Hail to the Thief: Democrats celebrate a “victory for democracy” with barbed wire, soldiers, and political terror | Front Page Magazine

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

On a cold, windy day with a small group of spectators watching from behind barbed wire,

Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. swore another in a long series of false oaths before his motorcade passed between a long row of soldiers with their backs to him looking outward for threats.

No inauguration has been this empty in a century of American history. And at no inauguration have the spectators been outnumbered by a raw display of armed force. American presidents have been inaugurated in wartime and during actual national emergencies with a better turnout.

Through world wars and wars on terror, Washington D.C. has remained a national capital where the hundreds of millions of taxpayers who labor to pay for its grand edifices, free museums, and lavish lifestyles could briefly come to enjoy a little of the life lived by the ruling class in the Imperial City. Now the ruling class has made it clear that it doesn’t want peasants entering D.C.

Even as Biden’s team prepped the executive orders that would end the national emergency at the border and shut down construction of the wall, new walls topped by razor wire were rising across the imperial city. The new Fortress of Government sealed off two miles of the National Mall and parts of downtown D.C. and filled it with more soldiers than are deployed in Iraq.

The Secret Service designated green and red zones. Some 25,000 National Guard members were dispatched from Vermont, Maine, Louisiana, Wisconsin, Ohio, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Arkansas, Missouri, South Carolina, Rhode Island, Virginia, and Colorado to prepare for a fake invasion that never came. But the armored vehicles and heavy weaponry did come. President Trump had wanted a military parade that would show America’s strength to the world. Biden held his own military parade to intimidate his fellow Americans.

Democrats had deployed more soldiers in D.C. than they had in Iraq and Afghanistan while authorizing them to use lethal force and investigating their politics before the deployment. The radical leftists who had resisted using the military to fight terrorism or secure the border from invasion were eager to deploy the military against the people of the United States of America.

The handfuls of ordinary people who arrived, as Americans always do, to attend the inauguration of a new president were confronted with heavy weapons and barbed wire.

D.C. had become a Baghdad and Berlin of checkpoints, choking off access to much of the city, closing roads, bridges, and metro stations. Soldiers could be seen on every corner, and the 25,000 troops were bolstered by 4,000 Marshalls, and a motley crew of local forces, including 200 members of the NYPD, 40 members of the Chicago police, New Jersey and Maryland state troopers, Miami-Dade cops, and other law enforcement officers who were needed back home.

24 people were shot in Chicago this weekend and murders are already up 125% this year in New York City. Those officers could have done more good at home, but Democrats don’t care about murder victims in urban areas, instead redeploying officers to D.C. in a show of force.

Biden took office in a city under military occupation whose businesses were closed and boarded up. The D.C. government had tried to force hotels to shut down. The hotels didn’t close, but there were hardly any people. Instead the hotels were filled with soldiers tramping through their lobbies. Any tourists that did come found nothing to see except barricades and barbed wire.

Sometimes what you don’t see is more important than what you do see.

Filling D.C. with soldiers meant that no one was going to measure Biden’s crowds. The only crowds were heavily armed and had been ordered to come. The complete lack of enthusiasm for the new one-party state that was getting its Mussolini on was the dog that didn’t bark.

Questioning Biden’s election has been deemed to be incitement. It’s enough to get you censored, deplatformed, and fired by the companies standing behind him. The election challenges have been used as the pretext for a military occupation of Washington D.C. But the cloud of a disputed election, like the winter clouds overhead, still hung over the inauguration.

There were no crowds, just soldiers. After the military and police contingent, the second largest group there for the inauguration weren’t Biden’s civilian supporters, but his propagandists. With few people, the media had to work twice as hard to manufacture the illusion that this was a popular leader taking office instead of a usurper imposed by Amazon, Google, Facebook, and the rest of the political, cultural, and economic oligarchy which owns the media on America.

CNN, a subsidiary of AT&T, had already gushed about, “Joe Biden’s arms embracing America”. MSNBC, a subsidiary of Comcast, compared Biden to God. “He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.” The only wounds being bound up were those of the ruling class which had temporarily lost electoral power to an army of flyover country workers and peasants, only to reclaim it with sedition, wiretapping, abuse of power, billions of dollars, and soldiers in the street.

Popular leaders, elected or unelected, might have troops in their cities, but they also have adoring crowds to cheer them on. Biden’s only cheers were coming from employees of huge corporations whose jobs depend on praising him as the greatest thing since SuperPACs.

Biden couldn’t manage the cheering crowds that greeted even the most mediocre presidents on their arrival. The band might as well have struck up a rousing chorus of, “Hail to the Thief.”

Jokes like that are all but illegal these days even though they were ubiquitous during the Bush and Trump administrations. But jokes only need to be banned when they’re too close to the truth. The hysterical fascist theater with troops in the streets and fawning praise on the lips of the press are all efforts to overcompensate for the hollow man taking a false oath on a bible.

This isn’t the pageantry of Stalin or Hitler. It’s the weary theater of Brezhnev, a senescent leader of a decaying regime being propped up by desperate threats of force by the nomenklatura. Even though the media has told us more about Biden’s dogs than it has about any of the Americans killed by Islamic terrorists enabled by the open borders that Biden just reinstated, no one cares.

Biden isn’t a charismatic leader. He isn’t moving the cause forward. He’s a placeholder for a ruling class that wants homes in Dupont Circle that it buys by selling out America to China, by ruining our economy with environmental consulting gigs and racial contract quotas, and for all the manifold ways which the swamp is coming back as Biden’s wetlands restoration project.

“Hail to the Thief” is as much their anthem as it is Biden’s. They fought to keep hold of D.C., the center of their power base not because they care about its history or that of this country, but because it’s where they network, collaborate, and do their dirty little deals at our expense.

The troops in the street are their warning to the rest of the country about who is really in charge.

And it isn’t Joe Jr, who, along with his criminal family, will be allowed to dip their beaks in cash and cocaine until they’re sopping wet, along with every aide, staffer, and associate. Biden will be fawned over, his idiot wife will be dubbed a doctor, and the investigations involving his son and brother will be swiftly dropped. And when the time is right, Kamala Harris will step into his place.

When the Soviet Union was entering its last days, one leader quickly made way for another. The parade of old Communist hacks in their dotage became a procession of political funerals. Generations after the revolution and the purges, the only thing anyone in Moscow believed in was the power and decadence of the ruling class. That and the threat America posed to them.

These are still the only three things that Washington D.C.’s ruling class believes in anymore.

Democrats and their media claim that this charade is a “victory for democracy”.

“We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation rather than share it, would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy. And this effort very nearly succeeded. But while democracy can be periodically delayed, it can never be permanently defeated,” Amanda Gorman, the Harvard youth poetess, sonorously recited her tin-eared Maoist verses at the inauguration.

But where is this democracy? Where are the adoring crowds, the joyous mobs celebrating and the people cheering the tremendous victory of the democracy of Google, Facebook, Amazon, AT&T, Comcast and their D.C. lobbyists and associates over the Rust Belt and the flyovers?

Biden and the Democrats celebrated their democratic victory with barbed wire, troops in the streets, political terror, and the threat of even more political repression to come.

“There is a broader societal issue that is going to take years to detox the disinformation,” Ben Rhodes, the Obama adviser who had boasted of creating a media echo chamber, ranted on Comcast’s MSNBC. On that same state TV news network, John Brennan warned that “because of this growth of polarization in the United States” members of the Biden team would be “moving in laser-like fashion” to “root out an insidious threat to our democracy”.

Democracy is in a state of permanent emergency that requires locking down D.C., filling it with soldiers, walls, and barbed wire, and investigating political crimes. And D.C. will do everything it can to end the threat that Americans pose to democracy even if its ruling class has to live in its green zone surrounded by troops and barbed wire until democracy is saved from Americans.

Biden, we are told by the political interests and corporations advocating this, is incredibly popular. But the crowds of his devotees can’t be allowed to come to Washington D.C. Anyone who doubts that Biden is incredibly popular is inciting violence and will have to be rooted out as an insidious threat to our democracy. The more people doubt Biden’s popularity, the longer D.C. will have to be under military occupation until finally no one doubts his legitimacy in office.

Source: Front Page Magazine

Election fraud evidence significant, cases dismissed only on legal process grounds | Life Site News

https://youtu.be/CreVpaDZgOY

By Patrick Delaney

A business law professor at New Mexico State University (NMSU) said that anyone who proposes there “is no evidence” for massive election fraud in November’s presidential election doesn’t know what they are talking about.

Professor David K. Clements released a provocative video in response to a lettersent to the entire faculty of NMSU from Dr. John Floros, the university’s president. Clements described the letter as “regurgitating” the narrative “in the media” regarding the election and the January 6 violence at the U.S. Capital.

While broadly addressing many issues on these topics, he was very specific with regards to his own personal investigation into the election fraud question.

For those who believe “there is no evidence, you don’t know what you are talking about,” he said. “I’ve reviewed hours upon hours of public hearings. I have read almost all of the lawsuits that are out there. Most of them were dismissed on legal process grounds.

These suits, he said, were dismissed due to a legal lack of standing. “The general argument” that was presented in these cases, he said, “was that because this was a general harm,” then “you have no standing because your harm has to be particular. It’s not because there isn’t evidenceThere is evidence,” the professor emphasized.

“In fact, I’m in possession of 574 pages of sworn affidavits, forensic reports, all of which would make its way in a court of law under the rules of evidence in a federal or state court. The fact that the evidence has not been heard here by these courts” should not be conflated into “this idea that there is no evidence,” Clements argued.

“The courts have done what they always do,” Clements explained. “When you have political matters, they want them to be decided politically, not in a court room, but through the elections, through the state legislatures.”

However, he observed, the main problem was that “we have a bunch of cowards. We have judges who are cowards, we have politicians that are cowards, and that’s the reality.”

Clements, who lost a close primary run for senate in 2014, encouraged all “to look at the evidence, [including] sworn affidavits where people face 10 to 15 years of prison time if they commit perjury, and statistical analysis that just flies in the face of this idea that there was no fraud in this election.”

More broadly Clements went through Floros’ letter providing commentary along the way. He highlighted hypocrisy on the part of the NMSU president for the special attention paid to the intrusion at the Capitol and his silence during the BLM riots last summer.

“I’m offended that this is the email you are going to send to faculty, when you have been largely silent as cities have burned. People have lost their businesses [and] homes … entire city blocks [were] turned into zones for Antifa and BLM … Your silence speaks volumes,” he said.

Floros celebrated how on January 6 “our democratic institutions held strong, and by the end of the day both houses of Congress returned to the Capitol Building to do the people’s business.”

Clements, a long-time political independent, responded, “The people’s business” that day “was to certify votes to ensure that there was a proper transition to the next president. However, in seven of those states there were dueling electors, and the ‘People’s Business’ allowed for the American people to hear evidence of voter fraud. When these members of Congress returned, they did not deal with the massive black cloud hanging over the election in November. They did nothing of the sort. They used the riot as grounds to move forward and push their paper.”

According to the law, the professor explained, during this certification process, “you can object, and you can investigate, when certain votes are not regularly given. And in many states, it’s clear that they weren’t.”

Therefore, Clements concluded, “The people weren’t heard,” that day. “They were silenced once again. And that is why you had folks show up in the first place because they felt like they were silenced in their own respective states, and they wanted to be heard.”

To demonstrate the weakness of the media narrative Clements showed video clips, including an Antifa activist bragging about his involvement in the Capitol Hill riots, police removing barriers and waving the crowds into the Capitol area, and Trump supporters forcefully working to stop “Antifa” individuals from smashing windows at the Capitol.

“President Floros, you have reached a conclusion prematurely, way too quickly,’ the law professor concluded. “I hope you will send another email out saying that you rushed to judgment.

“For my fellow faculty members who are continuing to call out Trump supporters, to demonize them, I hope that you can treat them, and myself, with civility,” he concluded.

Source: LifeSiteNews

Ideological Alignment Pushing America Toward Totalitarianism, Experts Warn: Concerns over the nexus of big tech, big media, and big government | The Epoch Times

The American flag blows in the wind after it was lowered to half-staff Friday, Sept. 18, 2020, in Washington, after the Supreme Court announced that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died of metastatic pancreatic cancer at age 87. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

By Peter Svab

The formation of a totalitarian state is just about complete in America as the most powerful public and private sector actors unify behind the idea that actions to stamp out dissent can be justified, according to several experts on modern totalitarian ideologies.

While many have warned about the rise of fascism or socialism in “the land of the free,” the ideas have largely been vague or fragmented, focusing on individual events or actors. Recent events, however, indicate that seemingly unconnected pieces of the oppression puzzle are fitting together to form a comprehensive system, according to Michael Rectenwald, a retired liberal arts professor at New York University.

But many Americans, it appears, have been caught off guard or aren’t even aware of the newly forming regime, as the idea of elected officials, government bureaucrats, large corporations, the establishment academia, think tanks and nonprofits, the legacy media, and even seemingly grassroot movements all working in concert toward some evil purpose seems preposterous. Is a large portion of the country in on a conspiracy?

The reality now emerges that no massive conspiracy was in fact needed—merely an ideological alignment and some informal coordination, Rectenwald argues.

Despite the lack of formal overarching organization, the American socialist regime is indeed totalitarian, as the root of its ideology requires politically motivated coercion, he told The Epoch Times. The power of the regime is not yet absolute but it’s becoming increasingly effective as it erodes the values, checks, and balances against tyranny established by traditional beliefs and enshrined in the American founding.

The effects can be seen throughout society. Americans, regardless of their income, demographics, or social stature are being fired from jobs, getting stripped of access to basic services such as banking and social media, or having their businesses crippled for voicing political opinions and belonging to a designated political underclass. Access to sources of information unsanctioned by the regime is becoming increasingly difficult. Some figures of power and influence are sketching the next step, labelling large segments of society as “extremists” and potential terrorists who need to be “deprogrammed.”

While the onset of the regime appears tied to events of recent years—the presidency of Donald Trump, the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) viruspandemic, the Capitol intrusion of Jan. 6—its roots go back decades.

Is It Really Totalitarian?

Totalitarian regimes are commonly understood as constituting a government headed by a dictator that regiments the economy, censors the media, and quells dissent by force. That is not the case in America but it’s also a misunderstanding of how such regimes function, literature on totalitarianism indicates.

To claim power, the regimes don’t initially need to control every aspect of society through government.

Adolf Hitler, leader of the National Socialist Workers Party in Nazi Germany, used various means to control the economy, including gaining compliance of industry leaders voluntarily, through intimidation, or through replacing the executives with party loyalists.

Similarly, the regime rearing its head in America relies on corporate executives to implement its agenda voluntarily but also through intimidation by online brigades of activists and journalists who take initiative to launch negative PR campaigns and boycotts to progress their preferred societal structure.

Also, Hitler initially didn’t control the spread of information via government censorship but rather through his brigades of street thugs, the “brown shirts,” who would intimidate and physically prevent his opponents from speaking publicly.

The tactic parallels the often successful efforts to “cancel” and “shut down” public speakers by activists and violent actors, such as Antifa.

Dissenting media in America haven’t been silenced by the government directly as of yet. But they are stymied in other ways.

In the digital age, media largely rely on reaching and growing their audience through social media and web search engines, which are dominated by Facebook and Google. Both companies have in place mechanisms to crack down on dissenting media.

Google gives preference in its search results to sources it deems “authoritative.” Search results indicate the company tends to consider media ideologically close to it to be more authoritative. Such media can then produce hit pieces on their competitors, giving Google justification to slash the “authoritativeness” of the dissenters.

Facebook employs third-party fact checkers who have the discretion to label content as “false” and thus reduce the audience on its platform. Virtually all the fact checkers focused on American content are ideologically aligned with Facebook.

Attempts to set up alternative social media have run into yet more fundamental obstacles, as demonstrated by Parler, whose mobile app was terminated by Google and Apple, while the company was kicked off Amazon’s servers.

To the degree that a totalitarian regime requires a police state, there’s no law in America targeting dissenters explicitly. But there are troubling signs of selective, politically motivated enforcement. Signs go back to the IRS’s targeting of Tea Party groups or the difference in treatment received by former Trump adviser Lt. Gen Michael Flynn and former FBI deputy Director Andrew McCabe—both allegedly lying to investigators but only one getting prosecuted. The situation may get still worse as the restrictions tied to the CCP virus see broad swaths of ordinary human behavior being considered “illegal,” opening the door to nearly universal political targeting.

“I think the means by which a police state is being set up is the demonization of Trump supporters and the likely use of medical passports to institute the effective equivalent of social credit scores,” Rectenwald said.

While loyalty to the government and to a specific political party plays a major role, it’s the allegiance to the ideological root of totalitarianism that gives it its foot soldiers, literature on the subject indicates.

Totalitarian Ideology

The element “that holds totalitarianism together as a composite of intellectual elements” is the ambition of fundamentally reimagining society—“the intention to create a ‘New Man,’” explained author Richard Shorten in “Modernism and Totalitarianism: Rethinking the Intellectual Sources of Nazism and Stalinism, 1945 to the Present.”

Various ideologies have framed the ambition differently, based on what they posited as the key to the transformation.

Karl Marx, co-author of the Communist Manifesto, viewed the control of the economy as primary, describing socialism as “socialized man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature,” in his Das Kapital.

Adolf Hitler, leader of the National Socialist Workers Party in Nazi Germany, viewed race as primary. People would become “socialized”—that is transformed and perfected—by removing Jews and other supposedly “lesser” races from society, he claimed.

The most dominant among the current ideologies stem from the so-called “critical theories,” where the perfected society is defined by “equity,” meaning elimination of differences in outcomes for people in demographic categories deemed historically marginalized. The goal is to be achieved by eliminating the ever-present “white supremacy,” however the ideologues currently define it.

While such ideologies commonly prescribe collectivism, calling for national or even international unification behind their agenda, they are elitist and dictatorial in practice as they find mankind never “woke” enough to follow their agenda voluntarily.

In Marx’s prophecies, the revolution was supposed to occur spontaneously. Yet it never did, leading Vladimir Lenin, the first head of the Soviet Union, to conclude that the revolution will need leadership after all.

“The idea is that you have some enlightened party … who understand the problem of the proletariat better than the proletariat does and is going to shepherd them through the revolution that they need to have for the greater good,” explained James Lindsay, author of “Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody.”

Elements of this intellectual foundation can be found in ideologies of many current political forces, from neo-nazis and anarcho-communists, through to progressives and to some extent even neoliberals and neoconservatives, Lindsay acknowledged.

“This is why you see so many people today saying that the only possible answers are a full return to classical liberalism or a complete rejection of liberalism entirely as fatally disposed to create progressivism, neoliberalism, etc.,” he said.

That’s not to say these ideologies are openly advocating totalitarianism but rather that they inevitably lead to it.

The roadmap could be summarized as follows:

  1. There’s something fundamentally and intolerably wrong with current reality
  2. There’s a plan to fix it requiring a whole society buy-in
  3. People opposing the plan need to be educated about the plan so they accept it
  4. People who resist the persuasion need to be reeducated, even against their will
  5. People who won’t accept the plan no matter what need to be removed from society.

“I think that’s the general thrust,” Lindsay said. “We can make the world the way we want it to be if we all just get on the same page and same project. It’s a disaster, frankly.”

Points four and five now appear to be in progress.

Former Facebook executive Alex Stamos recently labeled the widespread questioning of the 2020 election results as “violent extremism,” which social media companies should eradicate the same way they countered online recruitment content from the ISIS terrorist group.

The “core issue,” he said, is that “we have given a lot of leeway, both in traditional media and on social media, to people to have a very broad range of political views” and this has led to the emergence of “more and more radical” alternative media like OAN and Newsmax.

Stamos then mused about how to reform Americans who’ve tuned in to the dissenters.

“How do you bring those people back into the mainstream of fact-based reporting and try to get us all back into the same consensus reality?” he asked in a CNN interview.

“And can you? Is that possible?” CNN host Brian Stelter added.

The logic goes as follows: Trump claimed the election was stolen through fraud and other illegalities. That has not been proven in court and is thus false. People who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 and managed to break inside and disrupt the electoral vote counting did so because they believed the election was stolen. Therefore, anybody who questions the legitimacy of the election results is an extremist and potentially a terrorist.

With tens of thousands of troops assembled to guard the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden, Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) recently told CNNthat all guard members who voted for Trump belong to a “suspect group” that “might want to do something,” alluding to past leaders of other countries who were “killed by their own people.”

Former FBI Director James Comey recently said the Republican party needs to be “burned down or changed.”

“They want a one party state,” commented conservative filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza in a recent podcast. “That is not to say they don’t want an opposition. They want a token opposition. They want Republicans where they get to say what kind of Republican is ok.”

Just as Marx blamed the ills of the world on capitalists and Hitler on Jews, the current regime tends to blame various permutations of “white supremacy.”

“Expel the Republican members of Congress who incited the white supremacist attempted coup,” said Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) in a recent tweet, garnering some 300,000 likes.

She was referring to the Republican lawmakers who raised objections on Jan. 6 to election results in Arizona and Pennsylvania. Their objections were voted down.

“Can U.S. Spy Agencies Stop White Terror?” Daily Beast’s Jeff Stein asked in a recent headline, concluding that a call for “secret police” to sniff out “extremist” Americans “may well get renewed attention.”

Under the regime, allegations of election fraud—de facto questioning the legitimacy of the leader—have become incitement of terrorism. YouTube (owned by Google), Facebook, and Twitter have either banned content that claims the election was rigged or are furnishing it with warning labels. Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey was recently recorded as saying that banning the president’s account was just the beginning.

The approach closely mirrors that of the Chinese communist regime, which commonly targets dissidents for “subverting” the state or “spreading rumors.”

What’s the Alternative?

If calls for radically reorganizing the world are inherently totalitarian, how is the world to avoid them? The question appears to be its own answer. If totalitarianism inherently requires allegiance to its ideology, it can’t exist in a society with a lack of such allegiance.

The United States was founded on the idea that individual rights are God-given and unalienable. The idea, rooted in traditional beliefs that human morality is of divine origin, stands a bulwark against any attempt to assail people’s rights even for their own good.

“If you’re not a believer in actual God, you can posit a God’s ideal on the matter … We have to posit some arbiter who’s above and beyond our own prejudices and biases in order to ensure these kinds of rights. … Because otherwise you have this infinitely malleable situation in which people with power and coercive potential can eliminate and rationalize the elimination of rights willy-nilly,” Rectenwald said.

Source: The Epoch Times

Tucker: Democrats using military to send ‘power’ message to America | YouTube

Editor’s Note: The National Guard troops loyal to Biden are still standing by in DC to protect the insurgent Democrats and rogue Republican lawmakers who allowed a fraudulent election to be certified in favor of the Biden Administration who has now assumed power.

U.S. federal courts all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court stood on the sidelines and refused to examine the mountains of evidence or hear a single case based on their merit. Without a political or legal remedy available, the last recourse of a free people is to assemble peacefully in DC and make their voices heard.

But instead of listening to their pleas for justice, the elitists who run DC chose to frame the protest as an “insurrection” and the protesters as “domestic terrorists” instead of admitting their own “treason” against the USA. The mainstream media covered for the elitists with a similar narrative.

The second impeachment of Donald J. Trump proceeds rapidly on grounds so vague and evidence so insufficient to warrant a trial in the U.S. Senate. There is no constitutional authority for impeaching a President who has already left office. The impeachment continues unabated to seal the coup d’tat and delegitimize the true results of the 2020 election (which the elitists, and one-half of the American people, know fully well which candidate actually won). 

As clearly stated in the U.S. Constitution Presidents cannot be impeached after they leave office. So perhaps by impeaching Trump after the fact, the elitists are actually admitting that Trump was and is the duly elected President and must be removed by proceeding with a mock impeachment trial. This would be the irony of ironies!

Source: YouTube

No, Donald Trump Did Not Incite An Insurrection | The Federalist

By David Marcus

The Democrats and their media allies are trying to convince the American people that President Donald Trump is guilty of inciting an insurrection last week. In both legal terms and in terms of the plain meaning of the English language, their claim is absurd on its face. There are two fundamental reasons for this: Trump did not incite the riots at the Capitol, and the riots were not an insurrection.

The Standard for Incitement

Legally speaking, incitement has an incredibly high bar that none of Trump’s actions since the election come close to meeting. These standards were set by the Supreme Court in its landmark Brandenburg v. Ohio case. Among other things, the decision held that in order to constitute incitement to violence, speech must include intent and specific, not abstract, instructions to act. It also required that the speech in question would likely produce “imminent lawless action,” which went a step further than the previous legal tests for incitement. According to the ruling:

[T]he constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.

So as a legal matter, this seems pretty clear. But what about more generally? In Salon, Amanda Marcotte attempts to make a case that Trump incited an insurrection. She starts with a big claim: “There is no doubt Donald Trump incited the insurrection on January 6. It happened largely in public and is recorded for posterity. Let’s review the record.” But only a paragraph later she writes, “[T]he people who stormed the U.S. Capitol armed with guns, pipe bombs and flex cuffs to take members of Congress and Vice President Mike Pence hostage understood Trump’s wink-and-nudge style loud and clear.”

One cannot incite with a wink and a nudge — not unless those gestures have already been specified to mean a call to violence. In this case, nothing Trump said at his speech before the violence broke out was a specific call for violence, much less insurrection. Part of how we know this is that the vast, vast majority of those who attended his speech (where he called literally for a peaceful protest at the Capitol) did not engage in any violence whatsoever.

What Trump asked his backers to do was to make their voices heard in support of the members of Congress who were working to ensure that the election was a fair one. What happened next was a chaotic mess caused by a small number of violent agitators, a complete and total breakdown of security at the Capitol, and a poor response once things began to get out of hand. Some of that poor response was owing to the fact that the events were surprising. If it was so bloody obvious that Trump was telling people to storm the Capitol, why were we all so shocked and caught off guard when some people did?

This Was No Insurrection

So much for incitement. As to insurrection, at no point was the overthrow of the government of the United States even a remotely possible outcome, not even close. Those cosplaying idiots taking selfies in Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office and parading around with podiums had no intentions of forming a new government. This was an expression of anger, not a realistic, organized coup attempt. Anyone among the rioters who believed their actions would result in the overthrow of the government, if there were any, were delusional to the point of insanity.

So if it wasn’t incitement and it wasn’t insurrection, why do the Democrats, the corporate media, and the big tech tyrants want you to believe it was? That is quite simple, actually. The purpose is to create an atmosphere of crisis and emergency that gives cover to extreme and illiberal actions to punish and silence those with whom they disagree politically.

And that has worked. Trump is banned from Twitter, as are thousands of his supporters, and big tech has colluded to destroy its competitor, Parler. Democrats are moving forward with an absurd and pointless impeachment, Simon & Schuster has canceled Sen. Josh Hawley’s book that criticizes big tech, and people who merely attended the rally and never stormed the Capitol are being fired and abused.

None of the above actions are just. None of them can be justified. This is not some existential threat to the Republic, and it never was. This is now all about power, about those on the left milking a tragedy for all it’s worth in an attempt to destroy their political rivals. But Americans are a clear-eyed people with a healthy dose of skepticism about those in power. They see what’s going on here. They will not allow the bad actions of a tiny few to fundamentally change forever the country and its freedoms they love.

Source: The Federalist

Tucker: Our only option is to fix what’s causing this | YouTube

Editor’s Note: Here’s another level of censorship by Google/YouTube whereby they decide what’s appropriate for viewers to watch or not, then label it as such (especially political content they choose not to agree with). Welcome to 1984 today!.

Source: YouTube

“This Country’s Fabric Is Being Torn Apart” | Exclusive Interview With L. Lin Wood | Crossroads

Attorney L. Lin Wood sits down for an exclusive interview with Joshua Philipp on the 2020 US presidential elections, the possibility of martial law, the Georgia Senate runoff, China’s infiltration of America, and why he fights for the truth.

Source: YouTube

This may be the most important speech I’ve ever made by Donald Trump re: election integrity | YouTube

Trump won by a landslide in all six battleground states – that’s why they had to spike the numbers in the middle of the night for Biden in all six states. This election fraud was a coordinated conspiracy of totally corrupt local and state election officials, Governors and Secretaries of State from both parties, Dominion paid by Chinese Communist Party to alter the results and numerous domestic enemies of the USA.

Source: YouTube

Rep. Mo Brooks Plans to Challenge Electoral College Votes in Congress | The Epoch Times

Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) confirmed that he’s planning to challenge the Electoral College’s votes when Congress certifies the presidential election on Jan. 6, 2021, during the Joint Session of Congress.

“In my judgment, if only lawful votes by eligible American citizens were cast, Donald Trump won the Electoral College by a significant margin, and Congress’s certification should reflect that,” Brooks told Politico in a report on Dec. 2. “This election was stolen by the socialists engaging in extraordinary voter fraud and election theft measures.”

At least one member of the House and one from the Senate has to challenge the counting of Electoral College votes to initiate a challenge.

Brooks argued in the report that the Nov. 3 election was compromised and “badly flawed,” and he termed mail-in voting as “unconstitutional.”

The lawmaker said it’s unlikely the Supreme Court or other courts will be able to overturn the election results, saying they don’t possess the constitutional authority.

“A lot of time is being wasted in court,” he said. “The Supreme Court does not have the lawful authority to determine whether to accept or reject a state’s Electoral College submissions. Under the United States Constitution and U.S. law, that is the job and duty of elected officials. … And so it’s the United States Congress that is the final judge and jury of whether to accept or reject Electoral College submissions by states, and to elect who the president and vice president of the United States might be.”

Earlier in November, Brooks told The Epoch Times that Congress has the right to reject a state’s Electoral College votes during the Joint Session.

“Congress has the absolute right to reject the submitted Electoral College votes of any state which we believe has such a shoddy election system that you can’t trust the election results that those states are submitting to us, that they’re suspect,” Brooks said on Nov. 18. “And I’m not going to put my name in support of any state that employs an election system that I don’t have confidence in.”

In the interview, he noted that at 1 p.m. Eastern time on Jan. 6, when the Joint Session meets, the president of the Senate—who is Vice President Mike Pence—“will report to Congress what they contend are their Electoral College results in their state.”

“If a House member and a senator objects to the submission of Electoral College votes by any state, that immediately triggers a House floor vote and a Senate floor vote on whether to accept or reject those Electoral College votes submitted by that particular state,” Brooks said before citing provisions in the U.S. Constitution for his reasoning. “The amount of debate on the House and Senate floor is limited to two hours under federal law.”

Meanwhile, President Trump’s lawyers have pushed state legislatures in Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Michigan to reassert their constitutionally given role to call up electors. They cited fraud allegations and significant irregularities presented by witnesses in recent days.

Secretaries of state in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin have said they’ve seen no evidence of fraud that would overturn the results of the election. The Electoral College is scheduled to meet on Dec. 14.

Source: The Epoch Times

The 4-Year-Long Campaign Against Trump: Efforts to undermine the president haven’t stopped since 2016 | The Epoch Times

It is the culmination of a four-year-long campaign against him, which started during his first run for president in 2016 when the FBI launched a politically motivated investigation of his campaign. During his subsequent four years in office, there have been consistent efforts to remove him from office, first through the Russia-collusion narrative and then through impeachment.

The Epoch Times here provides an overview of some of the main efforts made against the sitting president of the United States.

This is an issue that transcends party lines, as it is not only an assault on Trump, but an assault on the office of the presidency, and with it, an assault on the foundation of America.

Politically Motivated Investigation

The FBI under the Obama administration in 2016 launched a politically motivated investigation of the Trump campaign. Based on publicly available information, we know the investigation was initiated based on the thinnest of evidence: remarks made by a junior Trump campaign adviser to the Australian ambassador in London. In reality, the investigation primarily relied on the discredited “Steele dossier,” produced by former MI6 agent Christopher Steele on behalf of the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC).

The Trump–Russia Shadow

While the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation itself would not find any evidence of Trump–Russia collusion, the ongoing investigations, including selective leaks to the media, would create the public narrative that Trump had colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election. This cast a shadow over the first few years of his presidency and constrained his actions both domestically and internationally. Some members of Congress had gone so far as to call for Trump’s impeachment over the false allegations.

FBI Under Comey and McCabe

The FBI under Director James Comey and Deputy Director Andrew McCabe pro-actively worked against Trump. McCabe was directly involved in the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, working with FBI agent Peter Strzok and FBI attorney Lisa Page. After Comey was fired by Trump in May 2017, McCabe actively pushed the agency to further investigate Trump. McCabe’s FBI went as far as suggesting Department of Justice official Bruce Ohr reach back out to Steele, despite that many of the claims in his dossier had been disproven by that time and the FBI had cut ties with him over his leaks to the media.

Media

Perhaps one of the most powerful forces working against Trump during his presidency has been the news media. Over the past five years, they have relentlessly published skewed and inaccurate information about Trump while minimizing or ignoring his accomplishments, seeking to portray him publicly as an illegitimate president. This type of reporting has created a climate of anger, hate, and instability in America. It has resulted in threats made to the president’s life and acts of violence against his supporters.

Impeachment

The House of Representatives on Dec. 18, 2019, impeached Trump along partisan lines. Though the Senate would later dismiss the charge, it left a mark on his presidency and dragged the country through months of public attacks in the media. At the center of the impeachment was a phone call Trump made on July 25, 2019, to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, during which Trump expressed his hope that allegations of potential corruption involving former Vice President Joe Biden would be investigated. Given even the publicly available information at the time, there were legitimate concerns that American political influence and taxpayers’ funds were misused in Ukraine. At the time, it was publicly known that Biden’s son Hunter had received tens of thousands of dollars a month from a Ukrainian energy giant, while then-Vice President Biden—in his own words—had pressured the Ukrainian president to fire a prosecutor as a prerequisite for receiving $1 billion in foreign aid. That same prosecutor had been investigating the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, as well its board, which included Hunter Biden.

CCP Virus

Trump’s opponents have accused the president of mishandling the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, commonly referred to as the novel coronavirus, by acting too late. This, however, is contrary to the events of early 2020. The Trump administration on Feb. 2, 2020, banned all foreign travel from China, the source of the CCP virus. This decision was made by the president against the advice of some of his top advisers and exceeded actions taken by most other nations at the time. Meanwhile, his opponents in politics and media described it as xenophobic and an overreaction. In hindsight, the decision proved immensely valuable in helping to slow the spread of the virus. As the virus spread in the United States, the Trump administration increased testing capacity, coordinated with state governments to provide them with the federal assistance they needed, used the defense production act to compel companies to produce critical health equipment such as ventilators, and provided billions in federal funding and eased federal regulations for major drug companies to push for the development of a vaccine.

Foreign Interference

It would be accurate to say that Trump is communist China’s biggest adversary. The president broke a decades-long U.S. policy toward China that was based on the belief that, through engagement and economic development, the People’s Republic would evolve from a totalitarian regime toward a more democratic country. In reality, this strategy of appeasement merely resulted in trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of U.S. jobs going to China. And instead of becoming more democratic, the Chinese regime used this wealth to advance its dictatorship, creating the most technologically advanced tyranny the world has ever witnessed. The CCP has consistently worked against Trump during his presidency, both publicly and behind the scenes. Beijing has used its domestic and overseas propaganda channels—often by relying on the United States’ own media—to vilify Trump, going as far as to suggest that the outbreak of the CCP virus in Wuhan was because of the American military.

Black Lives Matter

Black Lives Matter (BLM) has been behind the riots that have plagued American cities for much of this year. The group has hijacked the concerns people have over racism and used them to justify its advance of a Marxist agenda. In a 2015 video, BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors described herself and her fellow founders as “trained Marxists.” Just like in Russia, China, Cuba, and Venezuela, trained Marxists have hijacked righteous causes to advance the communist agenda. Many of those who lived through the Cultural Revolution in China in the 1960s have commented that the riots in the United States over the summer, which included the toppling of historical statues, were eerily similar. The result is a climate of chaos and insecurity that affects the entire country.

Antifa

Dressed in full black gear including armor, helmets, and masks, and trained in agitation and basic combat, Antifa extremists have been involved in numerous acts of violence during Trump’s presidency. In many cases, these acts of violence, which include the use of weapons, rocks, and Molotov cocktails, were directed at law enforcement and government property. But Antifa members have also directly targeted unarmed common citizens for simply supporting Trump. We saw this happen twice in Washington, where those who had gathered to support Trump were later attacked when alone in the city at night. Antifa’s use of a militia-style force to intimidate and physically attack citizens for their political beliefs creates a powerful climate of fear and stands against the most basic American values.

The Permanent Government

Though Trump as president is the leader of the executive branch, when he came to office he inherited a federal government staffed with hundreds of thousands of employees. It’s no secret that many career officials in the U.S. government have actively sought to undermine or even openly work against Trump. Many in government have been led by false information published by media organizations to believe that they are doing the right thing, and that by working against Trump, they are putting the interests of the country first. In fact, they have done the country a disservice by blocking a rightfully elected president from executing the will of the people.

Mueller Special Counsel Investigation

Following the firing of FBI Director Comey, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein assigned former FBI Director Robert Mueller to continue the FBI’s investigation of alleged Trump–Russia collusion. Mueller would conclude in a final report that there was no evidence of such collusion. But this only came after a nearly two-year-long investigation, giving the media and Trump’s political opponents leeway to portray Trump as an illegitimate president because of his supposed affiliation with Russia.

Illegal Leaks

Throughout the past four years, the Trump administration has been plagued by selective leaks aimed at damaging Trump’s presidency. Some of these leaks have been criminal in nature, such as the leak of the transcripts of Trump’s conversations with foreign leaders—a felony offense. Treasury official Natalie Edwards was found guilty of illegally leaking suspicious activity reports (SARs) on financial transactions by former Trump campaign associate Paul Manafort, among others.

2020 Election Fraud

Following the Nov. 3 elections, dozens of credible allegations of voter fraud or other illegal acts connected to the counting of ballots have emerged. Dozens of poll workers across multiple states have given testimony in sworn statements—under penalty of perjury—detailing irregularities in how ballots were counted, as well as how the workers were instructed to make otherwise illegal changes to ballots, how they were unable to properly observe ballot counting, and how they witnessed new ballots mysteriously appear out of nowhere. The Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee launched a number of lawsuits to challenge the process. They’ve argued that in Pennsylvania alone, 600,000 ballots should be invalidated, as Republican election observers weren’t allowed to witness the ballot processing.

Manufactured Narratives

The use of manufactured narratives to attack Trump has been pervasive since he assumed the presidency. Perhaps the most notable is the claim that he defended neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia, when in fact he said that that there were “very fine people on both sides,” referring to people who “were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name.” Trump specifically added, “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally—but you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists.” Yet despite this being on public record, Trump would continue to be asked throughout his presidency, especially during the election season, whether he was ready to “denounce white supremacy,” despite having done so on many occasions, even before becoming president.

Source: The Epoch Times