Mark Steyn on three things we’ve lost during the past year

The New Neo Posted on by

Here are some excerpts from a speech Mark Steyn made in late April at a Hillsdale College seminar. The topic is some things Americans have lost:

One is equality before the law, something absolutely essential to a free society. In its place, we now have politicized law…

Second, border control. Functioning societies, at least since the Peace of Westphalia three centuries ago, have borders. America has no southern border and no plans to get one…

And third, dare I bring up the fact that it is a real question whether we can go back to agreeing to have open and honest elections? And if we don’t have open and honest elections, control of our borders, and equality before the law, then we don’t have the conditions for politics or free government.

I guess Steyn didn’t list “an objective press” because we haven’t had one in ages, if ever. If an objective press isn’t possible, how about a press that’s at least honest about its partisanship and doesn’t pretend to be objective when it’s not?

I agree with this summary from Steyn:

President Macron of France is not my favorite chap—he’s a sinister globalist for one thing. But he made an admirable stand when he announced that not one French statue would be taken down and not a single French street name would be changed, because they are all part of French history. And “Bingo!” as Peter Navarro likes to say, the statue toppling and street-name changing in France went away. Why can’t American conservatives show that kind of strength? The Senate Minority Leader says he personally would not be bothered if the historical names of U.S. military bases are changed. The editor of National Review says that he wouldn’t be bothered about taking down Confederate statues. But of course it doesn’t stop there—now they’re going for all the statues. Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, McKinley, and on and on. The point conservatives need to grasp is, unless you’re prepared to surrender everything, don’t surrender anything.

I’ll end by pointing out that the Left wins because it seizes language. Take the policy of letting people vote who are not U.S. citizens and shouldn’t be voting. The Left calls this policy “counting every vote.” Therefore someone who wants to make sure voters are citizens is opposed to “counting every vote.” If we don’t take back the language, we will lose the truth…

Don’t surrender the language. Reclaim the language. It’s the first step to recovering our civilization.

The first of many on a very long road.

Former ethics chief under Obama is disgusted with Biden

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Walter Shaub was the head of the Office of Government Ethics under Obama (and under Bush, and very briefly under Trump till Shaub resigned the post). In his official capacity he was especially tasked with monitoring possible conflict of interests (or is it conflicts of interest?).

Here are some tweets Shaub has put up recently:

People on the right sometimes ask me why I try to understand the workings of the minds of people on the left. I think it’s obviously important: if you’re interested in changing minds politically you have to at least attempt to think about why people believe what they do. But sometimes I admit I’m flummoxed – thus, so many “fool or knave?” posts on this blog, and so many “maybe both” answers.

So with Shaub we have this: “A lot of us worked hard to tee him up to restore ethics to government and believed the promises.” I assume that the promises referred to there are the ones made by Joe Biden during his 2020 campaign. But why on earth would any intelligent person – except for the most naive and/or the most partisan – have believed the promises of a long-term corrupt political hack such as Biden? A person could hope, I suppose. But believe? The mind boggles.

So Shaub was either unintelligent, or non-observant, or naive, or hopelessly partisan, or all of the above or some combination of the above. He doesn’t seem as partisan as some now, though, since he’s criticizing Biden quite strongly here. But his partisanship shows when he offers what is probably one of the worst insults he can muster about those making excuses for Biden: “They sound just like MAGAS.”

Actually, Shaub, they sound just like hypocritical political hacks who refuse to apply the same rules to both sides. As an ethicist, surely you must know that?

Apparently not. Shaub actually does seem rather shocked at all of this, which is somewhat shocking in itself for a long-time participant in the federal government.

Glenn Greenwald: on January 6th and the FBI

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Glenn Greenwald has written some must-read pieces about the January 6th Capitol incursion, and here’a another. This one focuses on the role of the FBI – how much the agency knew, and how involved it was in the planning and even the execution of the so-called “insurrection.”

Greenwald has a lot to say because he was part of the campaign against FBI entrapment of would-be Islamic terrorists during the post-9/11 years. A few days ago, before I read Greenwald’s piece, I mentioned something similar in my post on the FBI’s role in January 6th:

Entrapment is a constant possibility in situations in which agencies such as the FBI infiltrate terrorist or other suspicious groups, supposedly in order to monitor them. I noticed many years ago that some of the Islamic terrorist attacks that were said to have been foiled in this country while still in the planning stages involved either entrapment by government agents or reason to suspect entrapment. And as recently as this past October, the story of the arrest of six men planning to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer seemed to feature FBI entrapment of the accused perps, as well.

But Greenwald offers a lot more detail on the subject, and he points out the double standards and hypocrisy of the media and Democrats on the subject. They were terribly upset with the FBI when the FBI was going against Muslims who might be entertaining jihad, but now the FBI is their bosom buddy because it’s focusing its dubious attention on the right.

Here’s Greenwald:

What would be shocking and strange is not if the FBI had embedded informants and other infiltrators in the groups planning the January 6 Capitol riot. What would be shocking and strange — bizarre and inexplicable — is if the FBI did not have those groups under tight control. And yet the suggestion that FBI informants may have played some role in the planning of the January 6 riot was instantly depicted as something akin to, say, 9/11 truth theories or questions about the CIA’s role in JFK’s assassination or, until a few weeks ago, the COVID lab-leak theory: as something that, from the perspective of Respectable Serious Circles, only a barely-sane, tin-foil-hat-wearing lunatic would even entertain.

This reaction is particularly confounding given how often the FBI did exactly this during the first War on Terror, and how commonplace discussions of this tactic were in mainstream liberal circles. Over the last decade, I reported on countless cases for The Guardian and The Intercept where the FBI targeted some young American Muslims they viewed as easily manipulated — due to financial distress, emotional problems, or both — and then deployed informants and undercover agents to dupe them into agreeing to join terrorist plots that had been created, designed and funded by the FBI itself, only to then congratulate themselves for breaking up the plot which they themselves initiated. As I asked in one headline about a particularly egregious entrapment case: “Why Does the FBI Have to Manufacture its Own Plots if Terrorism and ISIS Are Such Grave Threats?”

In 2011, Mother Jones published an outstanding, lengthy investigation by reporter Trevor Aaronson, entitled “The Informations,” which asked: “The FBI has built a massive network of spies to prevent another domestic attack. But are they busting terrorist plots—or leading them?” Aaronson covered numerous similar cases for The Intercept where the FBI designed, directed and even funded the terror plots and other criminal rings they then boasted of disrupting. A widely praised TEDTalk by Aaronson, which, in the words of organizers, “reveals a disturbing FBI practice that breeds terrorist plots by exploiting Muslim-Americans with mental health problems,” featured this central claim: “There’s an organization responsible for more terrorism plots in the United States than al-Qaeda, al-Shabaab and ISIS combined: The FBI.”

Please read the whole thing – it’s worth it.

One of the things that makes Greenwald’s pieces so good is that, whether you agree with him or not on each issue, he’s remarkably consistent in applying the same principles to each side. I value that, and it’s a practice I try to follow, as well. Greenwald also is a very clear writer, and he has a lot of information about the press in particular, from his many years as a regular journalist. He resigned from The Intercept, the outlet he founded, because the new chiefs wanted him to toe the party line much more and he wouldn’t do it.

Hunter and his dad

The New Neo Posted on by

The NY Post has written about Hunter Biden’s artwork, which is apparently selling for big bucks – or at least, is expected to fetch big bucks.

Examples of his work at the link.

This is the quote from Hunter that interested me and is the reason I’m writing this post:

Asked whether the president is a fan of his art, Hunter replied, “My dad loves everything that I do, and so I’ll leave it at that.’’

Everything? The mind reels.

Recall that Biden also said in the fall of 2020 that Hunter was “the smartest guy I know.”

Portland’s entire Rapid Response Team quits

The New Neo Posted on by

Well, why not? Why ever not?

Portland’s entire Rapid Response Team, cops who volunteer for riot control duty, voted unanimously to resign on Wednesday, effectively leaving the city in the hands of antifa. The riot cops’ decision follows the criminal indictment of one of their own for assault, stemming from a riot in August 2020, a police source told The Post Millennial.

On the night of August 18, 2020, antifa skirts threw a Molotov cocktail firebomb into the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Department Headquarters as the Rapid Response Team struggled to contain the riot. Rapid Response Officer Budworth hit a rioter from behind with a baton, as seen in a video with no context whatsoever.

Portland DA Mike Schmidt stated that “no legal justification existed for Officer Budworth’s deployment of force.” The person Budworth hit – a woman – is described in that link as an “activist photographer” – in other words, someone allied with the rioters who was taking photos and/or videos of the proceedings.

More here:

It marks the first time a Portland police officer has faced prosecution stemming from striking or firing at someone during a protest and only the second time in county history a police officer has been indicted for such physical use of force on duty.

The indictment charges Corey A. Budworth, who joined the Police Bureau six years ago, with fourth-degree assault, a misdemeanor.

It accuses him of “unlawfully, knowingly and recklessly causing physical injury” to Teri Jacobs on Aug. 18. Jacobs alleges Budworth “bashed her in the face” with his baton after he had already knocked her to the ground, according to court records…

The police union, though, characterized the prosecution as politically driven and said Budworth’s baton strike to a woman’s head was “accidental,” not criminal.

Why this officer? Why now? Apparently our very own DOJ got involved:

U.S. Department of Justice lawyers and a city-hired compliance officer had highlighted the police strike in reports critical of the bureau’s review of officers’ use of force during nightly demonstrations.

Now that the riot team is gone – Portland and Mike Schmidt and the DOJ won’t have them to kick around anymore – what will happen during the next riot? No one knows:

“Now that the riot team is no more, we have no clue what’s going to happen. We don’t have enough patrol officers to be pulled from the road to handle huge crowds,” a Portland police officer told The Post Millennial. “We are only backups with no gear like the riot team has.”

Schmidt may be hard on the cops, but he went easy on the rioters:

In October 2020, Schmidt dropped over 540 riot-related cases in the “interest of justice.” He essentially implemented catch-and-release for the rioting, pink-haired antifa lady-boys. The Biden apparatchiks dropped almost 50% of all federal charges, as well. And what do you know, appeasing the beast has led to more violence, more assaults on police, and massive property damage.

As for DA Mike Schmidt, it’s exactly as you might have suspected:

Schmidt represents a progressive view towards prosecutions and criminal justice reform, preferring alternatives to prison, against trial as an adult for juveniles, for police accountability, against mandatory sentencing, and against the death penalty. Since a DA has the power to decide who to prosecute, his stance can influence local and statewide cases to counter what has been described the “irrationality of our system” of biased prosecution using data-driven outcomes.

Days after the election results, on June 16, 2020, Rod Underhill resigned his position immediately, to the surprise of Schmidt…

The Portland Mercury noted that Underhill’s resignation was less than a week after the resignation of Portland Police Chief Jami Resch.

With Underhill’s encouragement, Governor Kate Brown appointed Schmidt to fill the seat on July 7, 2020. The following day, the president of Multnomah County Prosecuting Attorneys Association resigned in protest.

Shortly after Schmidt took office last August, this occurred [emphasis mine]:

…Daryl Turner, president of the Portland Police Association wrote an open letter to Mayor/police commissioner Ted Wheeler and Schmidt, calling their “operational direction” insane, describing examples of violence, and telling Wheeler to “Step up and do your job”. Directing comments at Schmidt, he called police accountability “a thinly veiled threat to indict police officers“, and again telling him to “Step up and do your job”.

Does Turner get “I told you so” bragging rights?

[NOTE: I thought perhaps Schmidt was Soros-backed, but so far I can’t find any evidence of that, at least not to any great extent.]

The Chinese defector and the COVID origins story

The New Neo Posted on by

Well, this story makes sense. And it’s just about the only explanation for the sudden turn-around for the Democrats re the idea that COVID was bioengineered in China.

But is the story completely true?

Spy Talk, a website that reports on U.S. intelligence, defense, and foreign policy, alleges that the information provided by [alleged Chinese defector] Dong was the impetus behind the Biden administration making a 180-degree turn on the lab-leak theory. The site reported that Dong is a “longtime official in China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS), also known as the Guoanbu.” According to his public profiles, “he was responsible for the Ministry’s counterintelligence efforts in China, i.e., spy-catching, since being promoted to vice minister in April 2018.”

If that is true, Dong would be the highest-level defector in the history of the People’s Republic of China.

And what is Dong alleged to have been saying? Not just that COVID escaped from a Wuhan lab, but that it was purposely bioengineered as biowarfare and perhaps even purposely released to the world. That is such a classic science fiction spy/adventure novel plot that it seems at first glance that it must be fiction. But so much of the last two years or so resembles novels that one cannot rule out this scenario as well:

To explain the breadth of the data Dong reportedly turned over to the feds, a single terabyte is approximately the equivalent of 75 million pages — or nearly 19 million documents. The potential scope of such a cache of documents is breathtaking to consider. According to RedState, the data includes:

Early pathogenic studies of the virus we now know as SARS-CoV-2
Models of predicted COVID-19 spread and damage to the U.S. and the world
Financial records detailing which exact organizations and governments funded the research on SARS-CoV-2 and other biological warfare research
Names of U.S. citizens who provide intel to China
Names of Chinese spies working in the U.S. or attending U.S. universities
Financial records showing U.S. businessmen and public officials who’ve received money from the Chinese government
Details of meetings U.S. government officials had (perhaps unwittingly) with Chinese spies and members of Russia’s SVR
How the Chinese government gained access to a CIA communications system, leading to the death of dozens of Chinese people who were working with the CIA

It should come as no surprise to anyone that the MSM isn’t really jumping to get in on this story:

Spy Talk might not have a high profile in American media, but The Daily Beast certainly does. One might think that other media outlets would find this story worth reporting, even as a speculative matter. If the US really does have a high-level defector of Dong’s rank, it could be a game changer in US-China relations, and not just about COVID-19 origins.

That might be especially true in our nation’s capitol, nearly a day after the Daily Beast co-published the Spy Talk story and a week after Jennifer broke it. Yet a search of the Washington Post for “China defector” over the last week turns up only one story .. about Venezuela…

Democracy’s not the only thing that dies in darkness, it seems. What about the Paper of Record? A similar search at the New York Times also turns up one story … about the “vicious cancer” of K-Pop in North Korea…

The case is similar with CNN.

Also:

It’s fair to point out that this story still remains without firm corroboration, and we still haven’t heard the full context of whatever this person has told investigators. It’s equally true that all three of these leading US news outlets have run stories on much less evidence on stories of much lesser import. Even the potential of having one of Xi Jinping’s trusted aides as a defector should at least prompt these outlets to alert their readers of the possibility, even while cautioning on pending validation.

That’s what I’ve tried to do.

Open thread 6/18/21

The New Neo Posted on by

Carla Fracci again, this time in the Rose Adagio from Sleeping Beauty. This is a variation that can easily turn into a series of show-offy circus tricks, and very often does. Fracci has another idea in mind:

Here’s the latest on the 2020 election in Fulton County, Georgia

The New Neo Posted on by

“Significant irregularities” reported:

Thousands of ballots are potentially impacted by these irregularities, suggesting they could be results-changing, as Joe Biden’s state-certified victory in the state was by fewer than 12,000 votes…

Lawyer Bob Cheeley, who’s leading the audit, told Just the News that the evidence he’s seen so far points to “election tabulation malpractice,” though experts and state election officials disagree on whether the evidence is proof of fraud or gross incompetence. They are, however, mostly united in the opinion that top election supervisors in Fulton County should be removed.

Please read the whole thing.

Whatever is found will not change the election results at this point. But we need to know, and to do everything we can to prevent a repeat of fraud and/or gross incompetence.

Biden says the January 6th rioters killed Sicknick

The New Neo Posted on by

Biden’s not one to abandon a useful lie:

Biden made the incorrect statement on Wednesday at a press conference in Geneva following his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

His response came after he was asked to respond to Putin’s comments about why he banned protests in Russia. That saw the Russian leader say he did not want a repeat of the January 6 riots in his country, or for a group like Black Lives Matter to form there.

‘I think that’s a ridiculous comparison,’ Biden said when asked for his reaction to Putin’s comments.

‘It’s one thing for literally, criminals, to break through a cordon, go into the Capitol, kill a police officer, and be held unaccountable, than it is for people objecting and marching on the capitol and saying you are not allowing me to speak freely, you are not allowing me to do A, B, C or D. And so they’re very different criteria.’

Truth? What’s that? Even though the press finally corrected its story about the death of Officer Sicknick, it did that only partially and I doubt most people got the message. So Biden is free to keep lying. Once a lie gets halfway round the world – which the “Officer Sicknick was murdered by MAGA insurrectionists” story did with lightning speed – it persists.

Of course, it’s not clear that Biden even knows he’s lying, because of his cognitive problems. But since he’s been a habitual liar his entire life, it almost doesn’t matter. He’s mendacious and incompetent, as well as unprincipled. Quite a combination.

The audacity of the left

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Barry Meislin” writes:

No, the Democrats will STOP AT NOTHING…alas we already know this, at least rationally. The problem is that it’s immensely difficult to truly digest it emotionally; come to terms with it; actually believe it.

Moreover, I’m convinced that the Democrats KNOW this and they understand that it gives them a huge advantage when facing basically decent, law-abiding people.—Whether it’s a Bolshevik-style, “Who will be the most ruthless?” Or a more general, “He who dares wins.”

Or Obamian “AUDACITY…of hope” to transform America…

The Soviets of my youth seemed quite obviously ruthless, but today’s US left is more subtle. Or at least it was more subtle for a while. Like Hemingway’s description of bankruptcy – that it happens slowly and then suddenly – the left’s takeover has been going on for many decades but in the past year its speed has accelerated enormously. Now it may have reached critical mass.

The whole thing has an air of unreality that many people have remarked on. The word “surreal” keeps popping up, as well as the idea that people have gone crazy.

Just to take one example, I’ve used the Emperor’s New Clothes analogy many times to describe what’s happening with the press coverup of Joe Biden’s cognitive inadequacies. It’s crazy-making to notice something so very obvious – that the man does not have all his marbles – and to see so many people pretend otherwise. There is an audacity in the pretense because the lie is so obvious.

Orwell’s Winston Smith couldn’t bring himself to say that two plus two equals five when he knew it did not. Even torture didn’t cause him to renounce truth – not for a long time, anyway. But his tormentor and inquisitor O’Brien patiently explained that sometimes one must say that two plus two equals five if the Party so decreed – and not only to say it, but to believe it was true.

It’s profoundly disturbing and disorienting to see so many people willing to say that two and two equals five, and to pat themselves on the back for doing so and to revile anyone who doesn’t agree. And unlike Winston they don’t even have to be tortured in order to do it.