Wednesday, March 2, 2022
The Left Loves Its Rainbow Demons....
There rides the Rainbow Demon
On his horse of crimson fire
Black shadows are following closely
On the heels of his desire
Riding on in the mist of morning
No one dared to stand in his way
Possessed by some distant calling
Riding on through night and day
Blogs With Rule 5 Links
The Other McCain has: Rule 5 Sunday: Return From Reno Double-Scoop Edition
Proof Positive has: Best Of Web Link Around
The Woodsterman has: Rule 5 Woodsterman Style
EBL has: Rule 5 And FMJRA
The Right Way has: Rule 5 Saturday LinkORama
The Pirate's Cove has: Sorta Blogless Sunday Pinup
Special Counsel Finds Zuckerberg’s Election Millions Violated Bribery Laws in Wisconsin; Leaves it to Assembly to Decertify
The special counsel who investigated the November 2020 election in Wisconsin, determined in a 135-page report Tuesday that the nearly $9 million in election grants provided to Center for Tech and Civic Life by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, violated a Wisconsin election bribery law.
Special Counsel Michael Gableman, a former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice, was tasked by Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos to investigate the election.
Gableman said in his report that it is up to the Wisconsin Assembly to decide whether the 2020 election results should be decertified.
“This Report is not intended to reanalyze the re-count that occurred in late 2020,” he wrote. “And the purpose of this Report is not to challenge certification of the Presidential election, though in Appendix II we do sketch how that might be done. Any decisions in that vein must be made by the elected representatives of the people, that is, the Wisconsin Legislature. Yet it is clear that Wisconsin election officials’ unlawful conduct in the 2020 Presidential election casts grave doubt on Wisconsin’s 2020 Presidential election certification.”
Republican State Rep. Timothy Ramthun has for months been calling for a Joint Resolution to decertify Wisconsin’s electoral votes, and made it a major theme in his run for governor. Vos and Wis. State Rep. Jim Steineke both staunchly oppose decertification.
Gableman listed eight items he refers to as “unlawful conduct and irregularities.”
1. Election officials’ use of absentee ballot drop boxes in violation of Wis. Stat. § 6.87(4)(b)1 and § 6.855;The former state Supreme Court Justice spoke at a public hearing on Tuesday in front of the Committee on Campaigns and Elections.
2. The Center for Tech and Civic Life’s $8,800,000 Zuckerberg Plan Grants being run in the Cities of Milwaukee, Madison, Racine, 8 Kenosha and Green Bay constituting Election Bribery Under Wis. Stat. § 12.11;
3. WEC’s failing to maintain a sufficiently accurate WisVote voter database, as determined by the Legislative Audit Bureau;
4. The Cities of Milwaukee, Madison, Racine, Kenosha and Green Bay engaging private companies in election administration in unprecedented ways, including tolerating unauthorized users and unauthorized uses of WisVote private voter data under Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) policies, such as sharing voter data for free that would have cost the public $12,500;
5. As the Racine County Sheriff’s Office has concluded, WEC unlawfully directed the municipal clerks not to send out the legally required special voting deputies to nursing homes, resulting in many nursing homes’ registered residents voting at 100% rates and many ineligible residents voting, despite a guardianship order or incapacity;
6. Unlawful voting by wards-under-guardianship left unchecked by Wisconsin election officials, where WEC failed to record that information in the State’s WisVote voter database, despite its availability through the circuit courts—all in violation of the federal Help America Vote Act.
7. WEC’s failure to record non-citizens in the WisVote voter database, thereby permitting non-citizens to vote, even though Wisconsin law requires citizenship to vote—all in violation of the Help America Vote Act. Unlawful voting by non-citizens left unchecked by Wisconsin election officials, with WEC failing to record that information in the State’s WisVote voter database; and
8. Wisconsin election officials’ and WEC’s violation of Federal and Wisconsin Equal Protection Clauses by failing to treat all voters the same in the same election.
He said that multiple polls in Wisconsin indicate a bipartisan distrust in the state’s elections.
Gableman noted that in every Wisconsin county that received Zuckerberg funding, nursing homes reported 100 percent turnout.
In addition to the nursing home fraud, he said “we had the specter of private, dark money—unaccountable to anyone—coming in, and taking an active role in the actual administrative process of our public elections—something that is unprecedented, as far as I know, in the history of this state.”
Gableman testified that the nation’s faith in its election system has been shaken and his goal is to “cure various systemic problems in the state.” He urged the legislature to act this month to rectify the situation before...
Surprise: Mussolini Was Not the First Fascist
So the question becomes this: what is fascism, and where did it originate? Consensus often points to post–World War I Italy. However, that old belief is starting to crumble. Fascism and its state-oriented mixed economy appear to have an earlier starting date. Some scholars are now pointing at Soviet Russia.
Benito Mussolini may be the world's most notorious fascist, but he was not the first to introduce socioeconomic and political fascism to the world. In actuality, this Italian Marxist intellectual simply popularized the word. The socioeconomic mechanics behind Fascism came from another Marxist, one deep inside Russia. He was a Russian revolutionary whom Mussolini lionized: Vladimir Lenin.
After Lenin secured control of Russia in 1921, his unrelenting nationalization of the Soviet economy finally collapsed. Moscow and other Russian cities transformed into walking-dead hellscapes. Most factories and mills closed. Most Russians were starving. Workers fled to the countryside to find food. Hundreds of violent riots spread across the land. Lenin and the communists were almost overthrown. Karl Marx's dreams of a socialist worker's paradise had failed.
Under these dire conditions, Lenin had to change direction. He reluctantly rolled back the communist economic system and established a mixed economy: the state still owned the big industries but allowed small companies, farmers, and individuals to exist and engage in open commerce. At this point, Lenin embraced Marxist-lite Fascism by supporting an alternative "third way" between socialism and capitalism, a concept Lenin and Mussolini called "state capitalism." The political sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset concurred, arguing that Fascism is "extremism of the center," referring to its reliance on a mixed economy. He contended that Fascism is not right-wing because Mussolini did not plan to restore monarchical or aristocratic privilege.
In 1921, Lenin dubbed his revised economic policies the New Economic Policy (NEP), which introduced a form of "market socialism," "crony capitalism," or what he approvingly termed "state capitalism." Lenin described this change as the "development of capitalism under the control and regulation of the proletarian state." This meant that fascism was not the "last stage of capitalism" as Marxist historians have maintained, but the first stage of a pullback from the economic and political failures of Marxism-Leninism. Lenin's policies to mitigate the defects of absolute nationalization and communism spawned the NEP and produced a fascist economy.
Under his NEP policies, Lenin said he would allow "a free market and capitalism, both subject to state control," while socialized state enterprises would operate on "a profit basis." His policy even allowed the ownership of small companies, which were privatized from former state-owned enterprises. And by initiating a mixed economy in 1921 and early 1922, Lenin became the world's first fascist dictator, over a year before Mussolini was appointed Italy's prime minister in late 1922.
Who makes such a bold claim? It was Peter Drucker, the famous professor of politics, philosophy, and management, who lived in Germany in the early 1930s. He asserted that fascism came out of communism in his 1939 The End of Economic Man. He wrote, "Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion. ... Communism in anything but name was abandoned in Russia when the Five-Year Plan was substituted for the New Economic Policy (NEP)."
Since Mussolini, Lenin, and Trotsky were Marxist chums in Switzerland, it is not surprising that Mussolini closely watched Lenin and his regime with keen interest. Considering himself a disciple of Lenin, Mussolini proposed that Italy should officially recognize the Soviet Union in 1923. According to Stanley G. Payne in his History of Fascism, 1914–1945, "[n]ot only was Italy the first Western country to recognize the Soviet Union in 1924, but the new Soviet art first appeared in the West that year at the Venice Biennale, Italy's premiere art show." In the Italian elections of 1919, as the leader of the Fascist Revolutionary Party, Mussolini publicly compared himself to Lenin, bragging that he was the...
Under his NEP policies, Lenin said he would allow "a free market and capitalism, both subject to state control," while socialized state enterprises would operate on "a profit basis." His policy even allowed the ownership of small companies, which were privatized from former state-owned enterprises. And by initiating a mixed economy in 1921 and early 1922, Lenin became the world's first fascist dictator, over a year before Mussolini was appointed Italy's prime minister in late 1922.
Who makes such a bold claim? It was Peter Drucker, the famous professor of politics, philosophy, and management, who lived in Germany in the early 1930s. He asserted that fascism came out of communism in his 1939 The End of Economic Man. He wrote, "Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion. ... Communism in anything but name was abandoned in Russia when the Five-Year Plan was substituted for the New Economic Policy (NEP)."
Since Mussolini, Lenin, and Trotsky were Marxist chums in Switzerland, it is not surprising that Mussolini closely watched Lenin and his regime with keen interest. Considering himself a disciple of Lenin, Mussolini proposed that Italy should officially recognize the Soviet Union in 1923. According to Stanley G. Payne in his History of Fascism, 1914–1945, "[n]ot only was Italy the first Western country to recognize the Soviet Union in 1924, but the new Soviet art first appeared in the West that year at the Venice Biennale, Italy's premiere art show." In the Italian elections of 1919, as the leader of the Fascist Revolutionary Party, Mussolini publicly compared himself to Lenin, bragging that he was the...
Joe Biden’s State Of The Union Previewed Dems’ Fake Attempt To Walk Back Their Culture War
Joe Biden’s ”State of the Union” address clearly marked an attempt by his White House to make their culture war seem like an afterthought. It’s not, of course, as evidenced by the president’s description of abortion as “health care” and his demand that Congress pass the radical Equality Act. But the bulk of Biden’s speech focused on “meat and potatoes,” as Chris Hayes repeatedly claimed during MSNBC’s coverage.
It’s true, Biden dedicated much of his address to Ukraine, infrastructure, the economy, health care, and Covid-19. He earned a robust round of applause with a line that said, “We should all agree the answer is not to defund the police. It is to fund the police.” He touched on guns, immigration, and the environment, but they were hardly his focus. Notably, Joy Reid lamented the absence of Jan. 6 from Biden’s address, arguing it was characteristically devoid of “red meat.”
Reid was right to find that balance remarkable. Rather than signaling a shift away from Democrats’ scorched-earth culture war, Biden’s speech signaled a shift away from the party’s strategy of obsessing over identity politics. This comes with an enormous caveat: Democrats cannot and will not meaningfully make any such pivot beyond rhetoric.
Until they’re willing to drop truly radical policies like the Equality Act, it’s all smoke and mirrors meant to distract voters from what they’re actually doing to the culture. Democrats cannot simply pretend the summer of 2020 and the lockdowns never happened, no matter how much the media might help them try, because the party has now spent years committing to inflated definitions of bigotry that would condemn any moderation from their positions.
Sure, voters have short memories and the media is complicit. But these definitions are now baked into our institutions. They are ingrained in the minds of a generation. They’re clung to by journalists and activists that Democrats need to please.
Samuel Goldman of George Washington University disrupted the annual flood of breathless SOTU tweets with a great reminder on Tuesday night. “Guys, this speech is not for you,” he wrote. “It’s for D-leaners who disapprove of the administration and these are the lines that worked for them in focus groups. Don’t overthink it.”
That’s exactly right and it’s also why Biden’s “meat and potatoes” tone felt different. From recalls and losses like Terry McAuliffe’s to Biden’s dismal ratings to Covid missteps and brutal new polls, establishment Democrats (and even their allies in the corporate press) are worried enough about their power to start making small sacrifices in the culture war, even if they’re superficial.
And they have to be superficial, because establishment Democrats have spent years emboldening the cultural left, so much that small departures from dogma are now treated as bigotry by a vocal minority of their base. While those voices may be a minority of the base, many of them are very powerful, and they can weaponize all of Democrats’ prior cultural leftism against them to level accusations of racism and sexism and all the other -isms over rhetoric alone. See this tweet Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo., blasted out to her 900,000 followers after the speech.
Woke and Stupid: As Russia Invades Ukraine, U.S. Army Gives Mandatory Training on Gender Identity
We can only hope that the madness in Ukraine doesn’t escalate to the extent that the U.S. military ends up getting involved. It’s clear that Gen. Mark Milley and the rest of the brass have learned absolutely no lessons from Afghanistan and are determined to repeat the same mistakes that led up to the catastrophically mishandled withdrawal from Kabul. If the Army were called upon to move into Ukraine, which would be an indication that the situation there had gotten wildly out of control, it isn’t at all clear that today’s woke force would pose a significant threat even to the manifestly weak and sluggish Russian forces. An American army presence in Ukraine would likely herald World War III, and we hope it won’t come to that, but if it does, look out.
These are the priorities of Milley’s thoroughly modern military: early in February, Army officers were forced to sit through an official and mandatory presentation entitled “Policy on the Military Service of Transgender Persons and Persons with Gender Dysphoria.” According to the Washington Free Beacon, the presentation gives “training on gender pronouns and coaching officers on when to offer soldiers gender transition surgery.”
While Vladimir Putin’s army was preparing to invade Ukraine, officers of the U.S. Army were learning that they have to refer to some men as “she” and “her” if they want to keep their jobs, and be attentive for moments when it might be appropriate to offer Private Jack a chance to become Private Jill (no doubt soon to be Seargent First Class Jill, for being such a useful soldier of the zeitgeist).
According to an Army spokesman, this woke presentation was “mandatory training,” and was “used to train Army personnel on the recent changes to the DoD and Army transgender service policy.” The Free Beacon reports, “all Army personnel, from soldiers to commanders and supervisors, are required to participate in the training by Sept. 30, 2022, according to the spokesman.”
All this is part of “a larger push by the Biden administration to make the military more welcoming to transgender people.” The presentation states, “The Army allows transgender soldiers to serve openly. An otherwise qualified soldier shall not be involuntarily separated, discharged, or denied reenlistment or continuation of service on the basis of gender identity.”
In a sane society, a man who thinks he is a woman, or a woman who thinks she is a man, would be recognized as suffering from a severe psychological disorder, such that he or she would not be seen as “otherwise qualified.” But the military’s presentation offers the hypothetical scenario of a “soldier who was assigned male at birth” but “says he identifies as a female” and “lives as a female in his off-duty hours.” This language reveals how this entire business is a fantasy from start to finish: human beings are not “assigned” a gender at birth, as if the baby is neuter until a doctor or parent decides it will be a boy or a girl. The baby is a boy or a girl; all the doctor and the parents do is notice which one.
The presentation directs that if a male soldier believes he is female but “is not requesting to be treated as a female while on duty,” he should be left alone. However, if the soldier “later requests to be identified as a female during duty hours and/or experiences increased distress relating to his gender identity,” an officer must “inform [the] soldier of the Army’s transgender policy and recommend that he sees a...
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