The great minds shaping our nation's, um, intellect

 Bill Maher: ‘Never Ending Woke Competition’ Is Destroying America, We’ve Already ‘Lost’ To China | The Daily Wire    Left-wing HBO host Bill Maher slammed the “never ending woke competition” that is engulfing America, warning that it has turned Americans into a “silly people” and that China is “eating our lunch” as a result.

“And finally, new rule, you’re not gonna win the battle for the 21st century if you are a silly people and Americans are a silly people,” Maher said on his show “Real Time” on Friday. “That’s the classic phrase from Lawrence of Arabia when Lawrence tells his Bedouin allies that as long as they stay a bunch of squabbling tribes, they will remain a silly people. Well, we’re the silly people now. You know who doesn’t care that there’s a stereotype of a Chinese man in a Dr. Seuss book? China. All 1.4 billion of them could give a Crouching Tiger flying f**k … because they’re not a silly people.”. . .

“We have to save this country because our country is dying. Our country is being destroyed by stupid people.” pic.twitter.com/mhP9XKeCIz

— Liz Harrington (@realLizUSA) May 11, 2023

 Phoenixcruiser  @Phoenixcruiser1 May 10 (And will vote in 2024)

Replying to

@realLizUSA

Trump ruined this country, President Biden is bringing it back to life!

'CNN should be ashamed of themselves': AOC and Joy Behar lead backlash to Trump's Town Hall | Daily Mail Online

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Joy Behar have led condemnation of CNN's decision to host a town hall with Donald Trump, which saw the former president bask in the spotlight and repeat a series of lies, joking about being found liable for sexual assault and mocking the moderator as 'nasty'. The 70-minute session, held in New Hampshire in front of a strongly pro-Trump crowd, seemed at times more like a Trump rally than an interrogation, as the former president held court and moderator Kaitlan Collins tried to keep control. During his tense confrontation with Collins he called January 6 a 'beautiful day', insisted he had 'every right' to take classified documents to Mar-a-Lago.

Why Did We Let Stupid People Run America?

Dems starting to discover that reparations demands are a political trap -

As enjoyable as it is to see Gavin Newsom squirming, unfortunately, the opinions expressed in Oakland are going to grow and feed an even deeper sense of frustration and anger on the part of many blacks. And that anger will fuel actions that will be very harmful, even if “mostly peaceful.” 

 Thomas Lifson; American Thinker   . . ."In California, which likes to see itself as a trend-maker for the rest of the nation, the Democrat-dominated Legislature passed and Governor Gavin Newsom signed into law a bill, AB-3121, establishing a “Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans,” effective October 2, 2020. Nine members were to be appointed, 5 by the governor and 2 each by the leaders of the state house and senate. But despite the law’s mandate that “Members shall be drawn from diverse backgrounds to represent the interests of communities of color throughout the state,” 8 of the 9 members were African Americans – which means that they also had a personal stake in the outcome of their deliberations. Otherwise known as a “conflict of interest,” as Daniel J. Flynn points out.

"Is it any surprise, then, that the task force ended up with a set of recommendations that would bankrupt the state, costing an estimated $800 billion, two-and-a-half times the state’s annual budget? Which already is facing an estimated $22.5 billion deficit. The reparations study separately undertaken by the City of San Francisco was even more lavish, recommending a whopping $5 million payment to every resident who qualifies. This would make a two-person household that qualifies almost wealthy enough to rank in the top one percent of Americans in terms of net worth.

"Can anyone honestly claim that African Americans descended from slaves, roughly 12 percent of the population, would all be in top one percent of wealth but for the lingering effects of slavery?

Trump vs. CNN

 

CNN’s brief ratings success with the Trump Town Hall  The numbers are in.

Considering the blowback that CNN has received for broadcasting The Trump Town Hall, from pretty much every direction on the political spectrum, one wonders if – even with a ratings blip of two hours – the undertaking was worth it.

 A Few Thoughts about the CNN townhall with Trump; Patricia McCarthy   . . ."The CNN sit-down Wednesday night was no exception.  Host Kaitlan Colllins clearly thought she would have the upper hand.  Coming from the bubble of leftist propaganda that is CNN’s principal reason for being, of course she believed she would be the hero of the event.  But she got her comeuppance within the first few minutes.  She acted the fool and Trump does not suffer fools, he eviscerates them with a smile on his face. ". . .

 Babylon Bee | Fake News You Can Trust:   CNN Host Sues Trump For Assault And Defamation After Town Hall

"A visibly shaken Kaitlan Collins announced she will be suing Trump for assault and defamation after being destroyed by the former President on national television last night.

"He said things I didn't agree with. Even worse, he said things I didn't like," said Collins in a statement. "It was the most traumatizing experience of my life. It was assault, plain and simple. And defamation. I'm suing Trump for $5 million like that other lady."

"Sources also reported Trump called the CNN host a "nasty person," which trusted fact-checkers have determined was false.

"Media experts applauded the announcement and were all in agreement that Trump's performance in the town hall was the most horrifying spectacle ever televised. "I am literally shaking right now," said CNN Host Jake Tapper. "The lies, the misinformation, the pure evil of that monstrous orange man is too much for my soul to bear. Our democracy is in danger once again. God help us all."

"Biden also responded to the town hall, saying: "Reflustrazuuure! Shut up, fat!". . .

UltraViolet calls for firing of CNN CEO as Trump town hall draws 3.3 million viewers – HotAir  . . ."That is what the left does. Anything they don’t want to hear is called a lie. Yet, they remain silent every time Joe Biden opens his mouth and another lie falls out. UltraViolet aligning itself with AOC to limit the free speech rights of a former president and current candidate is all you need to know about its agenda. The liars were CNN and other liberal networks who spun lies and concocted tales of Russian collusion for the years of Trump’s term in office.

"Joe Biden has been a failure as a president. He is Jimmy Carter-level bad. There are no big successes for the left to credit Biden with as he runs for re-election so they go back to the 2020 election and dredge up old issues. Kaitlan Collins focused on old stories – January 6, 2021, classified documents, the 2020 election, the Access Hollywood tape, and so on. She asked if Putin is a war criminal. What cable media hosts like Kaitlan Collins don’t understand is that voters in the Midwest and the middle of the country don’t care about any of that stuff now. They want to know about what a candidate is going to do about inflation so that they can more easily pay their bills and buy groceries and gas for their car to get to work and and the kids to school. Voters look forward, not backwards. Trump has to learn to stop talking about the 2020 election. The media has to talk about what voters what to know about." . . .

Since the Trump town hall worked out so well...

Anderson Cooper Whimpers Over CNN Hosting Trump Town Hall - Tells His Viewers He Understands if They Never Watch CNN Again (VIDEO) | The Gateway Pundit | by Jim Hoft   . . ."CNN had to cut the network’s town hall with President Trump by 20 minutes after Trump, backed by a wildly supportive audience (hand-picked by CNN), took control of the forum from anchor Kaitlan Collins right from the start and never let up.

"Puck’s Dylan Byers reported on CNN cutting the town hall short, “Note: The CNN Town Hall was a 90-minute broadcast, though the network expected the actual event to go as long as 75 minutes. They stopped less than 70 minutes in. In other words, they could have gone longer if they wanted—which is usually what executives do with big ratings draws.”

Trump vs. CNN | Power Line (powerlineblog.com)   "Donald Trump’s “town hall” appearance on CNN last night has liberals gnashing their teeth. They don’t understand why CNN would give Trump a forum, they are appalled that the audience was in Trump’s corner, and they are frustrated that Trump dominated the event, with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins unable to keep Trump under control, let alone embarrass him.

"Inevitably, CNN’s host ignored the pressing issues of the day and went straight to what the Left really cares about, the 2020 election and Trump’s refusal to accept that Biden’s victory was legitimate (just as Hillary Clinton refused to accept that Trump’s 2016 victory was legitimate). This was Collins’s first question (from CNN’s transcript):

[Y]our polls show that you are dominating the Republican race right now, but you are also under active federal investigation for trying to overturn the 2020 election results. Your first term ended with a deadly riot at the Capitol, and you still have not publicly acknowledged the 2020 election results.

Why should Americans put you back in the White House?

"That set the tone for the evening. The Washington Post, which long ago abandoned any pretense of being a news organization, headlined the Democratic Party’s theme:" . . .

"Mercy Rule": CNN Abruptly Cut Trump Town Hall Short by Twenty Minutes | The Gateway Pundit | by Kristinn Taylor

Breitbart’s Joel Pollak observed the audience was laughing at Collins, “The @CNN audience is laughing at Kaitlin Collins because she keeps trying to squeeze Trump’s answers into her preconceived categories. It’s stupid and, yes, it is funny to laugh at her doing that.”

CNN Expected To Tap Kaitlan Collins For 9 PM Primetime Slot (yahoo.com)

Currently co-anchor of CNN This Morning, Collins generally received positive reviews for her attempts to fact check Trump and call out his mistruths at the event, while critics have blasted the format. After the event ended, the network was quick to praise her performance, saying she “exemplified what it means to be a world-class journalist.”

Kaitlan Collins Speaks Out About Her Trump Town Hall, Calling It “Major Inflection Point” In Race For President; Critics Call It Something Else Entirely (yahoo.com)

Reparations Derangement Syndrome –

  Issues & Insights

Let’s not pretend this is about justice, fairness and decency. It’s a shakedown – aided and abetted by rich, white, guilt-ridden, virtue-signaling progressives – that not even Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton could have envisioned a decade ago.  

"A panel in California, where rotten public policy ideas metastasize like a fungus growing in dark, slimy conditions, has approved paying reparations to descendants of slaves. It is impossible to overstate just how insane this is.

The reparations task force, appointed by Boy Gov. Gavin Newsom, voted Saturday to recommend the state pay out as much as $800 billion to the descendants of enslaved or free black people who were in the U.S. by the end of the 19th century. That’s 2.5 times the size of California’s annual budget. Recipients could rake in as much as $1.2 million each." . . .

. . .The case against reparations is irrefutable. Or would be in a sane world, which we no longer live in.

Despite the lunacy that has a grip on our politics, we will lay out the arguments.

First, no taxpayer in California or the U.S. was alive when slavery was allowed in this country, and none of those who were enslaved are alive either. Anyone who doesn’t think this is irrelevant is neither a clear nor honest thinker.

Second, we go to Andreas Koureas of The Spectator, who brings up an unpopular but salient point: “Ultimately, the great evil of slavery was practiced by all inhabited continents and all races.” Consequently, nearly every human on the planet has “an ancestral link to the slave trade.” 

History, perpetually in conflict with “The Narrative,” tells us that “indigenous Africans, would capture slaves in village raids or as prisoners of war, and they would be sold at the African coast to outside traders or fellow Africans within the subcontinent.”

“​​Long before the transatlantic slave trade began, slavery was commonplace in many parts of the globe,” Koureas adds. “The further you go back in history the longer the list of slavers grows, including everyone from the Ancient Egyptians to the Shang dynasty in China.”

D.C. Democrats Have Gone Full ‘Weekend At Bernie’s’

 The Federalist

It’s hard to watch. But it’s par for the course for today’s Democrats — and the Washington establishment in general — which are motivated far more by ideological fidelity than by competent and decisive governance.

" 'Dianne Feinstein is back at her Senate perch and “ready to roll up her sleeves and get to work.” At least that’s what her colleague Chuck Schumer says. “[I]t’s clear she’s back where she wants to be and ready to deliver.”

"Feinstein doesn’t appear to have gotten that memo. After her months-long absence from Congress with shingles, she’s back… ish. “I’m still experiencing some side effects,” Feinstein said in a statement accompanying her return to Capitol Hill on Wednesday, adding that she’ll have “to work a lighter schedule.”

"That seems like an understatement. Photos of the senator, who will be 90 years old next month, are quite grotesque, as if Getty Images asked AI to generate “a photo of Sen. Dianne Feinstein starring in ‘The Toxic Avenger.’” . . .

. . ."I mean no disrespect to the senator, who can’t do anything about contracting a nasty virus and aging just like everybody else. Her countenance is certainly as sad as it is startling. But since she refuses to appease her fellow Judiciary Committee members with a letter of resignation, and leftist lawmakers are champing at the bit to ram as many norm-shattering judges as possible through Senate confirmation, they’ve got her propped up in a wheelchair “Weekend at Bernie’s”-style. All Democrats need is a body and an “aye,” and the party can go on as usual.". . .

Book Review: Lifting the Mask of the Antiracist Cult; Stanley Ridgley exposes “antiracism” in its hateful, undiluted form.

Lifting the Mask of the Antiracist Cult › American Greatness    "People far removed from the insular world of academia sense there is something hostile brewing in the ivory tower, but today’s “woke” ideologues dismiss these suspicions with a

wave of the hand. The disconcerted layman, they say, is too dumb to understand critical race theory much less criticize it. The unflattering truth is that critical race theory is not complex. It may be too generous even to call it an ideology. Regular people understand it is a form of race prejudice, in the words of author Stanley Ridgley, a “psychopathic” and paranoid “conspiracy theory” that makes white people into a demonic, omnipresent enemy.

"It’s uncommon to see the issue framed in terms so direct and disparaging to the enlightened ones who control our national “conversation” on race, which is more of a one-sided interrogation. Ridgley, a professor at Drexel University, has done a great service lifting the mask of sophistication in his book, Brutal Minds: The Dark World of Left-Wing Brainwashing in Our Universities. Ridgley doesn’t waste time conceding respectability to pseudointellectuals peddling the equivalent of Radio Rwanda propaganda. Rather, he heaps scorn on the cultists and discredits them in their own words. 

"The evidence in Brutal Minds is drawn from the horse’s mouth: the journals, training manuals, and conference speeches of “antiracist educators,” and the forced confessions of their victims, demonstrating the methodical process by which they are broken down and reconstructed. The valuable material Ridgley has gathered together puts meat on the bones of abstractions like “indoctrination,” which have been vitiated in a culture war driven largely by cable news soundbites.

"At its core, “antiracist education” is shown to be a dehumanizing, and strangely casual, form of psychological torture. Ridgely draws a straight line from Mao’s Cultural Revolution to the contemporary American university, where deranged, underqualified careerists in “student affairs” harangue white students in creepy games and “discussion groups.” 

"We are treated to a detailed investigation of the deceitful, unscrupulous techniques that are deployed to target, disarm, and re-educate students. Recruits are groomed with false “empathy” and encouraged to surrender sensitive information about their personal lives. We are reminded that “brainwashing” is more about subtraction than addition: not so much filling minds with ideas, but removing personality and deforming the soul.

"While the details of anti-white “thought reform” are worth reviewing, the author’s chief concern is in exposing the anonymous bureaucracy that is turning academia into a gravy train for “diversity, equity, and inclusion” consultants. . . ."

Street Thugs and the Intellectual Thugs Who Enable Them ›

  American Greatness

Criminals who endanger our safety should know they are taking their own lives in their hands.

. . . "On May 1, riding a different F train near the Broadway-Lafayette stop in Manhattan, was 30-year-old Jordan Neely, a homeless black man with a history of mental illness who had been arrested 42 times, including for punching a 65-year-old woman in June 2021 and a 67-year-old woman in November of the same year. I should note here that someone who has been arrested 42 times has proven beyond any doubt that he cannot be trusted in society and should be confined either to a prison or a mental hospital for his own safety and ours. But he was out and about and, on May 1, he was aboard that F train threatening riders, up to no good yet again. Witnesses report that he was yelling, tossed down his jacket, was throwing around garbage and shouted that he was “fed up,” that he “didn’t care” if he went to “prison for life” and that he was “ready to die.”

"That kind of behavior would make almost anyone on that subway car apprehensive. Fortunately, unlike the incident I had witnessed a few weeks earlier, in which we had to sit silently and hope that the threatened violence would not materialize, in the case of Jordan Neely, a 24-year-old Marine named Daniel Penny happened to be on the train and, with the assistance of other riders, managed to subdue Neely and put him in a chokehold. Unfortunately, the Marine squeezed too hard or held on too long, and Neely passed out and later died.

"Neely did not deserve to die, of course. But neither did his death represent some wholly unexpected and shocking turn of events. When you get on the subway and start threatening riders and act like a dangerous lunatic—and, given Neely’s criminal record, engage in such risky behavior repeatedly—the possibility that sooner or later, something bad could happen to you or others around you is necessarily higher than it would be during afternoon tea.". . .

9-Year-Old Boy's Life Hangs in the Balance: Denied Transplant Over Vaccination Status –

 RedState

"Despite the fact that COVID-19 is no longer a major threat to anyone, the COVID cult is still in effect, and it could cost a nine-year-old boy his life. The COVID regime has already caused immense damage and ruined far too many lives. But, unfortunately, it appears the cult is not through with us just yet.

"Tanner Donaldson, a 9-year-old boy with stage 4 chronic kidney disease, was born with a rare birth defect causing irreversible kidney damage. Tanner’s father, Dane Donaldson, is a suitable live kidney donor, but due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Cleveland Clinic Children’s Hospital has refused to conduct the transplant surgery because Dane is not vaccinated against the coronavirus.

"The hospital has a policy that requires all organ donors to be fully vaccinated to minimize complications during and after surgery. Dane questioned the hospital’s hypocrisy, pointing out that deceased organ donors are not required to be vaccinated. He even offered to sign a waiver freeing the hospital from liability.

"But the hospital still rejected him.

"In April, the Epoch Times reached out to the hospital for an explanation. “Individuals who are actively infected with COVID-19 have a much higher rate of complications during and after surgery, even if the infection is asymptomatic,” the hospital responded" . . .

Update on Tanner Donaldson, the 9-Year-Old in Need of a Kidney Transplant - ICAN - Informed Consent Action Network (icandecide.org)

The callousness of this institution is truly astounding.  But as cruel as its actions are, they are all the more shocking in light of the grave professional and legal consequences they are risking in enforcing this policy.  As ICAN’s attorneys pointed out in the letter, those physicians who are complicit in enforcing the hospital’s vaccination policy are risking disciplinary action against their medical licenses since physicians are legally required to uphold the minimum standard of care.  

 Cleveland Clinic denies boy, 9, a kidney from naturally immune, healthy donor over vaccine status – World Tribune:  

An ideal match for a kidney for Tanner, Donaldson, once a mechanic for the Green Berets, was approved in 2017. Donaldson has spent the last nine years in rigorous athletic conditioning and healthy eating in order to donate one of his kidneys to his son when the time comes.