American Greatness
The 2020 election will be decided in the fall by swing voters in ten or 15 states.
Prior to the COVID-19 outbreak, those voters were leaning to reelect President Trump, largely on the powers of incumbency and a near-record vibrant economy. The Democratic left-wing primary agendas, from the New Green Deal to reparations, the clownish candidates of the Beto O’Rourke and Corey Booker sort, the arrogance and meltdown of Mike Bloomberg, and Joe Biden’s cognitive impairment collectively frightened voters.
Meanwhile, the booming economy, record energy production, record-low minority unemployment and reckoning with China had overshadowed Trump’s cul de sac tweeting, 93 percent unfavorable media coverage, and the three-year slow-motion coup of the 25th Amendment nonsense, Russian "collusion," Robert Mueller, Ukraine, and impeachment.
Then came the contagion, the lockdown, the recession, and the collective madness of looting and arson, which in turn led to the present anarchy of statue toppling, cancel culture, name-changing, and McCarthyism 2.0.
Of course, a president is blamed for chaos on his watch even if he did not create the chaos. He either stops it and is praised as a winner or, like Jimmy Carter during the Iran hostage crisis of 1979-1980, is written off as a loser.
...The hour of reckoning is here and either Trump will crush the lawlessness and win the swing voters to his side, or he will listen to the trimmers and lose the country. Trump’s dilemma, however, is real and in some sense unprecedented. We are in uncharted waters when blue-state officials don’t mind the violent chaos in their midst, or at least feel that in a cost-benefit analysis it serves their November purposes more than a restoration of law and order.
...So if blue states don’t want federal help, and the military-intelligence complex might well oppose such an act, Trump is left with either sounding tough while carrying a popsicle stick or using the powers of federal attorneys to start indicting veritable terrorists, charging negligent state authorities with impairing the civil rights of their own citizens by knowingly exposing them to violence, cutting off federal funds to wayward states, and reclaiming federal properties within blue state sanctuary states to ensure monuments and federal buildings are safe and national parks open to the public.
If that way the Trump Administration can show the public that the federal government is restoring calm, then, at what point do these fence-sitting swing voters conclude that Trump could be the only thing between them and the Antifa/Black Lives Matter mob at their local suburban shopping center, or their child’s class rebooted into a reeducation camp, or their once tranquil local park now a cemetery of unburied bronze and stone corpses, or their police either defunded or in silent slowdowns? How many times do the liberal-minded have to be slandered as "white racists" before they say "you are the racially obsessed, not me"?
...Even the unaffiliated and apolitical may finally conclude that revolutionaries want to erase his collective memory, his history, his national anthem, and his the American identity. A Colin Kaepernick airport? Antifa Drive? Saul Alinsky’s head grafted onto the decapitated bronze of Columbus? Obama’s visage chiseled over Teddy Roosevelt on Mt. Rushmore? 1619 in our schools swapping out 1776 as the new founding of America?
...Just when you thought these anarchists were real revolutionaries who would retire to the Rockies and Sierras as maquis to continue their war on the corporate state, they seem terrified of being arrested, and charged with résumé-staining racketeering or felonious assault. In extremis, they prove petite bourgeois careerists, not Bolsheviks on the barricades. Hollywood central casting could not have dreamed up more audio-visually off-putting characters. The distance between them and the unjustified death of George Floyd is now a vast abyss.
...Despite the tsunami of unforeseen contagion, mass quarantine, and national riot, the choice is still Trump’s: stay calm, speak softly, and carry a club, while promising for the future to protect the vulnerable of all races and classes, and restore a great nation; or talk loudly carrying a twig while whining about unfair personal treatment of the past.
The former is victory, the latter socialism, in November.
The dangers of Politico/SJW censorshop. Join Parler
[Humanevents] I’m just a guy from the middle of America who voted for Donald J. Trump, but apparently that is enough to lump me in with every vile person on the planet, real or imagined.
#3
The crypto-fascists that advocate for the use of violence to vanquish their intellectual enemies are not simply nodes on a network. They exist in the real world as well, and the rules can change in an instant.
[Jpost] A review of incidents in southern Syria in recent weeks points to the area becoming an increasing flash point as many issues are now in flux.
A review of incidents in southern Syria in recent weeks points to the area becoming an increasing flash point as many issues are now in flux. It is important to highlight several of the trends that appear to be happening from Daraa near the Golan border to Deir Ezzor and Albukamal on the Euphrates river.
This is an area that is a triangle of 500km on one side from the Golan to Albukamal and then 120 km from Albukamal to Deir Ezzor. These represent two distinct areas. Albukamal to Deir Ezzor is an important corridor. It is where there are some pro-Iranian militias and Iranian presence. Reports indicate that the Afghan and Pakistain volunteers who serve with Iran’s IRGC may be in this area. They are called Fatemyoun and Zainabiyoun. There are also Iraqi Shi’ite militias in this area.
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[American Thinker] The skinny jeans. The nonfunctional glasses. The spray tans. The tight muscle shirts. The obscene shopping bill at Nordstrom. And the social justice sermons more fitting for the faculty lounge at Wellesley than for a Bible-believing church. Behold, the Woke Pastor, and he’s gunning for your White Privilege and ready to tackle America’s systemic racism, one vegan protein shake at a time.
There are myriad examples of the Woke Pastor today, with ministers falling over themselves publicly to prove their progressive bona fides in the wake of George Floyd’s awful death. Let’s focus on two in particular. Both lead megachurches on different ends of the country. Both are considered dynamic preachers with A-list followers. Both are viewed as models by media elites on how to render Christianity "cool" and "relevant" to the unchurched. And both exemplify the disturbing trend among young Christian leaders to align with culture, rather than speak truth prophetically to it.
Judah Smith is the senior pastor at the oddly-named "Churchome," which is based in Seattle and Los Angeles, and where it is "not uncommon to find the front row reserved for celebrities," as one publication put it. If you thought that the phrase "All Lives Matter" was both innocuous and conveyed a fundamental axiom that, well, all lives do matter because we are all made in the image of God, and therefore we should condemn racism wherever and through whomever it surfaces, Judah Smith has a message for you: Stop It.
"It is very normal for Caucasian Christians" in this country "to insist that All Lives Matter," for Caucasian Christians "to insist" that we should "also pray for business owners and police officers." But, implores Smith, "we don’t need to say that anymore" because "All Lives Do Not Matter until Black Lives Matter." The circular reasoning here aside, why is a lead pastor, who has at least 10,000 people pack his pews each Sunday and who has even more devotees online, instructing his congregation not to pray for law enforcement and entrepreneurs in the midst of anarchy? What about the black police officers who have been murdered and the black businesses destroyed by those killers and vandals marauding under the Black Lives Matter banner? Do their lives and their livelihoods not matter because of what one rogue cop did in Minneapolis?
Judah Smith didn’t specify. You’ll have to take his word for it.
#2
A family friend's son is one of the top people in the Lutheran Church for Lutheran World Relief. He recently unfriended me on Facebook for telling him to be careful in Minneapolis where he lives and works. He's just too damn "woke" to be rational.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
