France was the fiftieth country to ratify the Convention, and "fifty" was the number required for the Convention to enter into force.

The United States is a signatory to the treaty, and President Bush submitted the Convention for ratification to the Senate back in 2002.

Posted by Jonathan at 14:37

And here is the second day of the blog: 

Saturday, February 21, 2004

We have no bananas to-day!

Let's check in on our friend Dieudonné. Where do we find his career?



The stunt he pulled seems to be costing him dearly, according to Le Monde. The paper writes that the show he was supposed to have yesterday at L'Olympia was canceled. The venue's directors issued a press release stating that, after receiving anonymous threats, they were canceling the show due to the "climate of extreme tension we have observed over several days." They say that Olympia would "not have the means to guarantee the security of its audience and employees." Indeed, Olympia claim that on Tuesday they received a letter from police headquarters that "reminded [the director] of his responsibilities" and pointed out "that the staff in private establishments are responsible for safety and security on their premises." Contacted by the AFP, Dieudo's agent said the "funny man" didn't want to "react in anger."

So much for that. Dieudonné decided to hold his show in the street outside the theater.

They came by the hundred to chant the slogan "freedom of speech" and to support Dieudonné, who decided to have his show on a platform erected on the sidewalk opposite Olympia, the venue where he was supposed to have performed on Friday and which canceled this.

The humorist raised his arms, greeted his fans, the "descendants of slaves," the "Arabs," the "blacks" and also the whites of all ages who had massed on the boulevard des Capucines in Paris, surrounded by anti-riot police. "We love you," shouted young girls, waving their cameras.

Libération is writing derisively that now Diedonné "takes himself for a defender of the black cause" and reports that the "comedian" said "400 years of slavery and we don't have the right to speak!"

Alain Finkielkraut is criticizing those who leveled threats against l'Olympia (causing the venue to fear for its safety), as he thinks they are "transforming [Dieudonné] into a martyr for human rights and freedom of speech."

Dieudonné is now claiming that he's been banned from French public television. "I've been banned from the TV... just like Coluche and Bedos once were." This was categorically denied however by France 2. Do you imagine they have any interest in seeing him ever again? Do you think many other venues will want to book him now? Can we now ask, as W. once did, "Dis donc Dieudo, les recettes de ton dernier spectacle, ça achète beaucoup de bananes?"

reconnaissance

Le Monde is also offering a slide show of reconnaissance photos (note that in French reconnaissance means "gratitude") from World War II. Some are from the Imperial War Museum, some from the Aerial Reconnaissance Achives and some from the Public Record Office. They include that now famous photo of Auschwitz-Birkenau ("at its criminal apex") and of Omaha Beach (on D-day).

On décompresse...

Ça se fait comme ça... con nosotros

Posted by Douglas at 20:32

Blurring the Faces of People Who Are Already Wearing Masks: Is CNN a Serious Network?

CNN Blurs Image of People (Kids, in This Case, to Be Sure) Who Are Already Masked

CNN finally had to give in and allow a scandal involving a beloved Democrat to come forward: namely, the (in)famous picture of Stacey Abrams maskless among schoolchildren.

Apart from the obvious hypocrisy involving the Georgia "Governor" which has been dissected again and again (and rightly so), CNN decided to blur the faces of all the kids. There is only one problem:  the kids are… already wearing masks. (Which, indeed, is the whole point of the news story.)

So, CNN did not actually blur the faces of the kids, just their eyes and the top of their faces.

What's the point?! Nobody (apart, perhaps, from each kid's mommy and daddy) can recognize any of them anyhow.

It has probably been a rule that everybody in the past 5,000 to 10,000 years who wears a mask cannot be recognized. This is the reason why — this is precisely the reason why — outlaws and robbers from time immemorial, when committing a crime, hide their facial features behind… masks.

To be fair, CNN is not alone in this; everybody does it, not excluding Fox News, which was the only channel, as far as I know, which decided to blur the entire video (see below) of the recent news report featuring schoolkids erupting in applause as they were told that masks were gotten rid of.

Yes, here we can see the faces of the kids tearing off their masks. But so what?

I find the whole blurring thing annoying — even though I want to be of an understanding nature.

It seems to me that it started about two decades ago. First, it was T-shirts and signs in the background. We weren't supposed to see an (unpaid) ad for Coca-Cola, i guess. Then it became faces.

People have been blurred. Kids. Babies. Newborns. What is the point?!

I hate to say this, I hate to sound "hateful," but nothing looks more like a baby than another baby. Not to you, the parent, granted, but to everybody else (especially strangers).

I recently watched a(n Italian?) documentary on the Costa Concordia disaster showing personal videos inside the ballroom in which everybody starts reacting to the sound of the ship striking a rock off Isola del Giglio. Needless to say, their faces are blurred.

What's the point?!

There are probably good legal reasons involved.

But it shouldn't go this far.

When I worked on a feature on the Lego company for the Reader's Digest at the beginning of my career, the company kept the ages of the CEO's three children a secret (the CEO was the son or grand-son of founder Ole Kirk Christiansen, I believe), in case kidnappers read the story. The dead-tree editors blurred the kids, or their ages, one could say. And since the threats were real, for good reason.

But let's not go too far. Must it be a automatic reaction, at this point?!

It doesn't excuse CNN's producers for not being professional and not noticing the obvious, that telling their professional face-blurrerers (is that an actual full-time job?) to blur the (tops of) faces of people (even kids) who are unrecognizable in the first place is going beyond the call of duty…

One Exception Was John Vinocur, Who Was a Breed Apart: “Journalists used to act like cynics but at heart we were idealists; Now we’re often cynics masquerading as idealists”

The title of Bret Stephens latest opinion piece in the New York Times is When Did ‘Me,’ ‘We’ and ‘Us’ Become the Media’s Preferred Pronouns?

But on the front page of its global edition (the International New York Times is the successor paper of John Vinocur's beloved International Herald Tribune), the title is a more sober Honoring old-school journalism.

In Honoring old-school journalism, Bret Stephens discusses the present state of the craft, and mentions his friend, the late John Vinocur, as the antidote.

The IHT pundit, almost all of whose final decade of weekly opinion pieces were linked to by No Pasarán, died at 81 on February 13.

I feel exactly like Bret Stephens, when he says that Vinocur's 

column in The I.H.T. was the one thing I would never miss 

when he (Stephens) was a graduate student in England and later when he worked as a journalist.

Over drinks not long ago, a friend summed up the way journalism had changed over the course of his career. “Journalists used to act like cynics but at heart we were idealists,” he said. “Now we’re often cynics masquerading as idealists.”

I thought of that line twice last week. The first time was on Wednesday, while reading, against my better judgment, about the abrupt resignation of Jeff Zucker as president of CNN. The second was on Sunday, after learning that my friend John Vinocur, the former executive editor of The International Herald Tribune, had died in Amsterdam at 81.

In these two stories lies the difference between the kind of journalism Americans used to venerate and the kind we have today.

 … When did “me,” “we” and “us” become the news media’s preferred pronouns?

One journalist who was not much for navel gazing was Vinocur, whose column in The I.H.T. was the one thing I would never miss when I was a graduate student in England and later when I worked as a journalist in Brussels and as an editor in Jerusalem.

From reading him over the years, I gleaned that Vinocur had covered, so it seemed, everything. The Biafran war. The Munich massacre. The Rumble in the Jungle. The Stroessner regime in Paraguay. Spy games in Germany. The Mitterrand monarchy in France. He was almost absurdly well sourced, thanks to years spent as The Times’s bureau chief in Paris and Bonn. And his prose — confident and confiding, energetic and endearing, intimate in detail and Olympian in scope — was, by far, the best in the paper.

 … [His lines from a vintage Vinocur lede] … made the morning paper a joy to read. And they gave a young journalist a sense of what his vocation might be like when practiced at its best: adventurous, literary, significant. As I read John in my 20s, I figured out what I wanted for my own career: to see the world without illusions — but without losing the ballast of personal ideals.

About 10 years ago, I got an unexpected visit from John in my office at The Wall Street Journal. Would I, he asked, give him a job? He was retired from The Times. But he still knew everyone, he had plenty to say, his skills were intact. In this way I became his editor, he became my mentor, and we became friends.

For the next several years he delivered a string of columns that look only better with the passage of time. From a 2015 column on the Minsk agreement, which helped set the stage for the present crisis in Ukraine: Its holes, he wrote, were “so gaping as to allow Russia to drive tanks unhampered through an open Ukrainian border for next to forever.” From a 2017 column raising alarms about Berlin’s increasingly neutralist foreign policy: “Is there a kind of German complicity or reflexive softness involving Russia that permits Moscow’s blatant (and strategic) lying without anything resembling serious retaliation?”

For many readers, these topics may have seemed distant. They didn’t trend on Twitter. They didn’t have the gossipy salaciousness of a newsroom scandale.

But they mattered. They looked outward. They dwelt heavily on the inner mechanics of politics and diplomacy. But they did so not for the sake of the game itself, but for the large things at stake.

I last saw John in Florida, shortly before the pandemic began. We had a gloomy conversation about the state of journalism. But when we parted, he said, “It’s a noble profession.”

It is. We should do more to live up to his example.

Good-Bye, Friend: RIP, IHT's John Vinocur

If there ever was a pundit worth quoting from the International Herald Tribune (which used to be jointly owned by The New York Times and The Washington Post), it was John Vinocur. 

The lone conservative pundit who rose to become the executive editor of the IHT (amazing, as he was a conservative) was always worth reading, as I discovered through the years that it became more and more evident that the plethora of liberals there (half from the Times and half from the Post) were often boring and oftenpredictable (not to mention flat-out wrong). 

And No Pasarán linked to John's pieces in the IHT many a time over the years, — not least when he seemed to be the only man in the MSM not to feel "a thrill go up the leg" about Barack Obama — and he was the true red-blooded conservative (not the David Brooks type) in a liberal newspaper.

I communicated with him once or twice — precisely because our blog would be quoting large swathes of his pieces. When I started blogging, indeed, I decided that I would not only link to pieces on the internet but regularly quote extensive excerpts on our blog (which turns 18 this month), because you never knew when a website would disappear.

I communicated this to him at the time, and he seemed happy about it as well as intrigued.

But I admit that I never believed that the website of a major newspaper like the IHT (the descendant of an American-language newspaper founded in Paris in 1887) would suffer that fate. But because the Times did nothing to save it, the IHT's online presence is gone from the web (probably for all time) — that is, with the exception of Vinocur from the early 21st century, if you are a reader of No Pasáran.

I'll be honest: I cannot deny that I'm damn proud that I started copy/pasting long quotes, or the IHT's Vinocur would be lost on the internet (perhaps for all time?).

God bless you, John Vinocur. And godspeed.

• Related: Not John Vinocur, Who Was a Breed Apart: “Journalists used to act like cynics but at heart we were idealists; Now we’re often cynics masquerading as idealists”

PS: Here is a piece mentioning Joe Biden that dates from the election of 2004 (on this occasion, Instapundit is — again — involved):

Wednesday, March 31, 2004

Europe in for a letdown if it's counting on Kerry, says Vinocur

Via Instapundit and Just One Minute: the IHT's John Vinocur, who went to Oberlin, had an article to-day on a U. Michigan seminar (thanks, Mr. Minuteman, for the link) attended by ranking Dems and European diplomats. Vinocur has Senate Foreign Relations committee chairman Joe Biden making the following remarks:

Recalling that he had talked to six European government chiefs about the war, Biden caricatured how they would have done things better. "Blah blah blah, international cooperation," the senator mimicked. He added, in his own voice, "Give me a break, huh."

When Biden offered the possibility, beyond more civility, of a future in contrast to the Bush administration, it was in a plague-on-your-houses context. He said of the two, Europe and Bush, "You have fallen in love with international institutions to the extent that this administration has fallen in love with unilateral action."

For good measure, Biden threw in the view that the European Union will not have a unified foreign policy, and with it, the phrase, "I hope you do, I wish you well, but I see no evidence you're going to spend the money needed" to create a serious European military force either.

January 6 — What the American media will never tell you

Un an après l’attaque du Capitole, le parti Démocrate fait feu de tout bois pour accabler Trump et le camp républicain. Pourtant, les dégâts générés par les antifas ou le mouvement Black Lives Matter – soutenu par de nombreux démocrates – sont bien plus importants.

The head of Republicans in France, Paul Reen, has penned an article for the French readers of the Causeur magazine.  (Here is the French version.)

It’s been one year since the Trump rally of Jan 6 2021 ended with the attack and breach of the U.S. Capital Building.  We’ve all seen the horrifying videos and pictures in the media. This was not just a shocking and terrible day for the country but, speaking as a Republican, I can say that it was even more terrible for Republicans. This was the last thing Trump supporters wanted. Those responsible for the violence are criminals and should be held fully accountable and punished to the full extent of the law. I haven’t heard one Republican Politician, political pundit or patriotic Republican support the breach of the Capital.  But the acts of violence are so antithetical and uncharacteristic of Republican and MAGA principles of peaceful protests that it makes perfect sense for Republicans to question the media narrative of exactly what happened, why and especially what has happened afterwards in American politics.

The Democrat Leftists and their supporting media in the U.S. repeatedly call the breach on the Capital an “insurrection”, an attempted “coup d’état” by violent Trump supporting racist, white supremacist, domestic terrorists; the greatest attack on our democracy since the Civil War, worse than Pearl Harbor and even Sept 11 (an incredible insult to the 3000 Americans who lost their lives on 9/11) and that the violent attack was incited and supported by Trump himself.

But if this hysterical, hyperbolic rhetoric were true, why has the Left felt it necessary to lie so much about what did and did not happen? Yes, Trump did hold a rally not far from the Capital on Jan 6 with thousands of supporters, as the joint session in Congress was set to confirm the election results. The purpose of Trump’s rally was to convince Republicans in Congress to join those Republicans planning to contest the certification of certain states election results that were potentially based on fraudulent votes. This would force at least some discussion and debate on the Congressional floor which is lawful under the constitution. 

What the media won’t tell you is that many Democrats have also contested results of past Presidential elections including the recent 2016 election when Trump beat Hillary Clinton.  Democrats objected based on the now proven false accusations that Trump stole the election by colluding with Russia. A lie that Democrats continued for the entire Trump presidency and even today.  So Trump’s objective was simply to have Republicans see the support he had from the American people.  Any violence to disrupt this process on Jan 6 would serve no benefit to Trump. It is proven that Trump called for supporters to “peacefully and patriotically” march to the Capital. But the violence did disrupt the process. After Trump called for all rioters to leave the Capital and the senators and congressmen and women returned, they immediately called for a certification of all states votes with no discussions. Biden was confirmed.

I, as well as most Republicans, agree that Trump did fail to not speak forcefully enough and quick enough to the rioters to stop. But why spread lies about it? Anti Trumper Liz Cheney (R-WY) who is now Vice Chair of the Select Committee to investigate Jan 6, has been spreading the lie that Trump made no statement during the riot for 187 minutes (over 3 hours). The media won’t tell you that this is a provable lie. The timeline of events clearly shows that Trumps first statement via Twitter was 23 minutes after the initial break-in, to “stay peaceful and support our police”, he then sent a second tweet 35 minutes later. After another hour he sent out a video message telling everyone to leave. That’s 2 statements and a video message over 2 hrs.

Not a Government overthrow, more a disorganized protest

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-protests-idUSKBN29B24S
https://www.voanews.com/a/2020-usa-votes_thousands-storm-us-capitol-shameful-assault-our-democracy/6200429.html

The media told you that thousands of armed Republicans invaded the capital to kill politicians and overthrow the government. The media won’t tell you that it was actually hundreds of frustrated patriots that foolishly entered the Capital, following a group of violent instigators. Not one protester was found to be carrying a firearm. Many witnesses even say that some of the police allegedly opened the doors from the inside to let protesters in, as can be seen in many videos where police were actually escorting protesters through the hallways.

5 people killed but not by Republicans

https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/06/politics/us-capitol-lockdown/index.html
The media then told you that violent, armed Republicans caused the death of 5 people on their way to trying to hang Vice President Pence. That one of the 5 was a Capital Police Officer who was attacked by the Republican mob and bludgeoned to death using a fire extinguisher.  The media won’t tell you the actual truth that came out much later that there never was an attack with a fire extinguisher and instead the police officer died the following day of natural causes, caused by multiple strokes and was confirmed by his family. 3 of the remaining 4 deaths were of Trump supporters who also died of natural causes such as heart attacks. The 5th and last person who died was also a Trump supporter who was the only victim shot and murdered that day, and by a Capital Police Officer. Her name was Ashli Babbitt. She was unarmed and draped in an American Flag. She was a veteran in the Air Force. The police officer was never convicted of a crime and set free.  The misguided Republicans who decided to follow the criminal instigators made poor decisions, they should not have been inside the Capital, but they were not trying to overthrow the government and Ashli Babbitt did not deserve to be shot in cold blood.

Americans deserve honest investigations and answers  

Over the past year there have been many investigations (primarily by Republicans) with videos and eye-witness statements claiming that some of the primary instigators were Anti -Trump imposters posing as MAGA supporters. Repeat, some not all.  In fact, these alleged imposters have been filmed shouting to break into the capital and these videos are readily available on right wing websites. What is surprising is that of all those charged and arrested by the FBI for participating in the Capital riot, these filmed instigators were allegedly never arrested. I am not saying it is fact or proven that these were anti-Trump imposters, but the American people deserve answers to the questions of who really instigated the break-in on the ground, why were police officers told to stand down and not intervene to prevent it and why weren’t the National Guard in place to support the police?  But anyone who raises these questions is immediately shamed and considered a dangerous, right wing conspiracy theorist.
725 arrested, none for sedition, insurrection or terrorism

According to the official U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) Website, 725 people have been arrested and charged by the DOJ in connection with the Capital Building break-in. This required a massive nationwide man hunt in all 50 states by the FBI, as an attack on a Federal building is considered a federal crime. While over 600 have been charged with simple trespassing, per the DOJ website, “at least 225 defendants have also been charged with assaulting, resisting, or impeding officers, approximately 10 individuals have been arrested for assaulting a member of the media, or destroying their equipment, and at least 275 defendants have been charged with corruptly obstructing an official proceeding, or attempting to do so.”   A small detail – not one person has been charged with insurrection! To date, only 70 defendants have been sentenced receiving between probation and 5 years. More serious charges of obstruction face maximum sentences up to 20 years in prison.

unAmerican “Gulag” prison conditions

Another 80 defendants (approximately) are being in held in a “temporary” jail in Washington D.C.  awaiting their trials, many have been there for nearly one year. The media won’t tell you how they are being treated. It is being reported that this jail is extremely poorly maintained. Republican politicians recently demanded to see them and described their conditions as outrageous. “They have been beaten by the guards” said Rep Marjorie Taylor Greene on Dec 7. “They are called white supremacists. They are denied religious services, haircuts, shaving, and the ability to trim their fingernails. They’re denied time with their attorneys, they are denied the ability to even see their families and have their families visit there. They are denied bail and being held there without bail. Many of these people have never been charged for a crime before. Some of them are veterans. And the treatment is unbelievable.”

No comparison to Black Lives Matter and Antifa damage and deaths of 2020

There will be hundreds of defendants in court starting in 2022 and certainly throughout 2024. It’s important to detail what many of these defendants are being charged with – trespassing, assaulting police officers and media, and obstructing an official proceeding. Quite remarkable when you think back to the 3 months of riots in 2020 by Black Lives Matter and Antifa who committed the identical crimes,  and worse,  but were often not imprisoned and released under bail funded by Democrat politicians and even V.P. Kamala Harris. During 3 months in 2020, BLM and Antifa caused nearly 570 violent riots, in 220 locations around the US, causing the death of over 30 American citizens including at least one retired police officer and injuring over 2000 other officers. 

In terms of property damage comparison, the Capital Building caused $1.5Million of damage while the BLM/Antifa riots caused $2 Billion worth (most costly riots in US history according to a Princeton University study). Often overlooked is that these BLM/Antifa riots included a 4 month sustained attack on a Federal Building in Portland, OR. This was the Federal Courthouse that was burned and damaged. Like the Federal Capital Building attack, shouldn’t this be a Federal crime? When the Democrat Governor finally allowed Trump to send in the National Guard, the rioters attacked them and tried to set fire to the building while the Guard were still inside. Democrat politicians criticized the National Guard and compared them to Nazi “Stormtroopers”.  Never during the 3-4 month riots on ordinary Americans and a Federal Courthouse did Democrats say that our Democracy was under attack. No, they and their media simply repeated the lie that these were mainly “peaceful protests”. The importance is not to minimize the unacceptable violent break-in at the Capital but to point out the blatant hypocrisy of the Left, their egregious lies and exaggerations of Jan 6 to not only blame Trump as a domestic terrorist but also all Trump supporters.

Politically biased Committee set to smear all Republicans as “insurrectionists”

So now we wait to hear from the House Select Committee on the Jan 6 “insurrection”, led by Democrats.  I, and most Americans, would be happy to see a bipartisan, transparent and thorough investigation of the Jan 6 events. Unfortunately in today’s politically polarized congress and Democrats in the majority, that is not possible. This select Committee is nothing but a politically biased committee against Trump and Republicans, with a pre-determined outcome – convict Trump (once again) and try to put him in jail. 

The evidence of this is overwhelming. When the committee was formed in June 2021, Leader Pelosi was to choose 8 Democrats and the Republican Minority leader, Kevin McCarthy was to choose 5 Republicans. When McCarthy submitted his 5 names, Pelosi took the unprecedented step of denying 2 of them. These were two outspoken Trump supporters. She refused them for spreading alleged “misinformation” as of course only Nancy Pelosi is the arbiter of truth. Basically she refused any Republican who she thought would disagree with the Democrats findings. So McCarthy removed all 5 Republicans in protest saying he wanted no part of a political sham committee. 

Pelosi then made another unprecedented step of asking two famously anti-Trump Republicans to join her Committee, Lynn Cheney (R-WY) and Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), so she could call it “bi-partisan”. Both Cheney and Kinzinger voted to impeach Trump. They naturally accepted and Cheney was even appointed as Vice Chair. Both have been shunned by the Republican Party as a whole and especially in their respective states.  

So the Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans will stretch this political sham masking as a bi-partisan committee throughout 2022 and beyond, in the hopes it will help them in the Nov 2022 elections. McCarthy has vowed to conduct his own investigation in parallel. Sadly the many questions that the Americans deserve to be honestly and transparently answered may never be. The Democrats will continue to smear all Trump supporters as “insurrectionists” to try and deflect and distract from the catastrophe that is the Biden/Harris Administration. But no political propaganda, no false committees, no lies and smears by the media will ever be able to distract Americans from such a colossal failure as Joe Biden.

Let’s take actions to never allow a breach of the Capital again, penalize those that are truly responsible, and begin to focus on reducing inflation, protecting our borders, reducing crime and supporting our police, ending COVID and returning to global leadership. Now there’s a New Year’s resolution!

Mountie: What Is Called a "Vaccine" Is—Literally—Nothing of the Sort; in Fact, it is a Large-Scale Drug Trial with Gene Therapy

When you hear some brain dead parrot repeat the talking point “trust the science,” politely ask them to provide a definition of science. They never can because they don’t know. What they are really saying, but are too stupid to realize, is that they are saying “trust authority and don’t ask questions.” This, my friends, is the antithesis of science. 

When a suspect is arrested, he is told that he has the right to remain silent. With the development of the Coronavirus “vaccine”, that no longer seems to be the case — and that, for common citizens. Easton Spectator publishes an extraordinary letter from an RCMP Mountie (obrigado to Sarah Hoyt) that is essential for the debate. And without further ado, here is 'Corporal Richard Mehner, your “vaccine” free Minotaur': 

The low T wannabe tyrants in Ottawa have decided that I can no longer serve as a police officer because I refuse to tell them if I have submitted to their “vaccine” edict. I’ve served in the RCMP for 21 years and one of the first things I said to any person I ever arrested was “you don’t have to say anything to me.” Unfortunately, our government has told me that I have to tell them what’s in my body, and if the right drug is not inside me, I have to get it as condition of my continuing employment, human rights be damned. Why did I put vaccine in quotations above you ask? More on that later. Buckle up and tighten the straps on your government mandated shame muzzle, this goodbye email will likely ruffle some feathers.

 … Since the pandemic began, until now, I was in a position to see every single sudden death file that came through our detachment area. What did I notice in this position? Nothing. No upwards trend whatsoever. Funny enough, I didn’t see people dropping dead in my neighbourhood either.

This was a very stark contrast to what I saw in media. A non-stop chorus on TV, radio, and internet, of case counts, hospitalizations and deaths. At no time in my life had I seen anything like it. A complete disconnect between my observed reality and that which was portrayed by my government and the government subsidized mainstream media. And they were reporting deaths in care homes. Care homes? When did the media ever report deaths in care homes unless it was some sort of instance of gross negligence? It’s called end of life care for a reason. People go to care homes at the end of their life. Death is the natural consequence, and this fact used to be understood as common sense.

When the statistics started showing that the vast majority of anyone dying from Covid, either had one or more co-morbidities, or was older than the average life expectancy, my skepticism of the pandemic narrative only grew. Then in the summer of 2020, I got Covid. For a few days I was really tired and shivered a lot. Then it was over. I survived the “deadly” disease like the vast majority of anyone else who caught it. To be honest, I’ve had worse Flus, and worse hangovers.

 … Since I was already skeptical of the pandemic, I was naturally skeptical of the need for a “vaccine”. Oh look, vaccine is in quotations again. Why am I doing that?

Because it’s not a f^#king vaccine!!!

A vaccine is created when a virus from nature is made harmless in a lab and then cultivated there. The vaccine, created from the neutered virus, is then injected into a person. The body then reacts to the vaccine just like it would to the unaltered, dangerous virus. However, because the vaccine is a modified harmless version of the virus, it doesn’t cause disease and the body’s natural immunity is able to “learn” how to cope with the virus. This “learning” is lifelong and is why people develop an immunity to whatever they were inoculated against. People who have been vaccinated against Measles do not get Measles, and the same with mumps etc etc. None of the so called Covid “vaccines” meet this definition. If you were wondering why “vaccinated” people are still getting Covid, and spreading it, this is why. The fact that “vaccinated” people still get Covid and spread it should tell you that this madness will never end as long as you buy into the official narrative.

  … How these new Covid “vaccines” work is based on a brand new technology never used on a massive scale. … Make no mistake here. This is a large scale drug trial and whoever was jabbed is taking part. … 

As I was already skeptical about the entire pandemic narrative, I decided a long time ago that I was not going to take any of these “vaccines”. So as I had decided to sit back and watch how the so called pandemic unfolded, I decided to observe the vaccination campaign. One of the first things I noticed is that people like me were completely ignored and never talked about. What do I mean by people by like me? I mean people who had Covid and recovered. Suddenly, natural immunity didn’t exist anymore. Everyone had to get the vaccine regardless of whether they had natural immunity or not. Wait….. what? No one would ever suggest someone who had measles or polio should get vaccinated against those diseases. Why was natural immunity suddenly not talked about anymore? But if you knew where and how to look, it was talked about, and studied. The largest study was in Israel where the researchers concluded that natural immunity conveyed 27 times more protection than vaccination. Not double, not triple, 27 times! 

 … And now we are able to see much of the results of this mass vaccination campaign. And despite what you’ve been told, it’s not good.

 … Don’t be afraid. The government, and their mouthpieces in the mainstream media, have promoted a nonstop campaign of fear for almost 2 years now. Turn off your television and radios. Do your own research and question everything. Knowledge begins with asking questions. With each new variant they will try and frighten you, despite the fact that never in the history of virology has a virus ever mutated to become more deadly. Selective pressures always favour a more contagious, but less deadly mutation. The new “scariant” is Omicron.

 … When you hear some brain dead parrot repeat the talking point “trust the science,” politely ask them to provide a definition of science. They never can because they don’t know. What they are really saying, but are too stupid to realize, is that they are saying “trust authority and don’t ask questions.” This, my friends, is the antithesis of science.

Related: Here Is the Key Question Regarding the Coronavirus
• And here are the 7 Basic Points about Covid-19 that You Need to Know
• Is the Yellow Star Really an Inappropriate Reference for the Vaccine Passport?
And from the March 2020 and April 2020 archives:
• Is There 100% Irrefutable Proof that the Covid19 Pandemic Is Overstated?
• Anti-Americanism in the Age of the Coronavirus, the NBA, and 1619

Plea Bargaining: Punishing people for exercising their constitutional rights is entirely incompatible with the very idea of a constitutional right

Good evidence suggests that the people who founded this country thought that plea bargaining should be prohibited

writes Carissa Byrne Hessick, the author of Punishment Without Trial: Why Plea Bargaining Is a Bad Deal (which is reminiscent of Instapundit law professor Glenn Reynolds's The Judiciary's Class War and Ham Sandwich Nation [Due Process When Everything is a Crime]), in The Atlantic. 

"Nearly every aspect of our criminal justice system encourages defendants—whether they're innocent or guilty—to take a plea deal." Punishment Without Trial "showcases how plea bargaining has undermined justice at every turn[, forcing] the hand of lawyers, judges, and defendants, turning our legal system into a ruthlessly efficient mass incarceration machine that is dogging our jails and pun­ishing citizens because it's the path of least resistance."

Instead of protecting defendants’ right to have their guilt or innocence decided by their peers, judges routinely punish defendants for exercising that right. Specifically, judges regularly impose longer sentences on those defendants who insist on going to trial than on those defendants who plead guilty. A 2018 report shows that, on average, defendants who insist on a trial receive sentences three times longer than those of defendants who plead guilty.

 … The reason that the Supreme Court gives for carving out the jury-trial right from its ordinary constitutional rules is simple: resources. The Court doesn’t think that the criminal-justice system could handle granting every criminal defendant a trial. Without plea bargaining, the Court said, “the States and the Federal Government would need to multiply by many times the number of judges and court facilities.”

 … On some level, the resources argument is convincing. It is certainly true that our courts could not possibly hold trials for all of the criminal cases that come through the justice system. But this lack of capacity does not explain how few trials we have now. In 1990, more than 7,800 criminal trials were held in federal court. By 2016, that number fell to fewer than 1,900. In other words, we have made it so easy for prosecutors to pressure defendants into pleading guilty that we have less than a quarter of the criminal trials that we had 30 years ago, even though we have more judges and more prosecutors now than we did then. So resources can’t explain the policies that we have adopted to pressure nearly every defendant to plead guilty. Even if we accept the resources-argument logic, we could still protect the constitutional rights of thousands more Americans each year.

But is the resources argument right to begin with? Of course, many Americans want government to be efficient and keep costs down. But efficiency in the criminal-justice system has a serious downside: The more easily and cheaply it can be run, the more people end up in it. Unfortunately, the United States has been incredibly efficient at locking people up. As a result, we are the world’s leader in imprisoning our citizens. … So maybe we should be thinking about how we can make our system less efficient.

It isn’t too late for the country to change its course. The rise of originalism—the theory that the Constitution should be interpreted as it was understood when it was first written—could hold the solution to plea bargaining and mass incarceration. Good evidence suggests that the people who founded this country thought that plea bargaining should be prohibited.

 … But adopting an originalist view of the Constitution isn’t necessary to reject the constitutionality of plea bargaining and the trial penalty. No matter what your constitutional theory of interpretation, punishing people for exercising their constitutional rights is entirely incompatible with the very idea of a constitutional right.

America's Kulak Class: Horrific Prison Conditions for January 6 Republicans "Treated as Subhuman" Predicted by Abe Lincoln in 1860

After you read the inhumane treatment that the January 6 political prisoners have been undergoing for nearly a year "as subhuman", see if Abraham Lincoln did not predict the opposition's condescending (and, frankly, hateful) attitude as far back as 1860.

Some two weeks before Christmas, writes PJ Media's Kevin Downey Jr (thanks to Stephen Green + (update) to Ed Driscoll for the instalink), Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene 

released “Unusually Cruel — An Eyewitness Report From Inside The DC Jail,” her report about what she saw when she was finally allowed to meet the January 6 political prisoners.

Reps. Greene, Gohmert, Gaetz, and Gosar tried, unsuccessfully, to visit the January 6 political prisoners twice earlier this year. … Greene and Gohmert (and their respective staffs) finally got to tour the D.C. jail where the J6 inmates are held, though the jail staff DID try to end the tour of the jail before the reps got to meet the political prisoners.

“What is there to hide?” Gohmert pressed. “The complaint has been that they’ve been treated
differently than the other detainees. I thought tonight we were going to find out.”

At that point, the tour had already lasted two hours and Greene and Gohmert hadn’t yet met a single J6 inmate. After an 11-minute discussion, the tour went forward.

Greene and Gohmert met with roughly 40 J6 inmates, in what Greene described as a noticeably older part of the prison, which appeared to have not been updated recently, unlike the rest of the prison.

 … Greene’s report is disturbing and damning. It highlights the brutal and unconstitutional treatment of J6 prisoners at the hands of Biden’s legal system. J6 inmates have been beaten. The prisoners complain of chemicals and pubic hair in their food.

The conclusion to her report starts with the following,

The congressional visit to the D.C. jail on November 4 unquestionably proved that there is a twotrack justice system in the United States. This two-tiered system is not based on race, violence, or conviction of crime, but politics.

It would be too much of a stretch to compare Andersonville (to use another Civil War-era image) to "the DC Gulag", but still, when you hear how rights are being violated by Democrats or leftists, check out if the portrait of one of the wardens isn't at least partly reminiscent of the CSA's Commandant Henry Wirz… 

Especially while reading Kathleen Landerkin's tweets calling Trump and/or his supporters — i.e., the warden's current prisoners — "morons," "people who conspired with the traitors," and persons who are worse than "foreign terrorists." 

No wonder the demands for Maoist self-denunciations. No wonder the abusive treatment of January 6 protestors and the unrighteous sentences handed down on the heads of such political prisoners as Jacob Chansley (a non-violent, harmless eccentric and U.S. veteran). No wonder that, during the Terror in the Capitol Tunnel on January 6, the usual Drama Queens went berserk with batons on the protesters. Julie Kelly:

Future court filings, interviews, and security footage will slowly reveal to the public how law enforcement, beginning at around 1 p.m. that day and continuing for hours, attacked and beat American citizens who dared to protest the election of Joe Biden.

As The Hill's Brad Dress reports,

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and 13 other Republicans are calling for the immediate termination of the deputy warden in charge of inmates connected to the Jan. 6 riot, who are being held inside a Washington, D.C. jail.

In a letter to D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser shared on Twitter, Greene accused D.C. Central Detention Facility (CDF) Deputy Warden Kathleen Landerkin of "displaying animus toward anyone who supports Donald J. Trump" and of a perceived bias against Trump supporters.

"While most of these inmates have no prior criminal history and have yet to be convicted of any crime, Landerkin is allowing them to be treated as subhuman," Greene wrote in the letter Thursday signed by fellow Republican Reps. Paul Gosar (Ariz.), Matt Gaetz (Fla.), Andy Harris (Md.) and Lauren Boebert (Colo.).

Deputy Warden Kathleen Landerkin, the person in charge of J6 pre-trial detainees is an unhinged left-wing ideologue who despises President Trump, his supporters, and Republicans.

Today, 13 of my colleagues and I sent a letter to @MayorBowser demanding her immediate termination. pic.twitter.com/XdE4IhZCbf

— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (@RepMTG) December 16, 2021

… The letter criticized Landerkin for tweets it said she had sent calling Trump a "pig," and "equating Christians to the Ku Klux Klan," as well as saying Ashli Babbit, a rioter who was killed on Jan. 6, "was responsible for being shot.

So where does Abraham Lincoln and his 1860 speech fit into all this?

Only a dozen years ago, James Carville referred to (modern-day) Republicans as "reptiles".

And 160 years ago, when an Illinois Republican felt the necessity to address himself to Southerners and Democrats (during his Cooper Union speech in February 1860), guess which term Abe Lincoln reached for:

…when you speak of us Republicans, you do so only to denounce us as reptiles [!], or, at the best, as no better than outlaws. You will grant a hearing to pirates or murderers, but nothing like it to [Republicans]. In all your contentions with one another, each of you deems an unconditional condemnation of [Republicanism] as the first thing to be attended to. Indeed, such condemnation of us seems to be an indispensable prerequisite — license, so to speak — among you to be admitted or permitted to speak at all. Now, can you, or not, be prevailed upon to pause and to consider whether this is quite just to us, or even to yourselves? Bring forward your charges and specifications, and then be patient long enough to hear us deny or justify.

"Reptiles, outlaws, pirates, murderers"… How often have Republicans been called (domestic) terrorists in the past seven years?  (And in the years, in the decades, before that?)

Who would want to be patient long enough to hear such heinous beings deny or justify? (Ain't that true, MainStream Media?) Who wouldn't want to punish such monsters?

Related: What Caused Secession and Ergo the Civil War? Was It Slavery and/or States' Rights? Or Wasn't It Rather Something Else — the Election of a Ghastly Republican to the White House?

Let's let Tucker Carlson have the final word. Although the Fox anchor is talking about a different subject — Biden’s COVID policies — he points out that we are witnessing the muscle spasms of a dying political party: 

 … the people in charge of diverting your attention are working overtime right now

 … political parties, like markets, often seem the strongest right before they collapsed. The problem is, at this moment, the Democratic Party is still in power, and that's a very bad combination for the rest of us. Regimes in decline tend to become dangerous. As they weaken, they get increasingly desperate and ruthless. They've been rejected by voters. Democracy doesn't work for them anymore. That means they can no longer operate within democratic boundaries and hope to stay in power. So inevitably, they swerve outside those boundaries. Instead of trying to convince the public to support them, that's a democracy, they invent domestic enemies and national panics to keep themselves in charge. And that's exactly what we're watching happen right now. 

 … CNN and its masters in the Democratic Party have identified the real villain to blame for [the latest COVID outbreak]. And you'll know, even before we tell you that it's not Pfizer, it's not the government of China. It's America's working class, a group now known as "The Unvaccinated." On Thursday, Joe Biden informed us that these people will die for what they've done. 

 … Biden's advisers want you looking elsewhere. And to get you looking elsewhere, they are working to create a kulak class — a group of reviled subhumans at the rest of us are free to hate and mock and whose deaths were allowed to root for. That's the unvaccinated. 

When David Frum tells you we should let the unvaccinated just die, he's not alone. That is not the official position of the Democratic Party. If you get COVID in you’re unvaccinated, it is immoral for you to go to the hospital, you're overcrowding it. And we need that space for the many people who've taken the COVID vaccine and are now sick from COVID. That's what the president United States just said on Thursday. 

 … whatever personal decisions about the vaccine or COVID or how many masks you wear, if any, know what you're watching here. This is not a public health campaign designed to save you from a variant that has not killed a single confirmed American. Sorry, it has not. No. So, what is this? These are the muscle spasms of a dying political party. The people in charge are on their way out. Unfortunately, they can still hurt you.

America has no enemies, we are told. All of humanity could easily live as brethren. With one exception. America's conservatives and, on a larger scale, the American people. 

They hate you.

And they want you dead.

“We’re in a war, and it’s a war to the death. Now they [the Left] actually admit it. They used to pretend. Not anymore.”

— Norman Podhoretz in The New Criterion

Related History Posts:
• What Caused Secession and Ergo the Civil War? Was It Slavery and/or States' Rights? Or Wasn't It Rather Something Else — the Election of a Ghastly Republican to the White House?
• During the Winter of 1860-1861, Did the South's Democrats Obtain Their Aim — the Secession of 7 Slave States — Thanks to Elections Filled with Stealth, Lies, Voter Fraud, Intimidation, Violence, and Murder? (Wait 'til You Hear About… Georgia's Dark Secret)
• Abraham Lincoln and the Founding Fathers' Supposed Embrace of Slavery Along with Their Alleged Rejection of Women's Rights • Wondering Why Slavery Persisted for Almost 75 Years After the Founding of the USA? According to Lincoln, the Democrat Party's "Principled" Opposition to "Hate Speech"
• The Greatest Myth in U.S. History: Yes, the Civil War Era Did Feature Champions of States' Rights, But No, They Were Not in the South (Au Contraire)
• Harry Jaffa on the Civil War Era: For Democrats of the 21st Century as of the 19th, "the emancipation from morality was/is itself seen as moral progress"
• Why Does Nobody Ever Fret About Scandinavia's — Dreadful — 19th-C Slavery Conditions?
• A Century and Half of Apartheid Policies: From Its 1828 Foundation, the Democrat Party Has Never Shed Its Racist Past
• The Confederate Flag: Another Brick in the Leftwing Activists' (Self-Serving) Demonization of America and Rewriting of History
• How to Prevent America from Becoming a Totalitarian State
• Inside of a month, Democrats have redefined riots and election challenges from the highest form of patriotism to an attack on democracy — And by “democracy”, they mean the Democrat Party
• Why They Don't Tell You the Whole Truth: The 1619 Project Summarized in One Single Sentence

From my and Dan Greenberg's upcoming graphic novel on The Life & Times of Abraham Lincoln: