“I hope some future day will bring me the happiness of seeing my family again collected under our own roof, happy in ourselves and blessed in each other.” —Abigail Adams (1784)
IN TODAY’S DIGEST
Nate Jackson
The beginning of this week marked some highly anticipated good news: The first coronavirus vaccines were shipped out and taken by eager recipients. However, given the general lack of trust in our institutions and between (and even among) the two political sides, it’s no surprise that there’s division over the vaccine itself. I can’t wait to take it, say some. Nobody’s injecting me with any of that, say others. And then there’s California, which may consider “historic injustice” when deciding who gets the vaccine first.
To say the whole thing has been grossly politicized is an understatement.
Predictably, there’s also division over what life will look like now that there is a vaccine. The “experts” tell us not to be in any big hurry to return to normal because it will be late spring or summer before herd immunity is achieved — assuming any number of variables.
“Can I stop wearing a mask after getting a COVID-19 vaccine?” asks an Associated Press FAQ. “No,” comes the immediate answer, which might as well have added, And you should be ashamed for asking, you careless mouth-breather.
In truth, there are legitimate reasons for continued vigilance. Both major vaccines require two shots, and the second one comes three weeks later for the Pfizer dose and four for the Moderna one. Full protection takes a couple of weeks after the second shot. Moreover, vaccinating hundreds of millions of people will take time, and, as previously mentioned, there are likely millions who will refuse.
Yet there are reasons to question the wisdom of the experts.
“I would recommend to people to not abandon all public health measures just because you’ve been vaccinated,” the Great and Infallible™ Dr. Anthony Fauci said in November. “Because even though for the general population it might be 90 to 95% effective, you don’t necessarily know for you how effective it is.”
Likewise, Dr. Vin Gupta, NBC’s analyst for health policy, lectured this week, “Just because you get vaccinated with that second dose does not mean you should be participating in things like traveling in the middle of an out-of-control pandemic or that you’re liberated from masks.”
Interesting choice of word there: “liberated.” It wasn’t lost on Senator Ted Cruz, who responded, “This is a bizarre, lunatic, totalitarian cult. It’s not about vaccines or protecting people’s lives — it is instead profoundly anti-science, and is only focused on absolute govt control of every aspect of our lives.”
Congressman Jim Jordan agreed. “First, it was don’t wear a mask,” he noted. “Then, it was slow the spread. Then, it was lock everything down. Then, it was wear a mask. Then, it was wait for the vaccine. Now that we have the vaccine, they tell us it’s not going to stop. Freedom!”
Some of us here in our humble shop have had COVID. Some of us have lost friends or family to it. We’ve spent a good bit of time this year working remotely instead of in our small office so as to protect loved ones who would be hit very hard if they got it. We do not take this pandemic lightly.
Yet there are far too many in this country who are either statists themselves or who have succumbed to that siren song, sacrificing, as Ben Franklin once put it, “essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety.” Politicians with a preexisting condition of totalitarianism used the pandemic to justify totalitarian edicts. And millions of Americans are doing what these politicians and their media mouthpieces are telling them to do — live in fear and panic.
Well, for all of you grassroots Patriots who tire of such tyranny, here are a few thoughts that should resonate:
We don’t want another $1,200 going to people who don’t need it. We want government to quit redistributing income and to get out of the way.
We don’t want an extra $300 for unemployment. We want an end to the lockdowns that take our jobs.
We don’t want to be confined to our homes, ordering everything from Amazon and skipping dining out. We want local small businesses to thrive and that corner chef to stay in business.
We don’t want kids staring at a computer screen and struggling to stay motivated. We want them in school.
We don’t want virtual church or 25% capacity. We want to join our brothers and sisters in corporate worship.
And whether you think masks save countless lives or they’re useless virtue signals — or somewhere in between — we think we speak for everyone in saying we look forward to no longer having to wear them.
So, what will life be like in the coming months? It certainly appears that it will be much the same, with varying lockdowns to go with mask and distancing mandates. Is that because such things are necessary, or because there are just some folks who won’t let go of their power over others?
Thomas Gallatin
The continuing controversy over Jill Biden’s insistence on being publicly referred to as “Dr. Biden” has now resulted in exposing the absolute vacuous nature of her dissertation upon which she was granted her preferred title. More on that in a moment. Naturally, Joe Biden’s camp, including the Leftmedia, came running in defense of her pretension.
It all began when Joseph Epstein penned the Wall Street Journal op-ed entreating Mrs. Biden to drop her ridiculous “Dr.” demand. He was predictably derided as engaging in sexism and misogyny, with Biden communications director Kate Bedingfield’s comments serving as a typical example: “What patronizing, sexist, elitist drivel. Dr. B earned a doctorate in education, so we call her Doctor. The title Mr. Epstein has earned here is perhaps not fit for mixed company.”
However, as the controversy has grown, a few conservative pundits dug into Mrs. Biden’s doctoral dissertation only to find more fodder to bolster the argument that her demands for acknowledging her preferred title are nothing more than a classic example of undeserved self-promotion. Like a barking chihuahua insisting it’s a doberman.
Fox News host Tucker Carlson “diagnosed” Mrs. Biden’s 137-page dissertation by reading through excerpts. “Doctor Jill needs reading glasses,” he quipped. “Either that or she’s borderline illiterate. There are typos everywhere, including in the first [paragraph] of the introduction. Doctor Jill can’t write. She can’t really think, either.” He further called her dissertation an embarrassment “not only to poor illiterate Jill Biden but to the college that considered this crap scholarship.” He added, “[It’s] embarrassing, in fact, to our entire system of higher education; to the nation itself. Jill Biden’s doctorate dissertation is our national shame.”
Believe it or not, National Review’s Kyle Smith was even more stinging in his critique of Mrs. Biden’s dissertation, which he called “garbage.” Smith writes, “Jill Biden’s dissertation is not an addition to the sum total of human knowledge. It is not a demonstration of expertise in its specific topic or its broad field. It is a gasping, wheezing, frail little Disney forest creature that begs you to notice the effort it makes to be the thing it is imitating while failing so pathetically that any witnesses to its ineptitude must feel compelled, out of manners alone, to drag it to the nearest podium and give it a participation trophy. Which is more or less what an Ed.D. is. It’s a degree that only deeply unimpressive people feel confers the honorific of ‘Doctor.’ People who are actually smart understand that being in possession of a credential is no proof of intelligence.”
A “participation trophy,” as Smith says, is exactly what Mrs. Biden’s “doctorate” amounts to. But being a typical leftist, for Mrs. Biden it’s the symbolism that counts, not the substance. She deserves the praise and recognition, according to the Leftmedia, not because she has actually done anything worthy of such an honor but simply because she participated. Oh, and she fell in love with and married the longtime Delaware senator, Barack Obama’s running mate, and now the next president, Joe “The Plagiarist” Biden.
Douglas Andrews
It’s hard to un-see something so shocking, but it makes us newly sympathetic to the New Yorker folks on that Zoom call with Jeffrey Toobin. Still, there it was, hanging from a thick, burnt-orange neck ribbon: a gold medallion with a smugly familiar face on it; a medallion encircled by the words, “The Dan Rather Medal for Excellence in News and Guts.”
It’s perhaps even harder, though, to imagine why the Moody College of Communication at the University of Texas would debase itself, would beclown itself, by publicly announcing such an award. Far better to play it on the downlow and plead ignorance than to broadcast it for all the world to see.
And it wasn’t like this was some prank, some sinister bit of cyber-mischief by a few intrepid CompSci geeks at Texas A&M. No, this award has a dedicated website and the enthusiastic endorsement of Jay Bernhardt, dean of the Moody College of Communication. “Dan Rather is not only a legend,” gushes Bernhardt, “he’s the namesake of new awards honoring his career and the work of today’s journalists. We are thrilled to announce the Dan Rather Medals for News and Guts.”
Hook ‘em, dude.
Rather, of course, was the longtime anchorman of CBS News who was forced to resign in disgrace when he and his producer, Mary Mapes, got caught red-handed trying to throw the 2004 presidential election to John Kerry. They did so by fabricating a story about then-President George W. Bush’s long-ago service in the Texas Air National Guard — service that Rather and Mapes falsely maligned. Their downfall was brought about by their reliance on a deeply suspect witness, a Bush hater named Bill Burkett, and a couple of ridiculously fraudulent military documents — documents that used Microsoft Word features such as proportional spacing and superscript characters that were, of course, unavailable on ’60s-era typewriters.
“Within hours of the broadcast,” wrote Power Line’s John Hinderaker and Scott Johnson, “after CBS News posted online PDF copies of four memos highlighted in the segment, the story began to fall apart. The memos looked phony. By the following evening, CBS was in crisis mode trying to deal with the mess. As other news outlets followed up, the story continued to disintegrate. CBS nevertheless hung with it for nearly two weeks. The New York Times provided its own form of encouragement to CBS. In the words of the classic headline over its story of September 15, ‘Memos on Bush are fake but accurate, typist says.’ Four Times reporters collaborated on the story.”
That’s it, really. That’s the summing-up of our mainstream media in three devastatingly self-incriminating words: Fake. But. Accurate.
The real journalistic heroes of the day were then-obscure bloggers like Hinderaker and Johnson. Their 2015 piece, “Rather Shameful,” is probably the definitive summary of the Memogate scandal and its aftermath, which included a pathetic attempt by Hollywood leftist Robert Redford to rewrite history with a dud of a film called — we kid you not — “Truth.”
As our Mark Alexander noted at the time, “It’s no small irony that this BIG Lie of a film is titled ‘Truth.’ That was the translated name of the official newspaper of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Indeed, ‘Pravda’ was the party’s primary instrument for political ‘dezinformatsia’ from 1912 to 1991.”
Johnson shared some thoughts yesterday about the force behind modern journalism. “The left simply does not give up in its efforts to rewrite history,” he notes. “The efforts are unrelenting. Memories are short. And the left has highly effective tools of persuasion at its disposal, such as naming an award in honor of one of its disgraced votaries or conferring such honors on leftist fraudsters, as has become something of a tradition with the Pulitzer Prizes.”
He’s spot-on about this, and the hilariously unselfconscious “Dan Rather Medal for Excellence in News and Guts” is Exhibit A. To borrow from Robin Williams: People say satire is dead. But it isn’t dead at all. It’s alive and well and flourishing at UT Austin’s Moody College of Communication.
Mark Alexander
Former White House National Security Advisor and Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn (USA, Ret) has been under siege for the last four years. He was the earliest target of the deep-state co-conspirators in their effort to take down President Donald Trump.
Michael Flynn served our nation with great honor and dignity as a career defender of American Liberty, which is precisely why he was chosen to join the Trump administration as national security advisor. But that didn’t stop the cabal who set him up in order that he wouldn’t be an obstacle to what amounted to a coordinated subversive coup d’état against the Trump administration. Beyond Flynn’s indictment, and the long-overdue dismissal of the contrived case against him by leftist Judge Emmitt Sullivan, it is the principal coup orchestrators, John Brennan and James Comey, who should be indicted.
Of course, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will form a gauntlet against any such indictments.
In a recent interview, General Flynn’s statements provide great insight into the depth of this Patriot’s faith both in our Creator and our people: “The American people saved me. They saved my family. If there’s something I get emotional about, it’s that. I mean, I don’t know why. Prayer. Faith. The American people have been buddy breathing with me for four years. Another way to describe it is the deep state buried me six feet under ground, wanted me to die. Somehow, somebody stuck a straw up through that, a straw was allowed to be stuck up to the air, and I laid down there for four years breathing through that straw, but that straw became wider and wider and wider over the years because the American people came to my family’s aid. That’s an amazing story about people that had nothing, and they were willing to give me everything they have because they believed in something, they believed in me, they believed in my family, they believed in something that was bigger than what it is we are about, and thank God they did. I’ve been buddy breathing for four years down under, and the American people were giving me that oxygen to survive, to get through this.”
The day after Sullivan begrudgingly dismissed the charges, Flynn penned a summary about the choices we face as a nation:
The battle we are engaged in cannot be fought with only human weapons: it requires the intervention of God because in a war against the forces of Evil, only the Lord can obtain the victory. And as American citizens, we must refuse to go to the funeral of our own independence.
We the people are proud to proclaim that the United States of America is “One Nation under God” — in this public profession of faith in God, we recognize his Lordship over our country, and we proudly stand beneath the banner of Christ and our flag in which millions have sacrificed their very lives for. In scripture through the strength and commitment of Matthew, he said, “Whoever is not with Me is against Me.”
We do not want a world governed by tyrants whom no one has elected and who want to have power in order to destroy us. We understand what their plan is: to eliminate dissent, subdue any criticism, and outlaw those who do not submit unconditionally to the dictatorship of the “New World Order.” And if they do not succeed through the hammering persuasion of the mainstream media, they do not hesitate to resort to deception, betrayal, perjury, and censorship. Let’s not forget that by the crimes they have committed, they have violated our laws; they have betrayed our Nation and their oath to serve our Country, their oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution.
What prosperity for our Nation, what peace for our people, what success for our endeavors can we hope for, when those who govern us show that they are unworthy of the authority they hold, of the role that has been given them as our representatives? And what blessing can these United States expect to receive from God, when those who govern us are his declared enemies?
Our protest, our denunciation of electoral fraud, is not only motivated by the fact that we are supporting Donald J. Trump as a candidate: it is above all a battle for justice and truth, which goes far beyond membership in a party or voting for a candidate. If today we do not obtain justice from our elected officials; if the United States of America does not know how to choose between defending the Law and legitimizing a coup against its citizens, our Nation will abdicate its duties toward Americans and its international role. A betrayal will take place and History will ask for an account of it from all of us and from our Institutions and our leaders. Pray now that when the light shines in the coming days, it reveals the truth along with a new era of American patriotism.
On behalf of tens of millions of your fellow American Patriots, thank you, General Flynn, for remaining true to your oath “to support and defend” our Constitution, especially against those domestic enemies of Liberty who have relentlessly attacked you and your family.
Thankful for you
During what has been a particularly challenging year for us all, we hope you know how much our Patriot Post staff appreciates your patience with our year-end funding process. It takes time to meet this goal, and we are tremendously grateful to those of you who continue to invest in our mission year after year.
As we work to close out the current campaign, if you are able to financially assist us, would you make your gift today?
Every penny counts and is put directly toward our 2021 operations budget.
Thank you in advance for considering this need. If you have already sent in a recent contribution, thank you!
Arnold Ahlert
“What country could put 1 million religious dissidents in a gulag archipelago, destroy the semi-independence of Hong Kong, threaten any of its dissident neighbors with commercial destruction, embark on the largest imperialist and colonialist project in two centuries throughout Africa, Asia, and Europe, obliterate the culture of Tibet, militarize, with man-made atolls, the South China Sea, systematize internal surveillance known heretofore only in the pages of Nineteen Eighty-Four, nonchalantly practice institutional racism, and infect the planet with a novel virus — and receive almost no official criticism from the United Nations and the governments of the European Union and the United States?” —Victor Davis Hanson
In a single paragraph, Hanson fully illuminates the wholesale corruption of our ruling-class oligarchs. And last Sunday, his question was answered: As reported by Australia’s Sky News, a list of 1.95 million Chinese Communist Party (CCP) members has been leaked, and it contains the names of thousands of people who live in the United States and other Western nations — and who work for major financial institutions, medical research and pharmaceutical companies, and Western governments.
Some of them work with American congressmen, like California Democrat Eric Swalwell.
The list of CCP members, including their names, party position, birthday, national ID number, and ethnicity, was compiled in 2016 by Chinese dissidents, who extracted the data from a server in Shanghai and leaked it in mid-September to the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC). IPAC’s website says it’s a group of 150 legislators created to “assist legislators to construct appropriate and coordinated responses, and to help craft a proactive and strategic approach on issues related to the People’s Republic of China.”
For the purposes of independent verification, IPAC made the leak available to four different media outlets, including the Daily Mail in the UK, The Australian in Australia, De Standaard in Belgium, and a currently unnamed Swedish editor, who has not published the story at this time.
The since-confirmed details are damning. “Communist party branches have been set up inside western companies, allowing the infiltration of those companies by CCP members — who, if called on, are answerable directly to the communist party, to the Chairman, the president himself,” said Sky News’s Sharri Markson. The list of the 1.95 million CCP members, most of whom come from Shanghai, also includes “details of 79,000 communist party branches, many of them inside companies.”
Markson believes the exposure of the list will embarrass Chinese President Xi Jinping. “It is also going to embarrass some global companies who appear to have no plan in place to protect their intellectual property from theft. From economic espionage,” she adds.
Details reported by the Daily Mail illuminate the “mass infiltration” of UK firms, including AstraZeneca, Rolls Royce, HSBC, and Jaguar Land Rover. “Most alarmingly,” the paper adds, “some of its members — who swear a solemn oath to ‘guard Party secrets, be loyal to the Party, work hard, fight for communism throughout my life … and never betray the Party’ — are understood to have secured jobs in British consulates.”
Here in America? The database reveals that Boeing, Qualcomm, and Pfizer have employed dozens of CCP members in their Chinese facilities, and the U.S. consulate in Shanghai employs three CCP members. Of the aforementioned 79,000 communist party branches, Boeing’s work force has 17 branches, totaling 252 CCP members, Qualcomm Wireless Communication employs 229 CCP members from six branches, and Pfizer employs 69 CCP members in four branches in Shanghai. New York University also employs 71 CCP members.
Boeing spokesman Bradley Akubuiro insisted the company is satisfied with its security. “As a global company,” he stated, “we enforce strict security protocols and maintain secure firewalls to protect both our customer and company proprietary data in all countries we operate in.”
Such assurances ring hollow. As revealed in 2015, the Chinese successfully hacked 22 million records on government employees, including sensitive data on government and military employees who hold security clearances, from the Office of Personnel Management. And it’s galling to know that AstraZeneca and Pfizer, the two most prominent producers of the coronavirus vaccine, still employ a total of 123 party loyalists, despite a joint statement issued by the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency — last May — revealing they were investigating “the targeting and compromise of U.S. organizations conducting COVID-19-related research by [People’s Republic of China]-affiliated cyber actors and non-traditional collectors.”
The media reports insist there is no evidence that any of the listed individuals are engaged in espionage, but the word itself has lost all real meaning. In 2019, more than a dozen students, researchers, and professors at American universities were arrested for lying about their ties to the Chinese government, even as they were paid handsomely for their efforts. None of them were charged with spying. Instead, charges included theft of trade secrets, failure to disclose ties to the Chinese government, filing false tax returns, and wire fraud, despite all of them trying to abet the ambitions of our nation’s foremost adversary.
Or is that our foremost paymaster? How many American entities, from the NBA and Hollywood to academia and Big Tech, have sacrificed their own integrity — and imperiled America’s national security — in return for a yuan buck?
Even worse, how many government officials — from both parties — have been compromised by Beijing? A recorded lecture by Di Dongsheng, vice dean of the School of International Relations at Renmin University, contains a chilling boast. After noting that “fixing” the Trump administration has been problematic, Di asks why “China and the U.S. used to be able to settle all kinds of issues between 1992 and 2016?”
He then answers his own question. “I’m going to throw out something maybe a little bit explosive here,” he states. “It’s just because we have people at the top. We have our old friends who are at the top of America’s core inner circle of power and influence.”
There was a time when this nation would label such “old friends” as the traitors they truly are. But that word has also lost any real meaning in a nation where Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, sent a 2017 email requesting keys for “new office mates” that included the president-elect, his wife Jill, his brother James … and Gongwen Dong, an emissary for Jianming Ye, who was chairman of a Chinese energy conglomerate called CEFC. CEFC was one of the largest energy companies in China before going bankrupt. CNN columnist Jenni Marsh stated that the company “aligned itself so closely with the Chinese government that it was often hard to distinguish between the two.”
It’s getting even harder to distinguish between America’s nation-state-hating oligarchs and their Chinese communist counterparts. Moreover, our oligarch-controlled mainstream media intends to keep it that way. “The massive data-file … was offered to all major international journalists and media organizations,” states Conservative Treehouse columnist Sundance. “All of the major U.S. media outlets did not want the data.”
“Communist China has been allowed to infiltrate our universities and corporations with people loyal to only the Communist Party,” former Acting Director of National Intelligence Ric Grenell said last Sunday.
Allowed to — or invited to?
Lewis Morris
If it’s true that the cornerstone of a healthy republic is a free press, then America has a big problem. The seizure of the legacy news media by rabid leftists has created a situation in which we can no longer trust the information we’re given. All major news outlets (print, television, and digital) have become mouthpieces for the Democrat Party and the Left, spinning stories to fit their narrative, burying others that don’t fit, and flat-out lying when those two tactics fail. Welcome to the age of fake news.
President Donald Trump has been credited with popularizing the term fake news, but he didn’t create the phenomenon. It arose in the 1990s during the Clinton years — and we started The Patriot Post in 1996 in large measure to counter this problem. Left-leaning reporters and editors, sons and daughters of the 1960s and Watergate, fawned over Bill and Hillary, burying or downplaying stories about Bill’s personal indiscretions and the crimes committed by his closest associates.
The perversion of the legacy media into a Democrat Party organ reached its zenith during Barack Obama’s presidency. In partnership with tech oligarchs who helped them weaponize social media, leftists tried to shape a narcissistic, politically tone-deaf, anti-American community organizer into the Second Coming. They were so effective at their work that by the time Trump became president, media figures were no longer afraid to show their true colors and go after the 45th president with all guns blazing.
Three key types of fake news have been used in the assault to take down Donald Trump and the American republic he so steadfastly defended — omission, hypocrisy, and lies. Perhaps the most effective at this point, considering the circumstances, is omission.
News outlets routinely bury stories they don’t want us to hear. Earlier this election season, the New York Post published a series of articles revealing the extent of the Biden family’s corruption. The paper shared concrete evidence of Hunter Biden’s shady foreign dealings while his father was vice president. Seeing what happened to Hillary Clinton after her illegal email server took up too much of the news cycle in 2016, other news outlets refused to report on the story, and Twitter and Facebook censored any mention of it. They knew that widespread coverage of the story would harm Biden’s chances of winning the presidency. It is only now that the Electoral College has met that we are starting to hear more about it. But don’t count on the media to go after Biden. They are much more selective in their “investigative journalism.”
This brings us to the second brand of fake news: hypocrisy. The former vice president tried to burnish his bona fides two years ago with the #MeToo movement by saying that all women should be believed when they come forward accusing males of sexual misconduct. Except, of course, when that male is Joe Biden. When Tara Reade came forward with her own credible story about Biden’s sexual misconduct, the media did not chase down the story, or any of the multitude of accusations about Biden that have surfaced over the years. Instead, they collaborated with Biden’s campaign to downplay the story. Never mind that they trained their sites on Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, targeting him for character assassination and making his accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, the poster woman of the #MeToo movement.
It turns out that Ford’s story and all the other smear stories against Kavanaugh were lies, which is the third tactic of fake news. When in danger or in doubt, the Left will simply lie to get its message across. Much of the coverage of the Trump administration was predicated on this tactic, whether it be the bogus Russia-collusion narrative that eventually led to his impeachment, the smears that he was willfully ignorant in combating COVID-19, or the false narrative that he supported white supremacy. None of these stories hold any basis in fact, but they were repeated so often that people believed them.
While the “fact-check” has become the Left’s most potent tool to bolster its fake news strategy, there were few fact-checks on the aforementioned fake news. Leftmedia outlets use the “fact-check” not to investigate their own stories but to smear Republicans and conservatives for voicing facts and ideas that go against leftist dogma. In May, Trump was “fact-checked” for predicting that we would have a coronavirus vaccine by year’s end. His statement proved to be true, but rather than wait until January 1, 2021, to see if Trump was correct, the media leaped to rebut the prediction as soon as he made it. And not because of what Trump said, but because it was Trump who said it.
Since its earliest years, American journalism has always had a political tilt. But there were journalistic standards that were taught, handed down, and respected. Journalism was considered a serious vocation entered into by people dedicated to informing the public and keeping politicians honest.
Unfortunately, we don’t live in that world right now. Freedom of the press is listed first in the Bill of Rights for a reason. Without it, none of the other freedoms or the Constitution itself mean all that much. Leftists know this, and if they are going to turn America into a socialist country, the press has to be the first thing they control and thus destroy. Our mission is to provide a bold voice against that leftist agenda.
Douglas Andrews
Now what?
That’s what Leftmedia pundits must be thinking. Now that we’ve thoroughly debased ourselves, destroyed our already limited credibility, and conspired with the Democrats to get rid of our raison d’être, what’ll we do for kicks, and clicks, and ratings, and paychecks?
It’s a great question, and one that’s no doubt on the minds of everyone from Jeff Zucker on down to talentless talkingheads like Don Lemon. As The Wall Street Journal’s James Freeman writes, “There’s an emerging media narrative that Joe Biden is more difficult for the press to cover than Donald Trump because Mr. Biden allegedly has superior character and therefore generates fewer scandals. Accepting this spin naturally requires one to ignore the Biden family influence-peddling business. But the fear among media executives about their own businesses is real. Bashing Donald Trump has been profitable. Can you hold an audience by lauding Joe Biden?”
Sans Trump, we think the mainstream media can still hold an audience. Of insomniacs. After all, what better way to put folks to sleep than to cover our sorriest and least-inspiring new president with wall-to-wall hosannas about his “superior character” and “scandal-free” existence?
Frankly, we can’t wait. And we think they’ve made a huge mistake. For as philosopher and cultural critic Barry Manilow once said, “You know I can’t smile without you. I can’t smile without you. I can’t laugh, and I can’t sing. I’m finding it hard to do anything.”
Seriously: What’ll Rachel Maddow do now that she won’t have President Trump to accuse of being in Vladimir Putin’s pocket? What’ll Lemon do now that Trump isn’t holding Klan rallies at the White House? What’ll Jeffrey Toobin do now that, er, uh … never mind about Toobin. He’ll (ahem) find a way to entertain himself.
And then there are the children. Think of the children. And by “children” we don’t mean real children; we mean those emotive, entitled, attention-starved members of Congress. What’ll Nancy Pelosi do for attention if she can’t fake-clap in the president’s face, or tear up his State of the Union speech, or tic her way through an angry, spittle-flecked interview? And what’ll Chuck Schumer do if he can’t steamroll a few colleagues on his way to the nearest mic to denounce the president’s latest depredation?
Then, of course, there are those other children; those Facebook friends of yours who couldn’t keep from caterwauling about Trump for the past four years; who couldn’t keep from posting the latest wishful-thinking hit piece from The New York Times or The Washington Post about how the noose is tightening and the walls are closing in on this vile, racist, traitorous Putin puppet of a president. What are they gonna do without their bête orange? It’s been an awfully tough four years for those poor souls, but who knows? Trump withdrawal might prove even tougher.
Their plight aside, it’s been a flush four years for the resistance media — the Trump-hating networks are doing better now than ever. “Mr. Trump’s refusal to leave the political stage quietly has kept viewers watching through the postelection daze,” the Times tells us. “In recent weeks, CNN is regularly beating Fox News, the longtime No. 1 cable news network, in total viewers. CNN has also led in the advertiser-friendly bracket of adults under the age of 54 every day for more than a month, its longest such streak since the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001. … With Mr. Trump so central to MSNBC’s ratings surge, some producers see a slide coming. Others at the network say that Trumpism — with its attendant partisanship and politicization of society — will persist, keeping viewers locked in even after Mr. Trump is no longer in the White House.”
Forgive us if we seem skeptical. If Donald Trump isn’t making news, the Trump-hating media isn’t making payroll.
Thomas Gallatin
“Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it.” —Proverbs 22:6
A report released earlier this year by Lyman Stone of the American Enterprise Institute is getting new attention for this reason. Stone found that America’s declining religiosity can be tracked in large part to America’s public education. More specifically, what America’s secular public schools are (or aren’t) teaching children.
The report notes that religion has always played a significant role in America’s history and cultural identity. That religious history is of course the Judeo-Christian beliefs of the West, which profoundly impacted our nation’s founding by being the primary influence in shaping the country’s values.
However, many have observed a growing trend in recent decades of fewer and fewer Americans holding onto the religious beliefs of their parents. “By any measure, religiosity in America is declining,” Stone notes. “Since peaking in 1960, the share of American adults attending any religious service in a typical week has fallen from 50 percent to about 35 percent, while the share claimed as members by any religious body has fallen from over 75 percent to about 62 percent. Finally, the share of Americans who self-identify or report being affiliated with any religion has fallen from over 95 percent to about 75 percent.”
Stone says there are two major factors that can lead to a decline in religiosity. The first is sectarian governance that establishes a state religion and effectively eliminates competing religious beliefs. The second is a government that increasingly expands its “services” — “especially increasingly secularized government control of education.” This, Stone asserts, “can account for virtually the entire increase on secularization around the developed world.”
Obviously, it is the second one at play in America. Big government increasingly takes over the role religion once played in society. Government effectively takes the place of God, taking on the responsibility of providing everything for citizens — the welfare state, including education. It’s not necessarily that the state is intentional in usurping religion’s role, but secular governments by nature ignore God and take it upon themselves to solve problems.
This is especially true when it comes to public education. As National Review’s Cameron Hilditch writes, “So how do we explain this link between education policy and religious belief given that academic attainment itself isn’t a factor? It’s quite simple, really. Children learn more at school than reading, writing, and arithmetic. They imbibe a whole set of implied assumptions about what’s important in life. By excluding religious instruction from public schools, the government-run education system tacitly teaches students that religious commitments are not a first-order priority in life. Faith in God becomes a sort of optional weekend hobby akin to playing tennis or video games. Christ and Moses are treated by teachers and administrators like weapons or drugs — confiscated upon discovery.”
While secularists and atheists like to assert that education simply makes people more secular and less religious by disabusing them of mythical beliefs, the data and history belies that claim. Instead, the greatest factor is what children are being taught, not that they are being educated.
“The content of education matters,” Stone argues. “Evidence that education reduces religiosity is fairly weak: American religiosity rose considerably from 1800 until the 1970s, despite rapidly rising educational attainment. But the evidence that specifically secular education might reduce religiosity is more compelling. Indeed, statistically, most researchers who have explored long-run change in religiosity find that education-related variables, which I have argued are a proxy for secular education, can explain nearly the totality of change in religiosity.”
In short, American children are being taught secularism, and the predictable result is that they are becoming more secular and less religious.
Don’t Miss Alexander’s Column
Read If Our Republic’s Constitution Still Matters…
If you’d like to receive Alexander’s Column by email every Wednesday, update your subscription here.
Jordan Candler
Top of the Fold
- Hunter Biden in 2017 sent “best wishes” from “entire Biden family” to China firm chairman (Fox News) | Joe, who never lies, “confident” Hunter did nothing wrong (Fox News)
Election Debrief
- Biden considering pro-China Disney CEO for ChiCom ambassador (National Review)
- Biden calls Pete Buttigieg’s (ahem) husband “Kirsten,” snubs gay GOP cabinet member (NY Post)
- Raphael Warnock’s voter registration group failed to pay unemployment taxes (Free Beacon)
- “Need new leadership”: AOC says time’s almost up for Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer (Washington Times)
Leftmedia
- Despite his supposed downfall, Jeffrey Toobin is holding on to his post at CNN (Fox News)
Education
- Nation’s top high school poised to pick students based on race, not achievement (The Federalist)
Economy
- Retail sales fell 1.1% in November, biggest drop in seven months (AP)
- However, the Fed raises its economic outlook, sees 4.2% growth next year and 5% unemployment (CNBC)
- U.S. brands Vietnam and Switzerland as currency manipulators (AP)
- Supreme Court will hear NCAA case on college athlete pay, which could upend business model (Politico)
Big Tech
- Texas and nine other states file new antitrust lawsuit against Google (CNBC)
Annals of the “Social Justice” Caliphate
- Cartoon Network is promoting the use of self-selected pronouns to six-year-olds (Not the Bee)
- Guardians of the Galaxy comic confirms Star-Lord is bisexual (Entertainment Weekly)
Culture
- Study finds a third of young American adults have no religious affiliation (Disrn)
Around the Nation
- Feds cut off California over abortion insurance mandate (Free Beacon)
- Free-speech suppressor Andrew Cuomo signs bill banning sale of Confederate flags (NY Post)
- Fleeing New Yorkers resulted in an estimated $34 billion in lost income (Reuters)
“All told, a net 70,000 people left the metropolitan region this year… About 3.57 million people left New York City this year between Jan. 1 and Dec. 7, according to Unacast, which analyzed anonymized cell phone location data. Some 3.5 million people earning lower average incomes moved into the city during that same period, the report showed.”
Religious Liberty
- Ninth Circuit enjoins Nevada COVID order discriminating against houses of worship (National Review)
“Climate Change”
- Biden to tap the military to further ambitious climate agenda (Washington Times)
- Britain to ban new petrol cars by 2030 on road to net zero emissions (Reuters) | Meanwhile, Toyota’s chief correctly says electric vehicles are overhyped (WSJ)
“Theater of the Absurd” Headline Award
- How to talk to your friends and family about COVID, vaccines, and wearing masks (NBC News)
Caveat emptor. This same “enlightening” news outlet infamously reported on May 15, “Fact check: Coronavirus vaccine could come this year, Trump says. Experts say he needs a ‘miracle’ to be right.”
Double Standards
- Governor of Rhode Island encourages people to stay home, gets caught at wine bar (Fox News)
Non Compos Mentis
- Canadian bookstore kicked out a lady who didn’t have hands because she wouldn’t put a mask on. Then they threatened to call the police when she tried to explain. (Not the Bee)
- Paris fined 90,000 euros for naming too many women to senior positions (NPR)
Stranger Than Fiction
- For $33,000, you can hire Amber Heard, who admitted to abusing Johnny Depp, to talk about domestic violence (Daily Wire)
- Murder suspect escapes prison van during stop at Indiana McDonald’s (Disrn)
Other Notables
- Here are the most searched terms on Google in 2020 (Not the Bee)
- MLB officially reclassifies the Negro Leagues as major league (Disrn)
Closing Arguments
- Policy: The college debt debate is a culture war battle (National Review)
- Policy: Is this the end of cities in America? (The Hill)
- Humor: Seattle announces reverse purge where one night a year laws will be enforced (Babylon Bee)
For more of today’s editors’ choice headlines, visit Headline Report.
The Patriot Post is a certified ad-free news service, unlike third-party commercial news sites linked on this page, which may also require a paid subscription.
The Tyranny Tour of California Intensifies — State thugs harass Greek restaurant in Ventura.
The Left’s Hypocrisy on ‘Offensive’ Sports Mascots — “All the arguments are utter hogwash,” fumes Matt Walsh.
Satire: Socialist Media — The New Rules — JP Sears presents the new communist guidelines for us peasants.
For more of today’s columns, visit Right Opinion.
For the record: “Last August, Trump was questioned at a White House press briefing about polls showing his popularity was declining. Asked to explain, he responded, ‘Nobody likes me. It can only be my personality. That’s all.’ It was a rare moment of transparency for him. There is still a remnant of old-fashioned values my grandparents’ generation embraced and tried to instill in their descendants. One was not to belittle, demean, talk down to, or call other people names. Trump has consistently ignored that advice. While a large number of Americans still support him and the number who voted for him far outpaced any other Republican presidential candidate, or incumbent president, it wasn’t enough. The reason can only be his personality. Most Americans expect a certain amount of dignity emanating from one who temporarily holds our highest office. Could Trump have achieved all he has without the name-calling? I think so.” —Cal Thomas
What goes around comes around: “Given the Democrats’ Faustian bargain with their leftmost faction, destructive rumors about Biden’s faculties or his family’s financial escapades will more likely come from his own party’s left wing, eager for a Harris presidency, rather than from the Republican opposition. … It will not help Biden that to defeat Trump, many of our institutions were deformed. Special counsels usually never receive a blank check — 22 months and $32 million — to assemble a team of partisans to investigate a new president on mostly hearsay evidence and an opposition-concocted dossier. But that precedent ended with the ill-conceived Robert Muller investigation. By spring, Biden could have done to him what was done to Trump — and what Biden himself so frequently cheered on.” —Victor Davis Hanson
Re: The Left: “The enemies of American democracy are out there … though they are not the Republicans or Donald Trump. They are people such as the Clintons who supported radical politics from their earliest days: Hillary, with the Black Panthers and a communist boss in California in the early 1970s, and Bill, with his visits with communists in Prague in 1970 and his throwing marbles under police horses in London’s Grosvenor Square. In 2016, Hillary dusted off her radical rhetoric from the 1960s for one last revolutionary shout. Resist! Doubtless, Bill would have joined her, but he was under the bed hiding from the ladies he has abused. … The Clintons and like-minded Democrats will continue to stand above the law as they have for five decades. But thanks to Donald Trump, Hillary will never be president.” —R. Emmett Tyrrell
From the Department of Corrections: “In a story … about the Mexican and Brazilian presidents congratulating U.S. President-elect Joe Biden, The Associated Press erroneously reported that Biden’s first name is Jose. His name is Joe.” —Associated Press
And last… “We hear about the rigging of the election, but partly what [people] mean is the meddling on the part of big media and big tech to affect the outcome of the election.” —Mollie Hemingway
For more of today’s memes, visit the Memesters Union.
For more of today’s cartoons, visit the Cartoons archive.
Read Online
“The Patriot Post” (https://patriotpost.us)
Truth2Freedom's Blog 
