Dear Patriots,
Here are items on various timely subjects that we thought you would like to know more about.
1- There is no reason to trust anything “the media” pushes out anymore. Never forget what they have done to the world by failing to do their most fundamental job: hold power accountable.
Adam Creighton at Brownstone Institute
Media Is to Blame for Covid Vaccines’ Wall of Infallibility
QUOTE: The dam wall has finally broken. In the US and Australia, the chapter of silence on reporting Covid-19 vaccine injuries appears to have slammed shut, due in no small part to Christine Middap’s excellent series of reports in the Australian.
Throughout the pandemic criticism of masks or lockdowns was permissible, if frowned upon, but the vaccines attained an almost exalted status that ensured any critics – no matter the quality of their evidence – were unfairly disparaged as “anti-vaxxers,” “cookers,” or simply ignored.
Why this was so remains hard to explain, but some fault must lie with a too credulous, incurious mainstream media, naive to the political and financial forces that pushed governments to eschew the more sensible path of voluntary Covid-19 vaccination.
At the very outset, compelling entire populations to take a scientifically novel vaccine, produced on a political timetable, against a disease that for the bulk of people was a bad cold, was a highly questionable policy, arguably trashing traditional medical ethics about informed consent.
Yet even as it became clear throughout 2021 and 2022 that the experts pushing vaccine mandates had been wrong over and over again, “safe and effective” remained the mantra.
Warning signs were flashing bright red about safety all along.
Throughout 2021 the US government’s own vaccine injury reporting system, VAERS – for which it is a felony to file a false claim, not to mention time-consuming – suggested a massive, unprecedented increase in potential injuries. Sure, many would be spurious, but how such a surge was largely ignored continues to boggle the mind.
The point of a free media is to challenge authority, especially massive incursions on human rights, but many of us became cheerleaders for the health bureaucracy and politicians, assuming all were faithfully acting in the public interest.
Social media performed abysmally too. The latest batch of Twitter Files revealed a systematic effort by US government-funded NGOs to remove even true stories of vaccine injuries where they could promote “vaccine hesitancy.” In an Orwellian twist of history, any posts throughout 2021 that warned of vaccine passports, mandates, or argued for natural immunity were removed.
2- The left no longer has any principals or consistent beliefs. This means they can flip on a dime given the circumstance.
Victor Joecks Las Vegas Review-Journal
Modern leftism makes more sense when you understand that the only consistent principle is obtaining power.
QUOTE: See if this scenario sounds familiar: A crowd of angry protesters storm into the capitol building, upset over the proceedings. Some more aggressive individuals take to the legislative floor, bringing a halt to official business.
What happens next? It depends on the political motivations of those involved.
When rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the condemnation was swift. President Joe Biden labeled it an “insurrection.” Federal officials have gone after violent rioters. But they’ve also spent years aggressively tracking down people who peacefully entered the building and walked around.
But the reaction is different when the disruptors are Democrats seeking gun control. In March, left-leaning protesters stormed into the Tennessee Capitol. Three state House members disrupted the proceedings and took over the floor. One had a bullhorn and led chants. Democrats and the media lavished praise on the three legislators. The fawning increased after the Tennessee House expelled two of them.
You can’t make a principled argument against a mob disrupting legislative business if you won’t apply it to your allies. But few on the left appear interested in principles.
Many on the left no longer have consistent principles. This may stem from the critical race theory worldview that progressives have bought into. It holds that life is a battle between two groups — the oppressors and the victims.
If you accept this false dichotomy, the only thing that matters is obtaining and wielding power. It’s why radical leftists, who energize the modern Democratic Party, can so easily switch their positions. If a long-standing principle is helpful in the moment, use it. If it’s not, discard it.
This is repackaged Marxism, including the desire for revolution. Once you understand the worldview, it’s easy to see how the left views some insurrections as more equal than others.
3- As the Biden Regime pushes expensive EV policy with more regulations, Europeans are wising up to the disaster that is electric vehicles.
Finally, the Europeans May Be Rejecting the EV Kool-Aid
QUOTE: You may not know it if you rely solely on American media, but there is a growing revolt across much of Europe against Net Zero mandates in general and electric vehicle mandates in particular.
It seems that, led by luxury carmakers, the future may be bright for the venerable internal combustion engine if new synthetic fuels technologies can produce an affordable replacement for gasoline and diesel fuels.
The revolt had been brewing ever since Europe got a wakeup call with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that upset the Net Zero applecart and led even Germany to reopen coal-fired power plants. Still, the EU last November had struck a provisional deal on a new vehicle emissions law that would have banned the sale of internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles by 2035.
Two months later, though, the new Meloni government in Italy began to raise objections. The forced transition to EVs has already hit the Italian auto industry with job cuts, leading Transport Minister Matteo Salvini to argue that it makes no sense to put thousands of jobs at risk when there are plenty of reasons to keep ICE vehicles on the road with a carbon-neutral fuel.
Italy’s balking opened the door for German Finance Minister Christian Lindner to switch his government’s position to demand an exception for hydrogen-derived, carbon-neutral synthetic e-fuels (produced by electrolysis with added carbon) that can power ICE vehicles. Porsche, which has invested $75 million in a pilot plant to make e-fuels, and Ferrari could preserve their rich heritage and iconic models and still comply with zero-emissions requirements with e-fuels.
Automakers are still losing money in their quest to build all-EV fleets. Ford reported that its U.S. EV business had losses totaling $2.1 billion, a figure expected to rise to $3 billion in 2023. Ford finance chief John Lawler said it was normal for a startup to rack up losses, but if people have alternatives, not even the Inflation Reduction Act subsidies may be sufficient to turn car loving Americans into passive drivers of vehicles they cannot repair.
Finally, Europeans may be waking up to the realities of Chinese domination of the EV market and their attempted takeover of the European [and American] auto industry as well. The largest British auto dealership, Pendragon, has agreed with Chinese EV manufacturer BYD to sell its cars in the United Kingdom.
4- It is enjoyable to watch the left eat itself.
Liberals Get A Big Dose Of Their Own Medicine
QUOTE: There are few things as satisfying as watching a Democrat being pummeled by the same rules they force everyone else to live by. Cancel culture is cancer, but I do love it when it comes to the left.
Enter the New York Times. The New York Post reports Times employees who are members of the Alphabet Mafia – the “LGBTQRSTUVWXYZ community” – are outraged over being told they shouldn’t bother everyone with their personnel problems, that they should be directed through the proper channels.
“Natalia Villalobos — the paper’s vice president of inclusion, strategy, and execution — told workers to stop chirping on a Slack channel called ‘TimesOut’ and use other avenues to voice their complaints,” the Post wrote.
Turns out gay Times employees were apparently trying to out-complain each other on this channel, overwhelming whatever work-related communications were happening there. “Villalobos reportedly asked employees who had concerns about issues in the workplace to raise them in either an ‘ask-the-company’ Slack channel, one-on-one with a manager, or directly going to human resources,” the Post reported, which seems reasonable. There are avenues to address concerns, not wide communications networks.
Well, the Alphabet Mafia did not appreciate that at all.
You are probably asking how it is that the left-wing New York Times, in the left-wing state of New York, on the left-wing island of Manhattan, in the left-wing section of mid-town, became a hotbed of homophobia, and you wouldn’t be alone. There is no pleasing these people, so you shouldn’t even try.
5- If you have a relation who is deciding about college in the next few months, here is a good resource.
David P. Deavel at The Association of Mature American Citizens
A Professor Tells Students How to Fight the Woke University
QUOTE: The school year is nearly over. Millions of high school students are deciding what to do next. Many of them are still deciding on a four-year college. As a college professor, my own advice to students and their parents matches that of the radio host Dennis Prager: unless you are aiming at one of the serious (usually religious) institutions that is explicitly “right wing” in educational terms (meaning committed to traditional conceptions of education as imparting knowledge of the sciences and the humanistic wisdom of western civilization by teaching a philosophical habit of mind) then you should just go to whichever one is cheapest.
But if students do not go to one of those outlier schools such as Hillsdale, Grove City, the University of Dallas, my own University of St. Thomas in Houston, they have to be ready for what they will encounter. They have to prepare to recognize the kind of left-wing brainwashing they will encounter and be ready to fight back. Thankfully, Drexel University management professor Stanley Ridgley has written a book that does precisely that. Brutal Minds: The Dark World of Left-Wing Brainwashing in Our Universities is not only a guide to the mechanisms by which the world of the American university, which had been tilting left for decades, became a fully woke indoctrination center bent on imposing a dogmatic leftist take on race and gender. It also explains how the indoctrination works in practice and gives advice for how best to resist it.
While many ordinary Americans blame the professors for this shift, Ridgley rightly argues that full-blown activists are still a minority of faculty at most schools. Certainly students will find the kind of brutal Maoist techniques designed to separate them from their families, communities, and sense of morality in some classes, but the most dangerous people on campus are those in the “student affairs” (sometimes called “student services” or “student development”) positions—counselors, student orientation directors, residence life directors, first-year experience directors, academic advisors, and especially the hordes of diversity, equity, and inclusion staffers who have taken over.
Though Ridgley does not think the faculty in general are the biggest problems, some academic departments come in for special blame: mostly in the social sciences, the “studies” (women’s, sexuality, black, social justice, etc.), and especially the schools of education.
Ridgley’s final chapters encourage students and parents to take the information he offers and use it to stop the activists in their tracks. Given that university administrators and boards of governors finally are only concerned with lawsuits and bad publicity, pressure from students and parents holds out the possibility of reform on campuses that are not fully left-wing. Thus, he offers a path of recognizing these abuses, resisting them, and then reporting them. He encourages presidents and boards of governors to reassert their authority over the universities. And he encourages state legislatures to actually exercise oversight over state universities and colleges—and use the powers of the purse to stop the ideological takeovers.
Read. Share. Pray.
Hold Fast,
Defending The Republic
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