Behind the Façades in France: What expats and the mainstream media (French and American alike) fail to notice (or fail to tell you) about French attitudes, principles, values, and official positions…
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.
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.
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?).
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.
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
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!
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.
"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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
"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.
… 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?
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?
… 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.”
Here we are, coming up on the second anniversary of “two weeks to slow
the spread” of a flu-like virus most likely hatched in a Chinese
Communist laboratory in Wuhan, with a little help from Dr. Anthony Fauci and the American taxpayer, and the dreaded COVID-19 chest cold has conquered the planet, instilling fear and loathing in weak minds whenever and wherever it appears in any of its Transformers-like, constantly mutating configurations.
… The irony is, had the novel coronavirus been treated the same way as
its immediate predecessors, including SARS, the H1N1 pandemic of 2009,
and the Hong Kong flu of 1968, no one would be talking about it, there
would have been no lockdowns, no masks, no ruination of the economy, no
destruction of the travel industry, no stealth takeover of private
medicine and, most important, no unconstitutional loss of personal
liberty.
But the very act of neurotically obsessing over it has triggered and
weaponized the critter and, a la Heisenberg, transformed it from a bug
that preyed on old people into the Thing that Devoured the Planet.
Ever since the politically conveniently timed appearance of the CCP virus
early in 2020, Fauci and his coevals at various government “health”
agencies have whipsawed the American public with their erratic,
contradictory, and wholly unscientific pronouncements, all in the
interest of aggrandizing more power.
These [Transformers-like] Decepticons managed to take down the gullible Trump
administration, institutionalize their priorities for controlling the
population by nullifying the Bill of Rights, helping to install Joe
Biden, and giving a big fat Christmas present to the pharmaceutical
companies—which have profited handsomely from the pandemic.
… A “disease” that is in many cases strikingly asymptomatic, whose
lethality (such as it was and depending on who’s counting and how) is
counted by “cases” (a meaningless statistic), whose survival rate has
always been near 99 percent for the vast majority of the world’s
population doesn’t seem like much of a threat in the cosmic scheme of
things.
Nor does a “vaccine” that not only doesn’t prevent you from getting the bug but permits “breakthrough” infections and also has significant side effects seem like much of a vaccine.
But from the beginning the Democrat-Media Complex has gone all-in on
apocalyptic hysteria as governments around the globe have vowed to
“defeat” the virus, and some—like the newly formed police states of
Australia and New Zealand—even articulating an impossible “zero COVID”
policy.
… As it happens, Robert F. Kennedy,
Jr., has addressed these issues and more in a new book, “The Real
Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy
and Public Health,” a no-holds barred, full-frontal attack on Fauci
& Co. It’s a bracing read.
“Suddenly, trusted institutions seemed to be acting in concert to
generate fear, promote obedience, discourage critical thinking, and herd
seven billion people to march to a single tune, culminating in mass
public health experiments with a novel, shoddily tested and improperly
licensed technology so risky that manufacturers refused to produce it
unless every government on Earth shielded them from liability.
“Across Western nations, shell-shocked citizens experienced all the
well-worn tactics of rising totalitarianism—mass propaganda and
censorship, the orchestrated promotion of terror, the manipulation of
science, the suppression of debate, the vilification of dissent, and use
of force to prevent protest. Conscientious objectors who resisted these
unwanted, experimental, zero-liability medical interventions faced
orchestrated gaslighting, marginalization, and scapegoating.
… Enough is enough. After two years of poisonous squid ink regarding the
origins of the disease and its dangers, it’s time to put away the
electron microscope, back away from the Petri dish, and just ignore
Omicron
… trust evaporates when journalistic entities embrace political projects
… Because the [New York] Times ignored
today’s most eminent relevant scholars — e.g., Brown University’s
Gordon Wood, Princeton’s James McPherson and Sean Wilentz and Allen Guelzo, City University of New York’s James Oakes, Columbia’s Barbara Fields — the project’s hectoring tone and ideological ax-grinding are unsurprising.
… The project’s purpose is to displace the nation’s actual 1776 founding,
thereby draining from America’s story the moral majesty of the first
modern nation’s Enlightenment precepts proclaimed in the Declaration of
Independence and implemented by the Constitution. Although
monomaniacally focused on slavery, the Times’s project completely misses
the most salient point:
The phenomenon of slavery was millennia old in 1776, but as Gordon Wood says, “It’s the American Revolution that makes [slavery] a problem for the world.” Sean Wilentz (see his 2018 book “No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding”) correctly insists that
what “originated in America” was “organized anti-slavery politics,” and
it did so because of those Enlightenment precepts in the Declaration’s
first two paragraphs.
… Has … the slogan of the party governing Oceania in George Orwell’s “1984” [“Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past”] supplanted “All the news that’s fit to print” as the Times’s credo?
What is stunning is that George Will can see through the 1619 Project, and that so clearly, while he is still blind-sided regarding Donald Trump, the January 6 "riots", and the like.
Still, on this, the shortest day in the year, let George and his December 2021 column have his/their time in the sunshine:
The [New York] Times’s original splashy assertion – slightly fudgedafter the splash garnered a Pulitzer Prize
– was that the American Revolution, the most important event in our
history, was shameful because a primary reason it was fought was to
preserve slavery. The war was supposedly ignited by a November 1775
British offer of freedom to Blacks who fled slavery and joined British forces. Well.
That offer came after increasingly volcanic American reactions to various British provocations: After the 1765 Stamp Act. After the 1770 Boston Massacre. After the 1773 Boston Tea Party. After the 1774 Coercive Acts (including closure of Boston’s port) and other events of “The Long Year of Revolution” (the subtitle of Mary Beth Norton’s “1774”). And after, in 1775, the April 19 battles of Lexington and Concord, the June 17 battle of Bunker Hill and George Washington on July 3 assuming command of the Continental Army.
… Addressing the American Council of Trustees and Alumni last month, Gordon S. Wood,
today’s foremost scholar of America’s Founding, dissected the 1619
Project’s contentions. When the Revolution erupted, Britain “was not
threatening to abolish slavery in its empire,” which included lucrative,
slavery-dependent sugar-producing colonies in the Caribbean. Wood
added:
“If the Virginian slaveholders had been frightened of British
abolitionism, why only eight years after the war ended would the board
of visitors or the trustees of the College of William & Mary,
wealthy slaveholders all, award an honorary degree to Granville Sharp,
the leading British abolitionist at the time? Had they changed their
minds so quickly? ... The New York Times has no accurate knowledge of
Virginia’s Revolutionary culture and cannot begin to answer these
questions.” The Times’s political agenda requires ignoring what Wood
knows:
“It
was the American colonists who were interested in abolitionism in 1776.
... Not only were the northern states the first slaveholding
governments in the world to abolish slavery, but the United States
became the first nation in the world to begin actively suppressing the
despicable international slave trade. The New York Times has the history
completely backwards.”
Wood’s doctoral dissertation adviser in 1960 to 1964 was Bernard Bailyn, the title of whose best-known book,
“The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution,” conveys a
refutation of the 1619 Project’s premise that the Revolution originated
from base economic motives.
… The 1619 Project, which might already be embedded
in school curricula near you, reinforces the racial monomania of those
progressives who argue that the nation was founded on, and remains
saturated by, “systemic racism.” This racial obsession is instrumental;
it serves a radical agenda that sweeps beyond racial matters. It is the
agenda of clearing away all impediments, intellectual and institutional,
to — in progressivism’s vocabulary — the “transformation” of the
nation. The United States will be built back better when it has been
instructed to be ashamed of itself and is eager to discard its
disreputable heritage.
The 1619 Project aims to erase (in Wood’s words) “the Revolution and the
principles that it articulated – liberty, equality and the well-being
of ordinary people.” These ideas are, as Wood says, the adhesives that
bind our exceptional nation whose people have shared principles, not a
shared ancestry.
The Times says
“nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional” flows from
“slavery and the anti-black racism it required.” So, the 1619 Project’s
historical illiteracy is not innocent ignorance. Rather, it is
maliciousness in the service of progressivism’s agenda, which is to
construct a thoroughly different nation on the deconstructed rubble of
what progressives hope will be the nation’s thoroughly discredited past.
As Glenn Reynolds reminds us, regularly (with good reason),
The 1619 Project is the kind of false history that a conqueror would impose on a defeated people to break its will.
What better justification for the death penalty than the last-minute bombshell announcement from a Death Row inmate who — after 11 years on Death Row and only hours before his execution — confesses to a second murder, clearing up the 14-year-old disappearance of a woman in the process?
In all future debates with leftists, forevermore the name David Neal Cox shall remain etched.
As you read the following news story, remember some of the arguments that leftists usually make: a life sentence is a better punishment, or at least just as good a punishment, as the death penalty is; indeed, the death penalty does not accomplish anything; society is better off when/if it shows compassion; etc etc etc…
A Mississippi man who was executed [in November 2021] for fatally shooting his estranged wife [pictured in blue below] confessed to another killing just before he died, a prosecutor revealed …
… David
Neal Cox, 50, told his lawyers he killed his sister-in-law, Felicia
Cox [pictured in white], in 2007 and provided detailed instructions on where her body could
be found
… Cox made the stunning admission to his lawyers before he received a
lethal injection on Nov. 17 — marking the first execution in the state
in nine years.
… The state’s Office of Capital
Post-Conviction Counsel, who represented Cox, said he "felt deep remorse
and wanted to bring closure" to his victim’s family.
It seems pretty clear-cut that the disappearance of Felicia
Cox would never have been solved, and her remains perhaps never found, had David
Neal Cox been treated "compassionately," and received a "humane" sentence of life imprisonment.
His deep remorse came only after being sentenced to death, albeit not until hours — not days, not weeks, not months, not years — before his execution. I.e., only when, and only because (!), all hope was gone…
Of course, David
Neal Cox is not the only argument in favor of the death penalty, far from it. Needless to say, there are not last-minute confessions at every execution, nor, probably, is there even the need for additional confessions for every prisoner on death row. Still, it turns out that the David Neal Cox case does not hold the most important jigsaw puzzle piece in favor of the death penalty.
… the gulf is
unbridgeable between those of us who believe that some murderers – and I
emphasize some murderers – should be put to death and those who believe
that no murderer should ever be put to death.
… Opponents
of capital punishment … argue that keeping all murderers alive
sanctifies the value of human life. But the opposite is true. Keeping
every murderer alive cheapens human life because it belittles murder.
That’s easily proven. Imagine that the punishment for murder were the
same as the punishment for driving over the speed limit. Wouldn’t that
belittle murder and thereby cheapen human life? Of course, it would.
Society teaches how bad an action is by the punishment it metes out.
And
what about the pain inflicted on the loved ones of those murdered? For
most people, their suffering is immeasurably increased knowing that the
person who murdered their family member or friend – and who, in many
cases, inflicted unimaginable terror on that person – is alive and being
cared for.
Of course,
putting the murderer to death doesn’t bring back their loved one, but it
sure does provide some sense of justice. That’s why Dr. [William] Petit, a
physician whose life is devoted to saving lives, wants the murderers of
his wife and daughters put to death. In his words, death "is really the
only true just punishment for certain heinous and depraved murders." Is
the doctor wrong? Is he immoral? Well, if you think capital punishment
is immoral, then Dr. Petit is immoral.
And
what about opponents’ argument that an innocent person may be executed?
This argument may be sincerely held, but it’s not honest. Why? Because
opponents of capital punishment oppose the death penalty even when there
is absolute proof of the murderer’s guilt. If there were a video of a
man burning a family alive, opponents of capital punishment would still
oppose taking that man’s life.
Moreover,
by keeping every murderer alive, many MORE people are murdered -– other
prisoners, guards and people outside of prison in case of escape or
early release -- than the infinitesimally small number of people who
might be wrongly executed. And now, with DNA testing and other advanced
forensic tools, it is virtually impossible to execute an innocent
person.
Then there is the
argument offered by some people in the name of religion that only God
has the right to take human life. I always wonder what religion these
people are referring to, since the holiest book of no religion of which I
am aware ever made that claim. People just made that argument up. …
When I warn that speed limits, for instance, are proof of a creeping totalitarianism in the West, a number of people reply that that sounds like an exaggeration.
But here is the place for quoting an American comedian. Before we do that, however, let us remember how, in his book The Road to Serfdom, Friedrich Hayek explains that it is rare that we lose any type of freedom in one single blow.
Let us now turn to George Carlin: when fascism, or communism, takes over in the USA and the rest of the West, the comedian explains, it won't be in the form of black uniforms and marching jackboots, but with a smiley face ("We're from the government and we're here to help").
When we think of oppressive regimes, we immediately think of the Stalinist model portrayed in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, the heavy-handed thought control associated with Hitler’s Reich or Mao’s China
But where the old propaganda was loud, crude and often lethal, the
contemporary style of thought control takes the form of a gentle nudging
towards orthodoxy– a gentle push that gradually closes off one’s
critical faculties and leads one to comply with gently given directives.
Governments around the world, including in the UK, notes the Guardian, have been embracing this approach with growing enthusiasm.
… nudging also has an authoritarian edge, employing techniques and
technologies that the Gestapo or NKVD could only dream about to promote
the ‘right behaviour’.
… This situation is made worse because the people running our most
powerful institutions, from the media to the government, increasingly
share the same opinions and often have little tolerance for outliers. Their views on dissent and freedom of speech do not stem from Jefferson or Madison.
… The nudgers focus on three areas: identity (ie, race / gender), the
pandemic, and, most critically, climate. In terms of race issues, they
rule out scepticism towards Black Lives Matter, including criticism of
last year’s ‘mostly peaceful’ BLM demonstrations, which featured looting, arson and general mayhem. Many media outlets
will also characterise anyone who does not embrace the new
‘anti-racist’ orthodoxy as a ‘white nationalist’.
The pandemic has rained manna for nudgers. Across the high-income world,
we now see a form of hygiene authoritarianism, promoted and enforced by
nudgers in government and media. This goes beyond debunking clearly
unhinged and unsupported claims. It also includes purging anyone opposed to particular government Covid policies, including recognised professionals. The most egregious example was the cancelling and marginalisation of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, written by leading epidemiologists from Harvard, Oxford and Stanford – all for the ‘thoughtcrime’ of opposing lockdowns.
… No wonder so many nudgers see China as an ideal, a place without a nasty First Amendment that protects dissenters.
Read the whole thing, as the article is one of the most important in the past 21 years…
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