[A selection of links sent from Skye on what he thinks is worth TTPers’ consideration this week.  It should get you ready for the HFR tomorrow.  He welcomes your feedback and comments on the Forum!]

Turley on trollmeister Trump:

"Blood-Chilling" Or Just A Tweet? Debunking The Coup d'Trump

Its who counts the deaths and how they are counted:

MN Senator Investigated for Criticism of CDC Virus Death Count Guide

CDC: 'Perverse Incentive' for Hospitals to Inflate Coronavirus Deaths

De Blasio stupidly admitting to flagrant First Amendment civil rights violation:

De Blasio: Painting BLM Murals My Decision That 'Transcends All Normal Realities' - Anyone Else Who Wants Mural Has to Apply

Ratings Crash for NBA, MLB After Protest-Filled Debuts

Cultural suicide used to be a popular diagnosis of why things suddenly just quit.

Historians such as Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee cited social cannibalism to explain why once-successful states, institutions, and cultures simply died off.

Their common explanation was that the arrogance of success ensures lethal consequences. Once elites became pampered and arrogant, they feel exempt from their ancestors’ respect for moral and spiritual laws  — such as the need for thrift, moderation, and transcendence.

Take professional sports.

Anti-Putin demonstration in Khabarovsk, Siberia, August 2, 2020

The protests in Khabarovsk and other Russian cities in Siberia and the Far East over the last month have called attention to something that has been a problem for the central Russian government since at least the 19th century.

Moscow is already more concerned about Siberian regionalism than ever before. But now, the Siberians themselves—ethnic Russian and non-Russian alike—are giving the center more compelling reasons to worry.

“Held: Because it is evident that any recount seeking to meet 3 U. S. C. § 5's December 12 "safe-harbor" date would be unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause, the Florida Supreme Court's judgment ordering manual recounts is reversed.” – SCOTUS Bush v. Gore, 531 U.S. 98 (2000)

Democrats are so invested in their revisionist history concerning Bush v. Gore that they have forgotten why SCOTUS actually stopped the Florida recounts on December 12, 2000. That was the “safe harbor” date after which the state’s electors may not have been counted.

The Dems have actually laid a trap for themselves.  Here’s why.

In his latest incarnation as president emeritus and corporate multimillionaire community activist, we are reminded of the earlier Barack Obama of “get in their face,” “take a gun to a knife fight,” and “punish our enemies” vintage.

From time to time, Obama ventures from his hilltop, seaside, $12 million “you didn’t build that” Martha’s Vineyard Estate or his tony Washington, D.C. $8 million “spread the wealth” mansion to lecture the nation on all of its racist sins, past and present.

Obama has always been blind and deaf to the irony of himself. When the truth is finally known, the nation will learn that the Obama Administration was one of the most corrupt in history.  But for now, he is in our face again.  Why?

Winning is everything to these people, even if it means destroying the United States of America to do it (cf. Portland, Seattle, Chicago, and so forth).

So where is Dr. Anthony Fauci in all this?

His bizarre wild pitch at the Washington Nationals baseball opening last Thursday (7/23) is symbolic in the way the “pandemic panic” under which we live, has to a great degree been exacerbated by Dr. Fauci and his colleagues and their arrogance, cheered on, inevitably, by the Democrats and their media choir.

Call it Deep State Medicine.

Have we reached Peak Corporate Cave-In?

It kind of looks like it - Trader Joe's has decided to reverse course and not change all the brand labels of its products to satisfy the wokeness demands of a tiny, largely white, racism-parsing left-wing mob. Here's their statement.

That's a big change from all the cancel culture that's taking every minority face off food-label packaging. Reading through the lines of the corporate statement tells us a lot of just why, and is it commendable:

He came, he saw, he ate their lunch.

Yesterday (7/28) in four hours of testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, Bill Barr, denied a meal break, feasted instead on a gaggle of Democrat amateurs.  Another congressional hearing, another Dem disaster.

They planned a public hanging of the attorney general and spent weeks constructing their scaffold.  But the Dems were led by Rep. Jerry Nadler, whose rabidness is exceeded only by his haplessness.

The start was delayed because Nadler was in a minor car accident. That was obviously an omen, but Nadler doesn’t take hints, so he plowed forward into a head-on crash with a heavyweight opponent superior in ­every way.

Jack will be the first to tell you, as his wife of so many years, I am his most honest critic.  Recently, he was interviewed by Justin Huff on his YouTube show Smart Aspirations.  I found it so entertaining – so Jack being himself – that I told him, “TTPers need to see this!”  I hope you enjoy watching Jack explain this amazing life of his – and let us know what you think on the Forum. Have fun!  - Rebel

“It’s my greatest concern. My single greatest concern. This president is going to try to steal this election.”

--Joe Biden, June 10, 2020

They are literally destroying everything they can to make you pay the price for rejecting them. So what we have here is a montage of the Democrats and the Drive-Bys talking about Trump preparing to steal the next election using federal troops.

She knows the end is nigh

What accounts for the frenzied shift to hysterical language among Leftists when attempting to demean the president every time they open their mouths?  That is an easy question; they know that Biden is a pathetic loser and that Trump is going to defeat him handily in November.

Thus, we hear terms like "storm troopers," "militia," "private troops," and other nonsensical language to describe Trump's light-touch attempts at rescuing those Democrat-run cities that are under siege by violent Marxist groups like Antifa and Black Lives Matter.

They don't seem to grasp the fact that much of America is laughing at them for their misplaced arrogance and crying for the residents of those cities being destroyed by Leftist officials and the well-organized, well-funded anarchist groups that have turned them into war zones.

In the 1960s and early '70s, the U.S. was convulsed by massive protests calling for radical changes in the country's attitudes on race, class, gender and sexual orientation. The Vietnam War and widespread college deferments were the fuel that ignited prior peaceful civil disobedience.

Sometimes the demonstrations became violent, as with the Watts riots of 1965 and the protests at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. Terrorists from the Weathermen (later called the Weather Underground) bombed dozens of government buildings.

Yet a half-century after the earlier revolution, today's cultural revolution is vastly different -- and far more dangerous.  Here’s why.

As India and China confront each other across the Himalayas, it also clearly appears to have driven India and the United States closer. The two have conducted joint military exercises and seem to have been in regular contact, including regarding the Sino-Indian confrontation.

What is more surprising is a series of high-profile statements from senior U.S. officials and lawmakers supporting India. In contrast to the present tensions, during the 2017 Doklam confrontation, this time in Galwan on the other Western side of the Himalayas, the situation appears different.  [See maps below]

If you take black and white left-wing rhetoric seriously, blacks are not human beings like members of other races.

They are first and foremost black; they are human beings defined before anything else by their color—not their humanity, their personality, their character, their mind or their heart. So much so that, according to white and black leftists, if you dissent from this racist view, you are now labelled racist.

The idiocy and inhumanity of this, the “progressive” view of black people, is easily demonstrated.

Every country in the world is experiencing its own particular version of the ongoing global health-and-economic crisis.  Russia faces a particularly complex one, aggravated by outstanding and escalating mismanagement.

Putin relies on the habitual combination of information control and targeted repressions for suppressing the discontent; yet, his own sociological research, conducted—rather unconventionally—by the Federal Protection Service (FSO), warns about rising anger (Meduza.io, July 16).

Feigning supreme confidence, Putin refuses to acknowledge the swift erosion of his severely corrupt autocratic regime, but denials only back him into an ever-tighter corner, from which, as previous experiences indicate, he tends to lash out violently—and in an unpredictable direction.

Cultural revolutions are insidious and not just because they seek to change the way people think, write, speak, and act. They are also dangerous because they are fueled by self-righteous sanctimoniousness, expressed in seemingly innocuous terms such as “social activism,” “equality,” and “fairness.”

The ultimate aim of the Jacobin, Bolshevik, or Maoist is raw power—force of the sort sought by Hugo Chavez or the Castro dynasty to get rich, inflict payback on their perceived enemies, reward friends, and pose as saviors.

So beware when the Marxist racialists who run Black Lives Matter, the wannabe Maoists of Antifa, the George Soros-paid activists, “the Squad” and hundreds of state and local officials like them in cities such as Portland, Seattle, and Minneapolis, and Big Tech billionaires take power.

These are “caring” people who couldn’t care less about the working classes or the thousands of African-Americans murdered in America’s inner cities.

POTUS, Tulsa OK, June 19, 2020

Given the polls, you would think anyone positing Donald Trump has already won the 2020 election is some kind of blithering idiot—and maybe I am. (I’ve been called worse.)

But I can’t help but think that in current conditions the polls are not only not worth the paper they’re printed on, digital or otherwise, they’re about as accurate as a thermometer run over by a six-wheeler.

No one sensible is talking about their political allegiance these days in public—especially to an anonymous pollster.

Instead, they’re buying guns, in record numbers.

The National Football League celebrated its 100th anniversary last year. This should be a time of self-congratulation for the brutal sport, which has no similar counterpart outside the United States.

The NFL's megaprofits dwarf those of other professional sports in the U.S. The Super Bowl, not the World Series, is America's national sports event.

Yet the NFL is in deep trouble like never before.  Here’s why – and here are helpful suggestions on how it could cure its hypocrisy.

President Donald Trump on Tuesday (7/14) listed over 40 different disastrous things that former Vice President Joe Biden proposed to do if elected president.

“It’s probably never been a time when candidates are so different,” Trump said during a press conference in the Rose Garden of the White House. “We want law and order; they don’t want law and order. We want strong closed borders with people able to come in through merit, through a legal process; they don’t want to have any borders at all.”

Here is the list of Biden’s proposals, drawn from the transcript of the president’s press conference:

America is depressed. The combination of the Chinese coronavirus and racial unrest has left many Americans searching for ways to avoid the news. Donald Trump’s popularity has suffered—not because he is responsible for these problems but rather because they happened while he occupies the nation’s highest office.

What Americans need now is a jolt of positivity and optimism. Many loyal Trump supporters have lost hope for America and fear that even if the president wins four more years, it will not matter. To make matters worse, some supporters don’t even have clarity as to what the president’s 2020 message is.

So, while the campaign slogan for 2016 was “Make America Great Again,” allow me to offer a variation for 2020: Make America Dream Again!

To that end, I offer some suggestions for a platform that might inspire such dreaming:

[Yesterday, Bari Weiss – whom Vanity Fair  called the New York Times's "star opinion writer" and The Jerusalem Post  named  the seventh most influential Jew in the world – wrote a resignation letter to the Times’ publisher A.G. Sulzberger.  Fox News reported it as an event that “rocked the entire media world” – “a scathing indictment of the paper’s out-of-control liberal culture.”  Her letter in full is below.]

Dear A.G.,

It is with sadness that I write to tell you that I am resigning from The New York Times.

I joined the paper with gratitude and optimism three years ago. I was hired with the goal of bringing in voices that would not otherwise appear in your pages: first-time writers, centrists, conservatives and others who would not naturally think of The Times as their home…

Instead, a new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.

Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor.

USS Ronald Reagan and USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Groups steam in formation in the South China Sea (7/06)

[For many years, TTPers have known about the deranged Chicom claim of the entire South China Sea.  A typical article is The Trap of Lizzie Webber (March 2009).  How deranged?  Here is a map of the Chicom claim:

The South China Sea is Where Chicoms Must Stop Being Children (June 2015).  Now, ace national security reporter Bill Gertz gives us the latest on how President Trump is standing up to the Chicoms in one of the world’s most critically strategic areas. – JW]

She won a huge audience as she intended. But then the narcissistic Harvard alum posted a very different video — the second part above, one that shows her weeping in a near-fetal position.

She fights back tears while complaining how unfair the world had been to her. Her initial TikTok post had earned cruel pushback from the social media jungle she had courted. Deloitte, she sobbed, was mean and hurtful. And she wanted the world to share her pain.

Guess what, Claira?  The world could care less about your pain.  You’re an object of ridicule instead. A sampling of YouTube comments:

The truth is that the COVID-19 epidemic, the lockdown, and the rioting were seen by the Left, the media, and now the Democrat Party as a renewed effort in this election year to do what Robert Mueller, Ukraine, and impeachment had not—abort the presidency of Donald Trump, or make it impossible for him to be reelected.

To that end, almost daily, entire fantasies were birthed, floated, crashed, and then were replaced by new hoaxes. The strategy was that while one lie might be refuted, the bigger and more numerous the lies, the more a continuous narrative could be fabricated.

Consequently, the last two weeks, in succession we were told by the media:

July 1: Putin on video call with Turkey’s Erdogan and Iran’s Rouhani

For months, and particularly during the end of June and start of July, Russian politics was centered on ensuring the desired result in the vote on the set of amendments to the constitution to keep him in perpetual power.

By resorting to crude manipulations and fraud, President Vladimir Putin secured his “triumph” and can now claim yet another (his fifth) presidential term in the elections scheduled for 2024.

Economic indicators are also carefully doctored: even as real incomes and household consumption keep contracting, government forecasts continue to predict a fast recovery (Rosbalt, June 30).

Putin cannot order the recession to stop, so he has turned to the area where he used to thrive—foreign policy.  Used to – but not any more.

As the summer of our discontent drags on, the fall of 2020 will bring with it either the fall of America or its rise from the ashes.

This Independence Day, the battle lines were drawn unambiguously, and the fate of our nation truly does rest on the decision of the American voters in November.

It is now a commonplace that every election of our recent history is “the most important” election ever. Even accepting that given, any objective look at the parameters of the national discussion leading into this election makes it clear that 2020 is not only an important election, but indeed, a domestic existential crisis unlike any this country has seen since 1860 on the eve of the Civil War.

St. Lucia (photo ©Jack Wheeler)

I’ve been a avid TTPer for some years now.  In that time I’ve gotten to know Jack, talking geopolitics applying to my specialties as an international lawyer -- offshore banking, international trusts, and asset protection in foreign jurisdictions.

When I told him the other day about one of his favorite countries – St. Lucia in the Caribbean – and its “Coronavirus Passport,” he asked me to tell fellow TTPers about it.  So here we go.

The Coronavirus Pandemic that has been swamping the world the last six months and has brought death, destruction and economic devastation in its wake.  One silver lining in all of this negativity, however, for those seeking to protect themselves and their families, has been in the second passport arena.

This is the hardest thing I have written.

I grew up in a law enforcement family. My father worked his way up to the rank to Captain at the Ft. Smith, Arkansas Police Department. As I kid I remember going with him on Friday to pick up his check and I was in awe of these super heroes he worked around.

They were funny and fun to be around. Men and women of all races all with the same mission, to make the community safer.  After college, I was proud to become a police officer myself.  27 years has passed and if you would have told me the condition of law enforcement today, I would have never believed you.

It’s not that law enforcement has changed for the worse but everything around it has.  This why we are leaving, America.  You’ll soon be on your own.

The 2020 election will be decided in the fall by swing voters in ten or 15 states. Prior to the COVID-19 outbreak, those voters were leaning to reelect President Trump, largely on the powers of incumbency and a near-record vibrant economy.

Then came the contagion, the lockdown, the recession, and the collective madness of looting and arson, which in turn led to the present anarchy of statue toppling, cancel culture, name-changing, and McCarthyism 2.0.

Of course, a president is blamed for chaos on his watch even if he did not create the chaos. He either stops it and is praised as a winner or, like Jimmy Carter during the Iran hostage crisis of 1979-1980, is written off as a loser.

The hour of reckoning is here and either Trump will crush the lawlessness and win the swing voters to his side, or he will listen to the trimmers [Jared Kushner, anyone?] and lose the country.

If Donald J. Trump is re-elected to a second term as president, will that victory finally be enough to break the back of a military and policy “elite” who have surrendered to the anti-American mobs and the Democrat Party who made them possible?

It’s a good question.  Here’s more.

Who does our military serve?

Are they subordinated to some ineffable “conventional wisdom” about justice and racial harmony? Do they march to the beat of a “politically correct” agenda defined by the organizations like Black Lives Matter, Antifa, or to the nostrums of ivy league grandees?

Or are they under the command of the citizen America elects to hold the rank of their commander-in-chief?

Due process is not the strong suit of mobs. Neither is nuance, open discussion, or disagreement.

These inherent defects should be painfully obvious as mobs pull down statues, seize sections of cities, and demand the public approach them on bended knee, literally. Anyone who dares push back, perhaps with a mild tweet saying “All lives matter,” faces immediate censure.

In this perilous environment, the most frenzied voices do more than dominate the public square. They monopolize it by silencing dissent. They have received full-throated support from the tech giants that control electronic discussion and the media giants determined to shape the narrative rather than report the news.

The “thought police” are on patrol and ever-vigilant, twirling the twin batons of guilt and moral superiority.  They need to be defunded.

It’s certainly frustrating to watch a pack of reeking leftist scumbags declare a portion of an American city an “autonomous zone” – what is it with Democrats and their secession fetish? – but do not get frustrated because Donald Trump has not sent the 101st Airborne in to powerwash the human grunge from Seattle’s feces-bedecked streets.

That’s what the Democrats want. And Trump – a better strategic thinker than all the media geniuses, hack politicians, and Afghan War-losing generals who cry about him – is not only not going to give them the victory they crave. He’s going to jam their cheesy plan down their throats.

The libs’ plan to win in November corresponds to Trump’s plan to crush them yet again. Here’s how and here’s why.  You’re going to enjoy this.

BLM/Antifa proto-hominids attack Jackson statue (6/22)

When I see the images from Lafayette Square on Monday night (6/22) I keep wondering, where are the conservative leaders who have said so much and done so little to defend our history?

It was a multi-ethnic group of working class DC cops who stood guard protecting Andy Jackson’s statue, their facemasks flecked with the spittle from woke white women. Being taunted by woke white men with man buns. And getting called a traitor to their race.

What I want to see right now more than anything is elected officials and community leaders who are willing and ready to link arms with these cops and physically take part in cleaning up this mess and defying the mob.

When something cannot go on, it certainly will not go on. But what are the symptoms of what cannot go on and when?

There are two historic red lines and our revolution is getting close to both.

When Normal People Grow Weary 

One is when “average” people, both white and nonwhite, who identify neither with Left nor Right, woke nor unwoke, become frightened or appalled by the violence and the anarchy—and thus finally move to dismantle the guillotine as the razor increasingly starts haircutting friends, idols, and compatriots.

Their verdict can be known either by demonstrating themselves, boycotting, voting, or massive civil disobedience. At some point, tonight’s looting rioting hero on on CNN, becomes tomorrow’s commonplace, unnoticed felon.

Watching it today is a stark reminder that what we Americans are experiencing, the violence that is tormenting Democrat-run cities throughout America, is not particularly new.  The totalitarian left has forever been trying to eliminate those of us who rage against the dying of the light.

Serling was beyond prescient when he wrote the screenplay for this episode.  He was a true visionary.  He somehow envisioned the future we now inhabit — an era in which those who "have a mind" are deemed obsolete.

[Note by JW: this article of Dan Henninger is politely implicit, which is here made helpfully explicit in bold.  Enjoy]

Among the most durable of those institutions is what some call “the great American city.” America’s cities are indeed a wonder—built quickly from nearly nothing across a vast continent into a unique story of social and economic success.

We may now be on the cusp of a great reordering of the nation’s population as many people decide it is time to separate themselves and their families from the social, political and moral turbulence of this country’s large Democrat-controlled urban areas.

People with all sorts of political beliefs are going to get out because they are watching Democrat-controlled city after city reach a tipping point of social disorder and political disorganization.

In the past three months it has become clear that modern urban Democrat progressivism is politically incompetent and intellectually incoherent.

Derek Chauvin was a racist cop,

a registered Democrat,

working for a Democrat Police Chief

voted into office by Democrat voters,

in a Democrat controlled city,

in a Democrat controlled state.

He had 18 complaints against him and was let off multiple times by Democrat prosecutor,

now Democrat Senator and failed Democrat presidential candidate Amy Klobuchar.

But somehow, it's all Trump's fault?!

How is it possible in a country that we’re told is riddled with the cancer of white supremacism for those four groups to enjoy a higher standard of living and more success than their all-powerful, white oppressors?

The asking of the question answers the question.

The day after the horrific death of George Floyd on May 25, the rioting began in Minneapolis.  It was violent, destructive, and murderous.  Tragically, the death of this one man at the hands of one particular bad cop became an opportunity for the demolition of the city.  Hundreds of small businesses, many of them minority-owned, were destroyed.

Like previous riots, the rioters have set their own communities back decades.  The riots spread to New York; Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles; Chicago; Santa Monica; Beverly Hills; and elsewhere.  There have been protests in nearly every other city in America.  Hundreds of millions of dollars in losses due to looting and damage to buildings have been incurred.

The question is, where on Earth are the Republicans?

Why has there been no press conference with every Republican in the House and Senate standing together to denounce all this violence?  To passionately defend our police?  Why are they cowering in silence?