Was at a travel center yesterday and they had CNN on. Astonishing the theatrics, propaganda, and what they consider or try to pass on as “Evidence” to support their narratives. While I may be crazy, I am nowhere near some of the Leftist nut-jobs that post on this site. Hell, I have more respect for the paid, high volume cut and paste Leftist posters with multiple active social media accounts than the low information wack-jobs who suck it all in. The current themes CNN seems to be employing are “Now that Trump is out, there is competence in leadership” and “We shall present our propaganda in a calm assured manner as to convey professionalism”. Laughable, but to be expected. If I had the time, I would obtain fair use clips of their presentations and provide critical analysis how CNN is able to sell their propaganda to non critical or low information viewers. While most of the non paid Leftist posters on this site are smart, they are certainly not critically thinking. Perhaps for them, CNN has value, maybe deep psychological value as entertainment or self-validation for their glass-half full outlooks. Amazing how otherwise smart people do not pick up on CNN’s lies, distortions, “error” of omissions, out of context statements, blatant bias, unreasonable frame referencing, and other manipulations. On a positive note, Bugenhagen is apparently taking a posting break and applying time saved towards helping people. Good of him. As for myself, I’m thinking of limiting my posting to 30 minutes or so per week for better life balance. Perhaps I’ll be able to find a niche to help people as well, such as something education related that emphasizes critical reasoning.
what part of the word illegal don't these criminals understand? https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/10/us/politics/trump-georgia-investigation.html Georgia Prosecutors Open Criminal Investigation of Trump Phone Call Fulton County prosecutors have sent letters to state officials instructing them to preserve documents related to “attempts to influence” the Georgia election, including a call in which former President Donald J. Trump asked the Georgia secretary of state to “find” votes. ATLANTA — Prosecutors in Fulton County have initiated a criminal investigation into former President Donald J. Trump’s attempts to overturn Georgia’s election results, including a phone call he made to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in which Mr. Trump pressured him to “find” enough votes to help him reverse his loss. On Wednesday, Fani Willis, the recently elected Democratic prosecutor in Fulton County, sent a letter to numerous officials in state government, including Mr. Raffensperger, requesting that they preserve documents related to “an investigation into attempts to influence the administration of the 2020 Georgia General Election.” While the letter does not mention Mr. Trump by name, it is related to his intervention in Georgia’s election, according to a state official with knowledge of the matter. A copy of the letter was obtained by The New York Times. “This investigation includes, but is not limited to, potential violations of Georgia law prohibiting the solicitation of election fraud, the making of false statements to state and local governmental bodies, conspiracy, racketeering, violation of oath of office and any involvement in violence or threats related to the election’s administration,” the letter states.
Look what I rediscovered: From https://www.elitetrader.com/et/thre...on-fraud-please-answer-both-questions.326973/ Is It Time For Algorithms That Flag Potential Election Fraud? -- Please Answer Both Questions. Algorithms exist for almost everything else from credit card theft to consumer preferences. So why not for election fraud? Not to change or negate counts, but to flag highly unlikely results for further investigation. An article I read a few days ago got me to thinking about this... it said something to the effect that new ballots were discovered in Florida that favored democrats 3 to 1 in an area that was previously 2 to 1. There may very well be legitimate reasons for the shift. But if not, how likely is that due to chance? Please provide your intuitive responses to the following two questions before I post the answers (or you calculate them). Elections are not random processes like drawing colored balls from urns and this is an artificial oversimplification. But it does serve a useful purpose that I'll explain after replies are posted. Again, I'm looking for intuitive responses only. Please do not calculate anything. Situation: CNN County has an endless supply of voters and they favor democrats 2 to 1. Voting has ended. 500,000 votes were cast that favored democrats almost exactly 2 to 1. Question 1: 1,000 more votes are found. Assume all 1,000 voters who cast them are a random sample of the CNN County population. What is the probability that those 1,000 votes favor democrats 3 to 1 or better? Question 2: 10,000 more votes are found. Assume all 10,000 voters who cast them are a random sample of the CNN County population. What is the probability that those 10,000 votes favor democrats 3 to 1 or better? Answer from near the end of linked thread: Nobody wants to take a shot at the answers? OK. Here they are. With a brief preamble. Let's drop the strawmen. This is not about trying to "prove" fraud in Florida. But news reports from Florida got me thinking and I started this thread to show how counter-intuitive vote count probabilities can be. Why? If votes are suddenly "found" that deviate significantly from overall ratios (e.g. from 2:1 to 3:1) there had better be good reasons. Because the odds of it happening by chance alone are astronomically small. If liberal Unicorn Village's sealed ballots were accidentally misplaced for a few hours, no problem. But a suspicious scenario would be if a large number of ballots breaking 3:1 or more are suddenly "found" that had been randomly set aside throughout the day because of random machine breakdowns in otherwise 2:1 areas. The problem, as stated in the OP, is answered using the binomial CDF. For perspective I'll answer questions 1 & 2 in terms of the odds of winning the Powerball Jackpot (approx. 1 in 292,000,000 with one ticket). Answer to Question 1: 333 expected republican votes versus 250 or less actually obtained is no big deal, right? Wrong! You're more likely to win the Powerball Jackpot with just two tickets. Answer to Question 2: 3,333 expected republican votes versus 2,500 or less actually obtained is nothing to be concerned about, right? That's even less likely... a lot less. You have a better chance of winning the Powerball Jackpot 8 times in a row with just one ticket per drawing. If you object to the problem as stated in the OP because in real life we'd be sampling withoutreplacement from a finite population, fine. In that case the hypergeometric distribution wouldapply. The probabilities don't change much and the above answers would still be correct. In the 2020 US Presidential Election, the anomalies observed dwarfed the scenario or actual data that former ET poster Poindexter used as an example. This seems to suggest that Democrats winning the key battle ground states in 2020 is kind of like winning every lottery ever using the exact same numbers. You wouldn’t want to call it election fraud however. You might get sued.
Look at this laughable claim Trumpers have been making.... "Trump Won Two-Thirds of Election Lawsuits Where Merits Considered" https://www.politifact.com/factchec...did-not-win-two-thirds-election-lawsuits-whe/ Trump did not win two-thirds of election lawsuits ‘where merits considered’ If Your Time is short Former President Donald Trump and his allies have won one lawsuit related to the results of the 2020 election. It did not prove that widespread voter fraud contributed to President Joe Biden’s win. The database the Epoch Times relied on includes election-related lawsuits dating back to March 2020. Not all of them list the Trump campaign as a complainant, and some aren’t directly related to the general presidential election. Experts told us that just because a case is dismissed on procedural grounds does not mean it wasn’t duly considered. The Epoch Times revised its Feb. 7 headline after we reached out. See the sources for this fact-check Donald Trump and his allies filed dozens of lawsuits in state and federal courts seeking to challenge the results of the 2020 election. Some Trump-friendly websites make it seem like the former president prevailed in the majority of them. The Feb. 7 headline of an article from the Epoch Times, a media outlet backed by the Falun Gong religious movement, said: "Trump Won Two-Thirds of Election Lawsuits Where Merits Considered." "Of the 22 cases that have been heard by the courts and decided on their merits, Trump and Republicans have prevailed in 15," the site wrote. "This means Trump has won two-thirds of the cases fully adjudicated by the courts." The article was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.) The Epoch Times attributed the tally to John Droz Jr., who it described as a "physicist and environmental advocate in Morehead City, N.C." Droz is a political activist who has denied the science of climate change and advocated against legislation aimed at mitigating sea-level rise. None of the lawsuits filed by Trump and his supporters have proved there was fraud, and judges across the political spectrum have rejected their cases. But we wanted to take a closer look at the claim that the challenges were more successful than they appear. The Epoch Times’ headline gives the impression that Trump won several election-related lawsuits on their merits. But only one of the cases cited by the article was decided after Nov. 3, many were not exclusively about Trump, and some were not related to the general presidential election at all. "No one from the Epoch Times spoke to me about their article, so they made their own conclusions," Droz told PolitiFact. After we reached out to the Epoch Times for a comment, the website changed its headline to read: "In Two-Thirds of Election Lawsuits Where Merits Considered Decisions Are Favorable to Trump." Trump won one post-election lawsuit In its article, the Epoch Times cited an analysis of "81 lawsuits that were filed in connection with the Nov. 3, 2020 presidential election." Droz and a team of volunteers spearheaded that work and published their findings in a public spreadsheet. It includes cases spanning from March to December 2020 and links to copies of lawsuits published by the Healthy Elections Project, an initiative from Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Between November and December, Trump and his allies lost dozens of lawsuits seeking to overturn the election results. Some cases were rejected because plaintiffs failed to prove widespread voter fraud. In a statement on his website, Droz conceded that the majority of the cases he logged have nothing to do with allegations of voter fraud. The Epoch Times also included that disclaimer in its article. "The article (and our former and current headlines) clearly indicate that these are lawsuits related to the election, not about the election results," the Epoch Times’ public relations team wrote in an email. "And the article (and the Droz spreadsheet) indicate the cases involve Trump or the GOP — a lawsuit's outcome can be favorable to Trump even if he is not the plaintiff." In his spreadsheet, Droz found that "Trump and/or the GOP plaintiff prevailed in 15 out of 21 cases decided on the merits" related to the election. "Decided on merits" a note in the spreadsheet says, means the plaintiff "was able to argue the facts of the case, and, if applicable, given opportunity to present evidence via discovery." That’s more or less how the Cornell Legal Information Institute defines the term. The opposite of adjudicating cases on their merits is deciding them on procedural grounds. For example, some lawsuits filed by Trump and his allies were dismissed because they contained errors or faced jurisdictional problems. Of the 15 cases in Droz’s spreadsheet, three were filed on or after Election Day. None of them involved allegations of voter fraud. And of those three, just one case, filed Nov. 4, had to do with the election results. It centered on reducing the amount of time Pennsylvania voters had to fix errors on their mail-in ballots. The Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee were granted an injunction against the secretary of state to prevent extending the proof of ID period by three days. The matter involved a small number of ballots that didn’t change the outcome. "Trump won one case in the post-election and lost 64," said Marc Elias, a partner at the Perkins Coie law firm who has represented Democrats in the lawsuits. Trump has not prevailed in any cases that allege voter fraud or seek to overturn the election results. "The key place to challenge election results is in state court election contests. Trump and his allies brought a few and lost because he did not have evidence of any error or wrongdoing in any state that could have affected the results," said Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine. "Those cases are hard to win by design, and so Trump and his allies shifted to other suits, such as those in federal court, making legally dubious claims." Pre-election cases not all about Trump Trump and his allies have only won one lawsuit since Election Day. But what about those filed prior to Nov. 3? We looked at each of the lawsuits that Droz noted as a victory for Trump on their merits, dating back to March 2020. Among them are cases like RNC v. Miller and Texas v. Hollins, which blocked election officials from prepopulating mail ballots with voter information and sending applications to all registered voters. Other cases are not directly about Trump or his claims about mail ballots, such as a federal court’s decision to stay an injunction that delayed Arizona’s voter registration deadline by 18 days. "What we are trying to do is to identify all lawsuits related to the 2020 presidential election," Droz said. "In other words, these are not all directly about Trump. For example, most of them have to do with things like whether modified state election laws were changed legally."But some of the cases Droz counted as wins for Trump and the GOP aren’t directly related to the general presidential election. For example, Jefferson v. Dane County, filed in late March, sought to order an election official in Wisconsin to remove a Facebook post about the proper use of "indefinitely confined" status for voters requesting absentee ballots. Ritchie v. Polis, filed in May, had to do with whether a petition to put a measure on the ballot in Colorado had to be signed in the presence of a ballot circulator during the coronavirus pandemic. Among Droz’s tally of wins for "Trump and/or the GOP plaintiff," the Trump campaign was a complainant on four successful election lawsuits, two of which were filed prior to Nov. 3. Justin Levitt, a constitutional law professor at Loyola Marymount University, said, numbers aside, the focus on cases decided on their merits paints a misleading picture of the Trump campaign’s election litigation. "The procedural dismissals aren’t all small things," Levitt said. "Some of them are bad lawyering. But some of them are dismissals, because Trump supporters tried to challenge laws well over a year after they were passed, well after ballots had gone out to eligible voters who had the right to rely on the fact that the ballots they were receiving were lawful, and well after the election was over." Our ruling The Epoch Times wrote Feb. 7 that Trump won "two-thirds of election lawsuits where merits (were) considered." That claim is not literally true. The Epoch Times revised its headline after we reached out. Trump and his allies have won one lawsuit related to the results of the 2020 election, and that case did not prove that widespread voter fraud affected the outcome. Judges across the political spectrum have rejected dozens of other cases filed after Nov. 3 that sought to overturn the election. Just because a case is dismissed on procedural grounds does not mean it wasn’t duly considered. While the body of the Epoch Times’ story contains some of that nuance, its previous headline did not. We rate it False.
Epoch Times = China The Epoch Times is a far-right international multi-language newspaper and media company affiliated with the Falun Gong new religious movement, based in Midtown Manhattan. The newspaper is part of the Epoch Media Group, which also operates New Tang Dynasty Television.
The plot thickens... Time Magazine Gushingly Profiles The Successful ‘Conspiracy’ To Rig The 2020 Election Time magazine's article intones the 'Trump is crazy' mantra over his claims of a 'rigged' election while telling anyone who reads it how powerful people conspired to rig the 2020 election. By Joy Pullmann FEBRUARY 9, 2021 Corporate media has spent the last year arguing that Donald Trump’s claims about 2020 election integrity amount to “seditious” conspiracy theories. While maintaining that narrative despite the cognitive dissonance, Time magazine’s Feb. 15 cover story pulls back the curtain on a “conspiracy” among a “well-funded cabal of powerful people” in an “an extraordinary shadow effort” that successfully pushed Trump from office. “In a way, Trump was right,” writes Time national political correspondent Molly Ball. “There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes.” She later describes this “conspiracy” as something that “sounds like a paranoid fever dream — a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.” Trump was treated like he had three heads for complaining the election was “rigged.” In the infamous speech he gave as violence broke out in the U.S. Capitol the day Congress certified the Electoral College votes, Trump said, “This year they rigged the election. They rigged it like they’ve never rigged an election before.” The left and some Republicans like Rep. Liz Cheney have insisted Trump’s strong claims like this incited an “insurrection.” Yet Ball makes exactly these kinds of claims in the Time article, and goes on to substantiate them. It’s really hard to tell if the article is just a gloating bat flip, a horrifying attempt to radicalize more people among Democrats’ political opposition, or evidence the left believes Americans are so deadened under Democrat control they will not react to such public revelations of conspiracies to betray American self-governance. The article is above all a striking work of doublespeak. It intones the “Trump is crazy” mantra at Trump’s charges of election-rigging while telling how powerful people conspired to rig the 2020 election. Ball documents a massive election-manipulation “conspiracy” among the nation’s rich and powerful. She shows an amazing level of contempt combined with ignorance about how someone who believes in self-government, as opposed to rule by oligarchs, might take this information. Election Tampering The conspiracy’s “work touched every aspect of the election,” Ball writes. “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.” This, she and the “dozens” of conspiracists she interviewed claim, is evidence of their efforts to “protect the election.” In fact, all of these tactics weaken election integrity. For example, mail-in ballots are known as an unreliable voting method, even without its potential assistance to criminal fraud such as ballot-stuffing, because they create margins of error well within the margin of actual votes in a close election. That’s why labor unions, Jeff Bezos, and many foreign countries refuse to use them. Therefore, in a mail-in election such as 2020, in which half of the total votes and most of the Biden votes were mail-in, one can control the outcome simply by controlling the poll-watchers and vote-counters. Even if they are honest, their unconscious bias or the simple mayhem of unreadable handwriting and signatures creates the conditions for untrustworthy results. We have no way of knowing how many of the approximately 65 million 2020 election mail-in ballots were legal — meaning, how many fully complied with all applicable state laws to be validly completed by eligible voters. It could be all of them. It might not be. Nobody with power seems to care to find out. Joe Biden “won,” and the bad orange man is finally gone. That’s all that matters to them, and anyone who has any concerns or questions is simply a stupid bigot, end of story, move along, nothing to see here, shut up you white supremacist domestic terrorist or we’ll put you in jail without any bail — you’re so lucky we haven’t already. One of the core problems with the 2020 election is that many states did not follow their voting laws, suspending them with the excuse of COVID (which the Centers for Disease Control saidthe day before the election, after most votes were already cast, was not necessary). States were pressured or forced to do so, not by what Ball hilariously calls Trump’s “henchmen,” but by lawyered-up leftist pressure groups that strategically undermined election protections with pre-emptive lawsuits while courts rolled over for them. These leftist lawyers were unquestionably the aggressors in this situation, as Hans van Spakovsky and others have documented, filing as many as four times the number of lawsuits Trump or Republicans filed. Their efforts caused the very “election confusion” Ball claims her vaunted “conspiracy” was trying to avoid. What do you call people who do one thing while claiming to do the opposite? Idiots or liars. And I don’t think these people are idiots. Control the Information, Control the People This “conspiracy” also rigged the election by pre-emptively controlling the information voters were able to receive about the candidates. They did this by colluding with big tech companies to hide information that made Joe Biden look bad. Post-election research found that just the conspiracy’s successful information control on Hunter Biden’s alleged corruption and its potential links to his father would have been enough to tip the election. “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. After Election Day, they monitored every pressure point to ensure that Trump could not overturn the result,” Ball writes. The article shows how these activists pushed a narrative that election results would not be known on election night as part of their campaign to box out Trump. It then openly admits to a subsequent orchestrated attempt to anoint Biden the winner before all the votes had been tallied. This is how leftists made their “fever dream” a reality. This coalition had private polling that mirrored the Trump campaign’s internal polling, which differed from the public polling released throughout 2020 that consistently appeared to show Trump far behind. A top “conspiracy” leader “was warning everyone he knew that polls were underestimating Trump’s support,” Ball writes. To counteract this, he sent data to corporate media networks that got them to telegraph that the election results would take time to massage — oops, be counted. The delay made way for a late “surge” of “mail-in ballots” that were just what Biden needed in every place he needed them. “Election night began with many Democrats despairing. Trump was running ahead of pre-election polling, winning Florida, Ohio and Texas easily and keeping Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania too close to call,” Ball noted. But the “conspiracy” leader watched the results unperturbed, she says: “he could tell that as long as all the votes were counted, Trump would lose.” Amazing projection skills, right? Especially considering his “cabal” in reality pushed to declare Biden the winner before “all the votes were counted.” Another major part of this campaign to tamper with the democratic process was leftist’s influence over the media and tech companies that control what Americans learn about the world beyond their own ears and eyeballs. Ball introduces us to “a veteran progressive operative” who “piloted a nameless, secret project, which she has never before publicly discussed, that tracked…dangerous lies that might otherwise spread unnoticed. Researchers then provided information to campaigners or the media to track down the sources and expose them.” It appears from Ball’s reporting that somebody got this research in front of Mark Zuckerberg, who in November 2019 “invited nine civil rights leaders to dinner at his home, where they warned him about the danger of the election-related falsehoods that were already spreading unchecked.” Zuckerberg and his wife’s foundation was subsequently a massive part of the election 2020 “conspiracy.” Not only did Facebook make a massive in-kind contribution to Democrats with information manipulation on the platform, but also Zuckerberg’s foundation gave $350 million in 2020 to local governments to run elections, including “training” election workers. In Georgia, a highly contested state where subsequent Senate runoffs gave Democrats unified control of the federal government, Zuckerberg’s money was suspiciously aligned with hugely positive flips for Democrats. Coincidence? Maybe. Or maybe that’s just a conspiracy theory. Big Business Conspires With Labor The Time article bears close and repeated reading. One last area of observation here concerns its discussion of the alliance between big business and big labor. The “conspiracy” leaders purposefully reached out to people dressed in Republican clothing, like Chambers of Commerce, to use them to help cloak Biden’s coronation in “bipartisan” colors. These double agents’ mission was to convince Republicans to quietly accept the election results, fear violence from leftists, and to provide internal pressure at key postelection choke points like certification votes in cities and states. It all worked. It is certainly no coincidence that from 2020 to 2021, Republicans’ satisfaction with big business plummeted 26 points to 31 percent. The Wall Street Journal says that’s likely due to corporations increasingly choosing to “bypass[] the political process and interven[] directly to transform highly contested parts of American life.” No kidding. Amid the big business-big labor discussion, Ball’s interviewees admit the leftist rioters who terrorized America throughout 2020 did so with the tacit permission of higher-ups, who can turn the riots on and off at will. That will be cold comfort to those who lost more than 30 family members in the riots and hundreds more in the subsequent murder sprees enabled the unrest pushing police to stand down from their jobs. “Activists began preparing to reprise” the George Floyd riots as it looked like Trump was about to win, Ball writes. Their “Protect the Results” coalition “had a map listing 400 planned postelection demonstrations, to be activated via text message as soon as Nov. 4. To stop the coup they feared, the left was ready to flood the streets.” But a curious thing happened on the way to this nationwide riot. The white-collar “conspiracy” leaders called off their thugs. Their nonviolent plan to “fortify the election” was working. Violence wasn’t needed at the moment. “[T]he word went out: stand down,” Ball writes. What a convenient little violent militia these people have, all at the summons of a text message! ‘Democracy’ Means No One Can Vote Against Us The “conspiracy” of longtime Democrat activists who want Trump dead wasn’t about making sure he lost, Ball repeatedly insists while writing an entire article indicating the opposite. It was about “protecting democracy.” Left unstated is the context leftists have been stating for Trump’s entire tenure: they consider him “democracy’s” Public Enemy Number 1. In this same article, Ball herself writes that leftist activists considered it their mission to “oppose Trump’s assault on democracy.” To them, forcing him from office is synonymous with “democracy.” As leftists activists made explicit in their plans to “shut down the country” if Trump clearly won, to them it was impossible for “democracy” to result in Trump’s election. “Every attempt to interfere with the proper outcome of the election was defeated,” “conspiracy” member Ian Bassin told Ball (emphasis added). Heads Joe Biden wins, tails Donald Trump loses. In games, we call that “rigging.” In sports, we call it “cheating.” So when they say they suspended election laws and threatened deadly violence to “protect democracy,” what all these people really mean is they worked to rig the election against Trump. They just think you are too stupid to put those two statements together. And they are apparently too narcissistic to hide their masterfully successful plotting. As John Davidson says, the ruling class hates you, and they think you are stupid. In fact, they work to make you stupid and helpless, then laugh about it in your face afterward. A numerical error in this article has been corrected. Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Sign up here to get early access to her next book, "How To Control The Internet So It Doesn’t Control You." Her bestselling ebook is "Classic Books for Young Children." A Hillsdale College honors graduate, @JoyPullmann is also the author of "The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids," from Encounter Books. Photo Tyler Merbler / Flickr https://thefederalist.com/2021/02/0...ccessful-conspiracy-to-rig-the-2020-election/
Animal Farm revisited. Except it is now a real life nightmare according to the author od the article below. His concluding remarks: The revolutionary animals are now running the farm in a way that would be nightmarish even to Farmer Jones. They won. They are now one with—but also far, far worse than—what they rebelled against. The author’s story from the beginning: Our Animal Farm The Left’s 1960s dream is America’s 2021 nightmare. By Victor Davis Hanson February 7, 2021 George Orwell published Animal Farm in August 1945, in the closing weeks of the Pacific War. Even then, most naïve supporters of the wartime Soviet-British-American alliance were no longer in denial about the contours of Moscow’s impending postwar communist aggression. The short, allegorical novel’s human-like farm animals replay the transition of supposedly 1917 revolutionary Bolsheviks into cynical 1930s Stalinists. Thereby, they remind us that leftist totalitarianism inevitably becomes far worse than the supposed parasitical capitalists they once toppled. Orwell saw that the desire for power stamps out all ideological pretenses. It creates an untouchable ruling clique central to all totalitarian movements. Beware, he warns, of the powerful who claim to help the helpless. Something so far less violent, but no less bizarre and disturbing, now characterizes the American New New Left. It is completing its final Animal Farm metamorphosis as it finishes its long march through our cultural, economic, and social institutions. Leftists may talk of revolutionary transformation, but their agenda is to help friends, punish enemies, and to keep and expand power. First, remember the 1960s and 1970s agendas of the once impotent, young, and supposedly idealistic leftist revolutionaries. We were lectured 60 years ago that “free speech” preserves were needed on university campuses to be immune from all reactionary administrative censorship. Transparency and “truth” were the revolution’s brands. The First Amendment was said by them to be sacred, even as the “free speech movement” transitioned to the “filthy speech movement.” Leftists sued to mainstream nudity in film. They wanted easy access to pornography. They mainstreamed crude profanity. The supposed right-wingers were repressed. They were the “control freaks” who sought to stop the further “liberation” of the common culture. In those days, the ACLU still defined the right of free expression as protecting the odious, whether the unhinged Nazis, the pathetic old-Left Communists, or nihilistic Weather Underground terrorists. “Censorship” was a dirty word. It purportedly involved the religious bigots and medieval minds that in vain had tried to cancel ideological and cultural mavericks and geniuses from Lenny Bruce to Dalton Trumbo. “Banned in Boston” was a sign of cretinism. Only drunken “paranoids” like Joe McCarthy resorted to “blacklists.” We were reminded that the inferior nuts tried to cancel the brilliant careers of their betters whom they disliked, or feared. The Right supposedly had sunk into fluoride and “precious bodily fluid” paranoias, and “Who lost China?” conspiracy theories. Conservatives, the radicals lectured us, masked the poverty of their thinking by “red-baiting.” They talked as if “commies” and “insurrectionists” were around every corner—in hopes of militarizing the country, and using police and troops to intimidate the “people.” Snooping, surveillance, wiretaps—all that and more was awful—the purported work of nutty J. Edgar Hoover. His flat-topped, wing-tipped “G-men” usually outnumbered Black Panthers, Weathermen, and SDS members at secret strategy sessions. Hollywood went wild in the 1960s and 1970s by warning us about “them.” Endless movies detailed the solo efforts of heroes, who were watched and threatened by the “government,” working hand in glove, of course, with either corporations or the “rich.” In films like “Three Days of the Condor,” “The Conversation,” or “Blowup,” we were warned of the nefarious powers of surveillance. Fearing Russia was the mark of a conspiracist nut. In films like “The Russians are Coming, the Russians Are Coming,” we were reminded that the paranoia about the Soviets was as deadly as the Soviets themselves, who were pleasant enough, not much different from us. Students in the 1960s high schools were spoon-fed Nineteen Eighty-Four, Animal Farm, Brave New World, and other dystopian novels. Orwell and Huxley warned them of the dangers of a super-spy apparat, a one-party state that reorders a docile subservient population, and the combination of “science” with thought control—the sort of stuff that Nixon or Goldwater was no doubt plotting. So better to be an individualist, the Left preached, a rebel at war with all orthodoxy and conformity, a “Rebel Without a Cause,” Holden Caulfield, or one of the good renegades in “The Wild Ones.” We were to worship James Dean, Marlon Brando, and Steve McQueen because they were “free,” “didn’t give a s—t,” and demolished “the Man’s” silly imposed “rules and regulations.” “Easy Rider” was the 1960’s bible. On campus, professors began to drop F-bombs in class. They dressed like students, tore down hierarchies between student and teacher (“Just call me Mike”). Once staid academics now invited edgy campus speakers to blast America. In melodramatic fashion, they considered themselves perennially teaching from the barricades. We were told that they were the frontline speakers of truth to power. These were the nonconformists who had defeated loyalty oaths. After all, they dated their students and joined radicals to storm the college president’s office. They preached a “do your thing” credo of letting professors pretty much say whatever they wished. Reporters were either iconoclastic Gonzos or shoe-leather investigators on the scent of deep state overreach. They were obsessed with wrongdoing at the CIA and FBI. Politicians, of course, weren’t to be trusted—given the corporations who pulled their puppet strings. The enemy of America, we were told, was the “big guys,” especially the international conglomerates like ITT with global reach. The corporationists refined the arts of the cartel, trust, and monopoly. “Small is beautiful” was the antithetical mantra. Radical sons of the Left crusaded against “dirty money” and “the plutocratic rich” with their “concentration of wealth”—as if the Rockefellers or the Gettys posed existential threats to America by their abilities to insert huge amounts of cash to warp elections or to buy officials. Generals were caricatured as caudillos, cigar choppers with shades, showy ribbons and bronze on their chests, and oversized hats and epaulets. We were warned they threatened us with a militarized police state. The “revolving door” was a mortal sin, as the tentacles of the Pentagon octopus now squeezed out public money for bombs, rockets, and jets to fight needless wars. About every three weeks Ike’s farewell warning about the “military-industrial complex” was trotted out by liberal columnists to remind us of felonious corruption. Civil and women’s rights were the twin pillars of the 1960s radicals. From Martin Luther King, Jr. to Malcolm X, the themes were for “white America” to live up to the ideals of their Constitution, to finally realize the “promises of the Declaration of Independence” and to treat people on the basis of the “content of their character” and not on “the color of their skin.” The problem was never 1776 or 1787, but those who had not yet fully met the Founders’ exceptional ideals. A “color-blind society” was a ’60s sobriquet. Women strove to ensure girls had the same rights as boys, from leadership roles to sports. The point of the 1960s, again we were taught, was to tear down the rules, the traditions and customs, the hierarchies of the old guys. The targets were supposedly the uptight, short-hair, square-tie, adult generation who grew up in the Depression, won World War II, and were fighting to defeat Cold War Soviet Union. The good guys, the students, and the activists, if they only had power, were going to break up corporations, shame (or “eat”) the rich, and bring in young, hip politicians. Reformers like the younger Kennedy brothers, the John Kerry war hero-resisters, the Bay Area Dianne Feinsteins, and the hip Nancy Pelosis would disrupt the “status quo” of politics. They would all push hard for assimilation and integration of the races, and the equality of the sexes in pursuit of universal equality of opportunity. The mantra of the 1960s and 1970s was “opportunity,” Remember the 1964 federal EEOC—the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Our Nightmare, 2021 Fast forward a half-century. What did these now-late septuagenarians give America? Yes, the downtrodden pigs, the exploited horses, and the victimized sheep finally did expel Farmer Jones from America’s Animal Farm. But in his place, as Orwell predicted, revolutionary pigs began walking on two feet and absorbed all the levers of American cultural influence and power: the media, the bureaucracies, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, publishing, the academy, K-12 education, professional sports, and entertainment. And to them all, the revolutionaries added their past coarseness and 1960s-era by-any-means-necessary absolutism. We are now finally witnessing the logical fruition of their radical utopia: Censorship, electronic surveillance, internal spying, monopolies, cartels, conspiracy theories, weaponization of the intelligence agencies, pouring billions of dollars into campaigns, changing voting laws by fiat, a woke revolutionary military, book banning, bleeding the First Amendment, canceling careers, blacklisting, separate-but-equal racial segregation and separatism. Conspiracies? Now they brag of them in Time. Read their hubristic confessionals in “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election.” Once upon a Time, radicals used to talk of a “secret history” in terms of the Pentagon Papers, or a “shadow campaign” in detailing Hollywood blacklisting. They are exactly what they once despised, with one key qualifier: Sixties crudity and venom are central to their metamorphosis. Our left-wing American revolutionary cycle from the barricades to the boardroom was pretty quick—in the manner that the ideology of the Battleship Potemkin soon led to Stalin’s show trials, or Mao’s “long march” logically resulted in the Cultural Revolution. The credo, again, is that the noble ends of forced “equity” require any means necessary to achieve them. The Left censors books in our schools, whether To Kill a Mockingbird or Tom Sawyer. It is the Left who organizes efforts to shout down campus speakers or even allows them to be roughed up. The Left demands not free-speech areas anymore, but no-speech “safe spaces” and “theme houses”—euphemisms for racially segregated, “separate-but-equal” zones. “Microaggressions” are tantamount to thought crimes. The mere way we look, smile, or blink can indict us as counterrevolutionaries. Stalin’s Trotskyization of all incorrect names, statues, and commemoratives is the Left’s ideal, as they seek to relabel Old America in one fell swoop. No one is spared from the new racists, not Honest Abe, not Tom Jefferson, not you, not me. For “teach-ins,” we now have indoctrination sessions. But the handlers are no longer long-haired 1960’s dreamy, sloppy, and incoherent mentors. They are disciplined, no-nonsense brain-washers. The Left’s Russia is our new old bogeyman. Putin is the new “We will bury you” Khrushchev. The Left spun conspiracy theories about computer pings in Trump Tower, and nefarious meetings of Trump’s campaign officials colluding with Russian agents. CNN and MSNBC tell us that the whole plot was laid out in a bought dossier—as the fantasies of Christopher Steele’s canonical hired hit piece became the Left’s version of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. No longer were we told that our toothpaste and water were making us sterile. Instead, the Duke Lacrosse team was emblematic of the return of epidemic 1930s-style racial rape. The Virginia frat boys routinely roughed up and had their way with girls. The racist Covington kids, on the National Mall no less, mocked and insulted a noble indigenous combat veteran. And Jussie Smollett fought off racist thugs while managing to hold his sandwich and cell phone, as he stumbled home with a racist rope around his neck, stained with iconic bleach. “Hands up, don’t shoot” should have been true, even if it wasn’t. Assimilation and integration are not our goals. Instead, we are to ferret out “cultural appropriation” and the odious culture of “white supremacy” and “unearned privilege.” “All men are created equal. But some are more equal than others” is now posted on the electric barn wall. Deprogramming 74 million “whites” and “Republicans” is the advice on the pages of the progressive Washington Post. Don’t like an idea? Then wash clean the polluted minds of those who embraced it. The new and improved ACLU’s job is to encourage the suppression of conservative free speech. ACLU trains its handlers not to protect unfettered speech, but to spot “hate speech.” To advocate burning or destroying a book is not some nightmare from Fahrenheit 451, but a woke way to “stop the hate.” A new Orwellian phrase is “free speech is not free reach”—as leftists become the intellectual inheritors of the racists of the open-housing fights of the 1950s and 1960. The old racist boilerplate of apartment owners and realtors was “You can live anywhere you want, just not here.” The new hate mantra of Silicon Valley cartels is, “You can tweet or socially post anywhere you like—if you can manage to find a place.” Surveillance and spying are now good. How else to ferret out “right-wingers,” “white supremacists,” and “insurrectionists”? So the FBI and CIA have transmogrified into heroic agencies run by stalwart social activist fighters like John Brennan, the old Gus Hall supporter, James Clapper, James Comey, and Andrew McCabe. They cut to the quick to achieve social justice, without the messy give and take of Congress, or that albatross, the relic Constitution. What a wonderful world they have created: Eavesdropping on the national security advisor, forging FISA documents, spying on American citizens, aiding one presidential candidate by surveilling another. Finally, they can use their skills and surveillance to investigate and hound the “right” enemies, for the “right” causes.” The CIA and FBI always secretly wished to be beloved by the Left. Now they are deified. And the military elite? Militarization is now beautiful. The U.S. Army may become our People’s Revolutionary Army as generals sniff out counterrevolutionaries hidden deeply in their ranks. Maybe a cleansing purge or two is necessary, in the Soviet fashion. Barb-wiring the capitol and stocking it with camouflaged troops send the message that the military is, at last, woke and in control of America’s central nervous system. Corporate profiteering for retired generals and admirals is a necessary amplifier of their critical work. How else to have the resources to spot new Mussolinis, Nazi tactics, Auschwitz caging, and the al-Qaeda-like terrorists among us? Bank of America helps to find out which enemy of the people bought which coffee where. The financial heroes are not hip basement day traders taking down hedge funds by boomeranging them their own manipulative tactics, but Wall Street hedge fund traders, the holy wall between sober investment and Trumpian barbarians at the gate. Could we have ever stopped the hate without the help of billions of dollars from Mark Zuckerberg and George Soros? Why break up monopolies and cartels when their profits pour into progressive wokeness? Only their warping of communication and knowledge retrieval correctly guides Americans to the “right” conclusions. Jeff Bezos’ net worth alone is as much as the combined GDP of Idaho and Alaska. But then again, we are to think he is far more valuable than two states full of bitter clingers, dregs, and deplorables. The media? It is a Ministry of Truth. Informers and readers beg the Great Leader to let drop his favorite flavor of ice cream or the details of the Oval Office makeover. There is no need for censorship: the media are the censors. Whatever sinister idea a paranoid politician has for muzzling journalists, reporters themselves have already trumped it. Pravda is their model. Who can be disinterested when there is a war to be fought for diversity and equity, against climate change and white supremacy? The revolutionary animals are now running the farm in a way that would be nightmarish even to Farmer Jones. They won. They are now one with—but also far, far worse than—what they rebelled against. About Victor Davis Hanson Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is an American military historian, columnist, a former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush. Hanson is also a farmer (growing raisin grapes on a family farm in Selma, California) and a critic of social trends related to farming and agrarianism. He is the author most recently of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won and The Case for Trump.
You have a right to free speech as long as it complies with our narratives. Any deviation from this will be met with extreme prejudice. From RealClearPolitics.com: Back to Videos CNN's Jake Tapper: Trump Supporters Still Questioning Election Results Need To Be Held "Accountable" For "MAGA Terrorism" Tim Hains On Date February 8, 2021 CNN’s “State of the Union” anchor Jake Tapper spoke about the rise of "MAGA terrorism" and called for Republicans who supported President Trump's "big election lie" to be "held accountable." "If there is no accountability and no attempt by the Republican Party to stop these insane lies that have taken root in their party," he declared. "This is not going to be the end of MAGA terrorism, this will only be the beginning." JAKE TAPPER, CNN HOST: It was one month ago this weekend that a terrorist MAGA mob, fed lies for months about the election, stormed the Capitol, an insurrection that cost at least five lives, including Capitol police officer Brian Sicknick. There have been, as of Wednesday, 181 people charged related to the riot, Justice Department announcements and court documents show. Zachary Alam, shown here allegedly trying to break through the doors to the speaker's lobby. Kevin Seefried, here with the Confederate flag. Rachel Powell shown here with the bullhorn, allegedly giving instructions. That none of them are wearing masks correctly is a testament not only to the fact that they also ignored health guidelines during the pandemic, but they did not think they would be held accountable for their actions. And indeed a number of these insurrectionists are now saying they did what they did because they thought that then President Donald Trump wanted them to. As one defense attorney put it in a legal filing, quote, "the nature and circumstances of this offense must be viewed through the lens of an event inspired by the President of the United States." According to a New York Times opinion piece, about 40 percent of the phones tracked near the rally stage on the National Mall during the speeches were also found in and around the Capitol during the siege, quote, a clear link between those who had listened to the president and his allies and then marched on the building. But it was not only Trump whose impeachment trial starts Tuesday. What about accountability for the others who helped spread the big election lie that incited the crowd? That lunacy, of course, is not true from Lou Dobbs. And Friday night Dobbs lost his show after Smartmatic, one of the electronic voting companies that was lied about, filed a $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox, some of its hosts and two Trump allies. Some companies and donors have paused political contributions to the campaigns of the almost 150 House and Senate Republicans who voted to undermine the election one month ago today. We shall see how long that last, these things tend to have a short shelf life. There has been, frankly, no real accountability, none, for House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy and House Republican Whip Steve Scalise, who spread the lie and voted to undo the election. Or for Ted Cruz or Josh Hawley in the Senate. And there is already, frankly, right now a concentrated effort by the same MAGA smear machine to whitewash it all. This week Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went on Instagram Live and told her constituents and supporters and everyone else about her experience during the insurrection. Like many members of Congress and staffers and journalists and others on the Hill that day, she sought refuge in her office. Hers is in the Cannon House Office Building, which was briefly evacuated that day because of a bomb nearby. So there is a lot more to her story, but the point I want to make is that the very same bad actors in the GOP, on social media, Fox and elsewhere, those same people took her story and twisted it. They falsely suggested that she had hid the fact that she was in her office building, not in the Capitol dome itself, even though she had made that clear in the story. Or that the person pounding on the door was a cop, not a rioter, even though all that information came from her in that Instagram Live. Now, they seem to be doing this in the name of smearing her and diminishing the ugliness of the attack and, frankly, to distract from the blood on their hands. One month to the day before the attack, we here at State of the Union were warning about what we were afraid might happen. That was one month before the attack. Today, one month and one day after the attack, after that storm hit the Capitol, we are again warning, if there is no accountability and no attempt by the Republican Party to stop these insane lies that have taken root in their party -- witnessed the support this week by the House Republicans for bigot and conspiracy theorist Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Congresswoman from Georgia. If there's no effort at accountability, this is not going to be the end of MAGA terrorism. This will only be the beginning.