Tucker Carlson On P. J. O’Rourke (And Open Thread)

February 18th, 2022

Been running around all day and I’m going to make a batch of salsa, so I’m gonna have to push another packed LinkSwarm to Saturday.

In the meantime, here’s Tucker Carlson’s tribute to P. J. O’Rourke.

Facebook Manager Of Community Development Allegedly Busted In Child Sex Sting

February 17th, 2022

This seems like an important breaking story:

That “allegedly” in the title is for legal reasons (even child rapist scumbags are entitled to the presumption of innocence under the Constitution), but “Sure, I flirted with a 13-year old and set up two meetings with him, and gave him my hotel room number, but I never intended to follow-through on ‘make out with you, touch you, suck you!'” is hardly a compelling defense. Indeed, defense lawyers will be playing this tape for clients for years to come just to drive the “No, seriously, just shut the fuck up” point home.

Remember how everyone laughed at “Pizzagate,” at the very idea that there was a ring of powerful Democrats that engaged in pedophilia? Well, that particular instance may well have been bunk, but since then we’ve had Epstein’s “suicide,” every other member of Antifa seems to be a convicted sex offender, and we’ve had high profile pedophiles unmasked at such liberal bastions as CNN and now Facebook.

But it seems less like a ring than a widespread fraternal organization with many different chapters.

How many more leftwing child predators are still out there?

A Revolution in San Francisco

February 16th, 2022

If you wanted to place post-Virginia bets on the next locale to experience a conservative parent uprising against insane woke policies, San Francisco would be the very last city you would guess, since insane leftist policies seem to dominate at every level of city government. Yet that’s just what happened yesterday.

San Francisco residents overwhelmingly voted to oust three of the city’s progressive school-board members on Tuesday. It was the culmination of a year-long effort to reform the board, which has been accused of prioritizing social-justice politics over reopening schools and managing the district’s troubled finances during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Returns started coming in around 9 p.m. in California, showing that more than 70 percent of voters supported recalling each of the three candidates: 79 percent voted to recall board member Alison Collins, 75 percent voted to recall board president Gabriela López, and 73 percent voted to recall board member Faauuga Moliga.

Moliga conceded defeat via Twitter shortly after the first returns were released. Turnout for the election was about 24 percent, with 119,718 of the 499,771 registered voters in San Francisco casting ballots, according to the Department of Elections.

Democratic Mayor London Breed will now be tasked with appointing three new members to the seven-member board. Collins, López, and Moliga were the only members of the board who were eligible to be recalled. Their seats are up for election again in November.

“The voters of this city have delivered a clear message that the school board must focus on the essentials of delivering a well-run school system above all else,” declared Breed in a prepared statement. “San Francisco is a city that believes in the value of big ideas, but those ideas must be built on the foundation of a government that does the essentials well.”

Tuesday’s election marked the end of a year-long recall campaign launched by Siva Raj and Autumn Looijen, two single parents and Bay Area tech professionals spurred to action by their frustration with the board’s refusal to reopen the city’s schools well into the Covid-19 pandemic.

Instead of focusing its efforts on developing a reopening plan, the board has been preoccupied with woke culture war issues, expending energy on changing the admissions process at the highly-selective Lowell High School to boost the number of black and Hispanic students and reduce the number of white and Asian students; rechristening 44 schools named after prominent Americans, including presidents Abraham Lincoln and George Washington; and a proposal to spend close to $1 million to paint over a historic, 80-year-old mural at a local school that depicts the life of Washington, but also includes outdated stereotypes.

The board became the focus of national ridicule last February after a two-hour debate over whether a gay white dad was diverse enough to join an all-female volunteer parent committee. All the while, the district’s budget deficit ballooned to about $125 million last year, leading California education officials to threaten a state takeover. The California Department of Education sent an expert in last year to help the school board devise a plan to close the gap.

San Francisco is the farthest left city in the country; Republicans are a rounding error there. If woke nonsense can lose on the ballot there, there’s no place in America where it can win if it’s the central issue on the ballot.

Even Austin.

For a long time, what used to be known as moderate Democrats went alone with social justice garbage to avoid being dragged as the first one to stop clapping for Stalin. Now the Social justice warriors have dragged the party so far left that voters in San Francisco are sick to death of their nonsense.

The 2022 midterms offer an opportunity for a once-in-a-generation realignment election as big or bigger than 1994. Republican candidates at every level have a duty to highlight and vigorously oppose the entire panoply of social justice bullshit: Critical Race Theory, police defunding, tranny madness, queer education for elementary school children, antifa riots, school mask mandates. Tie every one of those woke anchors around the necks of Democratic incumbents and relentlessly pound away at them between now and November. Send flyers highlighting the lunacy to every black and Hispanic parent in America. Conduct outreach to every Asian family to remind them that Democrats are just fine with quotas that keep their children out of the college of their choice with racist quotas. Send out a thousand Scott Presslers to register outraged parents as Republicans and get them out to vote.

And once we win, blast every institution infected with social justice down to bedrock, purge the woke and rebuild from scratch.

Clean sweep.

Hard reboot.

No quarter.

One last bit: “In June, voters will decide whether to recall Chesa Boudin, the city’s far-left district attorney.”

Trudeau The Thieving Bully

February 15th, 2022

Justin Trudeau, the prick that keeps pricking, has decided that the risk of him looking impotent is such an astounding threat to the nation that it requires invoking the never-before-used Emergencies Act to end the vaccine mandate protests.

The Emergencies Act gives powers to the federal government:

  • the ability to “regulate or prohibit public assembly that may reasonably be expected to lead to a breach of the peace, travel, or the use of property”
  • the ability to “designate and secure protected places”
  • the ability to “assume the control, restoration and maintenance of public utilities and services”
  • the ability to “authorize or direct the provision of essential services and the provision of reasonable compensation”
  • the ability to “impose on summary conviction a fine not exceeding $500 or imprisonment not exceeding six months or both, or on indictment, a fine not exceeding $5,000 or imprisonment not exceeding five years, or both, for any breach of an order or regulation”
  • Trudeau has to meet with his provincial cabinet. Then he will release a proclamation.

    As soon as Trudeau invokes the Emergencies Act it will go into effect. However, Parliament must receive a motion for the emergency within seven days.

    The motion for the emergency must survive the House of Commons and the Senate. If it does not then it will end.

    Which of these limited powers is Trudeau invoking first? None of them. He’s using it to track and steal the money of people who dare to disagree with him.

    Canada Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Finance Chrystia Freeland has announced the government is broadening the scope of the country’s anti-money laundering monitoring and terrorist financing laws to cover crowdfunding platforms and the payment service providers they use.

    “These changes cover all forms of transactions, including digital assets such as crypto currencies,” she announced during a press conference on Monday night.

    “The illegal blockades have highlighted the fact that crowdfunding platforms and some of the payment service providers they use are not fully captured under the proceeds of crime and terrorist financing act.

    “Our banks and financial institutions are already obligated to report the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada or FINTRAC. As of today, all crowdfunding platforms and the payment service providers they use must register with FINTRAC, and they must report large and suspicious transactions to FINTRAC.”

    How quickly government power went from “We’re only taking money from druglords and terrorists” to “We’re tracking all transactions of peaceful protestors.” Imagine if the U.S. government announced it was going to freeze the bank accounts and impound the cars of everyone marching in Selma. That’s what’s going on in Canada.

    All over a vaccine mandate that was never enacted into law by Canada’s parliament.

    It may be time for all Canadians, not just those involved in the protest, to get their money out of Canada.
    

    Trudeau’s actions are so extreme that both the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and the Toronto Star have condemned him over it.

    A few more tweets:

    Dark times for Canada.

    Darker still if Canada lets Trudeau get away with it.

    Clinton’s Crimes: Worse Than We Thought

    February 14th, 2022

    Pretty much everyone outside the Democratic Media Complex realizes that the Hillary Clinton campaign conspired with deep state operatives to jam Donald Trump at the line, but new revelations show that the Russigate/dossier/FISAgate scandal wasn’t the worst thing they did by a long shot.

    Special counsel John Durham’s team alleged on Feb. 12 that a tech executive aligned with the Democratic Party was paid to spy on former President Donald Trump’s residences and the White House when Trump was president.

    Lawyers for the Clinton campaign allegedly paid the technology executive to infiltrate servers at the Trump Tower and the White House, Durham said in court filings, in order to establish an “inference” and “narrative” to tie Trump to the Russian government. Durham’s office made the claim as part of his investigation that had brought charges against Michael Sussmann, a lawyer who had worked on behalf of the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and who is currently charged with making a false statement to the FBI.

    Durham alleged Sussmann “had assembled and conveyed the allegations to the FBI on behalf of at least two specific clients, including a technology executive (Tech Executive 1) at a U.S.-based internet company (Internet Company 1) and the Clinton campaign,” according to a section in the court filing, titled “Factual Background.”

    Billing records he obtained suggest that Sussmann “repeatedly billed the Clinton Campaign for his work on the Russian Bank-1 allegations” and that the unnamed technology executive met and communicate with Mark Elias, a left-wing lawyer and operative who has filed numerous election-related lawsuits on behalf of the Democrats. Sussman previously pleaded not guilty and accused Durham of acting in a politically motivated manner.

    “Tech Executive-1 also enlisted the assistance of researchers at a U.S.-based university who were receiving and analyzing large amounts of Internet data in connection with a pending federal government cybersecurity research contract,” Durham’s filing states.

    The executive also “tasked these researchers to mine Internet data to establish ‘an inference’ and ‘narrative’ tying then-candidate Trump to Russia,” the filing states, adding that the technology firm that the executive worked for “had come to access and maintain dedicated servers” for Trump’s executive office.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

    So the Clinton campaign was paying to violate wiretapping and electronic privacy laws to spy on a sitting U.S. President. I don’t think I can even add up all the laws that were broken here.

    If Richard Nixon tried such a stunt he’d never have gotten pardoned.

    Some tweets:

    Satyagraha, Eh

    February 13th, 2022

    Satyagraha, in addition to being my least favorite of Philip Glass’ early operas, is Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophy of non-violent resistance to political repression. We’re seeing an excellent example of it being deployed up in Canada, as the trucker protest against Justin Trudeau’s vaccine mandates continues.

    Here’s an example of the philosophy in action:

    Veterans have reportedly joined the protest, forming lines between police and truckers.

    Evidently the Ambassador Bridge linking Detroit and Windsor, Ontario has been cleared but access to the bridge is still blocked.

    The primary roadblock to solving the crisis remains Justin Trudeau.

    Instead of treating the truckers as fellow citizens who have a valid, or at least reasonable, complaint about a relatively unimportant policy that the government vacillated on prior to its implementation, the establishment and center-left in Canada have reacted to them with outrage and contempt.

    They are agents of malign foreign influence or white nationalists. They must be fought on the beaches and the landing fields.

    Snip.

    Justin Trudeau speaks as if an enemy horde has descended that must be resisted in another Battle of Maldon. “I want to be very clear — we are not intimidated by those who hurl abuse at small business workers and steal food from the homeless,” he said. “We won’t give in to those who fly racist flags. We won’t cave to those who engage in vandalism or dishonor the memory of our veterans.”

    In this, he engaged in classic nutpicking, focusing on a few instances of misbehavior to tar the entire group. It’d be hard to come up with a better expression of the high-handedness that has characterized pro-restriction officeholders and public-health experts during the pandemic than Trudeau’s sneering attitude toward the protestors.

    Canada has been a relative monolith on Covid. Conservative officeholders have been broadly willing to go along with lockdowns and mandates. There has been no Ron DeSantis. Nor is there any conservative alternative media in Canada (with a few exceptions) to give a platform to dissenters from the Covid orthodoxy — the positive coverage of the truckers, for instance, has mostly been emanating from the United States.

    Surely, this is why the truckers have taken on such an outsized significance.

    In representing such a high-profile break from the Covid consensus, they have given conservative politicians permission — or affirmatively pressured them — to begin to back off restrictions. Already, the conservative leader who lost to Trudeau last year and is a relatively conciliatory figure has been dumped and will likely be replaced by a more combative alternative. Alberta and Saskatchewan have moved this week to lift various Covid restrictions.

    The truckers are another sign of the class inversion in advanced Western countries. The Left continues to shed working-class voters and gain college-educated voters and the well-coiffed Trudeau, fully attuned to haut progressive sensibilities, is the perfect paladin for the upper-middle class. On the other hand, the right is doing the opposite and sees blue-collar virtue in the truckers to whom it once would have felt no natural connection.

    One hopes that, on the ground, the whole episode doesn’t have an ugly end.

    Trudeau should give the truckers their victory on the vaccination mandate. His government, which already backed off on it once only to re-embrace it, can easily back off again. It’s not as though this was a law passed by parliament. It’s a unilateral, arbitrary rule of the sort that proliferated throughout the pandemic. And no one can seriously believe Canada is going to suffer a renewed Covid surge based on roughly 10 percent of its truckers not being vaccinated.

    The idea Trudeau should give in only works if you assume that he’s actually working for the best interests of Canada and Canadians. The stubborn resistance to a return to normalcy on the part of left-wing politicians across the globe suggest that another agenda is at work.

    Liberal comedian Bill Maher, whose diet seems to incorporate ever-more redpills these days, says Trudeau is starting to sound like you-know-who:

    Fact check: Trudeau was never a cool guy.

    Will the Canadian political establishment force Trudeau to blink, or is he going to push the crisis to bloodshed to make truckers bend their knees to the state?

    Audiences Know CNN Is Lying To Them, And Know Joe Rogan’s Not

    February 12th, 2022

    Enjoy Joe Rogan and Dave Smith slamming CNN’s fundamental dishonesty:

    Plus Russell Brand’s hilarious impersonation of Brian Stelter, and some takedowns of the Russiagate and Bountygate lies.

    LinkSwarm for February 11, 2021

    February 11th, 2022

    That Biden Inflation is up to another 40 year high, a BLM founder heads to the big house, Democrats wake the normies, more corrupt insiders playing footsie with China, and only white liberals are upset at Joe Rogan. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
    

  • Welcome back Carter inflation is in full swing. “The consumer price index went up by 7.5 percent over the last year, the highest annual increase since February 1982.”
  • Remember the mention in last week’s LinkSwarm about how cooking oil prices drove an Austin restaurant out of business? Well it’s a global problem that’s leading to record-high food prices.
  • “Activist who founded Black Lives Matter Memphis is sentenced to six years in prison for illegally voting when she was still on probation for felonies including stalking….Pamela Moses, 44, voted illegally six times since she pleaded guilty to evidence tampering, forgery, perjury, stalking and theft under $500, seven years ago.”
  • “PINKO ALERT: Kindergarten Kids in Masks Forced Into BLM School Parade, and That’s Just the Beginning.”
    

  • The Democratic education establishment done screwed up by waking up normie parents.

    Many public schools kicked off 2022 by switching back to remote learning — or canceling classes altogether — leaving frustrated parents across the country frantically searching for more consistent schooling options.

    These past two school years of remote and hybrid learning, forced masking, and an intensified culture of unpredictability has pushed teachers, administrators, students, and parents to very edge. What began as a temporary interruption to student learning has become a vicious cycle of confusion, inconsistency and lost educational time.

    Thanks to the unreliability of distance learning, children are retaining less of what they’ve learned, reading at lower grade levels and suffering from a lack of social interaction. There is little to no support for children who rely on school to provide a safe haven from difficult home lives, and students in free or reduced meal plans have a harder time receiving them.

    As school policies continue to isolate students from friends and peers, such as forcing students to eat their lunch outside on buckets, or facing the same direction without talking, the tragic numbers of adolescent depression, anxiety, and suicide continue to rise.

    Millions of exasperated parents, many in deep-blue cities and states, are desperately pursuing educational alternatives that better suit their families’ needs and values. Parents are enrolling their children in private and charter schools in droves, while those without the financial means to do so remain stuck in a system captive to the whims of teachers’ unions and indifferent school boards.

    Many teachers are going above and beyond in the name of what is best for kids, but their ability to truly innovate and explore new ways of teaching and inspire learning is being blocked by the unnecessarily restrictive demands of union leadership.

    These unions tend to operate at state and national levels in ways that do not represent most of their members. Rather than sticking up for these vulnerable children, unions — as recently exemplified by the Chicago Teachers Union — are prioritizing strikes, walkouts and funding political campaigns, halting true progress as students remain stranded at home.

    Fed-up teachers across the country have resigned their union membership, tired of their dues dollars funding an agenda they don’t support.

  • “Doctor Says She Was Pressured to Make Omicron Sound More Dangerous.”

    Dr. Angelique Coetzee is the South African responsible for alerting health officials about the omicron variant of COVID-19 back in November. At the time of the discovery, she observed that it presented “unusual but mild” symptoms.

    This was undeniably good news. Despite being more transmissible, the omicron variant was less severe, and many believed that it meant that the pandemic was nearing its end. But Dr. Coetzee says that she was subjected to “a lot of pressure from European scientists and politicians” to revise her original diagnosis that omicron presented mostly mild symptoms so that the public would perceive omicron to be just as dangerous as the delta variant.

    She was subsequently attacked for her refusal to push the preferred narrative.

    “Because of all of COVID’s mutations, all of these scientists and politicians who aren’t from South Africa were contacting me telling me I was wrong when I spoke out, that it was a serious disease … they were telling me I had no idea what I was talking about, they kept attacking me,” she told the Daily Telegraph. “In South Africa it is a lighter disease, but in Europe it has been a serious, serious illness, which is what the politicians want me to say … there has been a lot of pressure from European scientists and politicians who have said ‘Please don’t say it is a mild illness.’”

    There’s nothing our leftwing ruling elites won’t corrupt. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Nepo, meet Tism: “GM hires [Missy Owens], Biden niece, former Obama aide to head environment, sustainability and governance policy.” It’s a very exclusive club, and none of us are in it.
  • Speaking of nepotism by our elites: “Liz Cheney’s Hunter Biden problem: Husband’s firm reps China companies, dictatorial regimes.”

    Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) called on the U.S. to stand up to the “generational threat” posed by China while unveiling a major report on Beijing’s “malign behavior” at the same time her husband’s law firm was working on behalf of companies linked to China’s military, intelligence, and security services.

    As Cheney stood at the podium, her husband Philip Perry’s law firm was cashing in on legal and lobbying work that his employer — Latham & Watkins (LW), one of the largest law firms in the world — was doing for a host of Chinese companies, some of which were involved in the kind of activity that Cheney was warning had to be stopped.

  • More fallout from the midterm variant: Suddenly dire emotional appeals about Republican governors dropping mandates become strangely clinical when it’s Democrats doing the same thing.

  • “The GOP is gaining among Texas Hispanics. Women are leading the charge.”

    Democrats were caught off guard by Donald Trump’s numbers in South Texas in 2020. The Hispanic Republican women who live there were not.

    Many of them have played a leading role in urging their neighbors in majority-Hispanic South Texas to question their traditional loyalty to the Democratic Party.

    Hispanic women now serve as party chairs in the state’s four southernmost border counties, spanning a distance from Brownsville almost to Laredo — places where Trump made some of his biggest inroads with Latino voters.

    A half-dozen of them are running for Congress across the state’s four House districts that border Mexico, including Monica De La Cruz, the GOP front-runner in one of Texas’ most competitive seats in the Rio Grande Valley.

    It’s some of the clearest evidence that Trump’s 2020 performance there may not have been an anomaly, but rather a sign of significant Republican inroads among Texas Hispanics — perhaps not enough to threaten the Democratic advantage among those voters [Keep whistling past that graveyard. -LP], but enough to send ripples of fear through a party that is experiencing erosion among Hispanics across the country.

    “For so long, people here just never had Republicans knocking on their doors and calling them the way we did in 2020. The majority of us are women that did it then and are doing it now because we feel it’s our responsibility to keep the American Dream alive,” said Mayra Flores, a leading candidate for the GOP nomination in a South Texas-based congressional seat.

    For Flores, the road to becoming a Republican was similar to the path traveled by many Hispanic women in South Texas. She grew up seeing most of her immigrant family vote Democrat and felt that it was standard for Hispanics to only vote for Democrats. Then, she says, came an inflection point where she began to question her loyalty to the party.

    A family member asked if she knew what both parties stood for, and after looking into it, Flores felt that her religious, anti-abortion and pro-border security views were more conservative than she’d ever thought and more in line with the GOP. Five years ago, she got involved in her local GOP and now a majority of her family votes Republican, too.

    She wasn’t surprised at all to see Republicans gain ground in 2020 along the Texas-Mexico border, even as Democrats and Republicans outside the region expressed shock at results in places such as Zapata County — where Trump became the first GOP presidential nominee since 1920 to carry the county.

    Neighboring Starr County saw the most dramatic shift of any county in the state when thousands more Republicans turned out to vote than in prior elections. While President Joe Biden ultimately won the county with 52 percent of the vote to Trump’s 47 percent, that paled in comparison to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 performance, when she garnered 79 percent to Trump’s 19 percent.

    Can you hear them now, Democrats? (Hat tip: Push Junction.)

  • “Nationwide Battle Escalates Over Private Millions Bankrolling Public Elections.”

    Democrats want to continue allowing private money to fund public elections. Republicans want to limit the practice, which they say gave Joe Biden an unfair and perhaps decisive advantage over Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential contest.

    So far, at least 10 Republican-controlled states have passed laws to prohibit or limit the use of private money in public elections. These include the swing states of Arizona, Florida, Georgia, and Ohio. In another swing state, North Carolina, Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper vetoed such legislation, as did other Democratic governors.

    During 2020, nonprofits donated more than $400 million to state and local election boards to support their work and get out the vote. Most of the funding, about $350 million, came from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, distributed primarily through the Center for Tech and Civic Life, a Chicago-based progressive-led group that includes former operatives of President Barack Obama.

    Democrats and others contend that such money is necessary to support the work of underfunded election boards facing the added challenges of the pandemic. Republicans assert that the private grants were disproportionately allocated to counties eventually won by Biden, a mismatch that hurt them in 2020 and, if continued, would damage their chances in future elections.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Texas is doing well. New York? Not so much.

  • Carjackadephia.

    District Attorney Larry Krasner (D-Philadelphia), one of the George Soros-funded stooges who took office in some of our major cities with the explicit promise to reduce prosecutions, tried to tell people that yes, crimes with firearms had increased, but other crimes were down. That, of course, was bovine feces.

    The real reason for the increase in carjackings? It’s because the perps simply aren’t very afraid of being caught, or, if they’re caught, being seriously punished, not with a ‘social justice’ District Attorney in charge of prosecutions.

    (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)

  • Another week, another hate crime hoax. “A 19-year-old black female college student at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville (SIUE) is now facing disorderly conduct charges over lying to police after she reported a hate crime incident in her dorm last month….black female college student Kaliyeha Clark-Mabins now faces three disorderly conduct charges for filing a false police report over the matter.”
  • “The Biden Administration is now sending crack pipes to drug addicts in the name of “racial equity.” Happy Black History Month!
  • “That’s my n*gg*r, Joe Rogan! Fuck the noise!”

  • Related:

  • Freedom!

  • For sale: 1978 Ford F-250 Lariat, 139 miles. No, that last number isn’t missing three digits.
  • “CDC Director Now Says To Just Do Whatever Texas Did 12 Months Ago.”
  • The dog makes an eloquent case.

  • Ben Shapiro On Biden’s Pivot Dilemma

    February 10th, 2022

    Ben Shapiro has thoughts on The Great Democratic Party pivot discussed yesterday.

    All over the world, people are realizing that this is stupid and then it’s time to end it. The problem for Joe Biden is that he’s been stuck in “I will end COVID mode,” and he’s now created an entirely paranoid set of American citizens who believe the minute you take off a mask, you’ll be struck by the wrath of God.

    When your worldview is completely off, you have two choices: One, shift your worldview and announce that you made a mistake or: Two, keep doubling down. And Joe Biden has to keep doubling down, because the minute he announces it was a mistake, guess who the hero of this story is? It is no longer Joe Biden, it is no longer Andrew Cuomo, it’s the evil, horrible, no-good, very-bad Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who took the exact opposite approach, and they can never allow that to happen.

    I believe that Shapiro is right, in that there is a contingent of Democrats willing to mask and lockdown forever rather than admit Republicans were right. But I believe Shapiro overlooks the time honored gaslighting strategy, where the Biden Ministry of Truth solemnly announced that we’ve always been at war against mask mandates, and that a significant fraction of their mainstream media enablers will shamelessly parrot their new lie, just like Jen Paski shamelessly lied that it was Republicans that wanted to defund the police.

    It won’t work for the vast majority of American voters, but they don’t really expect it to. It just gives them the delusional fig-leaf that they were never wrong, to be followed immediately followed by even more “shut up” and “you’re a racist,” then a nice foreign war or riots over a random dead black felon to help change the subject.

    It’s the Democratic Party way.

    Midterm Variant Wrecking Flu Manchu Mandates

    February 9th, 2022

    Have you noticed the change in the air?

    Just a few weeks ago, Democrats were still talking about enforcing mask and vaccine mandates.

    Then the poll numbers got through to them.

    Not since the collapse of the Hindenburg Line in 1918 have such bitterly held positions been abandoned so quickly.

  • New York Gov. Kathy Hochul surrenders:

    Gov. Kathy Hochul will drop New York’s stringent indoor mask mandate on Wednesday, ending a requirement that businesses ask customers for proof of full vaccination or require mask wearing at all times, and marking a turning point in the state’s coronavirus response, according to three people briefed on her decision.

    The decision will eliminate a rule that prompted legal and interpersonal clashes over mask wearing, especially in conservative parts of New York. It was set to expire on Thursday and would have required renewing.

    Ms. Hochul’s decision will let the mask mandate lapse just as a crushing winter surge in coronavirus cases is finally receding. But it was not yet clear whether the governor would renew or drop a separate mask mandate in New York schools that is set to expire in two weeks.

    Are Democrats crazy enough to drop restrictions for adults but keep the ones harming children despite children at extremely low risk? Maybe. How else can they punish parents for daring to reject Critical Race Theory?

  • The same piece notes that New Jersey’s democratic governor also got religion on the issue.

    It was Gov. Philip D. Murphy of New Jersey who began the effort last fall, weeks after he was stunned by the energy of right-wing voters in his blue state, who nearly ousted him from office in what was widely expected to be an easy re-election campaign. Arranging a series of focus groups across the state to see what they had missed, Mr. Murphy’s advisers were struck by the findings: Across the board, voters shared frustrations over public health measures, a sense of pessimism about the future and a deep desire to return to some sense of normalcy.

    See, Democrats are listening to the science! The science of focus groups.

  • Another data point: CNN’s resident “doctor” Leana Wen says it’s time.

    Despite nothing changing at all, CNN’s resident ‘doctor’ Leana Wen claimed this week that “the science has changed” and so COVID restrictions including mask mandates should now be rescinded.

    Wen failed to cite any studies or data that shows the science has changed.

    Wen, who started to admit some weeks ago that masks don’t work in stopping the spread of COVID, stated that “the decision to wear a mask should shift from a government mandate to an individual choice.”

    She added that kids in schools should not be forced to wear masks because it can be harmful and makes it harder for them to learn.

    Welcome back to 2020, “Doctor” Wen, when everyone who didn’t have a (D) after their name already figured this out. I’m just going to leave these here:

  • More Democratic governors abandoning mandatory masking for children: New Jersey’s Phil Murphy, Connecticut’s Ned Lamont, and Delaware’s John Carney.
  • Two Republican governors were way, way, waaaaay ahead of the curve of their Democratic counterparts in eliminating lockdowns, masking and vaccine mandates. Both were ruthlessly smeared as dangerous extremists who wanted to kill grandma. One was Florida governor Ron DeSantis:

    Where does DeSantis go to get his apology from the liberal media?

  • The second Republican governor who scared Democrats into doing the right thing was Virginia’s Glenn Youngkin.

    Very, very rarely do you see the leadership of a major state political party so badly miscalculate where it stands, both in overall public opinion and amongst its own rank-and-file legislators. Three weeks ago, Virginia Democratic Party chair Susan Swecker declared that, “Masks are essential to keeping students safe and schools open, but Glenn [Youngkin] would rather use our children as political cover to appease the extreme, far-right fringes of his own party.”

    Got that? Wanting parents to decide whether or not their kids wear masks to school is a position of the “extreme, far-right fringes.” So Virginia Democrats prepared themselves for an epic showdown over masking in schools.

    And then they lost, badly. On Tuesday, almost half the Democrats in the Virginia State Senate said, “Nah, we’re fine with having parents decide”:

    The Virginia Senate on Tuesday overwhelmingly approved a bill that would prevent local school boards from levying mask mandates and from punishing students whose parents opt to send their child to school without a mask.

    Sen. Chap Petersen, D-Fairfax City, filed the provision Tuesday as an amendment to a bill about in-person learning introduced by Sen. Siobhan Dunnavant, R-Henrico. Democrats have 21 votes in the Senate to Republicans’ 19. Ten Democrats voted for the amendment, nine voted against it, and two abstained.

    The bill is expected to clear the GOP-controlled House.

    Youngkin hailed the Senate vote as a “victory for parents and children.” His administration plans to fast-track the bill to becoming law once it reaches his desk, meaning that it could be the law in less than two weeks.

  • Now some tweets:

  • We’re watching a preference cascade coming down the mountain like an avalanche, carrying Democrats before it.

    And it’s glorious.

    Now enjoy a Jane’s Addiction song: