More Americans have died from COVID-19 in the first three weeks of Joe Biden’s presidency than during the entire Vietnam War, a grim milestone for a leader who vowed to make ending the pandemic “the first priority, the second priority, and the third priority” of his administration.

The COVID-19 death count since Biden took office on Jan. 20 surpassed 60,000 over the weekend. That is more than the 58,220 American soldiers who died in the Vietnam War between 1964 and 1975.

But surprise, surprise. It’s not big news – unlike a similar milestone under Trump:

Numerous media outlets marked the occasion when COVID-19 deaths surpassed Vietnam War deaths under former president Donald Trump…

…[T]he Washington Free Beacon appears to be one of the only media outlets whose dedication to the truth compels us to diligently track COVID-19 deaths under Biden, the milestone has received far less coverage this time around.

To equate war deaths with deaths from a disease that is taking a worldwide toll in ways that are as yet poorly understood but that don’t follow a strict adherence to the policies or lack thereof laid down by the leaders of each country is to be logically inconsistent. So Trump – whose policies seemed quite reasonable to me – and Biden (whose policies on COVID so far don’t seem much different, except for some jawing about federal mask mandates on public transportation) shouldn’t be blamed for those deaths. Nor can they rescue us, except economically by lifting most of the restrictions, and physically by helping make the vaccine readily available.

So, why am I writing this post? To point out the absurdity of Biden’s suggestion that he had some master plan to combat COVID. Anyone who believed that was deep into wishful thinking and gullibility. And yet I would wager there were a lot of people who did believe him. They were the same people who believed the rhetoric that Trump had murdered everyone who died of COVID (or with COVID, as the case may be).

The post Was this Biden’s secret plan to combat COVID? appeared first on The New Neo.

In response to a question about the two Republican lawmakers [Cruz and Hawley] following remarks on January 8, Biden said, “I was being reminded by a friend of mine…when we’re told [about] Goebbels and the great lie, you keep repeating the lie, repeating the lie.”

Although Biden’s comparison was imperfectly stated, it was clear enough to follow. He was saying that the lawmakers’ efforts to challenge the Electoral College votes from disputed states was a Nazi-like effort.

What did Biden actually say? It took me a while to find it, and I finally located it through C-SPAN.

In the following quotes of Biden’s, which I’ve cut and pasted from there, please forgive the all-caps, which is the way C-SPAN printed the text of Biden’s remarks:

[Question from press] DO YOU THINK SOME OF THEM SHOULD RESIGN? SENATOR CRUZ OR SENATOR HAWLEY RESIGN?

[Biden’s answer]: I THINK THEY SHOULD BE BEAT THEN NEXT TIME THEY RUN. I THINK THE AMERICAN PUBLIC HAS A GAD [good?], CLEAR LOOK AT WHO THEY ARE. THEY’RE PART OF A BIG LIE. I WAS BEING REMINDED BY A FRIEND OF MINE, MAYBE YOU WERE WITH ME, I CAN’T RECALL, WHEN WE TOLD THAT, YOU KNOW, WITH THE GREAT LIE, KEEP REPEATING THE LAW, KEEP REPEATING THE LIE. THERE WAS A POINT WHEN DRESDEN WAS FIREBOMBED, 250 PEOPLE THAT WERE KILLED. OR WAS IT 2,500 PEOPLE THAT WERE KILLED. AND GOEBBELS SAID NO, 25,000 — OR 250,000 WERE KILLED. AND OUR PAPERS PRINTED THAT. OUR PAPERS PRINTED IT. THAT’S A BIG LIE. PEOPLE WILL NOTICE, ONE THING FOR ONE MAN, OR ONE WOMAN TO REPEAT THE LIE OVER AND OVER AGAIN. BY THE WAY, TRUMP SAID THAT BEFORE HE RAN. IF YOU SAY IT ENOUGH, I’M GOING TO CONVINCE YOU, I’LL SAY IT ENOUGH, THE PRESS IS BAD, THE PRESS IS BAD, THE PRESS IS BAD, THE PRESS IS BAD.

As usual, Biden gets his figures wrong, but we’re used to that. Dresden did not involve the killing of 250 or 2,500 people. Historians have settled on the likeliest true figure as being between 22,000 and 25,000. However, Goebbels claimed something upwards of 200,000. Biden’s figures are all over the place, but he never identifies anything like 25,000 as the actual figure and he claims a much lower figure as the correct one. We’ve already learned he has tremendous trouble keeping numbers straight.

Then Biden says something even more curious. After stating that, regarding Dresden, “our papers” printed Goebbels’ lie (Biden says that twice), Biden immediately follows that with the statement that Trump has been repeating a supposed big lie that “the press is bad.” But hasn’t Biden just indicated himself that “the press is bad” – they repeated Goebbels’ lies for years, didn’t they?

Not very logical. In fact, Biden’s point about Goebbels and the press would, if anything, support Trump’s contention about how bad the press is. But no one in the press demands anything resembling logic from Biden, and certainly not about their own malfeasance.

What’s more, Biden is committing another error of logic here. He appears to be implying (at least, as well as I can interpret his remarks) that the fact that Trump repeated the charge that the press is bad goes to show it’s a lie Trump was telling. But of course, even if Big Lies work by being repeated, that does not mean that repeating a point makes it a lie.

Biden continued:

BUT THE [uncertain word] THAT FOLLOWED HIM, CRUZ AND OTHERS, THEY ARE AS RESPONSIBLE AS HE IS. AND SO, IT’S NOT ABOUT WHETHER OR NOT THEY GET IMPEACHED. IT’S ABOUT WHETHER OR NOT THEY HELP — CAN CONTINUE TO HOLD POWER BECAUSE OF THE DISGUST THE AMERICAN PEOPLE HAVE FOR THEIR ACTIONS.

I’m under the impression that about half the American people have no disgust for the actions of Trump and Cruz and Hawley, and indeed that half probably have disgust for the actions (and words) of Biden. How does that translate into the idea that they shouldn’t “continue to hold power”? Isn’t that decided by elections, and/or later impeachment and conviction?

More from Biden:

THERE ARE DECENT PEOPLE OUT THERE WHO ACTUALLY BELIEVE THESE LIES. BECAUSE THEY’VE HEARD IT AGAIN AND AGAIN. I WAS WITH A FRIEND OF MINE, A MEDICAL DOCTOR, TELLING ME HIS NEIGHBOR SAID TO HIM, HE LIVES IN ANOTHER STATE, HIS NEIGHBOR IS A GOOD PERSON, SAID, BUT YOU KNOW, DOC, THIS IS TRUE. THERE’S A LOT OF — A LOT OF CHICANERY THAT WENT ON IN THIS ELECTION. I KNOW THERE WAS, THEY SAY IT IS, THEY SAY IT IS. THIS IS A HUMAN CONDITION. YOU SAY IT AND SAY IT AND SAY IT AND SAY IT. THE DEGREE TO WHICH IT BECOMES CORROSIVE IS IN DIRECT PROPORTION TO THE NUMBER OF PEOPLE WHO SAY IT.

Biden could just as easily be speaking of the Democratic Party and Joe Biden, of course. He is also perpetrating the idea – which I would say is a lie – that people believe there was “chicanery” in the election only because the likes of Trump and certain other Republicans say it over and over. The relaxation of the mail-in voting rules, the stoppage of the counting on election night, the throwing out of the observers, the hundreds of affadavits – none of that is considered by Joe Biden, who gives people zero credit for having their own observations and coming to their own conclusions. All Trump voters are merely zombie-like cult followers who have been brainwashed.

Joe Biden may be dim and inarticulate, but he’s far from stupid in the political sense. Everything he says there, confusing as it is, has a clear political aim, which is to discredit Republicans and their voters, and to support the narrative of a free and fair election. In particular, he’d like to make Cruz and Hawley – two of the strongest and smartest Republicans in office today – toxic and unable to win re-election. He knows the press is behind him on this message and will never challenge him, which makes his task a whole lot easier.

One thing Glick never discusses in her article – and it’s something I’ve almost never seen discussed whenever Goebbels and the “Big Lie” are mentioned – is the context in which Goebbels made his remarks. The supposed quote of Goebbels that has received widespread attention, and to which so very many people have referred (I’m going to assume it’s what Biden was referring to as well, although he doesn’t offer any actual Goebbels quote) is: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”

But did you ever wonder about why Goebbels would have said such a thing publicly? After all, wouldn’t it constitute an admission that it’s a technique the Nazis are using? Why blurt something like that out?

It turns out that no one seems to have found a primary source from Goebbels for that particular oft-quoted statement. However, Goebbels did speak of the Big Lie,, and the manner in which he did so is very telling. In fact, he was accusing the English of using the technique:

“The essential English leadership secret does not depend on particular intelligence. Rather, it depends on a remarkably stupid thick-headedness. The English follow the principle that when one lies, it should be a big lie, and one should stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.”

“Aus Churchills Lügenfabrik” (“Churchill’s Lie Factory”), 12 January 1941, Die Zeit ohne Beispiel (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP., 1941), pp. 364-369

So when Goebbels said it he wasn’t bragging that the Nazis did this. He was accusing his enemies of doing it – and in the process, he was lying about the English and covering up his own lies.

Hitler did talk about the Big Lie, although he didn’t state that quote that’s often attributed to Goebbels. Hitler’s words, like Goebbels’, were couched in an accusation towards others, this time not against the English but against – you guessed it – the Jews:

“But it remained for the Jews, with their unqualified capacity for falsehood, and their fighting comrades, the Marxists, to impute responsibility for the downfall [of the Germans in WWI] precisely to the man who alone had shown a superhuman will and energy in his effort to prevent the catastrophe which he had foreseen and to save the nation from that hour of complete overthrow and shame. By placing responsibility for the loss of the world war on the shoulders of Ludendorff they took away the weapon of moral right from the only adversary dangerous enough to be likely to succeed in bringing the betrayers of the Fatherland to Justice.

“All this was inspired by the principle — which is quite true within itself — that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.

“It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.”
—?Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, vol. I, ch. X

Hitler displays his knowledge of the workings of the technique, one he had mastered, but he certainly never owned up to his own use of it.

Obviously, making an accusation that someone else is using the Big Lie does not mean the accuser is telling the truth. But if you repeat it often enough – well, you know the rest.

In his quoted remarks here, Biden is implying that it is a foregone conclusion that no election fraud occurred and that Cruz and Hawley were knowingly lying when they spoke and acted as though election fraud might have occurred and asked for an investigation in order to ascertain the truth or falsehood of that evidence and to reassure the doubting public that the question has at least been looked into. Is it even necessary to point out that Biden almost certainly lacks any evidence for his own assertion that they were lying?

After all, what were Hawley and Cruz actually asking the Senate to do? This:

Whether one supports or opposes [Cruz and Hawley’s] decision to formally raise questions about the Electoral College vote count, the indisputable fact is that their actions were both legal and widely supported by their constituents. A Rasmussen poll released on January 6 found that 52 percent of politically unaffiliated Americans were less than fully confident about the integrity of the election results. The senators, and their colleagues in both houses who worked with them, noted that they had been flooded by requests from their constituents to question the returns from the states in question—Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, Wisconsin, Arizona and Nevada.

Cruz and Hawley incited no riots. To the contrary, they tried to channel the concerns of voters the American way — through constitutional, peaceful deliberations in Congress. Cruz, for his part, denounced the January 6 riot in real time, referring to it as “a despicable act of terrorism.”

Hard to see how asking that allegations of fraud be looked into in a constitutionally permitted manner could be argued to be a lie, much less a big one.

Lastly, it’s almost humorous that Biden ran as some sort of healer who would bring the country together. I’ll leave it to you to decide what sort of lie that might have been.

[NOTE: I probably should have made this post into a two-parter. What a mouthful!]

The post Goebbels’ Big Lie and Joe Biden appeared first on The New Neo.

President-elect Joe Biden on Thursday appeared on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” where he told the comedian that he has “great confidence” in his son Hunter.

If that were a true statement by Joe, he should be impeached just on those grounds alone, because it would show abysmally poor judgment. You can say many things about Hunter, but it is crystal clear that the only “great confidence” any person should have in him is that he will find a way to act out and screw things up.

Joe Biden added:

“He’s a grown man. He is the smartest man I know … in pure intellectual capacity and as long as he’s good, we’re good,” Biden said.

So, everyone else Joe knows is dumber than Hunter? Shudder.

And this statement was not a one-off for Joe. On October 29th of this year, Joe said much the same thing, calling Hunter “the smartest guy I know.” It seems to be one of Joe’s stock phrase talking points: “Hunter-the-smartest-guy-I-know.”

The post Joe Biden and Hunter’s towering intellect appeared first on The New Neo.

Joe Biden will be our next president. But he will face Nemesis in a way that few other presidents have ever encountered the cruel Greek god…

A President Biden cannot avoid the press forever. He will soon face unscripted meetings with foreign leaders. He will have to meet dozens of movers and shakers each week. Is he or the nation prepared for the consequences of his return to normality after nearly a year of media fawning and forced isolation?…

Given the Democrats’ Faustian bargain with their leftmost faction, destructive rumors about Biden’s faculties or his family’s financial escapades will more likely come from his own party’s left wing, eager for a Harris presidency, rather than from the Republican opposition.

Biden will enter office with an ethical cloud hanging over his head — one that could have been vetted and adjudicated rather than blacked out for most of 2020. His son, brother and perhaps family associates may talk if faced with FBI and IRS probes, if not a special counsel investigation.

It will not help Biden that to defeat Trump, many of our institutions were deformed. Special counsels usually never receive a blank check — 22 months and $32 million — to assemble a team of partisans to investigate a new president on mostly hearsay evidence and an opposition-concocted dossier.

But that precedent ended with the ill-conceived Robert Muller investigation. By spring, Biden could have done to him what was done to Trump — and what Biden himself so frequently cheered on…

But Biden should hope that the opposition will not do to him and his party what the Democrats did so bitterly to Trump.

I’m not sure why this prospect would cheer me up, if it’s the left that removes Biden only to replace him with someone younger and even more leftist – an occurrence that I and almost everyone on the right have been predicting for quite some time. I happen to think it will take two years to play out, but many others expect it a lot sooner.

In the case of what happened to Trump, the press and social media were a big part of the “resistance.” The former still has extraordinary power to shape perceptions, and the latter has gained extraordinary power in recent years. Both are dedicated to protecting Biden with nearly as much fervor as they previously were and still are dedicated to destroying Trump.

The only reason they will turn on Biden at some well-coordinated point is if and when they think it’s time for him to go and to be replaced by a more effective and viable leftist leader. And when they do, there will be a coordination and unity of purpose. For now, all I see is a small amount of reporting on the fact that Hunter Biden and his uncle might be in trouble but that Joe’s hands are clean. And I believe that the agencies tasked with investigating Hunter will keep Joe out of it as long as it is decided that he needs protecting, and will throw him under the bus if and when it’s decreed that his time has come.

Plus, I think the Hunter investigation will not yield anything but a slap on the wrist (if that) for Hunter Biden. If previous experience is any guide, he will be tainted but basically protected, and his father will be allowed to distance himself by publicly maintaining a “hands-off” policy so that he can say, “See? I’m so clean that I didn’t interfere with the workings of government, even when they investigated my own beloved son.”

VDH is a classics expert, and I’m not. But I do know the basics about the hubris-nemesis thing, and I don’t have so much hubris that I think I can really see the future. I can’t. But not only do I not sense a change in the media, but I also don’t foresee the GOP being the agent t successfully do to Biden and the left what was done to Trump. One reason is lack of unity and will on the right, and the other is that the institutions (FBI, press, etc.) would marshal all their forces to thwart them.

And I will add that I don’t think a hot civil war is coming. If there’s a successful movement by the right and for the right, I believe the form it takes will either be some sort of civil disobedience or something else that I can’t presently foresee, some sort of wild card or black swan.

The post Nemesis for the Democrats? appeared first on The New Neo.

I disagree that this investigation will end up in nothing. The Obama team is not going to let “this crisis go to waste”. They will use it to push him out. Already there are leaks and stories on how the Harris team is leaking. Will they have the decency to let him take the oath of office? Probably not.

Well, maybe. But I don’t quite see it that way.

To kick Joe out for the Hunter Biden corruption problems is way too damaging an admission for the Democrats to make. Why, it would mean – to practically any sentient being – that the GOP was right all along and the MSM deceptively covered it up in order to elect Biden and screw Trump. Plus, the Democrats impeached Trump for even suggesting to the Ukrainian president that these matters should be investigated. No, that’s just too much to own up to, both for the Democrats and for the MSM.

And it’s not even necessary. There’s a very simple solution for getting rid of Joe if they think that’s best – just declare him to have mentally and/or physically declined to the point where it would be a good idea to retire him. That might sound like an admission that those Republicans who claimed Biden was senile were correct, but the news could be carefully described as referring to a very recent decline in Joe’s mental abilities.

But I don’t think they actually want to be rid of Biden – yet. Yes, his “gaffes” (errors, mental absences) probably are making them cringe. But the anti-Trump pro-Democrat public has shown that it’s pretty much okay with that and will not demand he step down. So, as long as Biden doesn’t thwart the left’s plans by nixing something they want to do, why not keep him in the presidency as a figurehead? Others can pull the strings (Kamala or, as I suspect, Obama and/or his people) from behind the scenes and it will work just fine for the left.

There is an added benefit to waiting two years to remove Biden. Not only does it make the “recent decline” claim more plausible because of the passage of time, but it means – if the waiting period is long enough – that Kamala could finish up the remaining two years of Biden’s term and still be eligible to run for two more terms.

So that’s the scenario I see right now as most plausible, although things could change.

The post The plans for Joe appeared first on The New Neo.

“They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

This sentence was much used in the Revolutionary period. It occurs even so early as November, 1755, in an answer by the Assembly of Pennsylvania to the Governor, and forms the motto of Franklin’s “Historical Review,” 1759, appearing also in the body of the work.—Frothingham: Rise of the Republic of the United States, p. 413.

Quite a few people today have opted for what they perceive as safety, and yet few of them are starving or especially threatened. What they seem to want is absolute safety or the closest thing to it, as so many people’s reaction to COVID has demonstrated.

The COVID pandemic was a big test of an approach called the Great Reset, and the reaction has let The Great Reset’s proponents know that they can go ahead. The Great Reset is no shadowy conspiracy theory; it’s right out there in the open. See this from the World Economic Forum, September 2020 (emphasis mine – and note some of the phrases with which we’re already familiar from the Obama years):

THE CONTEXT

The Covid-19 crisis, and the political, economic and social disruptions it has caused, is fundamentally changing the traditional context for decision-making. The inconsistencies, inadequacies and contradictions of multiple systems –from health and financial to energy and education – are more exposed than ever amidst a global context of concern for lives, livelihoods and the planet. Leaders find themselves at a historic crossroads, managing short-term pressures against medium- and long-term uncertainties.

Note also the emphasis on needing to replace those messy multiple systems with some sort of global approach.

More:

THE OPPORTUNITY

As we enter a unique window of opportunity to shape the recovery, this initiative will offer insights to help inform all those determining the future state of global relations, the direction of national economies, the priorities of societies, the nature of business models and the management of a global commons. Drawing from the vision and vast expertise of the leaders engaged across the Forum’s communities, the Great Reset initiative has a set of dimensions to build a new social contract that honours the dignity of every human being.

Beware the elites and their “vast expertise.” They never, never, never let a crisis go to waste. And if necessary, exaggerate, predict, and even invent a crisis:

COVID-19 lockdowns may be gradually easing, but anxiety about the world’s social and economic prospects is only intensifying. There is good reason to worry: a sharp economic downturn has already begun, and we could be facing the worst depression since the 1930s. But, while this outcome is likely, it is not unavoidable.

The downturn was caused by the COVID reactions of the world community, and now even if COVID wanes (or as a vaccine is distributed) they are poised to take advantage of the economic downturn (or fear of a downturn) that they helped cause.

This next part is so important that I’ve bolded nearly the entire thing. Basically, it’s a summary of the goal:

To achieve a better outcome, the world must act jointly and swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions. Every country, from the United States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed. In short, we need a “Great Reset” of capitalism.

If you had any lingering doubts about the leftist background to this, please leave those doubts behind.

More [emphasis and remarks in brackets mine]:

The level of cooperation and ambition this implies is unprecedented. But it is not some impossible dream. In fact, one silver lining of the pandemic [not of the pandemic, of course – it’s of the lockdowns these same people have pushed as a reaction to the pandemic] is that it has shown how quickly we can make radical changes to our lifestyles. Almost instantly, the crisis forced businesses and individuals to abandon practices long claimed to be essential, from frequent air travel to working in an office.

Likewise, populations have overwhelmingly shown a willingness to make sacrifices [that is, how easily they can be pushed around by fear, which was the group’s hope] for the sake of health-care and other essential workers and vulnerable populations, such as the elderly. And many companies have stepped up to support their workers, customers, and local communities, in a shift toward the kind of stakeholder capitalism to which they had previously paid lip service.

Clearly, the will to build a better society does exist. We must use it to secure the Great Reset that we so badly need. That will require stronger and more effective governments, though this does not imply an ideological push for bigger ones. And it will demand private-sector engagement every step of the way.

We have already seen the corporations march in lockstep. Make no mistake about it. This is a top-down “reset,” and those on top will get the spoils.

Trump must have been such a tremendous 4-year thorn in their sides. No wonder they hate him so much and would do virtually anything to be rid of him.

“The Great Reset” became a popular Google search after Justin Trudeau recently started talking about it and other leaders started using some of its terms, as well – among them Boris Johnson, and our own fearless president-sort-of-elect Joe Biden, “build back better” being one of the tells. Previously labeled a baseless conspiracy theory, it’s now obvious (if you look at that link) that this has been part of the plan with the leaders of many countries of the world for quite some time.

There have been warnings in the past, but they didn’t get much traction. For example, see this from Fox Business last July:

A radical movement called the Great Reset embraced by some Democrats poses a grave threat to liberty and free markets in the United States and around the world. While former Vice President Joe Biden hasn’t endorsed the movement, his ties to it are growing as he changes his long-held policy views to appease the far-left.

While it hasn’t gained widespread attention, the Great Reset is perhaps the biggest danger to capitalism and individual rights since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

What is the Great Reset? Simply put, it’s a growing movement backed by many of the world’s most powerful business leaders, government officials and left-wing activists that aims to “push the reset button” on the global economy. It would destroy the current capitalist system and replace it with progressive and modern socialist systems, with a special emphasis placed on eco-socialist policies like those contained in the Green New Deal.

The left is nothing if not coordinated, ruthless, and relentless. The right is full of rank amateurs in comparison.

And whether Joe himself is fully onboard, or whether it’s just his handlers, it really doesn’t matter. The effect is the same. Biden was very useful as a candidate, though, because he could convincingly adopt – convincing to some, anyway – the mantle of moderation while actually intending to cooperate with nothing of the sort.

[NOTE: Also please brush up on the message of The Grand Inquisitor.]

The post All hail The Great Reset appeared first on The New Neo.

So I am hoping that all of you feel the same sense of urgency that I do. Whenever I campaign, I’ve always said, “Ah, this is the most important election.” Especially obviously when I was on the ballot, that always feels like it’s the most important election. This one — I’m not on the ballot — but I am pretty darn invested. We got to make this [a Democratic victory] happen.

To me, “pretty darn invested” meant running the show from behind the scenes. Unlike other ex-presidents, who absented themselves, Mr. Fundamental Tramsformation himself was still organizing ye old American community into the community he envisioned. At a certain point during the 2020 campaign, Obama realized that Bernie Sanders was in danger of scaring off enough voters that it would be hard to engineer a Democrat win by any means, and that strangely enough of the remaining group it was Biden who would be positioned best as a supposed “moderate” to get the job done.

As I wrote in early May:

“Pretty darn invested” – well, that’s certainly an understatement. He’s “pretty darn invested” indeed; seeking not just to protect his legacy, to be able to tell President Joe Biden what to do, to have Biden choose as aides and cabinet members the old Obama crew and implementing the old Obama agenda (only carrying it further than Obama ever had time for), but also to protect himself from further revelations at the hands of Barr and Trump.

Not rocket science.

The post It was always obvious that any first term of Biden would be Obama’s third appeared first on The New Neo.

A pleasant interlude.

And then, when you don’t see it coming (or at least the film maker hopes you don’t see it coming) – boom! Just when you thought you could relax, the danger is back.

That’s how I feel about the prospect of a Biden/Harris administration, and about reporting each pick and each decision, drip by drip. For me the Obama years were a time of chronicling a series of bad moves and bad messages and bad precedents: on immigration, on foreign policy, on economics, on liberty, on racial relations, on education, and on much more.

There was also the intensification of a previously Democrat-friendly press into a Democrat-worshipping press. The dichotomy could not be more stark, and the MSM’s mendacity in service of that endeavor could not be more blatant.

The 2016 election was not all that happy a time for me, either. I disliked and feared both candidates, but for opposite reasons and to differing degrees. Hillary was a known quantity and would represent a continuation of the Obama policies emboldened by time and the shifting of the Overton Window to the left. Trump was an unknown quantity, a volatile and unpredictable man with no political experience who might be a loose cannon and even a dangerous one. On balance, Trump was a bit better merely because a Trump presidency was a gamble and a Clinton presidency a known quantity, but both sounded like a bad deal to me.

These last four years, though, I’ve been mostly pleased at so many of the things that Trump has actually done as president – how effective he’s been in exactly those areas in which the Obama administration was so wrong. I’ve also felt horror at the marshaling of so many powerful forces against him, forces that were willing to do anything to destroy him.

So during the four years of the Trump administration I experienced many positives, but also a constant sense of dread and fear that those pluses would be overcome by the forces arrayed against him. And I was also dreading the election of 2020 increasingly as the date approached and the COVID-fueled “reforms” piled up, loosening the voting security safeguards in many states beyond all recognition. I knew that this election would be a no-holds-barred affair, and I feared it would involve a great deal of fraud on the part of the Democrats.

In addition, as the primaries developed, it became clear that there was no one who had any chance of being the Democratic nominee whom I thought would be better than Hillary would have been. Some were even to the left of her, and worse. Biden, who eventually won the nomination, was someone I hadn’t liked even back when I was a Democrat – that’s how bad his combination of mediocrity, bad judgment, corruption, and mendacity seemed to me.

I also expected post-election lawsuits to challenge the election results no matter who won, and riots if Trump won.

But in particular I felt I knew that a Biden presidency would feature all the awful policies of the Obama years – and then some. The press would see nothing wrong with this and everything right with it. The eight years of the Obama administration would look like a stroll in the park compared to what awaited us.

And now that specter is what we are likely to face – the monster’s return. In what sort of detail do I want to chronicle a Biden/Harris administration? The first decision I have to make is whether to discuss and evaluate appointment after appointment after appointment, bringing back people and policies I was so very happy to see leave. For example, months ago it occurred to me that John Kerry – whom I detested even when I was a Democrat – would be recycled one way or another. And so he has been. When Obama’s term was up, I figured I’d never need to see Kerry again because he would be too old next time. Ha! These days, seventy-seven (which is what he’ll be on Inauguration Day) is considered quite the spring chicken. So the laugh’s on me.

I’m not saying I won’t be covering a Biden/Harris administration if it comes to that. I plan to do so, but right now I’m not going to deal in depth with every appointment and every depressing announcement.

I always knew – it was quite obvious – that any Democrat who might manage to replace Trump would try to undo all of Trump’s many foreign policy victories, and that this person might succeed because foreign policy is something over which a president has a lot of control. Once Biden became the nominee I knew even more clearly that any Biden administration would be an Obama retread or worse, and I was dreading that.

And so we have things like this, Biden’s intent to restore Obama’s terrible Iran deal. Can he do it? Perhaps:

But among the obstacles facing Biden, a Democrat, in his bid to reopen a pathway to detente are Iran’s mistrust of Washington, which deepened sharply when Trump tore up the deal.

“Why should we trust Biden? He is like Obama. You cannot trust Democrats,” said a hardline official close to the office of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei…

That’s from Iran and Reuters, so take it with a grain of salt. I believe that Biden as president would be likely to make it worth Iran’s while by bending over backwards to sweeten the pot for them, just as Obama did. But it does occur to me that, American politics being what it is, the Iranians might be wary of Biden’s ability to deliver the goods in a way that will last.

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We can quibble over how many people are here illegally – estimates are that it’s actually much more than 11 million, but no one knows. But you can’t say Joe didn’t warn us. I wonder, though, if quizzed, how many Biden voters were even aware that he had made the promise – although perhaps, if they were, they’d support it. It’s hard to get a bead on how popular such a proposal is, because polls not only are suspect, but the way the question is asked varies greatly. Sometimes it’s just a “path to citizenship” or a chance at citizenship (vague, and especially vague as to how many would qualify and how long it would take) and sometimes it’s a “legal status” that’s asked about rather than citizenship itself.

At any rate, it’s one of those things that sounds “nice” to many good-hearted people. But in the past when it’s come to the legislature such a bill has never gotten enough votes in Congress. I make no predictions about a Biden-sponsored bill, in part because we don’t even know what party will dominate the Senate.

I can say a few things, though. The first is that, even if the legislature doesn’t pass such a bill, Biden and/or his administration will do everything they can to turn back the tide of all of Trump’s immigration orders. They may even attempt to use executive orders to provide some sort of “legal status” or even a “path to citizenship” for people here illegally, if they can. In other words, they’ll do whatever the public and the courts let them do.

That was always the weakness of executive orders, whether made by a Democrat or Republican president – they can be reversed by a successor in a vast pendulum swing.

What would be the economic consequences of such a move? There is no dearth of articles from the left saying it would be a great thing for all and articles from the right saying it most certainly would not be. I’m not going to hash that out in this post except to say that I see no reason to trust any forecasts on it, although I suspect the effect would be negative – and, coupled with much more relaxed rules on enforcing border security, would also be a motivation for a vast increase in future illegal immigration. In other words: après Biden le deluge.

The political effect is easier to predict, I think, and it is the real reason that Democrats are so in favor of the change: if given citizenship, these voters would swell the ranks of the Democratic Party enormously and probably would ensure one-party rule indefinitely (and that’s even without any fraud).

If the GOP retains the Senate I’m going to assume this won’t occur through a legislative path – for now. But are there some RINOs who would vote for it? Perhaps. In the past, of course, the filibuster/cloture rules made it impossible for a bill like that to pass without a large majority, but if in charge the Democrats will be jettisoning that rule, pronto. They mean business, and the business they have in mind is the business that benefits them and keeps them in power as long as possible, without any more challenges from the deplorable American public. Giving illegal alien residents the vote is just one means to that end.

The post Biden and the decision to give illegals citizenship: it’s the whole ball of wax appeared first on The New Neo.

If the MSM hasn’t covered them, they don’t exist. And of course the media’s slant on the stories they do deign to cover tends to affect people more than most people realize, too.

So the infuriating findings of this study should come as no surprise:

According to an explosive new study the Media Research Center (MRC) released on Tuesday, the legacy media’s suppression of eight key election-related news stories effectively handed the presidential election to Democrat Joe Biden. According to a poll conducted by The Polling Company on behalf of MRC, a whopping 17 percent of Americans who voted for Joe Biden would not have done so had they been aware of just one of these stories…

The Polling Company surveyed 1,750 Biden voters in seven swing states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Six of these states (all except North Carolina) have been called for Biden. The poll found that a whopping 82 percent of Biden voters were unaware of at least one of the news stories, while only five percent said they did not know about all eight…

The poll raised these eight news stories: Tara Reade’s sexual assault allegations against Joe Biden; Joe Biden’s involvement in the Hunter Biden corruption scandal; Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) getting rated the most leftist senator; 33 percent GDP growth in the third quarter of 2020; 11.1 million jobs created from June 5 to October 2; the Middle East peace deals with Israel that led to three Nobel Peace Prize nominations for Trump; U.S. energy independence; and Trump’s successes with Operation Warp Speed in fighting the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic.

These were not obscure stories, either. They were big. And I wonder how much the respondents read of any news, actually. Perhaps a lot of people simply are generally uninformed. After all, they may be busy living their lives.

Note, however, that only 17% would have changed their minds had they known of these things. My own experience with talking to friends is that literally nothing would have changed their minds this year. Trump was evil and had to be gotten rid of, and replacing him with anyone would have been just fine. So Joe Biden would do, and it didn’t really seem to matter much who Joe was and what he stood for, as long as he was a Democrat.

And no, my friends are not stupid, certainly not in the conventional sense. Nor are they evil. Their worldview is mostly shaped by the MSM and by their friends and family who believe the same things they do. I’m a weird outlier, and although most of them tolerate me and even think I’m intelligent, I believe they think I’ve been taken over by something strange and inexplicable, even though many have heard my explanations.

I truly feel that the MSM is responsible for a great deal of what has happened to America, and that they have a lot to answer for. Not that they’ll ever be tasked with answering it, any more than Joe Biden will be subject to their grilling.

The post Joe’s best friend was – and is – the MSM. But it’s not America’s. appeared first on The New Neo.