“Evenbefore the Capitol riot of January 6, 2021, congressional Democrats had formulated a plan to project the illusion that the most perilous threat to American national security — not just in our time but in our history — was domestic terrorism fueled by white supremacists. This was, and remains, a political narrative through and through. Democrats are not even subtle in signaling to the public that they should think of Trump supporters — not just the unabashed MAGA faction but any of the over 70 million Americans who found Trump preferable to Democrats — as white supremacists, or at least sympathizers of white supremacists, and ergo abettors of domestic terrorism.
I laid this plan bare in January 2021. Again, even before the Capitol riot, House Democrats were proposing their so-called “Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act.” They haven’t gotten it enacted yet, but they’re trying hard, calculating that they can demagogue the Republicans they need to get it across the finish line by masquerading their political project as pro–law enforcement and pro–national security. And, of course, by inveighing that anyone who opposes the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act must necessarily be in favor of domestic terrorism, right? That’s why House Democrats, while they had a slim majority, reintroduced and passed the legislation in 2022. That’s why, just a few days ago, Dick Durbin, the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, rolled out his symmetrical version in the Judiciary Committee.
The objective of this proposal is not to improve national security. As I explained in 2021, and as NR later editorialized, if that were the aim, Democrats would not engage in the subterfuge of attempting to change federal law’s perfectly serviceable definition of domestic terrorism — for the purpose of insulating jihadists and left-wing radicals while targeting their phantom white supremacists (i.e., Republicans, pro-life activists, parents who object to woke-progressive indoctrination in the schools, et al.).
The real purpose of this legislation is twofold: (1) stigmatize as terrorism policies that progressives oppose; (2) establish in law requirements that induce the FBI and other federal agencies to inflate the number of domestic-terrorism investigations, the better to insist that — though you’d never know it given the absence of, you know, actual terrorist attacks — the country is under a white-supremacist siege.
Exposing this demagogic scheme is an important purpose of House Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Jordan’s subcommittee on the weaponization of government. As our Brittany Bernstein has reported, that subcommittee held a hearing on Thursday at which three FBI agents testified as whistleblowers, relating both how the bureau has been politicized into serving this Democratic political gambit, and how they have been retaliated against for reporting the situation to Congress.
Jordan’s subcommittee issued a report that is startling.
Brittany noted that Thursday’s hearing focused, in part, on testimony from Agent Steve Friend, a twelve-year veteran and SWAT-team member, who has detailed how the FBI labors to inflate the number of terrorism cases and uses SWAT resources unnecessarily in arrest scenarios to create the impression that it is apprehending dangerous terrorists:
Friend said the FBI’s handling of the January 6 Capitol riot-related investigations “deviated from standard practice and created a false impression with respect to the threat of DVE [i.e., domestic violent extremism] nationwide.”. . . He testified that the FBI is in need of reform in several areas: “the integrated program management system incentivizes the use of inappropriate investigatory processes and tools to achieve arbitrary statistical accomplishments” and there is “mission creep within the national security branch [that] has refocused counterterrorism from legitimate foreign actors to political opponents within our borders. . . . The FBI weaponizes process crimes and reinterprets laws to initiate pretextual prosecutions and persecute its political enemies[.]”
Jordan’s report excerpts portions of a subcommittee interview with Friend, in which he explains that the bureau is deviating from its normal case-opening and accounting practices in order to make it appear that there are more domestic-terrorism cases and that the suspected terrorists are making mayhem throughout the country. As you’d expect, these shenanigans are woven out of the events of January 6.
That should tell you much of what you need to know. The operating premise of congressional Democrats, the Biden administration, and — therefore — the FBI is that the Capitol riot was a terrorist attack. That is absurd, for reasons I explicated when Attorney General Merrick Garland, putting his office in the service of this narrative, preposterously claimed that the Capitol riot was the most dangerous threat to American democracy he had ever seen.
As a Clinton Justice Department official, Garland supervised the prosecution of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing — a terrorist attack in which a U.S. courthouse was destroyed, 168 people were murdered, and another 759 people were wounded. The Capitol riot was nothing like that, just like it was not like that era’s other jihadist attacks and plots — the World Trade Center bombing, the (unsuccessful) plot to bomb New York City landmarks, the “Bojinka” plot to blow U.S. airliners out of the sky (in which a tourist was killed and a plane nearly downed in a dry-run explosion), the bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania (destroying buildings and killing 224 people), the Khobar Towers bombing (destroying a building and killing 19 U.S. Air Force members), the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole (killing 17 U.S. Navy members and nearly sinking a destroyer), and the 9/11 atrocities (killing nearly 3,000 Americans, annihilating the World Trade Center, badly damaging the Pentagon, and resulting in a missile-like explosion when Flight 93 crash-landed in Shanksville, Pa.).
What happened at the Capitol on January 6 was a protest that turned violent, devolving into a riot. But no one tried to destroy the Capitol (it sustained property damage that was trivial compared with the destructive force of a terrorist attack). No police and other security personnel were killed (though over a hundred were assaulted and some sustained serious injuries; three rioters died, two of natural causes trigged by the frenzy, one killed by a Capitol police officer). The worst of the violence was over quickly, the Capitol was cleared in a few hours, and so little damage was done — compared with a terrorist attack — that lawmakers were able to reconvene in the Capitol that evening.
It does not diminish the egregiousness of a riot to observe the incontestable fact that it was not an act of domestic terrorism — just like a murder, horrible as it is, is not a terrorist attack. And bad as the Capitol riot was, it did not approach in duration or lethality the radical left-wing rioting that beset this country for months after George Floyd’s death in police custody — rioting that Democrats take pain to exclude from their “domestic terrorism” bookkeeping because, sympathetic to the radicals’ ends, progressives turn a blind eye to their means.
But not January 6. You’re to see that not as a riot, but as domestic terrorism…”
Further evidence there is nothing The Left will not say or do in pursuit of ever-increasing power and personal wealth.
Case in point, courtesy of The Daily Signal, as the great VDH details the long, sordid history of…
“The most recent liberal ABC News/Washington Post poll showed President Joe Biden’s approval rating at 36%—the lowest in history for a president at this point in his first term.
Biden’s low popularity is no mystery. He inherited energy independence, affordable gas prices, historically low interest rates, low inflation, calm overseas, a low crime rate, and a largely closed border with legal-only immigration. And then Biden destroyed that inheritance.
…Biden promised “unity.” Instead, he habitually smears half the country as “semi-fascists” and “ultra-MAGA” extremists.
Biden is cognitively challenged and often incoherent. And he is now losing support in the polls from African Americans, once his most loyal constituency. In response, Biden does what he has always done for some 40 years: mouth wild, racist demagoguery.
This graduation season, Biden deliberately chose Howard University to scare its black graduates into believing the greatest threat to their aspirations is “white supremacy”—but that he, Biden, has been their protector in fighting it.
Note the existential threats Biden deliberately omits. Tens of thousands of illegal immigrants are flooding over a border Biden deliberately destroyed. Millions of incoming poor will vie for limited federal and state support with Americans who are in need. Since Biden was elected, there have been nearly 7 million illegal entries. Some 100,000 Americans now die each year from Mexican-produced fentanyl and other opioids shipped across a wide-open border.
Biden did not mention that nearly 10,000 African Americans are slain each year, more than 90% of them killed by other African Americans.
Biden first should heal his own racism before he fabricates it in others. He fueled his early Senate career with homages to southern Democratic segregationists, such as Sen. James O. Eastland, D-Miss. Biden even bragged that Eastland “never called me ‘boy.’” Biden gave eulogies for former Dixiecrat Sen. Strom Thurmond, R-S.C., and former Klansman Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va. Of school busing, a younger Sen. Biden thundered, “My children are going to grow up in a jungle, the jungle being a racial jungle.”
Biden in 2008 patronized President-to-be Barack Obama in racist terms as “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” In 2012, Biden condescended to a group of accomplished black professionals that the Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, would “put y’all back in chains.”
As a presidential candidate in 2020, he dismissed two black journalists, respectively, with the putdowns “you ain’t black” and “junkie.” His fabricated “Corn Pop” he-man autobiographical tales are utterly racist. As president he has referred to two prominent people of color as “boy.” He still uses the term “Negro” to refer to blacks.
Biden never cites data to support his wild accusations that white supremacy poses the nation’s greatest threat. The 2020 riots, the lengthiest in our history, left up to 40 people dead, destroyed $2 billion in property, led to 14,000 arrests, spanned 120 days of mass looting and arson, and saw mobs torching police precincts, federal courthouses, and a historic church. That violence was engineered by radicals in Antifa and Black Lives Matter.
In the Jan. 6 Capitol protests, the only person confirmed to have been killed at that event was an unarmed military veteran and Trump supporter, Ashli Babbitt. She was lethally shot by a Capitol Police officer for the misdemeanor of attempting to enter through a broken window.
If “white supremacy” is our “greatest” terrorist threat, surely crime statistics would reveal such an existential peril. Yet federal hate and interracial crime data show that so-called whites are considerably unrepresented demographically in such racially motivated violence.
Far from galvanizing the public, Biden’s monotonous racial demagoguery is turning it off. The military suffers a vast drop in enlistments that began once Biden’s Pentagon brass, without evidence, likewise began demagoguing about supposed “white rage” in the ranks.
Only 37% of independents in a recent poll now support Biden. Some 70% of the public in other polls opposes a second Biden run.
So on spec, a panicked Biden now turns to what he has done for decades—inflammatory racial demagoguery.
Though we’d challenge Joe to pronounce “demagoguery”, let alone spell it!
Since we’re on the subject of the worst president in American history, Jim Geraghty wonders why…
“Why is Joe Biden so convinced that he knows what Ukraine needs to win the war better than President Volodymyr Zelensky and the Ukrainian military do?
If the Biden administration is fine with other NATO allies sending F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine, why does it oppose sending U.S. fighter jets to Ukraine? It can’t be that it sees sending U.S. fighter jets to Ukraine as inherently too escalatory or provocative, because if it did, it would oppose allies sending the same kinds of jets.
It can’t be that the Biden administration genuinely believes it would take too long to train Ukrainian pilots on the F-16s for them to make a difference. The Ukrainian government admitted it would take six months for its pilots to train for combat in a Western-made jet like the F-16 . . . three and a half months ago. If we had started training those pilots then, they would be more than halfway done by now!
In fact, there’s evidence that Ukrainian pilots are particularly fast learners: “Yahoo News has exclusively obtained an internal U.S. Air Force assessment that concludes it would take only four months to train Ukrainian pilots to operate American-made F-16 fighter jets, a far shorter time frame than what has been repeatedly cited by Pentagon officials.” When your country’s civilians are being bombed by the Russians every day, you’re a highly motivated student.
The Ukrainian Air Force requested F-15s and/or F-16s back in March 2022. If we had started training the Ukrainian pilots back then, and supplied Ukraine with the jets once their pilots were ready, the Ukrainian skies would be full of F-16s winning air superiority by now. Put another way, six months from now, the war will almost certainly still be going on. We can decide whether that ongoing war six months from now features Ukrainian pilots in U.S.-made F-16s, or whether it does not. Which one do we want?
…A recent Politico article offered this absurd sentence: “The Biden team has suggested that discussions over sending F-16s should wait until after the war is concluded.” Yes, that’s brilliant, fellas. Let’s give them what they say they need to win the war, but only after they’ve lost the war.
…If the Biden administration is indeed hesitant to send F-16s to Ukraine because it’s way behind in sending Taiwan the F-16s it needs, then former Pentagon strategist and all-around China wonk Elbridge Colby is entitled to a few rounds of “I told you so,” as he has been arguing for months that the U.S. cannot give both Ukraine and Taiwan what they want, and will be forced to prioritize one over the other.
Whether or not Taiwan is a factor, the fact remains that Joe Biden is an old man who gets easily confused, and who, on the issue of Ukraine, is gripped by contradictory impulses that turn his policies into a jumbled, paradoxical mess. Biden wants Ukraine to win the war, and Biden wants the war to end. Biden wants to punish Vladimir Putin, and he’s terrified that strikes in Russian territory would enrage the bear. Biden wants to see himself as the second coming of Winston Churchill, leading the Western alliance and standing by Ukraine for “as long as it takes,” and also the conciliatory peacemaker who spent his first year seeking a “stable relationship” with Vladimir Putin. Biden stumbles around in a happy little fog, apparently having genuinely believed, “Putin knows that when I am president of the United States his days of tyranny, and trying to intimidate the United States and those in Eastern Europe are over.”
Biden vs. Putin: There hasn’t been a greater mismatch on the world stage since Chamberlain took on Hitler.
Moving on, here’s another sextet of special selections certain to sate the curiosity of inquiring Conservative minds:
(1). “I’m looking at the 14th Amendment as to whether or not we have the authority — I think we have the authority.” So says the liar who finished 76th in a class of 85 at the less-than-prestigious Syracuse University School of Law as he considers another extraconstitutional executive edict. Should Biden precipitate what would amount to a full-blown constitutional crisis, we hope and pray Kevin McCarthy won’t hesitate a nanosecond to seek redress via an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court.
(2). As CatholicVote notes on Twitter, “Wrong. These kids belong to their parents — not you. From schools, to ballot proposals, to gender counseling, the Biden admin is working to destroy the role of parents at every turn.”
.@PressSec “These are kids. These are our kids. They belong to all of us.”
Once again the left says the quiet part out loud: they want to take away your parental rights because they think government can do a better job.
— Protect Women Ohio (@ProtectWomenOH) May 17, 2023
Ponder that for which “the first female Black lesbian White House Press Secretary who can’t define what a woman is” is actually advocating: The genital mutilation of minors. Then consider the one undeniable result such procedures have: the inability of any of these children to ever have kids of their own.
(3). Just when you thought Progressives couldn’t go any softer on crime…
NYC Mayor Eric Adams just unveiled his new plan to combat skyrocketing retail theft in the city.
…but if The Donald’s the Republican nominee in 2024, the crazy uncle in the Dimocrats’ attic will almost certainly be reelected. Besides, even were he to win, we don’t want four more years of Trump, particularly when the likes of Ron DeSantis are available. And think about this: Who on earth would be willing to work for him based on his conduct during his first term?!?
“Jeffrey Epstein discovered that Bill Gates had an affair with a Russian bridge player and later appeared to use his knowledge to threaten one of the world’s richest men, according to people familiar with the matter. The Microsoft co-founder met the woman around 2010, when she was in her 20s. Epstein met her in 2013 and later paid for her to attend software coding school. In 2017, Epstein emailed Gates and asked to be reimbursed for the cost of the course, according to the people familiar with the matter.
The email came after the convicted sex offender had struggled and failed to persuade Gates to participate in a multibillion-dollar charitable fund that Epstein tried to establish with JPMorgan Chase. The implication behind the message, according to people who have viewed it, was that Epstein could reveal the affair if Gates didn’t keep up an association between the two men. “Mr. Gates met with Epstein solely for philanthropic purposes. Having failed repeatedly to draw Mr. Gates beyond these matters, Epstein tried unsuccessfully to leverage a past relationship to threaten Mr. Gates,” said a spokeswoman for Gates.
…The new details about Epstein and Gates reveal a layer of complexity to their relationship, and shed new light on how Epstein operated. In the years between his 2008 conviction and death, Epstein packed his days meeting with politicians, businessmen, academics and celebrities. He provided favors and sought to use the connections for his own purposes. And when the relationships soured, he could turn against people…”
Two thoughts immediately come to mind: (i) The headline reads, “Appeared to Threaten”, this despite Gates’s own spokeswoman affirmatively stating, “Epstein tried unsuccessfully to leverage a past relationship to threaten Mr. Gates“. Sure seems like Epstein threatened Gates to us; and, (ii) Note the underlined portions of the third paragraph immediately above…
“meeting with politicians, businessmen, academics and celebrities“…“provided favors and sought to use the connections for his own purposes“…“when the relationships soured, he could turn against people“
…add in Epstein’s proclivity for sexual deviancy, objectification of women and lack of a moral compass, then tell us who else comes to mind who fits that mold.
Magoo
Video of the Day
The truly troubling aspect of this video is it was shot over four years ago. Think these fascist snowflakes have grown less violent in the interim?!?
Tales of The Darkside
RattlesnakeTV features Dinesh D’Souza effectively and respectfully countering an Amherst student on the concept of reparations.
On the Lighter Side
Sorry, but it’s hard to take seriously someone unwilling to differentiate between giving the mentally-ill caring respect and permitting the irreversible genital mutilation of minors.
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