Who Are the Real Insurrectionists?

BY VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the House Democrats seem happy with their totally partisan Select Committee on Jan. 6. They will have activities this week including speeches by President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris at the Capitol.

Let me be clear: Those who broke into the Capitol, attacked police, and threatened members of Congress last year should be tried and brought strictly to justice. Further, Congress should seriously investigate what happened and how we can prevent it from ever happening again. But that’s not what is happening on Capitol Hill this week.

In the world of Big Government Socialist Democrats (nearly every elected Democrat in Washington) the riot last Jan. 6 is their best weapon to smear Republicans as unpatriotic. Just as the Russian Dossier, the Ukrainian phone call, and virtually every act of political theatre to defame Republicans has failed, this, too, will soon become an absurdity.

The reasons are simple.

First, Americans are worried about everyday life. As the Democrats are myopically stuck on partisan bickering, Americans see them actively not solving problems.

Each day that accelerating inflation increases prices, the Democrats lose ground with ordinary Americans.

Every school that is closed by Teachers’ Unions, despite evidence that distance learning hurts children—especially the poor and minorities—also hurts union-owned Democrat candidates.

Every report of people illegally flooding into the country with no COVID-19 testing or serious scrutiny hurts Democrats. (And when Americans learns more than a million of these people have been secretly sent around the country, they will get angrier.)

Every day that crime goes up, people are murdered, women are raped, carjackings multiply, and gangs openly steal from stores without consequences, it hurts the Democrats.

Every visit to the gas station hurts the Democrats.

When COVID-19 tests and medicine for therapies are not available after a year of total Democratic control in Washington, Democrats are the ones to blame.

When the number of cargo ships waiting outside Long Beach climbs to more than 120, and supply chains are halted across the country, the Democrats begin to be the party of incompetence.

The list goes on and on.

Second, clumsily rehashing the events of Jan. 6 is a double-edged sword. Serious unanswered questions about who was doing and saying what could embarrass Democrat allies and make them co-conspirators in accepting risks at the Capitol.

For starters, as a former Speaker, I know well that it is the Speaker’s responsibility to oversee the protection and defense of the Capitol. It is clear that Speaker Pelosi failed to do so—and it’s going to be deeply uncomfortable for Democrats to talk about that.

Further, House Republicans are beginning to ask about people such as Ray Epps, who was a suspected ringleader of the attack but has never been arrested. Some are suggesting he was an FBI asset (similar to the absurd case of the attempted kidnapping of Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer which was allegedly fostered and orchestrated by FBI agents). Attorney General Merrick Garland has, so far, refused to answer Rep. Thomas Massie’s question about FBI assets at the Capitol on Jan. 5 and Jan. 6.

House Republicans held a telephone press conference outlining the unanswered questions—and the Democrats’ efforts to block information that was unfavorable to them. Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik, and Reps. Jim Jordan, Rodney Davis and Jim Banks outlined what they were trying to learn—and how they were being stonewalled by the House Democrats and the Biden Justice Department. They also pledged to use their majority next year to get to the bottom of unanswered questions. You can listen to the whole press conference here.

Lastly, the process of the select committee is only getting more corrupt and destructive. Using an outrageous, painful, and unacceptable event (which I fully condemn) to smear your opponents rather than find the truth will ultimately be repudiated by the American people.

The best explanation of this deliberate smear campaign is the new book “January 6,” by Julie Kelly. The book is a thoroughly researched case about what happened on Jan. 6 and what the Democrats have done since then to smear Republicans and conservatives. Kelly makes clear that the truth has been a casualty of the Democrats’ political theatre.

For all these reasons, Jan. 6 is going to be a disaster rather than an asset for Democrats. It will lead them to lose even more seats in November.

The Democrats can’t seem to break out of their commitment to Big Government Socialism, wokeism, cronyism, and corruption. Having Jan. 6 to occupy their minds makes them feel more secure even if the impact does not help them at all.

I am reminded of the great political scientist Samuel Lubell. He had a deep sense that he did not understand most of America, and he was passionate for Americans to teach him. So, Lubell was focused on knocking on doors and interviewing voters. As a result, he was one of the first to predict the rise of the Republican Party in what was then the solidly Democratic South.

In my own career, I never forgot the lesson Lubell learned at a 1952 election night party in New York City. It was a gathering of intellectuals. As Lubell surveyed the room, he realized no one there had voted for Gen. Dwight Eisenhower to be president. They were all liberal academics and they instead identified with Gov. Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic nominee, as one of their own.

Lubell realized that Eisenhower had won in a landslide (ending the 20-year Democratic Party control of the White House) and yet none of his fellow intellectuals had voted for the winner. Worse, they had contempt for Eisenhower as “a golfing general.” Sure, Eisenhower led the allied armies in defeating Italy and Germany, but he wasn’t their kind of intellectual.

Lubell realized that cleverness and narcissism may not be sound tools for understanding politics in America. But listening to the real problems and real hopes of the American people would force an agonizing level of change for Democrats.

The focus on the Jan. 6 attack allows House Democrats to avoid rethinking their positions, focusing on real problems, or modifying their ideological fanaticism to try to find real solutions to real problems.

Americans will see right through the charade

https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_morningbrief/democrats-are-making-a-mistake-focusing-on-jan-6_4197086.html

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There Was No Insurrection on Jan, 6 But There Was A Coup

The debate is over. After a year spent investigating claims of election fraud, the media has determined that any fraud in the 2020 election was too insignificant to have changed the outcome and Joe Biden legitimately won. Now we can get back to our normal lives, or whatever passes for normal now…except that’s fiction.

In 44 BC, Roman Senators murdered Caesar, claiming they acted to protect the Republic. In fact, they simply sought power. Their coup d’état put the final nail in the coffin of a republic that had been dead in deed, if not name, for decades.

Coup d’états differ from revolutions in that they’re generally orchestrated by or include people within government who seize power—often by narrowly using or just threatening violence—resulting in a rapid transition of power. Revolutions are often longer affairs that include much of a country’s population and exponentially more bloodshed.

Most coups try to keep much of the society and government apparatus intact, merely changing who’s in charge. This illusion of continuity is intended to gain the population’s acquiescence by avoiding the appearance of a bloody civil war.

And that’s exactly what we got. While Donald Trump does not lie in a bloody toga on the floor of the Senate, America witnessed a coup d’état equally as vicious. Many will deny one took place because their guy won but, make no mistake, virtually every American knows one did, even if only 56% admit it.

The moment the coup began to reveal itself Americans knew something was amiss. Many went to bed on November 3rd believing that Trump was leading in enough states to secure an electoral victory, including in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, and Wisconsin. Strangely, however, while America slept, densely populated Democrat counties like Fulton (Atlanta) in Georgia and Allegheny (Pittsburgh) in Pennsylvania “stopped counting“ votes only to “restart” later when Biden suddenly got enough votes to swing the state blue. Similarly, Philadelphia stopped “reporting” at 1 AM and later announced Biden had won the state.

The morning of the 4th, as cries of fraud came from red areas across the country, the side that cried “election fraud” for four years suddenly fell silent. Apparently, 2020 had become the “most legitimate election in American history“.

Joseph Stalin said, “Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the vote decide everything.” That’s exactly how we went from being a constitutional republic to a banana republic, but rather than the United Fruit Company or the CIA running the coup, it was Mark Zuckerberg, Democrats, the FBI, and the media.

Immediately after Biden was sworn into office Molly Ball of TIME Magazine wrote a glowing paean to the coup:

Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers, and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears. They executed national public-awareness campaigns that helped Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days or weeks, preventing Trump’s conspiracy theories and false claims of victory from getting more traction.

And as with any good coup, Democrats threatened violence: “The nation was braced for chaos. Liberal groups had vowed to take to the streets, planning hundreds of protests across the country.” In this context, “protests” is a metaphor for Democrat-approved BLM and Antifa violence unleashed across America. Ball points out that, following Biden’s victory, Democrats called off the threatened violence: “There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs.”

While Ball’s homage may be insightful, the definitive account of the coup comes from Mollie Hemingway in “Rigged.” Unlike Ball, who couches everything about the coup in the fiction of patriots seeking to “protect” America from the fascist Donald Trump, Hemingway exposes how the leftist cabal set the table for the coup and, upon its execution, unleashed a propaganda machine to pretend the coup never happened.

Hemingway showcases incompetent GOP functionaries like Georgia’s Brad Raffensperger empowering Democrats, led by the treacherous Marc Elias and Stacy Abrams, to make unconstitutional voting rule changes. From corrupt jurists ignoring legislation and others explicitly ignoring the Constitution and allowing arbitrary election rulemaking that favored Democrats to the FBI and the media spending years attacking Trump, Hemingway exposes the coup step by step. She demonstrates exactly how Mark Zuckerberg wrote a $400 million check and financed the coup d’état that undermined our Republic.

In perhaps the single most telling line in Rigged, Hemingway quotes a reporter for the Wisconsin Spotlight: “The City of Green Bay literally gave the keys to the election to a Democrat Party operative from New York.” (p. 222.) Similar dynamics played out across the country.

The model was simple. Red counties in half a dozen states gave their counts while blue counties stopped counting or reporting. Once the red totals were in Democrats knew exactly how many votes they needed to “produce” and those numbers magically started coming in. Georgia’s Fulton County gave Biden a 250,000 margin of victory, enough to win the state by 12,000 votes out of 5 million cast. Pennsylvania’s Allegheny gave Biden a 150,000 vote margin, enough to take Pennsylvania by 80,000 votes out of 6.8 million.

When the dust settled, Biden was declared the 46th President with “81 million votes” to Trump’s 74 million. But Presidential elections come down to the Electoral College. Joe Biden won there because of three states and 103,000 votes: Pennsylvania, 20 Electors, by 80,000 votes; Georgia, 16 by 12,000; and Arizona, 11 by 11,000 votes.

After two months of being caricatured and called conspiracy nuts or white nationalists, almost a million frustrated Trump voters went to Washington on January 6th to demand Congress investigate the election. After a rally where President Trump explicitly said to “peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard“ a riot with a few hundred people broke out at the Capital and, suddenly, an “Insurrection” worse than anything “since the Civil War“ occurred. Anyone questioning the election was a guilty participant. That riot, which the FBI may have planned or empowered, suddenly changed the national conversation from investigating November’s coup to impeaching Trump for “incitement of insurrection.” And that was it. End of debate. Biden won and Trump tried to incite a coup. Any contrary ideas were verboten....

But of course, Americans know a lie when they see it and the debate isn’t really over. When the propagandists say there was no way fraud could have affected an election with 150 million voters, that’s a red herring. The cabal behind the coup didn’t have to affect 150 million votes. All they had to do was affect (or create) 100,000 well-placed votes, which is exactly what they did. Zuckerberg-funded Democrats in a few states merely had to wait until the red areas reported their totals and then magically produce more votes from their stopped or paused machines. And that’s how it’s done, a real-life enactment of Stalin’s adage, and it’s just another day at the office for Democrats.

Mark Anthony could only eulogize Caesar after the Ides of March, but Donald Trump is still very much with us. We still have an opportunity to reverse this treachery and avert the disaster that naturally follows when the Rule of Man subverts the Rule of Law. But will we seize it before it’s too late?

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/01/there_was_no_insurrection_but_there_was_a_coup.html

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Donald Trump's appeal is undimmed

It’s tradition that US presidents retreat from public view for a time after leaving the Oval Office.The move is supposed to give the incoming president clear air to bring the nation together after an election, and give the outgoing president a break after their years of service.

It was always going to be different with Trump, not least because the days after he left office were dominated by his still active impeachment trial in the US Senate.

Just five weeks after he left office, Trump gave his first public speech at the 2021 Conservative Political Action Conference. "Do you miss me yet?" was his opening line.

Trump's post-presidency plan started in earnest, and the "end of Trump" chorus began to fade into the background.

He started publicly endorsing candidates in Republican primary contests, often as a way to enact revenge on party colleagues who voted to impeach him a second time.

Trump's trademark rallies returned in June 2021, including one at the Iowa State Fairgrounds, the event presidential hopefuls flock to in an election year.

The same month, his former advisor Jason Miller made clear how the former president was viewed by Republicans. "President Trump is the leader of the Republican Party," Miller said in an interview.

Trump became a regular guest in the US conservative media ecosystem, appearing on his preferred programs on networks like Fox News. Books with his name and face on them, written by the mainstream journalists he called "enemies of the people", topped the New York Times best-seller lists.

Trump's supporters were bombarded with requests for money like it was an election year, sometimes at least one plea per day for a month in 2021 according to the Independent.

As a result, the money continued to pour into his Save America PAC (an official fundraising organisation with a reported war-chest of $US85 million, with the PAC claiming it had nearly one million donors on its books in November.

The PAC then hired staff in Iowa, the first state to vote in the 2024 Republican primary.

While there was no shortage of Republicans lining up to take on the former president in the wake of the January 6 attacks, in the year since nearly all have fallen into two camps.

Those who've stuck by their guns have been pushed to the fringes of the party or retired from politics. The rest came crawling back to Team Trump.

To understand Trump's appeal in 2022 and beyond, it's helpful to start with the very things that delivered him the White House in 2016.

At this moment he can again embrace the outsider, anti-politician message he could never truly grasp in 2020 while the seat at the Resolute desk was his.

Analysis by Pew Research of Republican voters found the equal-most dominant block (23 per cent of voters who are Republicans or lean Republican) are among Trump's strongest supporters.

"Most say Trump definitely or probably is the legitimate winner of the 2020 election, despite official counts showing that Joe Biden was the legitimate winner. And 79 per cent say there has been too much attention paid to the January 6 riot at the US Capitol," the research concludes.

Believing and repeating Trump's claims about the 2020 election has become a litmus test for any elected Republicans, and for those wishing to become one in the future.

On November 8 this year, Americans will head to the polls for the first nationwide elections since Joe Biden became president. It'll be a referendum on a lot of things in America, and Trump needs to decide how much he wants to involve himself in the election.

Advisers are reportedly urging him to play a quiet kingmaker role rather than put himself on the ballot, but the former president was never known for listening to anyone other than himself or staying quiet.

What little electoral evidence we have from 2021 also presents a muddier picture of the future for Trump than his meteoric rise back to the top of the Republican party might suggest.

Republicans will need more than just Trump loyalists if they want to win back the House and the Senate and land a serious blow on Joe Biden in November.

Trump remains widely unpopular with the broader American electorate according to an average of polls from FiveThirtyEight.

Can Republicans walk a tightrope of putting the spotlight on Trump that their base demands while not reminding undecided voters why they walked away from him at the 2020 election?

Democrats are confronted with a picture that's as muddy as the Republican one.

Do they run a campaign not focused on Trump (as some party insiders are suggesting) to replicate their 2018 midterm success?

Or does the party talk up the threat of Trump 2024 (as other insiders suggest) to replicate their 2020 success, and distract from their own unpopular president in the process?

Throughout 2021 Trump has winked, nodded, suggested, intimated and joked about a 2024 run at the presidency.

He was reportedly even talked out of announcing while Biden struggled with the US exit from Afghanistan.

Advisers were reportedly wary of making him a target of the upcoming 2022 midterms and of campaign finance laws that would kick in once Trump is officially a candidate.

It also keeps any Republican challengers to the throne at bay.

"He tacitly keeps the 2024 crowd on notice that nobody can move a major muscle until he decides what he's doing," Kellyanne Conway, one of Trump's former top aides, told the Washington Post.

Trump is no doubt bolstered by poll after poll that show him as the man Republicans want in 2024. A recent Politico-Morning Consult poll showed 69 per cent of Republicans want Trump to run again.

When Trump is compared to the Republican alternatives, no challenger is even close.

A Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll found 58 per cent of Republican voters it surveyed wanted Trump to run in 2024. The next closest challenger was former vice president Mike Pence on 13 per cent, followed by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on nine per cent.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-01-08/trump-after-january-6/100736202

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There’s nothing more frightening than a woman in politics

Alexandra Marshall

It is difficult to argue that women are the less capable gender when they have spent the last ten million years outsourcing humanity’s physical labour to men in exchange for sexual favours.

This advantageous arrangement backfires on women from time to time, but in general, it has been a successful strategy to deal with the physical imbalance between the sexes. The question of ‘which is the more powerful gender?’ remains impossible to answer, with women frequently holding the reins of power by the balls.

The manipulation of men is so complete that, for most of modern history, a man who is unknown to a woman in distress will still protect her in order to honour the social norms of the time. Less generous feminists will claim that men only help women in the hopes of sleeping with them, but it seems that men enjoy the gentleman narrative and derive satisfaction purely from the act of rescuing.

Women play far less angelic games with men.

The competition to secure a position in society via a sexual relationship dominates the female experience. Whether intentional or not, female friendships can be defined by their preference in lover. The strongest relationships between women are frequently founded on opposing interests in men, ensuring that the women do not pose a threat to each other’s ambitions. This is pheromonal, not deliberate.

Men are not the hard done by ones in this scenario.

Not only do they have women competing for their attention, those women that succeed spend their considerable talents protecting the man and his position from everyone else, regardless of gender. The protection of a dominant woman has secured many of history’s political empires, while the maintenance of power is often left up to the scheming of wives, mistresses, mothers, and daughters.

When it comes to politics, women wield the power men publicly hold.

There is no need for the Australian government or individual political parties to impose gender quotas on Parliament. Women are uniquely adapted to the intricacies of politics. The issue is not a matter of merit or desire, but rather ‘style’. History shows us that women prefer secretive politics. They build webs of intrigue that span so deep into political and social regimes that men only become aware of the threads after they have been captured by a successful plot.

While men trade verbal blows and spend years fighting for an inch of land, a sideways glance from an attractive woman can undo a treaty between nations.

Men parade power – wear it on their chests, fly it on flags, demand that it be screeched from the battlefields, and crowd themselves into the halls of Parliament. Enticing women into this arena must be a natural process, not a forced system of activist revenge. The more women who are artificially thrust into unsuitable political positions and then fail, the less likely suitable women are to try their luck. Role models cannot be manufactured, they have to create themselves without reference to the feminist agenda.

If anything, modern feminism has begun to erode the power of women. Angry social movements have told women to make themselves unattractive as a symbol of ‘power’ – to throw off the chains of beauty and femininity in order to conquer the masculine world. The harsh biological reality is that there is nothing less powerful than an unattractive woman of middling ability. They occupy the same position in society as a weak man without the virtue of a bank balance.

Very few women who lack the gifts of nature rise to dominate men. The few that succeed possess a ruthlessness superior to their male counterparts – something that cannot and should not be replicated by the masses. These women, which form the exception to the rule, do not require the help of feminism. They have reigned throughout the centuries based upon the sheer force of their iron will – and continue to do so.

Modern feminism’s demands betray the fragility of its parasitic movement. The very last thing these activists want is a powerful, attractive, conspiring woman in a short skirt and high heels sauntering onto the political stage. Such a woman is beyond their control and certain to tear down the flimsy #metoo demands of incompetent quota-holders that survive on career handouts from party strategists.

If modern women are exposed to this scenario, the days of ugly feminist activism and saggy-breasted screeching are numbered. Women want to be beautiful. They want to be powerful. Once they realise that they can also be publicly political – who knows…

https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/01/theres-nothing-more-frightening-than-a-woman-in-politics/

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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