’s explore. DIE is obsessed with assuring that everyone achieves the same outcome and is included in the greater tribe. Diversity means diversity of skin color, not diversity of thought. White bad, Brown good. The ancient Greeks knew that DIE was an idea food blender that removes the bright colors of respectful debate turning all thought into a bland pablum of groupthink. Today, we refer to this process as building consensus. In actuality, we are clipping the head off innovation and brilliance. Look what actually happens when groupthink occupies government. Only one point of view emerges, forged by hammering all thought into the lowest common denominator of agreement. Sometimes, that’s good enough; often it’s not.Today, our country is consumed with DIE, which lowers the bar deliberately. Everyone gets a trophy; nobody is recognized for excelling. It has become a secular religion, and it is dangerous. The old Soviet Union practiced this religion and honed it to a fine art. The mass leveling of achievement, enforced by strict rules on payment for services rendered, turned the country into a grey, groping society where a brain surgeon earned the same as an orderly. “Not that there was anything wrong with that” is the mantra of the DIE crowd. But there is something wrong with that. What is the incentive for innovation, industrious living, ethics, morality? Only the corrupt oligarchs rise to the elite strata, and only then by chicanery, leaving the peasants to struggle in their fate.Today in America and elsewhere, the chanting of the DIE folks, mostly privileged elites and media, have no worry about their standard of living or pursuit of happiness. After all, they are the elites, the intelligentsia, the oligarchy. And the rest of us, they don’t care. Medical scientist turned political scientist Fauci is exhibit A.The signs are all around us:• Crime is widespread, but not in the gated communities of the Swells.• The Capital is surrounded by high fencing to prohibit entry into the People’s House; it’s really there to protect the politicians from the people. I do not support the events of January 6th; I do support peaceful and constitutional demonstrations to express concerns. It still is not clear what stoked that event; we do know that there was infiltration by government agents. Because the “regime” is deeply implicated, we’ll likely never know the truth.• Perish an American citizen should support a cry for freedom in Canada. You will be sought out and punished. Doxing is encouraged.• The southern border is non-existent. The Border Patrol is completely overwhelmed on purpose. President Biden approves. More new voters are great as long as they vote Democrat. That would be horrifying in itself, but it’s worse. Fentanyl, manufactured in Mexico by cartels in modern factories, with raw ingredients supplied by China, pours into our country by the ton. One shipment, intercepted recently, was large enough to kill every man, woman, and child in the USA. Where are those pills going? To your children’s schools. This is chemical warfare, and it’s profitable.• Wokeness and Greenism have paralyzed innovation and destroyed energy independence. We are now begging for oil from the Saudi’s and others to save us from inflationary destruction. We used to be self-insured and export to the world. Nothing has changed except the regime, bent on punishing evil America. We are now weak and vulnerable. A year ago, we were not.• BLM and other groups scream white supremacy. We are either oppressors or oppressed… move to your corners. In 2008, we elected a black President. The sane among us looked at this accomplishment as the greatest opportunity for racial equality in the history of our country. We were optimistic and excited for the prospects ahead. Barack Obama announced that America had finally entered the post-racial period of our Great Experiment. But alas, he disappointed. He divided us into dependency or supremacy groups, further partitioning into racial affinity subsets. President Biden continues this perfectly racist pattern to “complete the job”. The media and celebs are infected, indoctrinated, intimidated, and too stupid to realize; they are useful idiots in the greater plan.• Critical Race Theory (CRT) infected the teachers in college, who willingly receive the orders of the teacher’s unions who take orders from the evil and wealthy elite. Fortunately, the rumblings of Americans see the danger and have responded. So alarming is this to the regime, they call out the Department of Justice, in a totally cooked up ploy, to tag Americans with a potential terrorist indicator… a scarlet letter of free will. The elections of 2022 have already begun and the people are speaking. The regime is concerned that they might lose power. The regime acts like the current Dictator of Canada.So, what’s the alternative? Freedom, Opportunity, Self-determination (FOS) is the only real answer. All revolutions, including ours, began in response to the absence of these imperatives. America succeeded and gave birth to the United States of America. Other countries have tried but were repulsed by strong men with weapons… see Venezuela, Cuba, maybe now Canada.• Freedom encourages innovation, industriousness, personal prosperity. Equality and color blindness… see Dr. Martin Luther King and Coretta Scott King. They motivate all who are interested in achievement. Yes, there will always be those who do not choose the path of hard work with an expectation of reward. I have a friend, whose son works on a cruise ship. He’s in the kitchen staff and perfectly content. I have another friend, whose daughter is an MD treating children’s cancer; again, perfectly content. We rise to the degree of our ability, personal expectation, contentment, and happiness. The pursuit of happiness is enabled by freedom. Our Founders were wise.• Opportunity, historically is a tough one. Opportunity allows every citizen to make progress on a personal journey without artificial or racial obstacles. We are an imperfect union, continuing the struggle to achieve a more perfect union. Opportunity begins (some say “and ends”) with education. Some governmental officials, especially at the city level, continue to repress their citizenry by providing disgusting educational opportunities for many, thus depriving those children of the opportunity they deserve. Sadly, liberals teachers’ unions and democrats control these cities and do nothing to serve their people. They only serve themselves. Having painted a bleak picture, there is an awakening in minorities and majorities alike. A new broom sweeps clean. It needs to happen.The other side of that coin is the ever-present “systemic racism” accusation. Eric Holder, Obama’s Attorney general, was first to accuse all of America of this original sin with no dispensation allowed. Some of this probably exists still, but no patriotic American sees race as a discriminator over experience and competence. This is a ruse that works for the Wokesters, but it is untrue. When we find it, the courts step in and level the (blind) scales of justice; note that those cases are no longer epidemic. The mess all started with the disappointing, sad Obama regime. Dividing a country does not move it forward. Equal opportunity does and hard work does.• Self-determination is the unspoken but most malicious anti-doctrine of the far left. The religion of Secular Wokism tries to erase this concept from our minds. Literally, brainwashing. If they tell the lies long enough, people will relax into the hammock of dependency and “like it”. It’s not that people really like it, they feel helpless to combat it or escape from it. Wherever one looks, one finds government programs that dole out dependency checks, bigger ones with more children of single parents, discouraging the formation of families through marriage and further splitting the society into ever more helpless pieces. Rather, government assistance should strongly encourage family formation, home renting/ownership, financial skills, parental educational involvement. If that can’t be accomplished because both adults need to work three jobs, craft programs that will help. Self-determination is nothing more than Escape from Poverty and Misery. Dependency is just the opposite. It locks people in. The Woke love it.Well, it’s DIE vs FOS. Which one will you pursue? The future of the American experiment depends on it.
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After finishing Mollie Hemingway's book three things become evident:
1) The 2020 election was determined by many states voting pre-election changes some of which were illegal because they were not made through the legislative process. Most particularly the state of Pennsylvania.
2) In far too many states the vote count was both irregular and fraught with questionable practices.
3) Democrats lay the foundation and keep working at getting what they want even if it takes decades. Mail in balloting has been something Democrats have wanted for years because it lends itself to fraudulent opportunities and increased voter manipulation.
Democrats seek to win at all costs and carried on for four years about voter fraud when Trump won in 2016. They not only did not stop but proceeded to impeach him twice based on totally contrived charges.
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New firearm owners shaking up gun culture and American politics
By Salena Zito
HARRISBURG — Richard Reisinger, of New Bloomfield in Perry County, leaned in as David Walker of Savage Guns, a Massachusetts-based firearm company, showed him how to work a new innovation that allows the owner to adjust a gun for right- or left-handed users.
“I have grandchildren; some of them are left-handed, some are right-handed, so now if you purchase a gun, all you have to do is place this on the handle and it accommodates either, so you buy one gun and multiple kids can shoot it,” Mr. Reisinger said, admiring the practicality of the design.
“It is really nice.”
Mr. Reisinger — who was visiting the Savage booth at the Great American Outdoor Show at the Pennsylvania Farm Show complex recently — said he comes from a long line of hunters, a tradition he now enjoys with his grandchildren.
“I do a lot of whitetail hunting at the moment — but with grandchildren, I’ll take them out to hunt pretty much anything that they’re interested in. I love coming to the outdoors show because I get to see, and touch, and feel a lot of different firearms that I might be interested in down the road,” he explained.
Mr. Reisinger — like dozens of other people interviewed that day — said gun ownership is about a lot of things: “Putting food on the table and providing for my family, self-protection and the motor and dexterity skills it sharpens when you go target practicing. You meet more and more new gun owners all of the time; most of them said they bought their first gun for those exact same reasons ... they found all of it personally empowering.”
This is a truth that conflicts with our culture’s misconceptions about who “the American gun owner” really is and what his or her motivations are for enjoying firearms. If you turn on the national news or log onto social media, you’re likely to find lawful gun owners portrayed as cultish, backwoods white males who have a gluttonous appetite for violence.
Gun owners see themselves quite differently — and their demographics and motivations don’t fit neatly into the stereotypes.
Despite the millions spent in digital advertisements by gun control advocates like former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the appeal of gun ownership is only increasing. Of all the firearms sold last year, 30% — 5.4 million purchases — went to new gun owners, according to a retailer survey conducted by the National Shooting Sports Foundation.
A new interest in self-sufficiency, caused by collapses in our supply chain, has also led to an explosion in applications for hunting licenses.
According to Stateline, a Pew Trust initiative, many states across the country saw a dramatic rise in both men and women taking a hunter safety class for the first time — with states like Michigan seeing a 67% hike in new hunting license buyers in 2021 compared with 2019, including a 15% increase in female hunters.
People who would never have considered owning a gun were now curious about hunting to provide for their families — and about target practice to learn how to defend themselves and their homes.
This expansion of gun culture is also reflected in the demographics of the new gun owner: The same survey showed a 58% increase in firearm purchases by Black people and 49% by Latinos, compared to 2019.
Further, one-third of people buying their first firearm in 2021 were women.
Those changes were evident in the cavernous halls of the outdoor show, which at times was filled shoulder-to-shoulder with a melting pot of all races, ages and genders. Vehicles in the parking lot sported license plates from as far as Maine, Mississippi and Colorado.
“If Disneyland is the happiest place on earth for kids, this might be the happiest place on earth for adults,” said Corina Novo of Warsaw, Ind., who was at a booth showcasing the Single Action Shooting Society, the governing body of the sport of cowboy action shooting.
Ms. Novo said that stereotypes of gun owners often come from people who have never shot a gun or known anyone who does: “When you lack curiosity about why someone would enjoy anything that is different from what your experiences are, no matter what the issue may be, it is easy to demonize it; I have seen attitudes change dramatically once a person learns to properly use a gun and understand all of the advantages that skill gives them.”
The biggest stereotype Ms. Novo dismisses is that educated, successful women shy away from gun ownership. “A lot of women are very surprised the first time that they handle a firearm and go out to the range — whether with their family, their husband or some friends — how well they actually do. There is also something to be said about the empowerment it gives a woman, not only because going to the range sharpens your motor skills, but also that you are developing the skills to protect yourself and your family and to also provide for them,” she said.
“It is a confidence that transfers in different parts of your life,” she said, as four women walked up to her booth with questions about the sport she’s advocating.
Political attitudes about guns seem to be following cultural ones. A December Quinnipiac poll found 47% of registered voters supported calls for more gun control, with 48% opposed. That marked the lowest level of support for gun control in six years of Quinnipiac’s annual polling.
Meanwhile, Gallup’s November poll found that support for stricter laws covering the sale of firearms had dropped to 52% — a huge 12-point decline since 2019.
Mr. Reisinger doesn’t say where his politics lie. It’d be easy to assume from his Perry County address and passion for guns that he’s a Republican, but assumptions are how distant pundits and analysts get elections wrong.
“I am an independent voter,” he said, “literally registered independent, and I always make sure that I vote every election I can — and do the research ahead of time. Again, I try to vote based on what makes the most sense for me, my family and my community.”
New gun owners don’t just live in the rural patches of the country — they are found in cities, suburbs and exurbs all across the nation, and they are less likely than ever to be old white men. And they will certainly have an impact on our elections and our culture — but precisely what impact will likely depend on how they feel treated. Ignoring them, dismissing them or boxing them into stereotypes won’t help and won’t make them go away.
And they might continue to rearrange American political coalitions, which will continue to be misread by activists and pundits, despite all of the evidence and data to guide them otherwise.
Click here for the full story.
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Does the Clinton's reach extend to Paris?
Another Convenient Epstein Suicide
By Jeff Crouere
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The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.
Financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein died in a Manhattan prison in August of 2019 under very mysterious circumstances. He was awaiting trial on additional charges when he supposedly committed “suicide” by hanging himself, although he told a prison psychologist, he would never take his own life.
To make matters even more suspicious, the video of his cell during the time of his death was conveniently “lost.” The prison guards on duty that night were reportedly playing video games and asleep, unaware that the most high-profile inmate in prison history was taking his own life.
Since these revelations, speculation has been rampant that Epstein did not commit “suicide” but was killed. The theory is that powerful individuals wanted Epstein dead so he would not talk. His “black book” reportedly contained the names of well-known celebrities, as well as business and political leaders who were involved in his worldwide underage sex ring.
This convenient “suicide” has now been followed by another one less than three years later. This time, the scene was an infamous prison in Paris, France. The inmate, Jean-Luc Brunel, was a fashion and modeling agent and close associate of Epstein, who allegedly invested “up to a million dollars” with Brunel to launch his business. On Saturday morning, Brunel was found dead in his cell, the victim of another mysterious “hanging.”
nteresting is that prison officials did not consider Brunel a suicide threat, so he was not housed in a high-risk section of the penitentiary. Prison officials have opened an investigation into the death, but sources tell the Daily Mail that “Early evidence points to suicide.”
As in the Epstein case, there is no video footage to officially document what happened to Brunel. In this case, there were no video cameras in the vicinity of Brunel’s cell. Is this another example of an inmate being killed to keep him quiet and protect powerful individuals? As we know, “dead men tell no tales.” Thus, the public may never know the truth.
Brunel had been in prison awaiting trial since December of 2020, when he was arrested on charges related to criminal conspiracy, human trafficking, sexual assault, and rape of an underage girl. At the time of his arrest at the airport in Paris, Brunel had a one-way ticket to Dakar, Senegal, in West Africa.
In September of 2021, Brunel was officially indicted on a charge of drugging and raping a seventeen-year-old model in the 1990’s. Virginia Giuffre, who also filed a sexual assault civil suit against another close Epstein associate, Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, claimed that she had sex with Brunel multiple times when she was only sixteen years old.
According to Giuffre, Brunel recruited girls as young as twelve years old for modeling and to “farm out to his friends, especially Epstein,” who forced them to participate in his sex ring. Giuffre said that Epstein bragged that he had “slept with over 1,000 of Brunel’s girls.”
The two were introduced by Epstein’s “pimp” Ghislaine Maxwell, who spent years working with Epstein and was accused by multiple victims of recruiting and grooming girls for his sex ring. Last December, she was convicted on five of six federal charges related to sex trafficking and conspiracy.
Obviously, Brunel’s “suicide” has alarmed Maxwell’s family. They are concerned for her safety. She is in a Brooklyn prison on “suicide watch,” being awakened every fifteen minutes at night. Her family contends she is not a suicide risk and will not kill herself. Maxwell is scheduled to be sentenced in June of 2022.
Epstein was close friends with plenty of powerful business leaders, celebrities such as actor Kevin Spacey and U.S. politicians such as former President Bill Clinton, who reportedly traveled on his plane over two dozen times and visited his private island.
One of Epstein’s most famous friends, Prince Andrew, recently struck a $16.3 million settlement with Giuffre over charges that he had sex with her when she was only seventeen years old. In the deal, Prince Andrew admitted no guilt and was spared the humiliation of a trial during the Queen’s platinum jubilee year celebrations.
In a statement released at the time of the settlement, Prince Andrew vowed to “make a substantial donation to Ms. Giuffre's charity in support of victims' rights.” He also affirmed that he “never intended to malign Ms. Giuffre's character” and recognized that she “suffered both as an established victim of abuse and as a result of unfair public attacks.”
Prince Andrew also acknowledged that “Jeffrey Epstein trafficked countless young girls over many years.” He expressed his regret about “his association with Epstein” and praised “the bravery of Ms. Giuffre and other survivors in standing up for themselves and others.” Remarkably, he vowed “to demonstrate his regret for his association with Epstein by supporting the fight against the evils of sex trafficking, and by supporting its victims.”
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Taking back the wheel!
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