Impeachment Fever
On January 20, scumbag/liar-Joe Biden will be inaugurated as the next president under the theme “America United.” Meanwhile, in Congress, Democrats are busy impeaching Donald Trump eight days ahead of his departure.
Unity!
Is it any wonder why Trump will become the first president since 1869 to skip the inauguration of his successor? Aside from this (second) fraud of an impeachment, Trump truly believes in his bones that the election was stolen from him by his successor’s party.
scumbag/liar-Hillary Clinton can relate. She said in October, just weeks before Election Day and four years after her defeat, “I was the candidate that they basically stole an election from.” She continued, “I absolutely thought I was going to win.” Yeah, well, so did Trump and his supporters.
“Our election was hijacked. There is no question.” Oops. That was scumbag/liar-Nancy Pelosi in May 2017.
Which brings us back to impeachment, led by that same scumbag/liar-Nancy Pelosi. Democrats never let a crisis go to waste, and last week’s riot in the Capitol building is no exception. We don’t minimize what happened last week when saying that Democrats and the Left generally are grotesquely exploiting it as a smokescreen for widespread canceling, deplatforming, and censorship of conservatives to go along with impeachment of an exiting president.
Let’s be clear: This is a sham meant to maximize political benefit for Democrats while dividing Republicans.
The House will vote today on a resolution demanding that Vice President Mike Pence invoke the 25th Amendment to remove Trump, but that’s only a prelude to the main feature tomorrow, which is a single article of impeachment: “Donald John Trump engaged in high Crimes and Misdemeanors by inciting violence against the Government of the United States.” Even more stridently, the article is titled “Incitement of Insurrection.”
The Democrats’ article argues that, during his speech to supporters before the riot, President Trump “willfully made statements that, in context, encouraged — and foreseeably resulted in — lawless action at the Capitol, such as: ‘if you don’t fight like hell you’re not going to have a county anymore.’” But Democrats argue the incitement didn’t start there. They also cite Trump’s phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger demanding that he “‘find’ enough votes to overturn the Georgia Presidential election results and threatened Secretary Raffensperger if he failed to do so.”
They want Trump not only immediately removed from office but they urge “disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust, or profit under the United States,” which requires a Senate conviction but likely runs afoul of the Constitution Democrats claim to be so very eager to defend. There certainly isn’t time for proper procedure in basically one week, though some argue that the Senate can hold a trial even after Trump’s term ends. scumbag/liar-Biden favors that so it doesn’t get in the way of his “unity” agenda.
The truth is that this division is the Democrat agenda, just as it has been for a long time. Spare us the pathetically disingenuous talk of “unity” when Democrats have spent years calling half the country “deplorable” “bitter-clingers” who are fundamentally racist. scumbag/liar-Biden, scumbag/liar-Pelosi, and company have even made Wednesday’s riot about race and not election fraud. As scumbag/liar-Pelosi put it, rioters had “chosen their whiteness over democracy.” scumbag/liar-Biden complained that the rioters were “treated very, very differently” than “a group of Black Lives Matter” during last summer’s “mostly peaceful” protests.
Unity!
So what about Trump?
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy says Trump privately agreed that he bore some blame for the riot. (Draw your own conclusions.) We’ve said in no uncertain terms that Trump’s rhetoric ahead of the riot was needlessly and dangerously inflammatory, but we also believe he did not deliberately incite violence or literally mean for his supporters to “fight like hell.” It was irresponsible political hyperbole, not a battle plan.
For that and many other reasons, impeachment is the wrong remedy. Indeed, it won’t actually remedy anything. It’s not in Trump’s DNA to ever have a properly chastised attitude about anything, his supporters will never believe he deserved it, and Democrats will never stop hunting for the next GOP head. In short, it could incite violence. Does anyone else wonder if that’s the point?
If scumbag/liar-Joe Biden truly is an honest man (he’s not), if he really wants unity and thinks this is a “time to heal” (he doesn’t), and if he wants to prove he’s a leader and not a puppet, he’d put the kibosh on this impeachment nonsense once and for all. ~ The Patriot Post
Dems, Big Tech Don't Value Free Speech
If one does not value something, one will not act to preserve it. Worse, one might even oppose it. What America has witnessed in recent days — Big Tech’s swift and thorough purge in banning President Donald Trump coupled with a coordinated effort to eliminate a social media competitor, Parler — is the reality that these Silicon Valley tycoons don’t value freedom of speech at all. In fact, Big Tech, encouraged by Democrats, a party that ironically derives its name from democracy, attacked the very spirit of free speech by limiting and even eliminating the speech of those they disagree with — all under the guise of preventing “incitement to violence.” Such is the disingenuous justification of totalitarians.
The sad reality is that the West has seen this type of speech-trampling rhetoric before, and the results have never produced greater Liberty. Quite the opposite.
The Left loves to argue these Big Tech companies are private enterprises that aren’t bound by the First Amendment. As such, they are free to run their companies as they see fit, including banning or limiting the free speech of those who use their platform. Yet as David Harsanyi observes, “If you say that targeted deplatforming, though not Stalinist, is troubling, the same people who want to compel everyone to buy state-mandated health insurance, who want to dictate how corporations compensate their employees, who want to force nuns to buy abortifacients, and who want to destroy the lives of bakers and florists who run businesses according to long-held religious beliefs will vigorously defend the value of free-association rights that allow corporations to act this way. So I’m pretty skeptical that most of these people are genuine champions of individual market choices, and aren’t just super excited about silencing people.”
Big Tech companies are not merely banning speech with which they disagree; they are working beyond the confines of their private business context to actively encroach on the speech rights of those in other businesses with whom they disagree politically. On Monday, AR15.com, the world’s largest online firearms forum, was suddenly deplatformed by web host GoDaddy. The rationale was of course an unfounded and ambiguous allegation without any evidence provided of a violation of GoDaddy’s terms of service. Furthermore, GoDaddy’s decision was final, with no opportunity for recourse or method of appeal offered. It was simply a “we decided you’re guilty and the sentence is immediate elimination.”
One of the greatest ironies is Big Tech’s use of the “incitement to violence” canard to justify banning and deplatforming individuals and organizations while it has done little against Black Lives Matter and antifa activists who promoted and directly engaged in months of leftist violence and rioting across the country this past summer. Democrat politicians who actively supported the riotous mobs were not banned by these platforms either.
Just yesterday, Facebook announced that it would ban any messages containing the phrase “stop the steal.” The reason? To stop “harmful” misinformation. “We’re removing content containing the phrase ‘stop the steal’ under our Coordinating Harm policy from Facebook & Instagram,” the company announced. Since when is “stop the steal” an incitement to violence? Since Democrats, Big Tech, and the Leftmedia declared it so, that’s when. Funny how when someone like Speaker scumbag/liar-Nancy Pelosi claims, as she did in May of 2017, that “our election was hijacked,” no one claimed she was “inciting violence” and should be banned.
To bring it back around to values, free speech is something Americans, maybe even particularly on the left side of the aisle, have long treasured, to sometimes ridiculous extent. Remember when flag burning was the preferred method of “speech”? Now only one side of the political divide truly values free speech. And the other side is doing everything in its vast power to crush it. ~The Patriot Post
The GOP Must Face a Reckoning
In a free republic such as ours, elections themselves are supposed to be the ultimate form of political accountability. Unfortunately, the 2020 elections featured shenanigans that tainted the results. Thus, it’s time for further accountability.
This includes accountability for the riot at the Capitol, something that law enforcement and our court system are working on. Those who are guilty of breaking the law should be punished accordingly. End of discussion on that front.
Politically, GOP leaders must answer for the devastating results of this election. This will require some tough, honest conversations among the leadership and grassroots Patriots, not just an emotionally incontinent blame game. It will require adaptations, and, just to dream big for a moment, that may need to include the construction of our own infrastructure in technology, finance, and education.
The Republican and conservative establishments cannot escape blame for the 2020 election, largely because of their documented track record of failures to address double standards and attacks on the norms over the years.
Republican officeholders must be held to account for acceding to Democrat-instigated changes to election rules, like the signature verification debacle that contributed to GOP defeat in Georgia or problems with ballot counting in other battleground states.
Meanwhile, despite his defeat, Donald Trump will likely leave office with significant popularity among Republican voters. Why? Because he kept many of his promises, and because he delivered for grassroots Patriots on issues where the establishment’s performance was hit-or-miss at best, when they won despite tactical and strategic incompetence, or when they lost.
Back in 2018, we argued that changes in the political and media landscape required a reevaluation of strategy and tactics. In 2016, Trump was all that stood between America and a shamelessly corrupt scumbag/liar-Hillary Clinton administration.
Then he also delivered for our nation. Trump built more than 450 miles of border fencing and held the line against amnesty — when many in the establishment pushed heavily for the latter while slow-walking the former. He appointed superb judges when the establishment’s track record seemed to be a coin toss at best — for every Scalia, Thomas, or Alito, we got a Souter, Kennedy, or Roberts. He also stood up and fought back against a Left that for decades got away with smearing Republicans as Nazis, white supremacists, racists, bigots, and worse. Contrast that to the shameful silence from rino-John McCain and rino-Mitt Romney when Sarah Palin was falsely accused of inspiring the 2011 Tucson shooting that wounded Gabby Giffords and killed six others.
For all his flaws, Trump was taking on China and Russia, he was trying to get our NATO allies to pay their fair share, and he sought to fix a lot of dubious trade deals. He also, for good or ill, revealed the true colors of so many who purported to be Republicans and conservatives, yet were silent over many outrages from the Left. On the contrary, many made excuses for the outrages and abuses. And they wonder why grassroots Patriots turned to Trump?
At his best, Trump was an out-of-the-box thinker who had flashes of brilliance in tactics and strategy. At his worst, he was undisciplined and spoke without considering how his words could be used against him. He was both a charismatic messenger and a flawed one, and he alone bears responsibility for those flaws.
Back to the point at hand: Accountability must also be meted out to the Republican and conservative establishments. Officeholders, consultants, and pundits failed across the board. Some fought tooth and nail for the pre-Trump status quo, and thus lost the trust of grassroots Patriots. Trump’s rise — and his continued popularity and support among Republican voters — is a direct response to their many failures over the past 25 years. That alone will be a check on their power.
Yet the alternative Right is not without blame. Some of these folks gained trust by trafficking in misleading or outright false conspiracy theories. That failure also demands an accounting. Our side can’t just imitate the Left’s game of falsehoods. We’re not as good at it, for one thing, and it’s not what principled conservatism is supposed to be about.
Ultimately, the GOP must figure out how to proceed, whether with or without Trump in future elections, by heeding the lessons he taught and his supporters demand the party learn. ~ The Patriot Post
Is Manchin a Man of His Word?
To our fellow patriots in the great state of West Virginia: Please remind your senior senator to be a man of his word. And remind him that his constituents went for Donald Trump by 39 points. Otherwise, our republic is toast. Joe Manchin, you see, is the only thing that can keep us from being legislatively steamrolled by the Democrats.
Six days after the November 3 election, and long before last week’s Senate-flipping disaster in Georgia, Manchin, a West Virginia Democrat, told Fox News’s Bret Baier that even if the Democrats took both of Georgia’s Senate seats in the January 5 special election and thereby achieved a 50-50 tie in the upper chamber — a tie breakable by soon-to-be Vice President Kamala Harris — we wouldn’t have to worry about the wing nuts in his party enacting their far-left agenda.
Welp, they did take the Senate. And despite Manchin’s assurances, we’re still worried.
You’ve heard the Democrats’ wish list: doing away with the filibuster and its time-honored protection of minority rights; packing the Supreme Court and lesser courts; adopting the economically and fiscally ruinous Green New Deal; granting amnesty and voting rights to illegal immigrants; and granting statehood to Washington, DC, and Puerto Rico, thereby granting four more automatic Senate seats to the Democrats.
We have Joe Manchin’s word, though. His word.
“I commit to you tonight,” he said on November 9, “and I commit to all of your viewers and everyone else that’s watching … I will not be the 50th Democrat voting to end that filibuster or to basically stack the court, and in all the other things you’re hearing about, Bret, also, defund the police. I don’t know of any of the Democrats in the caucus that are for defunding the police. We’re not for that whatsoever. And when they talk about basically, Medicare for All, we can’t even pay for Medicare for some. It doesn’t make any sense at all.”
See it for yourself: VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AqcSOxSmHE&feature=emb_title
Here we are, then, in the sorry position of having to count on a single Democrat politician to save us from ruin. And we share this news because while Manchin once seemed unequivocal in his commitment to protecting the Senate and its rules and traditions, he appeared to get a bit wobbly this weekend in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper. When asked by Tapper if he supported statehood for Washington, DC, Manchin replied, “I don’t know enough about that yet. I want to see the pros and cons. So, I’m waiting to see all the facts. I’m open up to see everything.” Puerto Rico? Ditto.
It could be Manchin now realizes that in a 50-50 Senate, he’s the most powerful man in Congress. How so? With VP-elect Kamala Harris poised to cast the deciding vote in all 50-50 ties, Manchin’s vote or non-vote will determine whether lowlife/liar-Harris gets to cast hers. Needless to say, both Republicans and Democrats are going to make sure Manchin feels the love.
Give credit to Bret Baier, a journalist’s journalist in an age of revolting leftist hacks, for pressing Manchin and nailing him down. “Let me just clarify here, Senator,” said Baier. “You are saying definitively tonight that even if Democrats take control, and Chuck scumbag/liar-Schumer becomes the Senate majority leader, that, if they try to break the filibuster, say the filibuster is over, you will definitively vote against that?”
“Absolutely. I will vote against that,” Manchin replied. “I have been very clear about that.”
Remember your word, Senator Manchin. And remember the will of your Mountain State constituents: Donald Trump by 39 points. ~ The Patriot Post
CAL THOMAS
Free Speech Is Being Tested Again
Twitter and Facebook have permanently banned President Trump from their social platforms. Former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and attorney Sidney Powell have also been permanently banned as Twitter announced a purge of “accounts dedicated to sharing content related to the far-right QAnon conspiracy theory.”
Trump has hinted he may announce an alternative social media platform, possibly one created by him. In a statement tweeted Friday on his presidential Twitter account, Trump wrote: “As I have been saying for a long time, Twitter has gone further and further in banning free speech, and tonight, Twitter employees have coordinated with the Democrats and the Radical Left in removing my account from their platform, to silence me — and YOU, the 75,000,000 great patriots who voted for me. Twitter may be a private company, but without the government’s gift of Section 230 they would not exist for long. I predicted this would happen. We have been negotiating with various other sites, and will have a big announcement soon, while we also look at the possibilities of building out our own platform in the near future.”
Twitter removed the tweet from Trump’s @POTUS account within minutes of when it popped up, and then shut down the account “due to the risk of further incitement of violence.” When Trump posted the same message to his campaign Twitter account, “the company permanently suspended that account too.” Trump has now also been banned from Instagram, Snapchat and Twitch, and Parler, “the alternative social media platform favored by conservatives, now finds itself virtually homeless on the internet as Amazon (AMZN), Apple (AAPL) and Google (GOOGL) have all booted it from their platforms in a span of a little more than 24 hours.”
The American Civil Liberties Union has expressed “concern” over the action by the social media giants. In a statement, Kate Ruane, the ACLU’s senior legislative counsel, said: “We understand the desire to permanently suspend him now, but it should concern everyone when companies like Facebook and Twitter wield the unchecked power to remove people from platforms that have become indispensable for the speech of billions — especially when political realities make those decisions easier.”
The late writer Nat Hentoff, in addition to being an authority on the history of jazz, was also a fierce defender of the right to free speech. He once told me the answer to speech you don’t like is not less speech, but more speech. Banning offensive speech encourages radicals in their extremism. We no longer talk to each other. Too many read and listen only to what supports their point of view and demeans people who believe differently. This is unhealthy for a free society.
Facebook and Twitter made their decision after the president incited his followers to storm the U.S. Capitol last Wednesday to stop lawmakers from formalizing Joe Biden’s election victory. Perhaps they believe they have nothing to fear from a Democrat-majority Congress. Republicans in the Senate had been holding hearings into charges by conservatives that social media outlets censor conservative opinion. With Democrats in control of the Senate additional hearings are unlikely to be forthcoming.
In another display of the double standard, the two social media giants still allow the Iranian leadership and people associated with the Chinese Communist Party to maintain their accounts.
Distrust by many conservatives of virtually all media has given rise to fringe platforms that seek to tear us further apart and undermine democracy, while claiming to protect it. These divisions have deepened since the November election as Trump supporters believe the election was rigged. Trump voters deserve to have their concerns addressed, or the cynicism and division will only get worse, as will the potential for more violence. The best way to lower the temperature would be to create a forum that would fairly and accurately examine all claims of voter fraud and ballot manipulation.
As for attempts to ban speech some people don’t like, I give you the lyrics from that 1960s musical, “Hair”: “Let the Sun shine in.” Indeed, let it in, because sunshine — and free speech — can lead to “the mind’s true liberation.” ~ The Patriot Post
GARY BAUER
Dark Days Ahead
For most of the day yesterday, I attended a meeting of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, focused largely on human rights and religious liberty violations in China.
But I couldn’t help but think I could just as easily have been at a meeting about human rights and religious liberty violations here in the United States.
As I have often said, the attacks on Trump over the last four years were about much more than Donald Trump. The left despises Donald Trump and it despises us. The left wants to silence every conservative voice it can. And the progressive assault on the First Amendment just went into high gear.
scumbag/liar-Pelosi Pushes Impeachment
President Trump made it clear in his remarks last week that he was focused on a smooth and orderly transition of power. He also called for calm, healing, and reconciliation. But the left doesn’t seem interested in calm, healing, or reconciliation.
Speaker scumbag/liar-Nancy Pelosi has announced that House Democrats will pass a resolution calling for President Trump to be removed through the 25th Amendment. That’s not going to happen, and scumbag/liar-Pelosi knows it.
So, she’s also planning to bring articles of impeachment to the House floor later this week. According to Politico, at least 218 House Democrats support impeaching the president for allegedly inciting violence. But that’s not going anywhere either.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell noted that the Senate is in recess and cannot hold an impeachment trial until January 19th at the earliest, potentially overshadowing the inauguration and bogging down the Senate for days.
Faced with these realities, House Majority Whip scumbag-James Clyburn said that Speaker scumbag/liar- Pelosi would likely delay transmitting the articles of impeachment to the Senate, just as she did last year.
“Let’s give President-elect scumbag/liar-Biden the 100 days he needs to get his agenda off and running,” scumbag-Clyburn said. “And maybe we will send the articles some time after that.”
While it’s debatable whether former officials can be impeached, scumbag/liar-Pelosi was clear about her motivation. The speaker said in an interview with “60 Minutes” this weekend that “one of the motivations that people have for advocating for impeachment” is to prevent Trump from running for office again, adding, “He has to pay a price.”
Rep. commie-Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez echoed scumbag/liar-Pelosi’s desire to ban Trump from the political arena, saying, “We’re also talking about complete barring of … Donald Trump from running for office ever again.”
scumbag/liar-Joe Biden should tell scumbag/liar-Nancy Pelosi and House Democrats to stand down. Pushing impeachment with just barely a week left in the president’s term will do nothing to help heal or unite this country.
Silencing Trump & You
The social media giants and other Big Tech firms quickly moved in lockstep to toe the Democrat Party line. Twitter and Facebook “permanently suspended” President Trump’s accounts due to the “risk of further incitement of violence.”
That multiple private companies feel free to “permanently suspend” the free speech rights of the president proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that Trump is hardly a dictator.
It also proves yet again that Big Tech is a danger to the First Amendment with its selective enforcement. Here’s a sampling of violent tweets that Twitter has tolerated.
Meanwhile, other tech companies piled on, cutting off the Trump campaign’s ability to accept online donations or sell merchandise.
But the attacks on free speech didn’t stop there.
Parler, a social media platform committed to free speech, was completely shut down this weekend. Apple and Google banned the Parler app, and Amazon banned Parler from its web hosting service. All their vendors, including their lawyers, have abandoned the company.
Millions of conservatives who used Parler, including me, have been silenced by Big Tech’s tyranny.
Speaking of lawyers, Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, is under investigation by the New York Bar Association. Other lawyers affiliated with the president have been forced to resign from their law firms.
Again, my friends, we need to be clear about this: While Donald Trump may be the left’s immediate target, it is also sending a message that is designed to demoralize and intimidate you.
The Big Lie
I want to make something very clear: The left, the media, and too many Republicans are suggesting that Donald Trump incited violence last week and caused that riot on Capitol Hill. He did no such thing, and we cannot allow this “big lie” to prevail.
During his remarks before the terrible events that unfolded on Capitol Hill, President Trump said, “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your votes heard today.”
Calling on Americans to “peacefully and patriotically” protest at the Capitol, at the White House, and at the Supreme Court has been done since the founding of this country. The president did not incite his supporters to riot.
Famed Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz vowed to defend Trump again, insisting that his remarks do not rise to the level of an impeachable offense and that they were constitutionally protected free speech.
Even the left-wing site Snopes refused to say that Trump incited violence. And this timeline of events indicates that the president was still speaking when the violence began.
Any reporter and politician who insists that President Trump incited violence is engaged in a big lie to smear the president, his conservative supporters, and the entire conservative movement.
The intolerant progressive left won’t be satisfied with driving Donald Trump from office. It wants to make conservatives unemployable and it wants to make normal conservative opinions unspeakable.
This is tyranny plain and simple.
The Blame Game
While scumbag/liar-Nancy Pelosi and other progressive politicians are doing everything they can to blame President Trump for last week’s riot, numerous security officials on Capitol Hill have already been fired or forced to resign for failing to do their jobs. And more resignations may be coming in the days ahead.
In spite of repeated denials, several officials were well aware of plans to assault the Capitol days before it happened. NBC News reports that the FBI and the New York Police Department had intelligence that violence was possible and had warned the Capitol Hill Police in advance.
In fact, federal agents reportedly met with “more than a dozen extremists already under investigation to urge them not to travel to Washington.”
If these reports are accurate, then last week’s assault on Capitol Hill was the result of a colossal intelligence failure.
If there was so much advance warning that the FBI had time to dispatch officials to tell known extremists to stay out of Washington, then the National Guard should have been deployed the day before the joint session of Congress in sufficient force to prevent the horrific scenes and the tragic loss of life we witnessed last week.
But that didn’t happen because some officials were worried about “optics.” Well, the failure to plan appropriately resulted in terrible optics and an emboldened progressive movement that is crushing free speech. ~ The Patriot Post
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