The following article, January 6 And The Burning Of The German Reichstag, was first published on Conservative Firing Line. By the grace of God I was not in D.C. on Jan. 6, 2021, or I’d probably be rotting away in the D.C. Gulag like the still-growing hundreds of MAGA political prisoners who fell into the entrapment nets set for them on that day by the Obiden secret police. I would never have committed violent … Continue reading January 6 And The Burning Of The German Reichstag ...

“I was hearing someone clawing their way up to ecstasy through immense suffering." The post “A portal to the sky”: The jazz album that changed St Vincent’s life first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

This spring, my big project has been the release of my latest novel King of the Jungle, which you should all buy and read for a copious number of reasons, mostly because you’ll greatly enjoy it. Injecting lesbian sex into the origin story of the Star Wars franchise is the Bud Light debacle on crystal meth. Writing the book was the fun part. That actually didn’t take a lot of time. Once I had a good idea of what was in the story, I just plowed through a first draft, and then I kept going back into the editing and rewriting until it was ready. Some people struggle with that process; I actually love it. What I don’t love, and what I’m trying to learn to do well, is the marketing of a book. I’ve dealt with a couple of different publishers for the two political books I’ve written. I learned a lot with each experience, but I’ll put it like this: I’m quite unlikely to use a publisher ever again. Publishing houses don’t seem to understand that their job is to sell books. They expect the author to do that. Well, fine. If I have to write the book AND sell it, then why on earth would I waste my time dealing with a publisher who doesn’t actually do anything? This is why more than half of the books sold in America now are by self-published authors. I can claim I’m a published author, and I can claim I’m a bestselling author. So now I’ll self-publish, or I’ll publish through my own company. But what that means is I’ve got to learn book marketing. And the extensive research I’ve been doing on that subject has led to an inescapable conclusion: you absolutely have to test an advertising message before you launch an advertising campaign. You’d better give the public an opportunity to let you know if you’re on the right track. If what you’re putting in front of the public doesn’t actually resonate with them, you’ll shortly have a disaster on your hands. We are speaking here of The Acolyte, the horribly disastrous Star Wars spinoff series appearing on the Disney+ streaming service. There have been three episodes released to date, and the third was a debacle of galactic proportions. I’ll turn you over to The Critical Drinker for a moment; he’s watched these calamities so we don’t have to… The storytelling here is so awful, so wooden and so propagandistic — so redolent of an agenda that just about anybody of average intelligence could tell you would not sell with the core audience of the intellectual property at hand – that a review like the Drinker just gave it would be inevitable. Injecting lesbian sex into the origin story of the Star Wars franchise is the Bud Light debacle on crystal meth. Anybody could tell you that. But Kathleen Kennedy, who has destroyed not just Star Wars but the Indiana Jones franchise as well from her perch atop Lucasfilm, can’t tell you that. Amid unmitigatedly awful reviews by the public of The Acolyte — last I checked it was sitting at a 16 percent audience score at Rotten Tomatoes — Kennedy is now making the rounds not to apologize for the damage she’s done but instead to… …bitch at the audience. I think a lot of the women who step into Star Wars struggle with [toxic fandom attacks] a bit more. […] Because of the fan base being so male dominated, they sometimes get attacked in ways that can be quite personal…. Operating within these giant franchises now, with social media and the level of expectation — it’s terrifying. Here’s an interesting thought experiment Kathleen Kennedy won’t undertake: someone puts you in charge of making and selling a product which has a well-defined, very loyal, and quite lucrative customer base, and you decide to change the product into something completely different which intuitively will not appeal to that customer base. And the result is that the customer base angrily refuses to buy your product. Who do you think is at fault here? Blaming the market for your failure to succeed in it has never, in the entire history of the market, produced positive results. Disney won’t fire Kathleen Kennedy. It’s almost too late to fire her. She’s done so much damage that the rot has completely consumed its host. But the mentality behind this applies to much weightier subjects than Star Wars. It’s interesting to study the Hollywood dysfunction because all of the elements of it apply to academia, to politics, to woke corporate governance and everywhere else dysfunctional woke incompetents reign. That classically pagan mentality which says you can change reality itself, as though you were a god, by force of will and influence over others, pervades everything in America now — or at least everything run by people who believe the things Kathleen Kennedy does. She really thinks she can shame the predominantly straight white male audience of the Star Wars franchise into accepting badly-written space lesbian shows starring actresses who publicly state their goals are to “make white people cry.” And when she’s proven wrong it isn’t her fault but that of the audience. Write that script into American politics and this isn’t quite so funny anymore. A market correction is needed, but it doesn’t seem like one is forthcoming. Which tells you this will get worse before it gets better. Let’s just hope this story stops with Disney and doesn’t go too much further. READ MORE from Scott McKay: They’ll Try To Steal It. They Have To. Five Quick Things: Why Aren’t the Rest With J.D. Vance? America Thrives at the Interstate Exit The post What They’ve Done To <i>Star Wars</i>, They’re Trying To Do To America appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Big Government fuels Big Corruption. Exhibit 749b for the prosecution comes out of Camden, New Jersey, where George Norcross, III, went from serving as a local Democratic Party committeeman decades ago to one of the richest men in the Garden State. How, exactly, does that happen? Targeted tax breaks, as well as more direct subsidies, similarly benefit rule-benders and breakers.   Support for one theory comes from the indictment of Norcross and several confederates released Monday by Matthew Platkin, attorney general of New Jersey. In one-party states, charges often come if at all from the feds. But Platkin put his allegiance to the law above his allegiance to his party in charging Norcross, whose brother Donald represents the area in the U.S. House of Representatives and who, until three years ago, served as a member of the Democratic National Committee. A Monday New York Times headline referred to him as “one of the most powerful political figures in New Jersey.” (READ MORE from Daniel J. Flynn: Joe Behaving More Strangely Than Hunter on Yeyo) Platkin says without saying: you are not too big to jail. The indictment essentially depicts Norcross as shaking-down developers. If they did not include him and his associates in their deals, then he allegedly used his political connections to hamstring the projects. His co-defendants include Dana Redd, the mayor of Camden from 2010 to 2018. “When the developer would not relinquish his rights on terms preferred by GEORGE E. NORCROSS, III,” one part of the indictments reads, “he threatened the developer that he would, in substance and in part, ‘f**k you up like you’ve never been f**ked up before,’ and told the developer he would make sure the developer never did business in Camden again. In a recorded phone call, GEORGE E. NORCROSS, III later admitted to threatening the developer: ‘I said, `this is unacceptable. If you do this, it will have enormous consequences.’ [The developer] said, ‘Are you threatening me?’ I said, ‘Absolutely.’” Specifically, the indictment claims Norcross and associates tailored tax law to their benefit, and then sold the tax credits they obtained through their schemes. “The tax credits approved for the three entities totaled over $240 million,” the indictment says of one project. “In 2022, the entities began receiving these tax credits and selling them.” In other words, the money involved amounted to something more than nickels and dimes. The number of zeroes explains how a Rutgers-Camden grad active in local Democratic politics can become one of the wealthiest people in one of the wealthiest states within the course of a few decades. The indictment includes allegations of skullduggery concerning a local nonprofit and also developers. One passage illustrated his alleged shakedown methods: “(1) conspired to have the City of Camden condemn the developer’s rights through legal action to gain leverage in their negotiations; (2) plotted for Camden City officials to publicly ‘accus[e]’ the developer of being ‘not a reputable person’; (3) caused certain Camden City officials, including the Mayor, to stop communicating with the developer; and (4) plotted to use the Camden government to damage an unrelated project of the developer’s. In a recorded call planning this scheme, GEORGE E. NORCROSS, III explained that ‘you can never trust [this developer] until you got a bat over his head,’ stated that he wanted the developer to ‘cry uncle,’ and identified the developer’s unrelated project as ‘another point of attack on this putz.’” More licenses, permits, and regulations do not provide more protection to citizens. They hassle them and enrich the politically-connected by way of bribes and extortion. In this way does government, in certain locales, become organized crime. Targeted tax breaks, as well as more direct subsidies, similarly benefit rule-benders and breakers. The less power government wields over you, and the less money government takes from you, the more difficult it becomes to corrupt the system. (READ MORE: The Doppio Standard on the Alito and Pelosi Recordings) Matthew Platkin putting away malefactors helps. But to minimize public corruption one must minimize its rewards. That means shrinking the power and purse of government. The post Dem Powerbrokers Love Big Government appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

The Democrats bet everything on the former U.S. ambassador to the EU blowing up the impeachment against Donald Trump, bringing about the ultimate downfall of the former president. After changing versions several times, his statement turned out to be essentially irrelevant. Perhaps my statements the night before last, when I came out of the nightclub with my shirt open, and howling and sweating, were more relevant to Trump’s political future than Sondland’s statement. In the aftermath, all that blew up was the head of more than one Democratic leader who was already dreaming of Trump’s forced withdrawal. Since the day he made official his intention to return to the White House, the Democrats have been scared to death. All the efforts, all the media and political machinery of the Government and the Democratic party is devoted to making Trump unable to compete with Biden. Good luck with that, guys. The West needs America to be great again, assertive, influential, and relevant. Now Sondland, whom Trump fired after his impeachment testimony, has returned to the limelight with an interesting op-ed on Fox News, titled very differently than what you’d expect from someone who believes his former boss should be convicted as a felon, “President Trump fired me and I’m still voting for him.” (READ MORE from Itxu Diaz: Spring Is the Season of Love) The most amusing thing about this story, aside from Mr. Sondland’s personal situation and reasons for rushing to work with Trump again, is that the point he makes in his article is unassailable. It is not replete with impressions, or coarse words, or feelings or emotions, which are the kinds of things the left employs to attack Trump. It is full of facts, which is something that terrifies Democrats. You show the postmodern left a fact and they run away with their hands on their heads and screaming in fear. Sondland says Biden is neither physically nor mentally prepared to continue four more years at the helm of the United States. And it’s true. And anyone who wants to deny it in public will have to put up with their audience laughing in their face. Sondland says this election is a battle between free market democracy and socialism. And it is true. And it is the gravest issue. And that is why it will be a key election in the history of the United States. I remember when in Spain the president of the Community of Madrid launched her campaign slogan: “now we have to choose between communism or freedom.” Freedom won. Sondland says Trump is the only candidate strong enough to lead the country at this delicate moment in history. And it’s true. Sondland says that with what’s happening in Ukraine, in Israel, on the U.S. border, and with the country under the greatest terrorist threat since 9/11, “we need Trump’s relentless energy speed.” And it’s true. The whole world will be focused on America in the next election, but the West, the free world that today is threatened by the treasonous and liberticidal follies of the left, will not only be keenly focused, but will probably also be on its knees and praying. The West needs America to be great again, assertive, influential, and relevant. Furthermore, in his article he suggests that he testified reluctantly while others testified cheerfully, and hints that the motive of those who have accused Trump the most is actually personal revenge. I abhor the spiteful. And I abhor those who devote their strength to harassing a former colleague or boss with whom they failed to get along. The most flattering then, the most accusatory today. Traitors with whom you should not even go to collect a winning lottery ticket. (READ MORE: The Polite European Right Missed the Point) You can think what you want about Gordon Sondland. But his repositioning of Trump, whether self-serving or not, is perhaps the most credible defense ever made of the former president. And not just because it comes from someone who was fired by him, but mostly, I insist, because his position is replete with incontrovertible facts, which place the voter before a very simple question: do you want this (free markets, strength, and prosperity) or the other (socialism, irrelevance, and misery)? The post Gordon Sondland Returns to the Right Side of History appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

The truth about battery-powered devices (EVs) is finally being emitted. One of these truths — styled a “hurdle for EV adoption” — is the plummeting resale value of these devices. The possibility is that the automakers will demand that EVs be forced on people … by forcing vehicles that aren’t devices off the road. How much — and how fast? How about more than 30 percent in just one year? That’s about five times as much loss in over 12 months as you’d typically lose (about 10 percent) if you bought a vehicle rather than a device. It’s a loss that is actually fast — as opposed to how long it takes to charge a device. (READ MORE from Eric Peters: Complicit Car Media Heralds ‘Revolutionary’ New Electric Vehicle) This latter accounts, in part, for the plummeting value of devices vs. vehicles. The word has gotten out about the time-cost of devices, including the truth about the lie that you don’t have to wait for the device to charge when you plug it in at home. Of course you do. EV apologists pretend it’s not waiting because you’re waiting at home — or because you’re sleeping while the device is charging. But there’s no getting around the waiting — which will become clear if you need to use the car before it’s done charging. But the real killer is that devices are dependent upon batteries that inevitably lose their capacity to retain a charge — at which point the device’s value plummets because it doesn’t work anymore and the cost to make it work again (i.e., a new battery) is too high relative to the value of the device itself. It’s easy to understand how this works. Everyone who owns a phone or even a laptop already knows how it works. After a few years, the device stops working — unless you keep it plugged in (which means you’re stuck wherever your electrical outlet is located) because the device’s battery has gotten old and won’t hold charge anymore. By the time this happens, the device itself is already an old device. Electronic devices age much faster than mechanical things, which also don’t need to be the latest things and routinely work for decades and so continue to have value for decades. Most people want to have the latest device — or at least, not an old one that’s lacking all the latest features or that won’t work with the latest updates. So when their old device won’t hold a charge anymore and they find out that it will cost them 50 percent of the rapidly plummeting remaining value of their device to get a new battery, what do most people do? They throw the old device away. That is easy enough to do — financially — with a small battery powered device such as a phone or even a laptop because the cost of a new device isn’t prohibitive. But it is effectively impossible — financially — for most people who own a large and very expensive device such as an electric vehicle to replace the thing’s battery because most people haven’t got the $15,000-plus it costs to buy a new battery, which they can’t (realistically, most of them) pay for in cash and can’t (also realistically) finance because they’d be putting that $15k on a credit card, at probably double-digit interest, compounded monthly. So they walk away from the device, which they probably leased (most devices are leased rather than bought because of the high cost of a new device) and leave the dealer that leased it holding the bag. Now the dealer has to eat the cost of the loss, which he can’t recover because most people don’t want a used device, even if it has a new battery. Because it’s still an old device and it will inevitably need a new battery and when it does, by that time, it will be an even older device and probably have lost 70 percent of its original value. These losses have consequences — including for the cost of leasing a new device, which has become high in proportion to the plummeting residual value of the device by the end of the lease term. It is the projected residual value — i.e., the remaining value of the vehicle after “x” number of years — that is the primary factor affecting how much a lease costs. A device that loses 30-plus percent of its value-when-new after as little as one year is going to cost a commensurately higher amount each month to lease than it would cost to make monthly payments on a vehicle that only loses about 10 percent of its value each year. It will also still be worth something by the time you pay it off — in the event you decided to buy. “Tumbling resale values aggravate buyers’ worries that an EV isn’t worth the price or the potential headaches, says USA Today.” They already worry about EVs’ high prices, charging, lack of choice, and driving range. Now, they fear when it comes time to sell the vehicle, they’re not going to get much back.” That’s not a “fear.” It’s a fact. A related fact is that vertical depreciation negates the device’s supposed “savings” in not having to spend money on gas — and oil/filter changes. Not surprisingly, people are eschewing devices in favor of vehicles. This is reflected in double digit declines in the number of devices being bought (and leased). Which has triggered a walking back of the “commitments” made by a number of vehicle manufacturers to make more devices because they’re beginning to realize they can’t force people to buy these devices. (READ MORE: The Car That Pulls Itself Over) Which brings up an alarming possibility that is likely to become a certainty after the pending election, if the Orange Man doesn’t win. And perhaps even if he does. The possibility is that the automakers will demand that EVs be forced on people — not just forced onto the “market” — by forcing vehicles that aren’t devices off the road (and not just out of the showroom). There are a number of ways this could be done, including a massive “carbon tax” on vehicles that aren’t devices — or on the fuel that vehicles need. That is just a matter of the how. The why is self-evident. Having poltroonishly (and short-term greedily) bought into the government pushing devices into production for a “market” that doesn’t want these devices, the manufacturers (car companies) are now hemorrhaging billions on devices and that bleeding has got to be staunched. The most obvious way to staunch it is to leave people no alternative but to buy the devices they’re pushing. The post Another Hurdle for the Electric Vehicle appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Joe Biden continues to be a terrible father. For all his senile doddering, the real problem with him isn’t his age, it’s that he lacks virtue. He has been willing to sacrifice anyone to obtain and keep power and the most disgusting sacrifices he has made have been his own children. The worst part? Both Hunter and Ashley Biden have cried for help, but Democrats and the media crave power, so they facilitate the abuse of these adult children by covering for Joe Biden. Joe Biden has kept his son fueled up with drugs and underaged prostitutes in his own quest for money and power. Bad dads cause countless cultural woes. Addiction, abandonment, abuse, and adultery are familial crimes rooted in self-gratification. Often, these things combine to create a toxic environment for children and the problems become intergenerational. The genetic proclivities to narcissism, psychopathy, and addiction create an unstable milieu the children suffer trauma. These victims, insecure and fragile and with the same genetic weaknesses, cope with their anxiety and fear in various ways and often end up addicts themselves seeking solace through drugs, alcohol, people, work, exercise — something, anything, to escape the emotional pain. Self-centered and fractured, with no one to sooth them, they become emotionally stuck. They are perpetual children in search of parental figures who love them unconditionally. They become frustrated when they find no adequate human or substance surrogate. They suffer endlessly unless they find recovery and God. (WATCH Melissa Mackenzie: The Spectacle Ep. 118: Conservatives Win European Elections, Shocking Leftist Elites) And so it is with the Biden family. Joe Biden, more criminal kingpin than pater, abandoned his children at the moment they lost their mother for his own narcissistic ambitions and then confabulated a story to narrate his debauched life when the truth is more ruthlessly terrible: his wife and child died, he left his remaining children when they needed him most, had an affair with the married wife of one of his campaign operatives, married her, and together, they crafted a lifetime of lies using and abusing the surviving Biden children as props, and in Ashley’s case, personal plaything, and later, as money mules for the criminal Biden organization. The play-pretend lid can only stay on this pressure-cooker situation for so long. Often, adult children of narcissists must reckon with their own pain well into their adulthood. If it is still unsafe to face the truth, sometimes the truth is revealed inadvertently. There is a psychological theory for this: leakage. Leakage is when someone’s words may convey one idea but his facial expressions or body language, or in particularly overt cases, actions, reveal the true intent or feelings. A person crying while saying nothing is wrong or balling his fists and claiming to not be angry are examples of leakage. And then there’s the Biden children. Ashley Biden “left” her diary to be discovered. Oopsie. And Hunter Biden “lost” his laptop during a bender. Oopsie again. These are monumentally huge psychological tells. This is leakage on a tsunami scale. Desperate to be heard, both Hunter and Ashley left their personal testimonies to their pain where someone, anyone, could find them. The tales of woe and self-incrimination (and Hunter Biden is a criminal), but more importantly, parental incrimination, are so damning it seems impossible that neither of these adult children of Joe Biden didn’t go back and search and reclaim their property in haste. But they didn’t. Why? One can imagine many reasons but the fact is that they did leave this evidence to be discovered. Both the diary and laptop are corroborated and verified evidence that were abandoned in public places. The sins of the father are revealed in both of these catalogs of catastrophe. From Ashley’s musings about inappropriate showers with her father to Hunter’s images with hookers, guns, and blow, these embarrassing vignettes are humiliating confessions; secrets to be guarded at all costs. But sometimes the self won’t survive unless the truth is known. So now the truth is out there and what has happened? The children have continued to be abused but not by the media that is exposing it. No. The abusers continue to be Joe and Jill Biden and, like the family members who cover for the pedophile favored son, the Democrats and mainstream media who aid and abet the abusers. The media portrayal of Joe Biden as a good father is risible. The fact that he’s cast as the victim of his son’s drug abuse and addiction is laughable. This father, knowing that his son is a strung out addict, continued to use him to conduct his corrupt influence-buying business dealings. He uses his daughter Ashley as a human prop. New evidence of corruption just broke. John Solomon reports that the FBI knew since 2016 that Hunter Biden, on behalf of his father, was setting up a side business in Lichenstein with the founder of Burisma: The FBI learned as far back as 2016 that Hunter Biden and his partners had plotted to set up a new venture in tax-friendly Liechtenstein that would be capitalized by a whopping $120 million investment from the controversial owner of the Ukrainian energy firm Burisma Holdings, according to documents obtained by Just the News that have been kept from the American public for eight years. The mega-deal was not referenced inside Hunter Biden’s now infamous laptop or during the 2019 impeachment proceedings involving Ukraine, but was instead chronicled in a trove of 3.39 million documents the FBI seized from Hunter Biden and his business partners during an investigation of securities fraud nearly a decade ago. The cache of documents was recently turned over by former Hunter Biden business partner Devon Archer to the House Oversight Committee as part of its impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden’s conduct. Hunter Biden has been an addict for a long time. Joe Biden has kept his son fueled up with drugs and underaged prostitutes in his own quest for money and power. These are not the actions of a loving father. Joe Biden has used the Feds to go after and prosecute those who found and then sold the diary. The FBI and intelligence community covered for the Hunter laptop to help Joe Biden’s election chances. Nancy Pelosi had been briefed about the laptop a year before the last election. (WATCH: The Spectacle Ep. 117: David Catron: Why Tim Scott Should be Trump’s VP) But the mainstream media and Democrats refuse to examine the contents of these revelations. They refuse to acknowledge the pain of these adult children. To look and really see is to find a bad father. Good fathers create a cultural legacy and build civilization. Bad fathers cause intergenerational pain and destroy civilization. Joe Biden is a bad father. The post Bad Father Biden and His Kids’ Cries for Help appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

This plot seems too diabolical to be true, but true it is. Late in the day of January 7, 2021, unknown operatives within the D.C. establishment made the conscious decision to have Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick “murdered.” Two of them relayed the news of the Sicknick murder to the New York Times. Reporters Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Tracey Tulley described these operatives as “law enforcement officials.” Babbitt was, in fact, one of four protestors to die that day, three as a result of police action. In the unrevised version from January 8, 2021, the reporters told Times readers that “pro-Trump rioters … struck [Sicknick] in the head with a fire extinguisher.” For authenticity’s sake they added this chilling detail: “With a bloody gash in his head, Mr. Sicknick was rushed to the hospital and placed on life support.” To secure Sicknick’s status as a martyr to the cause of democracy, the operatives saw to it that Sicknick’s cremated remains were laid in honor in the Capitol Rotunda. The previous last American to be so honored was Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and, before her, civil rights hero John Lewis. Sicknick’s remains were then buried with full honors at Arlington National Cemetery. He had served six years in the Air National Guard. In analyzing a given event, it is sometimes hard to distinguish conspiracy from incompetence. In this case, incompetence led to conspiracy. At 2:44 p.m. on January 6, a panicky Capitol Police officer, Lt. Michael Byrd, ignored all standard police protocol and fatally shot 35-year-old Ashli Babbitt, a 14-year Air Force veteran. This shooting was part of no one’s plan. (READ MORE from Jack Cashill: First, They Came for the J6ers) Byrd was positioned on the far side of the heavily barricaded doors leading to the House lobby. On the exposed side stood three Capitol Police officers. A few minutes before the shooting, Babbit had walked by herself down the long, narrow corridor leading to the lobby doors. Following her was citizen journalist Tayler Hansen who recorded her movements. Hansen offered the officers some water, while Babbitt joked with them. These were her people. She had spent most of her military career in police work. Within a minute or two, a trailing crowd of roughly thirty people quickly filled up the hallway behind Babbitt. In that crowd was Zachary Alam, thirty, a repeat offender with no social media ties to Donald Trump or MAGA. Alam moved to the front of the crowd, reached between the officers, and began punching the glass panels while yelling, “F*** the blue.” Appalled by Alam’s behavior, Ashli’s police training kicked in. “Call f***ing back-up!” she shouted at the feckless officers as they stood in place with their backs to the doors, doing nothing. “She was basically yelling at these officers telling them to do their jobs,” said Hansen. For more than a minute after the first window was cracked, protestors argued with the officers but did not touch them or threaten them. Nor did they smash any more windows. In a subsequent press release the Department of Justice (DOJ) observed, “Eventually, the three USCP officers positioned outside the doors were forced to evacuate.” The video does not bear this out at all. The officers were not in any imminent danger. As soon as the officers pulled away, Alam grabbed a helmet from a protestor and broke out all the glass from the transom on far the right side. “Ashli was actively trying to disarm these people,” said Hansen, “trying to calm them down through this entire kind of confrontation with these police officers.” After yelling for Alam to stop, Ashli took matters into her own hands, literally. A southpaw, she yanked at Alam’s backpack with her right hand. As he spun around, she slugged him square in the face with her left fist. His glasses flew off on impact. Fleeing the madness, Ashli hopped with some assistance into the window frame now fully free of glass. Only a person as small as she could have managed that feat. Just seven seconds after she slugged Alam, said Hansen, “Michael Leroy Byrd ended up issuing the kill shot with no verbal warning.” Complicating matters for the operatives was that the shot had been recorded by John Earle Sullivan, a black provocateur with BLM roots. Sensing a payday for his footage, Sullivan had his agent contact CNN on January 6 and enter into a one-week agreement for use of the critical forty-four seconds. CNN paid him $35,000. This video undermined the Democrat narrative. Babbitt was, in fact, one of four protestors to die that day, three as a result of police action, but her death was the most visible. The shooting of a petite, attractive, unarmed young Air Force veteran made it difficult to sell the saga of heroic police officers fending off a rabid mob, especially since all the dead were J6ers, and none of the police was seriously injured. Sara Carpenter, one of ten women I profile in my new book, Ashli: The Untold Story of the Women of January 6, shed unwitting light on the plot to “murder” Sicknick. A medically retired NYPD officer, Carpenter was driving back to New York after her day at the Capitol when she called an old friend who lived in Maryland. When Carpenter mentioned where she had been that day, her friend started screaming at her, “You killed somebody,” the “you” referring to the protestors. “You killed a Capitol Police officer with a fire extinguisher.” The friend’s husband had once been a Capitol Police officer. Carpenter presumed he had inside information.“It sent me reeling,” she told me. Fortunately for the operatives, the 42-year-old Sicknick just happened to die on January 7 from a stroke. They then wedded Sicknick’s real death to the fire extinguisher rumor and commissioned the aforementioned “law enforcement officials” to sell this cruel fiction to the New York Times. It appeared under the shocking headline, “He Dreamed of Being a Police Officer, Then Was Killed by a Pro-Trump Mob.” Independent journalist Glenn Greenwald made a screen shot of the Times account before it could be revised. “This horrifying story about a pro-Trump mob beating a police officer to death was repeated over and over, by multiple journalists on television, in print, and on social media,” said Greenwald. He called this counterfeit murder “the single most-emphasized and known story of the event.” It cowed the entire GOP into silence. The D.C. medical examiner’s office performed Sicknick’s autopsy on January 8. To preserve his fictional murder as fact, the medical examiner sat on the autopsy report for more than 100 days and might never have released it were it not for pressure from a Judicial Watch lawsuit. This suit also forced the medical examiner to reveal the true cause of Sicknick’s death, specifically two strokes at the base of his brain stem caused by a clot. Sicknick died a “natural death” on January 7. There was no fire extinguisher. No bloody gash. No rush to the hospital. Sicknick, a reported Trump supporter, did not deserve this ghoulish exploitation. (READ MORE: Why Republicans Should Make January 6 Their Issue) There is considerable debate as to whether January 6 was a trap or even an inside job. Beyond debate is the fact that someone had Brian Sicknick murdered. His reported “death by fire extinguisher” was no accident. Congress needs to find out pronto who ordered the hit. Jack Cashill’s new book, Ashli: The Untold Story of the Women of January 6, is now available for purchase. The post Who Had Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick ‘Murdered’? appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

In the Jewish calendar, this is the week in which the holiday of Shavuot is celebrated. It is called in the ancient prayerbook the Time of the Giving of Our Torah, and the Torah reading on that day is of the Exodus text in which the Ten Commandments are given on Sinai. Israel is upholding the most fundamental of human rights and acting on the most fundamental of societal imperatives. The laws and the ideas in the Torah have spread their influence far and wide. Its sensibility of humans as being created in the image of God inspires freedom-loving people everywhere. At the top of one of the two tablets was the prohibition on murder. And some simple attention to what the protection of human life means would clean up a great deal of the chaos in our world. (READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin: As John Adams Knew, We Must Hold To Received Traditions) Blood is protected. It is the fundamental protection given to humans. Without life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness are meaningless abstractions. Taking of life is a sin of the first magnitude, if only because, unlike sins most other sins against our fellows, we cannot restore the victim to wholeness in any way at all. The blood of others is like our own. “Do not stand by the blood of your fellow,” Leviticus directs, these terse words meaning not only that threats to the lives of others must be our concern but that standing, that is, inaction, is not an acceptable response. In the in-depth discussions that the comprise much of the Talmud, this imperative is taken up and fleshed out in terms of practical law. It rules that in the case of someone pursuing another with murder or rape in mind, “it is a mitzva (that is, an imperative) to get the jump on them to kill them.” The meaning is that it is not only an option but rather it is necessary to take pre-emptive action. The preference of biblical law is not to sit back and let murder happen and then prosecute the matter in court, but to stop it from happening altogether. Of course, the law specifies that the minimum of force necessary to accomplish the task should be used, but the task must be accomplished even if it requires nothing less than deadly force. This idea is present in the Biblical phrase “his blood is on his head.” This means that the murderer has removed from himself the protection God has granted all humans, and there is no guilt in taking his. The Talmud is telling us that the moment that protection is removed is the moment the person has committed himself to the act of murder. God does not require the murder to happen but prefers that it does not happen. Therefore, we do not give murderers a tactical advantage of always getting the jump. Their intentions made clear, we must act to do what they will not — not allow murder to happen. There is an interesting point that is implicit in the Talmud’s language on this point. The Hebrew says, translated literally, one must “get up earlier to kill him” [that is, the would-be murderer] when it could well have said “get up earlier and kill him.” This word choice is significant, as it teaches us the idea of deterrence. When it becomes known that people will be ready to use deadly force as necessary in defense of life, it becomes less necessary to use it. This is deterrence. When murder and mayhem are not resisted, when they are not vigorously anticipated and deterred, they will fill up the absence of will. Nature abhors a vacuum, especially the natural murderer that looks for the chinks in the armor of civilization. Rousseauian romanticism about human nature has led to dreamers to erect their utopias on piles of human bones. They turn to violence inevitably as the struggle to be civilized is an internal one and must be fought and won each day. Without the covenant passed on to us by those who preceded, we would never exit from barbarity and chaos. We preserve the legacy of insight, inspiration, and law that are passed to us from those whose humanity is just like ours and who cared enough to turn away from selfishness to live a life devoted to a larger self, one that includes us and our own posterity. (READ MORE: Biden Distracts Americans. Turns on Israel With New Ceasefire Proposal) Foremost of the imperatives that they passed down is the one to construct a society in which life is valued and in which you use whatever deterrent is necessary to make that value govern. This includes having to override the choices of those who choose to murder and rape, even if they don’t like it. Even if a lot of others also don’t like the idea and squawk about it in the UN. Israel is upholding the most fundamental of human rights and acting on the most fundamental of societal imperatives. Its magnificent and bold hostage rescue pre-empted the murderous intent of Hamas; their military pre-empted those who would kill to stop the rescue and to stop the saving of lives. Yet the Administration is remarkably uncomfortable with this victory of life and deterrence of murder and rapine. Under Biden and Obama, we have forgotten the necessity to pre-empt and to deter. The result has been a world in chaos. The policy towards Israel has shown a lack of clear purpose, unnecessarily confusing gaseous wishful thinking with the hard urgent choices that response to the cold-blooded ideological murderers requires. By failing to pre-empt, by handicapping Israel’s response to the would-be exterminators, Biden and his Obamanik crew have encouraged the murderers and prolonged the war and spilled far more blood than was ever necessary. But that is what Obama did in his pathetic response to ISIS and to Assad and his poison gas. That is what Biden did in his humiliating and unnecessary skedaddle from Afghanistan, forcing Americans to behave as if we had been routed. That is what they both continue to do by the spineless appeasement of the Iranian mullahs. In failing to act, in thinking that only good intentions and fine dreams are required, they have failed in their duty and in their own aims. This whole bloody mess was unnecessary. There is an example of four years of a presidency in which precious little bloodshed took place and in which the stock of the exterminationists went bust. It can be done. We have the evidence. If our current leaders can’t make better choices, let’s make better choices ourselves. The post The Bible: Kill Before They Kill appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.