Monday, February 1, 2021

February 1, 2021 Leftists are trying to destroy Trump's new attorneys By Andrea Widburg

 

American Thinker

« Politically and culturally, we are witnessing a journey to 'abnormalcy' | Trump, the GOP, and the House »
February 1, 2021

Leftists are trying to destroy Trump's new attorneys

By Andrea Widburg

The Senate's farcical impeachment trial of former president Trump is set to begin on February 9.  Farcical or not, Trump is entitled to be represented by the attorney of his choice — a right inherent in every American called upon to face a judicial body in America.  The Democrat party, however, no longer recognizes that right for Trump or anyone associated with him.  Activists are working to destroy completely the two new attorneys who have stepped up to defend Trump.

Over the weekend, news broke that the attorneys Trump had lined up for his impeachment trial had quit.  The problem was apparently over strategy:

CNN reported a person familiar with the departures as saying that the former president wanted the lawyers representing him to focus on his allegations of mass election fraud and that the election was stolen from him.

The legal team reportedly intended to focus on the legality of convicting a president after they have left office.

Both sides make sense.  As an attorney, if I have a clear shot at a procedural dismissal, I'm taking it.  Forty-five Republican senators have already announced that they believe it's unconstitutional for the Senate to hold an impeachment trial for a private citizen.

The procedural argument is pretty clear, given that the Constitution holds that the Senate's authority "in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office" (Art. I, Sec. 3).  Trump is already removed by operation of his having vacated the office so that Biden could enter.  What we're seeing instead is a bill of attainder — namely, a legislative act deliberately targeting a private citizen.  Article I, Sec. 9 states clearly that "[n]o Bill of Attainder ... shall be passed."

For his part, Trump, like all defendants who know themselves to be innocent, wants to make his case in court.  Getting dismissed on procedural grounds leaves a cloud over his head.  He understands that this is the last chance to get facts about election fraud before the American people.  The Democrats are memory-holing the facts and saying any challenge to the election is seditious.  It's now or never.

On Sunday afternoon, Donald Trump's office sent out an email notifying the world that he had hired new counsel for the impeachment: David Schoen and Bruce L. Castor, Jr.

Schoen represented Roger Stone.  He also agrees with many Americans that Jeffrey Epstein did not kill himself.  Schoen presumably has some insight into this matter because he represented Epstein shortly before Epstein was found hanged in his cell.

Bruce Castor's fame (at least for the left) rests on the fact that, in 2005, he did not prosecute Bill Cosby.  Nowadays BLM means that all prosecutors would make the same choice.  Go after a black man for rape?  Never!  Systemic racism.

Both men have had long and successful careers.  Do you know how you can tell that they're good at what they do and have the potential to be effective?  Democrats have gone after them, trying to destroy them personally and professionally in a way never seen in America.  (Hat tip: The Gateway Pundit.)

I attended law school in Texas, back when the school was fairly conservative.  A lot of my first-year classmates in Criminal Law found repugnant the idea that loathsome people, including people who were indubitably guilty of heinous crimes, deserved a lawyer.

I've never forgotten what my professor's response was to that attitude: no one should ever have to face the vast power of the government, which ultimately functions as judge, jury, and executioner, and that handles criminal matters day in and day out, without having a friend at his side.

Back in the day, that was a liberal viewpoint.  It was also then, and still is now, absolutely correct.  When facing the Senate, President Trump, like every other citizen, deserves a friend at his side.  For Americans to penalize those people willing to step up and help the unloved, unpopular, or even the evil (which is how Democrats view Trump) is to destroy one of the most important bulwarks of a free, civil society.
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February 1, 2021 Politically and culturally, we are witnessing a journey to 'abnormalcy' By Andrea Widburg

 

American Thinker

« A new racism emerges from the wokester set in Vermont | Leftists are trying to destroy Trump's new attorneys »
February 1, 2021

Politically and culturally, we are witnessing a journey to 'abnormalcy'

By Andrea Widburg

We are witnessing the opposite of Warren G. Harding's famous "return to normalcy" slogan.  Instead, we are embarking on a period in American history so abnormal that the nearest cognate is, maybe, Erdoğan's takeover in Turkey, Putin's takeover in Russia, or even Stalin's takeover in the old Soviet Union.

Harding ran for the presidency in 1920, two years after World War I ended, while the Spanish Influenza was still killing people (50 to 70 million people eventually died around the world) and while a Red Scare was sweeping America thanks to Russia's Revolution in 1917.  On September 16, 1920, a bomb blew up on Wall Street, killing 40 people and injuring hundreds.  Italian anarchists (i.e., leftists) probably detonated the bomb.

And then there was Harding, the man from Ohio, with his noble head, his affable charm, his mangled English, and his wonderful slogan: "A return to normalcy."  For all Americans — especially for newly enfranchised women — Harding promised to turn back the clock to a better time in America before war, disease, and communism threatened what Americans held dear.

Beginning in 2016, for the first time in almost 100 years, the word "normal" suddenly started being bandied about again in American political discourse.  Trump, we were told, was not normal.  Why wasn't he normal?

He was a businessman, not a politician.  But that's what our Founders wanted — citizen-politicians, not career people.

He was a sexual predator.  Well, no.  He was a man who liked sex and, during locker room talk, boasted in the abstract about grabbing women, although there was no credible evidence that he forced himself on women.  If Democrats wanted sexual predators, they should have looked closer to home (Clinton, Teddy Kennedy, Joe Biden, etc.).

He tweeted!  He gave people nicknames!  Yeah, whatever.

That was all window dressing.  For Democrats, what wasn't normal about Trump was his fealty to traditional American values: protecting our economy, securing our borders, forming beneficial overseas alliances, ending wars, lessening the government's burden on ordinary Americans...that kind of stuff.

For four years, Democrats defined those values as abnormal, evil, and racist.  With these Orwellian definitions, COVID allowed them to advance a "new normal."  The new normal was total government control over people's movements, the economy, and education.  The tech companies did their bit with total control over speech.

Democrats promised voters that Joe Biden, a notoriously corrupt, stupid, and debauched man, who was also visibly drifting into senility, was the calm, normal guy who would bring America back from the brink.  Now, with Biden in the White House and Democrats controlling Congress, we're getting "normaled" good and hard, right up the backside.

David Horowitz explains how abnormal what's happening now is:

The problem is not that we disagree. We are not suffering as a nation from healthy disagreement. We are suffering from a Tsunami of Hate emanating from the Democrat Party that seeks to demonize, criminalize and extinguish dissent from the 75 million supporters of Donald Trump. It is now official Washington dogma that to question an election result — something the congressional Democrats have done in the face of every Republican presidential victory since 2000 — is now "insurrection" and "domestic terrorism," or the incitement thereto, and needs to be prosecuted and suppressed.

You can't have a democracy if this is the attitude of a party that controls all three branches of government, is enabled by a corrupt and compliant media, and is determined not just to defeat, but to humiliate, destroy and expunge from the record an ex-president who is supported by a greater segment of the American electorate than any American leader before him.

There is Democrat-sponsored legislation pending that would prevent any public building or artifact, even a "bench" from being named after the 45th president of the United States. There is a farcical witch-trial to impeach the same villain even though he has left office and is now a private citizen. There is even Democrat talk of stripping Trump of his pension, despite the fact that he gave his entire $1.6 million salary as president to the American people — something no president before him has done. If ever there was a public lynching, short of stringing the victim from the nearest tree — and there are no lack of leftwing calls for that — the Democrats' unrelentingly vindictive assault on the defeated Donald Trump down to the last petty detail is it.

But what is in effect a total war is not merely a war to cancel Donald Trump. If it were, it would be reprehensible enough, but not a threat to the nation itself. This demonic hate directed by the Democrat Party towards Trump is also hate for the 75 million Americans who voted for him. 

Please read the whole thing.

Nothing about 2021 is normal, but don't let the left gaslight you.  You're in line with more than 200 years of the best American traditions.  All the "abnormalcy" is coming from your left.

Image: Joe Biden in March 2020 by DonkeyHotey, added text by Andrea Widburg.  CC BY-SA 2.0.
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February 1, 2021 A new racism emerges from the wokester set in Vermont By John Klar

 

American Thinker

« The sleazy Lincoln Project has the sleaziest of all co-founders | Politically and culturally, we are witnessing a journey to 'abnormalcy' »
February 1, 2021

A new racism emerges from the wokester set in Vermont

By John Klar

Vermont's "Racial Justice Alliance," a radical local activist group that lobbies the Legislature, unveiled an "initiative" to disparage white Vermonters with yet another acrimonious acronym and create a new grievance group: ADOS (American Descendants of Slavery).  These mostly out-of-touch "woke" whites who run this once again are blasting Vermonters for "being the whitest state."  

The latest trendy acronyms they've cooked up to advance this narrative are "ADOS" and "ACT":

This year, the Vermont Racial Justice Alliance is building its advocacy around three main tenets, known as A.C.T.

  • Acknowledging and reconciling historic systems of racism
  • Creating new structures for American Descendents of Slavery (ADOS) economic and cultural empowerment
  • Transforming state systems to better serve ADOS Vermonters.

A.C.T. will enable policy makers to prioritize ADOS wellness and empowerment and enable their ability to thrive.

This is a manufactured outrage.  Vermont has many whites owing to its geography.  But the presence of whites is now been deemed synonymous with a racist hellhole.  Vermont, in addition, is not exclusively white.  Virtually all Vermonters given the ADOS victim card are not victims of Vermont.  They're people who have relocated from states where slavery was practiced.  Slavery was never legal in Vermont. 

Further contrast is exhibited by the marginalized groups excluded from this new racist ADOS trademark: indigenous peoples, Hispanics, Jews, Asians. 

This demonstrates author Thomas Sowell's chief criticism of ideological efforts seeking "equity" — every step creates new inequities. 

If ADOS becomes the standard of government, and goes into use to secure favoritism, well, take just one example: isn't that unfair to Jews?  Why is there no "J" in those catchy monikers like BLM, BIPOC, ADOS, and QGBLTI?  Don't Jews require protection against discrimination?  Why exactly, are Jews, who have suffered tremendous discrimination elsewhere, in Vermont excluded?

Sowell references the Jewish experience as an example of why equal opportunity — not outcome — is the only sensible goal:

Late in the eighteenth century, the United States became a pioneer in granting Jews the same legal rights as everyone else, as a result of the Constitution's general ban against federal laws that discriminate on the basis of religion. France followed suit after the revolution of 1789[.] ... The net result in the late nineteenth century, and in the twentieth century, was a relatively sudden proliferation of internationally renowned Jewish figures in many fields[.] (Discrimination and Disparities, p. 11)

For Jews, improved opportunities (legal rights) yielded improved outcomes.  

Manipulating outcomes through government diktat necessarily undermines equality of opportunity.  For instance, a "coalition" seeks a BIPOC bank in Vermont — run by BIPOC people and funded by white people.  This is overtly racist and inequitable: many white Vermonters have historically been extremely poor — long before, and long after ADOS arrived.  Additionally bankrupt is the notion that money is the solution to every problem.  Has America learned nothing from the well intentioned failures of AFDC?

The United States Supreme Court has rightly viewed such race-based reallocations with a sharp eye:

In 1978, in  Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the Supreme Court found that race-conscious measures designed to address the effects of discrimination were as presumptively unconstitutional as was discrimination rooted in racial antipathy and the belief in racial inferiority. 

Subsequent decisions have affirmed that all racial discrimination (including against whites) is constitutionally suspect.  Vermont's government has yet to be "woke" to constitutional laws against its new racism.

So what of Descendants of the Holocaust ("DOTH")?  The Holocaust was sufficiently profound — and much more recent than slavery.  Insultingly, this novel Vermont Racial Justice Alliance initiative was launched on America's holiday commemorating the Holocaust.  Was that deliberate or merely clueless?

Abenaki Indian descendants (with minuscule genetic Indian DNA) are included in BIPOC but not in ADOS.  Is that "equitable"?  The Native Americans were here long before the former slaves who arrived in Vermont through Vermont's underground railroad. 

How is this new elitist group of ADOS defined?  How do members "prove" their 160-year-old slave status?  How much money do they inequitably thieve from others in the name of equity before balance of outcomes is achieved? 

What of black South Africans — don't Vermonters owe them for Apartheid?  Apartheid just ended in 1994 — not 1862.  Maybe the Rohingya and Uyghurs should move to Vermont and invoke privilege for their racial or ethnic composition.  There's room aplenty on this boondoggle bandwagon (just not for Jews or certain Asians).

If that offends "Racist Injustice Warriors," what of being called a racist solely because you live in the Green Mountains — maligned for the crime of "being too white"?  It is deeply offensive, and Vermonters are targeted as racists if they dare challenge this race-baiting fallacy.

Rohingya have more right to plunk down in Vermont and demand money than ADOS!  Black slaves were freed by Vermonters' blood in the Civil War, welcomed here before that war, and assisted by white Vermonters in escapes.  We Vermonters (and BLM) have done zero to help Rohingya; they are suffering now.

Vermont's Racist Injustice Alliance (who are not most black Vermonters) claims that ADOS are owed something by descendants of white immigrant subsistence farmers.  What of the Vermont bloodshed to liberate those same ADOS forebears?  These agitators wish to have their cake and eat Vermonters' cake, too:

Speakers from the Vermont Racial Justice Alliance will call for a statewide declaration that racism is a public health emergency, and a moral budget that centers ADOS in Vermont.

How is racism a public health emergency in this white state?  More white Vermonters are dying of narcotics overdoses than blacks of COVID.  There is indeed a "public racism emergency" — the left-wing liars who denigrate and scold innocent Vermonters.  That is systemic racism, illegal under existing federal laws.

Let us have a "moral budget" that "centers all people in Vermont" — as always.

Image: Pixabay, Pixabay License.
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