90 Miles From Tyranny

Tuesday, January 4, 2022

Corporate Media’s Jan. 6 Anniversary Coverage Is All About Silencing Republicans

Equating the U.S. Capitol riot with GOP efforts to reform election laws is a way to avoid honest debate over the latter.

lengthy New York Times editorial over the weekend has set the stage for this week’s Jan. 6 anniversary coverage. “Every Day Is Jan. 6 Now,” declare the Times editors, warning that Republican lawmakers in 41 states “have been trying to advance the goals of the Jan. 6 rioters — not by breaking laws but by making them.”

The argument itself, that tweaking state election law is somehow a subversion of democracy, is absurd and incredibly lazy. But it’s important to note, if only because it will serve as the baseline narrative for the entire corporate media’s Jan. 6 coverage this week.

Their message — they will all have more or less the same message — is simple: all Republicans are insurrectionists, the GOP is the enemy of the people, and the only way to preserve American democracy is to ensure that only Democrats can win elections.

To make this case, the Times’ editors had to stage a kind of linguistic insurrection. Lawful, constitutional efforts by elected representatives to change state election laws amount, in the Times’ telling, to a “bloodless, legalized” insurrection that “that no police officer can arrest and that no prosecutor can try in court.”

That’s no different than saying “speech is violence.” It’s nonsensical. By definition, there’s no such thing as a “bloodless, legalized” insurrection, any more than there could be a “mostly peaceful” riot. That said, the Times editors are wrong about one thing: state laws, including state election laws, can and often are challenged in court.

But the nonsense here serves a purpose. If the Jan. 6 riot can be conflated with perfectly valid GOP-led efforts to shore up state election rules, then perhaps those efforts can be wholly undermined, regardless of what voters in red states want. The irony is that it isn’t GOP lawmakers trying “to wrest control of electoral votes from their own people,” as the Times editors charge; it’s the Democrats and their media allies.

Consider that last year, 44 states enacted some 285 bills related to elections. In blue states, those bills tended to loosen certain election rules and requirements, especially for mail-in and absentee ballots. That makes sense given that Democrats tend to vote by mail-in ballot far more often than Republicans. Making mail-in and absentee voting easier is merely a way to boost Democratic votes in any...

Well, I won't back down
No, I won't back down
You can stand me up at the gates of hell
But I won't back down

No, I'll stand my ground
Won't be turned around
And I'll keep this world from draggin' me down
Gonna stand my ground
And I won't back down

Four footballers killed by heart attacks over Christmas

The deaths of a Croatian soccer player (23 years old), an Omani (29), an Egyptian (23) and an Algerian (30) happened in the wake of the sudden retirement of Argentinian player Sergio Agüero . Agüero suffered chest pains and dizziness during a match in October and the star striker had been benched for three months.

Last week was particularly tragic for world football. Four footballers died of heart attacks on the pitch, while disappointment at the sudden retirement of Sergio Agüero due to heart problems continued.

The first victim was the young Croatian player, Marín Cacic, 23, who died in the hospital where he was in an induced coma three days after fainting on the field while playing the Christmas Tournament in his native municipality, Gospic.

According to local media Sportske Novosti, Cacic felt unwell in the middle of the game, and as he left, he collapsed. An ambulance immediately transported him to the Gospic hospital where they resuscitated him. He was then transferred to the Rijeka hospital, the third largest city in Croatia, where he died. The cause of death was a heart attack.

“Marín had been healthy until now, and examined regularly, before he came to play in Italy and Slovakia,” said his father.

A day later, 29-year-old Omani soccer player Mukhaled Al-Raqadi died of a heart attack. He collapsed in the pre-match warm-up between the Muscat and Al-Suwaiq clubs. Both teams had been busy preparing for the sixth round of the Omani national championship.

Al-Raqadi had been warming up with his teammate, and then suddenly fell down on the pitch. According to the Omani press, the temperature was above 28 degrees Celsius, and many initially thought he had fainted due to the heat. But the player had been used to playing in high temperatures.

He was transferred to a hospital, but efforts to revive him failed. He passed away from a heart attack. The match was suspended after he was taken to the hospital.

The Egyptian third division club goalkeeper, Ahmed Amin, also passed away after suddenly fainting during training for his team.

According to the digital edition in English of Middle East.in-24, and Ahmed Abdel Aziz, the technical director of the team, Amin had just finished his training session when he collapsed in the locker room. The doctor tried unsuccessfully to revive him and an ambulance was called. At the nearest hospital, doctors again tried to revive him but he died of heart failure only a few hours after the death of Al-Raqadi.

Last Saturday, Algerian footballer Sofiane Loukar also passed away during a...

The Truths We Dared Not Speak in 2021

At the end of this terrible year, we are left only with ironies.

As the long year of 2021 finally came to a close, there were a number of truths Americans on the Left found themselves privately acknowledging but unable to say in public for fear of doing damage to their political cause, their own reputations, or their sense of security. But as 2022 advances, it will become even more difficult to hide these truths.
Collusion, RIP

No one wishes to speak of the “dossier” anymore. Everyone knows why: it was never a dossier. It was always a mishmash concoction of half-baked fantasies and outright lies, sloppily thrown together by the grifter and has-been ex-British spy and Trump hater, Christopher Steele—all in the pay of Hillary Clinton, the original architect of the collusion hoax.

Steele himself admitted that he had no sources or notes to substantiate his “research.” Most of those who had seeded the dossier around Washington now either agree it was fake, or “partially” false, or remain silent in embarrassment.

The perpetual NeverTrump revisionism is reduced to “The Russian Hoax Hoax,” in pathetic fashion suggesting Putin still colluded with Trump and such “collusion” is provable even without the dossier.

The logic is Orwellian: in 2017-2020 we heard, “But the dossier shows that ….” In 2020-2021 we heard, “Whoever said the dossier had anything to do with Russian collusion?”

The FBI—that in part used their paid informant Steele’s lies to birth FISA warrants—now disowns it. The entire 22-month, $40-million Mueller charade ended up in tragicomic style with Robert Mueller under oath denying he knew much of anything about either the purveyor of the dossier, Fusion GPS, or the dossier itself.

James Comey when asked about it and the investigations it spawned, on 245 occasions under oath claimed he lost his memory or had no knowledge of it.

The Russian collusion hoax will go down in history as one of the most shameful examples of Washington, D.C. mass hysteria, and of a concentrated effort to destroy an elected president, in modern American political history.

In the end, we always come back to where we started: Hillary Clinton.

She used the three firewalls of the Democratic National Committee, the Perkins Coie legal firm, and Fusion GPS, to pay Steele, a foreign national, likely barred by law from providing such dirt to a U.S. presidential campaign.

Steele then grabbed Clinton and FBI money, and in lazy fashion made a few calls to the now indicted Igor Danchenko, a Russian working in Washington, D.C. at the left-wing Brookings Institution, along with a Clinton crony Charles Dolan doing business in Moscow. Presto, Steele typed up their myths, in scary intelligence white-paper fashion, and passed them off as top-secret “Russian sources.” The dossier became the “proof” needed to show that Trump, in the words of former CIA director John Brennan, was “treasonous” or, as former Director of National Intelligence General (ret.) James Clapper alleged, was a “Russian asset.”

The Russian collusion hoax is now akin to Joe Biden’s cognitive decline; everyone knows it, but few bother to state the obvious—or rehash their now embarrassing earlier denials.
When the Musical Chairs Music Stops

Everyone knows the government cannot keep running up astronomical annual deficits. It is piling up a near $30 trillion national debt, printing trillions of dollars—and hoping to keep inflation down to 7 percent per year. Everyone knows that, and no one wishes to talk, much less do anything, about it.

Instead, we simply will go on redistributing money, inflating the economy, and hoping that the middle classes are naïve enough to believe that their inflated paychecks outpace their greater inflationary costs that, in truth, have more than wiped out all their wage gains.

When the interest rate hikes invariably come—the longer we wait, the worse will be the reckoning—we will again know the stagflation of the 1970s and 1980s.

The only calculus the Democrats weigh is whether they can print their way to a semblance of normality through 2022, in hopes the helium-over-inflated economy blows up only after the elections.

Who knows, maybe then they can blame Joe Biden in 2023 for empowering them to wreck the economy and losing the Congress, as a way of arguing his clear cognitive decline suddenly warrants resignation.
Spiraling Crimes without Criminals

Almost every statistic related to violent crime is up. Smash-and-grab has reached tony places like Union Square in San Francisco, Walnut Creek, and Carmel by the Sea.

Car-jackings are endemic. Gun sales are booming—among terrified upscale white liberals.

An entire blame-the victim protocol emerges—drive your oldest car, dress down, hide your jewelry, hire security guards for your person and business—because mysteriously there are no victimizers, or at least none that can be mentioned.

The once popular, but now discredited BLM has been reduced to a caricature, arguing that such violent crimes are constructs created by white people to jail black people, that Jussie Smollett was innocent and a victim of racism, and that the Waukesha massacre was the apparent start of a needed “revolution.”

Everyone knows that defunding the police failed and dangerously so. The public accepts that the Soros DAs are both incompetent and sinister. People of all classes and races look at crime statistics. They watch internet videos. They compare firsthand experience with robbery, assault, and theft. And they surmise that young black males are disproportionately—in terms of their percentages in the population—responsible for much of the violent crime wave, from murders to car-jackings to smash-and-grab mass thefts.

The more the media fails to print descriptions of suspects in criminal assaults, the more universities cavalierly violate the federal Clery Act by failing to provide their campus communities needed information about criminal suspects’ descriptions, and the more big-city mayors and district attorneys deny an epidemic of violent assault, the more the public knows that crime is even worse than what they hear, see, feel, and experience first-hand.

The public also assumes that voicing the truth is deemed “racist” and thus will earn them a doxing or canceling—and so in Soviet-style keep quiet. We do not dare speak of disproportionate black perpetrators of hate crimes, rare interracial crimes, and the killing of police.

Yet such silence does not hide the truth that cannot be quite smothered . In a recent op-ed, Heather Mac Donald estimated that “A police officer is about 400 times as likely to be killed by a black suspect as an unarmed black is to be killed by a police officer.”

So, we have a crime wave without criminals in the manner we had a SUV on autopilot without a driver that killed six and injured 62 in Waukesha.

Unofficially, the paradox plays out with the upscale blue-city suburbanite still with the BLM sign on his lawn but with a new 12-gauge under the bed, with the BLM hierarchs and their loud enablers living like Patrisse Cullors, Colin Kaepernick, or LeBron James in rich, mostly white areas, with ample walls and security fences and gates.

So, the year ended with a near record of black-on-black homicides, and a new record of lethal shootings—of police officers on duty.
Biden, A Robust 95?

Everyone knows that Biden may be chronologically 78, but mentally and physically he is at best 95 or more. People sense that he is failing at a geometric rate that makes his ability to...

Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #158

Public University Offers Professors Cash To Go Woke

University of Memphis asks faculty to infuse social justice into curricula

A public Tennessee university is offering professors financial incentives for "infusing" social justice into their classes.

The University of Memphis told faculty they could collect a $3,000 stipend for redesigning their curricula to align with the university's commitment to "diversity, equity, inclusion, and social justice," according to an email sent to all faculty obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. The offer is part of the university's "Eradicating Systemic Racism and Promoting Social Justice Initiative."

Interested faculty are asked to submit a copy of syllabi to be reworked as well as a 500-word "narrative" on their "diversity, equity, and inclusion philosophy" and how the new lessons will "address disparities" in their subject area.

The University of Memphis's offer is part of a growing trend on college campuses, where the overt promotion of social justice has become the new norm. At Ohio's Kenyon College, a small liberal arts school, professors can no longer receive tenure unless they can demonstrate "promotion of an inclusive classroom environment that values diversity."

The stipend offer from a public university has triggered concerns from both faculty and lawmakers over use of taxpayer money. One faculty member who requested anonymity due to fear of retribution said the offer "makes you scratch your head" due to the school's financial restraints.

"We've had a hard time retaining good faculty at our salary levels, so anytime you see money being spent on non-student or non-faculty causes, it makes you scratch your head," the professor said. "Could this money be spent on students or retaining quality faculty rather than a progressive agenda that isn't likely supported by the taxpayers or voters of Tennessee?"

The professor said he's concerned that otherwise apolitical courses would now be used to turn students into activists.

"I'm not sure how changing an accounting, nursing, or engineering course to align with social justice principles helps students," he said. "When faculty are underpaid in the first place, it's hard to blame them for taking this money. But it creates an incentive for a nonpartisan instructor to turn their students into activists for a...

Social media giant calls patriot picture book ads 'disruptive'

Facebook banned a conservative publishing company from advertising children's books on the site, claiming its ads were "disruptive content."

Heroes of Liberty founder Bethany Mandel said Monday that Facebook permanently blocked the company from advertising on the platform, and locked her out of the company's page when she appealed the decision. Mandel says Facebook's actions cost the company six months of advertising data. Facebook did not respond to a request for comment but told Heroes of Liberty it was being punished for "consistently promoting ads that don't comply" with Facebook's standards.

"We just assumed we were going to be safe from big tech censorship because we are so plain vanilla," Mandel told the Washington Free Beacon. "It's a children's book company. But even a children's book company will not be safe from the tentacles of big tech censorship."

Heroes of Liberty Facebook ads

Heroes of Liberty publishes "quality illustrated biographies of great Americans," including President Ronald Reagan and Supreme Court justice Amy Coney Barrett. Mandel said the company spent most of its marketing budget on Facebook ads. The company will now pivot to a subscription model. Mandel hopes the switch will stop tech companies from interfering with the company, though she acknowledges it is "not what we normally do in America for books."

Facebook is one of the biggest players in online advertising. The company earned more than $84 billion in advertising revenue in 2020, over a quarter of all U.S. ad revenue. The social media giant regularly shuts down right-leaning advertisers and individual users.

In 2021, Facebook suspended the Instagram account of a Gold Star mother who criticized President Joe Biden and blocked ads for a song that criticized Biden's Afghanistan withdrawal. Facebook also removed a political ad that criticized the withdrawal, suppressed claims that Kyle Rittenhouse was innocent, and blocked a Russian activist from posting evidence of abuse of political prisoners.

While Facebook regularly bans right-wing content, it also maintains a "whitelist" of nearly six million prominent users who are exempt from the platform's rules.

At press time, Facebook allowed ads for a children's book titled Who Was Fidel Castro?, which describes the Communist leader as "a boy who...