The riot on January 6 at the Capitol had a lot of FBI informants involved.

According to Steven D’Antuono, formerly in charge of the FBI’s Washington field office:

The FBI had so many paid informants at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, that it lost track of the number and had to perform a later audit to determine exactly how many “Confidential Human Sources” run by different FBI field offices were present that day …

 More recently, some reports indicate that there were at least 200 federal agents or “undercover assets” present on that fateful day.

With revelations like that, and these came last September, it appears even more likely that actual Trump supporters and patriots were baited and led into a trap by federal agents.

As someone once said, turnabout is fair play. Perhaps Trump supporters/MAGA types and other patriots should dress up as Antifa and BLM members and start burning down buildings and looting stores.

On second thought, that won’t work.

Recent history shows that no one cares. More to the point, the vast majority of Trump supporters couldn’t bring themselves to do these things, anyway.

Or maybe they could ditch the MAGA hats and American flags and dress up as Democrats and go around the country — indeed the world — proclaiming their disdain for the United States, its founding, and the rubes in flyover country.

Oh, wait. Actual Democrats already do that on a regular basis.

Is this what we’ve come to? Is everything we are allowed to see a hoax?

The answer to both questions seems to be an unequivocal “yes.”null

If this is indeed the case, how can we proceed as a functional society?

“January 6” wasn’t an “insurrection.” Far from it. Nor has Trump been charged with inciting one. It was the nearly inevitable result of citizens that had been mocked, demeaned and suppressed — and who had reason to believe their votes had been rendered moot … or worse.

If those in power continue to use the full breadth and depth of the government they control to harass, stymie, and imprison their political opponents, we will not be a functioning society much longer. The republic will be lost. The Shining City on a Hill will have slid down into the vast, fetid Swamp … to be devoured ‘fundamentally transformed.’ Forever.

Eric Utter

California is now covering the costs of genital-mutilating surgeries for illegal aliens.  Leftism’s slippery slope invariably leads to depraved absurdity.  Consider how Governor (receding) Hairdo and the Pyrite State’s other communist saboteurs have greased the shifting ground under Californians’ feet:

(1) There is no illegal immigration crisis.

(2) There may be a crisis, but California taxpayers won’t be paying for it.

(3) Taxpayers may have to foot the bill for the illegal immigration crisis, but California will do nothing to incentivize illegal immigration.

(4) After further review, these aliens aren’t “illegal,” but rather “undocumented.”

(5) Health care is a human right.

(6) California must provide “undocumented” aliens healthcare.null

(7) Mutilating the genitals to make them look like the opposite sex is health care.

(8) California taxpayers must pay for “undocumented” aliens’ genital surgery.

(9) Californians who object to paying for undocumented aliens’ genital surgery may be guilty of “hate” crimes and will be prosecuted. 

Quod erat demonstrandum.

Why punish the people who illegally enter the United States when you can punish the people who do not want to subsidize immigration crimes while canceling their votes with the votes of those here illegally?  Why should “health care” stop with free genital mutilation for the whole planet?  Why not label spacious split-level homes with at least one electric vehicle in each garage “health care” as well?  Why shouldn’t California taxpayers be on the hook for each new illegal alien’s  “green energy” lifestyle?  The absurdity will never end.null

As Sundance frequently reminds readers over at The Conservative Treehouse, “We are in an abusive relationship with our government.”  And in California, where the Marxist globalists rule with absolute power, the government never gets tired of slapping American citizens around and telling them it’s for their own good.

California’s decision to become a Mecca for foreign men who want to chop off their willies and hang out in women’s restrooms is just the latest example of government insanity promoted as “progress.”  While foreign nationals are invading the United States in unprecedented numbers, Department of Homeland (in)Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas continues to claim that (1) there is no crisis of any kind, and (2) if there is a crisis, Congress should just allocate more money for DHS to quickly bus the invaders into small towns throughout the country.  Hear that, American citizens?  The problem isn’t that tens of millions of foreigners are illegally entering the country; the problem is that people are noticing the problem — which would quickly disappear if DHS had the funds to hide the invaders more effectively and seed them into the counties where illegal votes from illegal aliens will do Democrats the most good.  Canceling American votes one invader at a time — yet none dare call it election-rigging on a massive scale!

Mayorkas’s admission that his plan to tackle illegal immigration consists of (1) making it worse but (2) hiding it more effectively is another infuriating example of why governments (of any kind!) can never, ever be trusted.  The best that any civilized society can do is shackle government power so severely that its agents feel as if they are rotting away in a dark dungeon without any prospect of public glory.  That’s why our Founders worked so hard to write a Constitution that limits the powers of all the miscreants who inevitably end up running things.  After all, at its core, government is nothing more than a collection of unethical people given legal immunity for performing otherwise criminal acts.  

In exchange for a little law and order, prosperity, and peace, the people look the other way while government bureaucrats steal their property (taxes), intimidate them with threats of force (FBI-Gestapo), and occasionally sacrifice their children for the greater good (war).  As soon as government is celebrated as something wonderful (instead of something that should always be dreaded and despised), those same bureaucrats break free from their dungeons, anoint themselves as unaccountable kings, and devise the most elaborate schemes to pillage, plunder, and endanger the citizenry without remorse.  No tax is too high!  No government mandate or regulatory fiat is too grotesque!  No life is too precious for the spoils of endless, needless war!  In Mayorkas’s world, bureaucrats bark orders, citizens comply, the government tells you what you may own, and armed IRS agents confiscate the rest!

How has the freest nation on Earth been reduced to a population of citizen-slaves begging for government scraps?  America’s tyrants use the same two-pronged approach that all totalitarian regimes do: the U.S. government (1) lies about everything, while (2) intentionally inflicting emotional harm on its citizens.  Everything that unscrupulous government agents such as Mayorkas shove down Americans’ throats is part of a psychological war meant to enfeeble, confuse, dispirit, and infantilize the adult population while indoctrinating younger generations to accept absurdities, surrender to “woke” ideology, and refrain from ever questioning authoritarian “elites.”

That’s why popular actors, musicians, and athletes must all believe the same thing — lest they be summarily “canceled.”  It is absolutely essential that young minds see intellectual conformity as something to celebrate and dissent as something to abhor.  It is why presidential puppet Joe Biden likes to say, “We’re all in this together,” while simultaneously stigmatizing half the electorate as “domestic terrorists” who “threaten democracy.”  Critical thinking, artistic individualism, philosophical disagreement, and public debate are not tolerated in totalitarian regimes.

In an essay for the Brownstone Institute, Jeffrey Tucker describes his experience at a train station where prominent warning signs still command travelers to obey COVID’s strict social distancing requirements.  For the most part, people just ignored the government’s orders and went about their lives.  After pondering the “enormous disjunction … between what we are told to do and what we actually do,” Tucker concludes that the “edicts to which no one complies serve a certain purpose.  They are a visual reminder of who is in charge, what those people believe, and the presence of a Sword of Damocles hanging above the whole population: at any point, anyone can be snatched away from normal life, made a criminal, and be forced to pay a price.”  In a psychological war meant to obtain total control over citizen behavior, “the nuttier the edicts, the more effective the message.”

Writer Kit Knightly aptly describes these nutty edicts as part of the government’s broader propaganda campaign to “cultivate” a “perfidious unreality,” where our “authoritarian ruling elite” promulgate “insane narratives” that “serve as both loyalty test and humiliation ritual.”  When government agents say something that is “impossible to believe” and people accept it as true nonetheless, then citizens demonstrate “greater loyalty” to the government’s absurd fabrications than to reality.  “Humiliation is the ultimate demonstration of control” because under a system “where nothing is true, anything could be.”  Knightly concludes that the government engages in psychopathic behavior meant to do one thing: break every citizen’s spirit and mind.

What this means is that fighting for human liberty against the government’s encroaching totalitarianism requires more than civil disobedience; it requires an acceptance that everything our government says is a lie and everything our government does is destructive.  The U.S. government — along with most Western governments that have been captured by central banks, spy agencies, and an international cabal of Marxist “elites” — is dedicated to destroying any notion of “objective truth.”  That is why we are told that biological sex is a social construct, that private property causes “climate change,” and that popular political movements are “undemocratic.”  To free our bodies, we must free our minds.  And to free our countries, we must work to free the minds of as many of our fellow citizens as we can.

When the battlefield is the human brain, revolutionary ideas are more important than bullets.

J.B. Shurk

Image: Don Hankins via Flickr, CC BY 2.0 (cropped).

17

| Print|

 Email

SUPPORT AMERICAN THINKER

To comment on this or any other American Thinker article or blog, you must be a subscriber to our ad-free service. Login to your subscription to access the comments section. You can subscribe on a monthly basis for $6.79 a month or for a year at $69.99

Login

Subscribe / Change Pwd

There’s a lot of noise about who should be the GOP nominee, and that’s being sorted out as the primaries begin, but Bill O’Reilly has very effectively put the election into perspective as far as what’s at stake, not to mention the ridiculous fearmongering from the Left.

Bottom line: The country can NOT take any more of the Biden train wreck and intentional destruction of the republic (while ironically saying Republicans threaten “norms and institutions.”

Watch:

Bill O’Reilly has reached his absolute limit. pic.twitter.com/FkuGovnDHs

— Big Fish (@BigFish3000) January 11, 2024

In a word: BINGO.

I miss this guy. He was one of the best to ever do it. https://t.co/zDsWdJ6oPV

— Eric Matheny 🎙️ (@ericmmatheny) January 11, 2024

Bill is saying what every one of us has been thinking and shouting about- he’s just got a bigger platform for it and I love it! https://t.co/NOt9D8k7qh

— QueenMother👸🏻 (@QueenMother1976) January 11, 2024

He’s absolutely correct ~ https://t.co/aHNdiUF6as

— Sheryl #rescue #loveofcountry #2A (@sav01) January 11, 2024

Yep, this is what 2024 is all about folks. The Biden White House and this entire administration must be shown the door in a landslide fashion.

Recommended

Where Is the FBI?! The Media?! X Suggests Punishments for 7 Texas Men Who Assaulted Toddlers in Bathrooms

San Fran Resident Decries Attack on ‘Food Justice’ as Neighborhood Safeway Is Set to Close Due to Crime

***

Recommended (current Twitchy articles):

Where Is the FBI?! The Media?! X Suggests Punishments for 7 Texas Men Who Assaulted Toddlers in Bathrooms

San Fran Resident Decries Attack on ‘Food Justice’ as Neighborhood Safeway Is Set to Close Due to Crime

Matt Walsh Makes Waves With Clip Stating That Buying Valentines Day Gifts Early is… Well, Just Watch

A ‘New College’ Alumnus Lost It Over DeSantis’ New Degree Program But SHOCKINGLY She’s All Wrong

‘Go Off, Queens’: Southwest Airlines Shows Off Its All-Female Flight Crew

Army Sees a Steep Decline in White Recruits Over the Past Five Years

TRENDING ON TOWNHALL MEDIA:

1 Seven Men Gang Rape Two Toddlers in Shopping Mall Restroom and Post Video Online

2 Joe Biden Just Suffered Two Judicial Losses

Where Is the FBI?! The Media?! X Suggests Punishments for 7 Texas Men Who Assaulted Toddlers in Bathrooms

Is electricity a source of energy? Most people will answer yes, which is incorrect. Electricity carries energy but it is not itself a source of energy, which in the U.S. is supplied 60% by natural gas and coal, 18% nuclear and 22% renewables (hydro, solar and wind). 

The related question is whether cars are a major consumer of energy and hence a significant contributor of Co2 emissions? Again, most people believe both statements are self-evidently true, hence the importance of moving to electric cars. 

In fact, cars (light-duty transportation) account for less than 5% of global energy demand, with U.S. cars accounting for 19% of the global car fleet, declining to under 15% by 2050 as car demand grows faster outside the U.S. 

Putting these facts together, and they are indisputable facts, provides a stunning insight. 

The U.S. car fleet accounts for a mere 1.0% of global energy demand (5% x 19%), declining to 0.8% by 2050. So even if the U.S. shifts 100% to electric-powered cars, the maximum climate impact in 2050 is a meaningless 0.2% (22% x 0.8%) reduction in global Co2 emissions from the current electric grid, up to a maximum of 0.5% assuming solar, wind, and hydro can, implausibly, power 60% of electric demand. 

In other words, there is no factual basis to claim that the government mandate to switch to electric cars will have any material impact on global Co2 emissions. 

This is not a debatable point — it is easily verified, it is correct under any view of climate science, and it remains true even if solar and wind magically grow sixfold over the next 25 years, which is highly unlikely given the need to build a new transmission network, estimated at more than 200,000 miles of wires crisscrossing the country, and devise totally unknown, unproven, and likely impossible to achieve large-scale, economic battery storage. 

Nor does the picture change materially if the entire world goes 100% electric for cars. In that case global Co2 emissions fall a mere 3.5% in 2050 versus a baseline of 24% electric adoption by 2035. 

Put simply, cars are not a meaningful source of global emissions and electric cars do not and cannot curtail the continued reliance on fossil fuels in electric generation. On top of this, counting all sources, the U.S. is responsible for only 14% of all global Co2 emissions, declining to 9% by 2050 due to rest of world economic growth. 

But facts count for nothing in the Biden era. The EPA seeks to force conversion to electric cars through draconian limits on tailpipe emissions. American taxpayers foot the bill for billions in subsidies to electric cars. California leads the way in mandating conversion to electric cars. Perversely, the major auto companies have signed onto the electric agenda, the harbinger of future bailouts. 

Perhaps most galling is the continuous misleading of the public. 

By law every new car must affix a window sticker with the following statement: “Vehicle emissions are a significant cause of climate change and smog.“ Any private company marketing such demonstrably false claims would be subject to ruinous civil and criminal liability. null

If going electric yields virtually no climate benefit, why bother buying a battery-powered car, with limited range, high purchase cost, and low resale value, the death knell to affordable leasing costs? 

Consumers are smarter than the government in figuring out that battery-powered cars are a raw deal, resulting in widespread reports of missed sales forecasts, high unsold inventories, and cancellation of future projections by the major auto companies. 

Here again the new car sticker hides economic reality by featuring in bold type a hypothetical five-year operating saving versus an average conventional car, based on the cost of gas and electricity. 

By sticker math, savings rise as gasoline prices increase, hence the perverse and persistent administration incentive to force high gas costs on Americans, except in an election year. And the savings disappear as electric costs increase. 

Already there is no operating benefit when charging stations routinely cost $.40/kwh-$.50/kwh, a fact conveniently not mentioned in the sticker calculation. Nor are consumers warned of the inevitable sharp increase in electric rates if the grid must absorb high-cost solar and wind, as in Germany where electric rates already are $.45/kwh, removing any incentive for electric cars. At current gas prices, a typical hybrid costs less to run on gas once electric prices exceed $.24/kwh.

Taking the broader view, fossils fuels currently account for 80% of global energy supply. Even if the world aggressively grows solar and wind, fossil fuels in 2050 continue to supply 68% of all energy. 

The reason is quite straightforward. The major sources of energy, and hence global energy emissions, come from non-car sources that are extremely difficult or technologically infeasible to convert to renewables, namely industrial, commercial transportation (heavy-duty trucking, aviation, marine, and rail), and residential/commercial. The government focus on cars is political theater. 

Nuclear energy can uniquely reduce emissions to zero in these sectors, but for reasons well-known, war has been successfully declared on nuclear energy in the U.S. and it is not growing globally at the exponential rates needed to solve global Co2 emissions permanently. 

The continued dominance of fossil fuels explains what is otherwise inexplicable: Warren Buffet’s multi-billion-dollar investment in oil companies, especially Occidental Petroleum, and the recent surge in oil acquisitions, notably ExxonMobil paying $58 billion for Pioneer Natural Resources and Chevron’s purchase of Hess Corp. for $60 billion.

Those with the greatest knowledge, betting real money, know oil and gas are here to stay. Without skillful, continuous oil and gas investment in the billions and trillions in the U.S. and the world, global oil and gas production by 2050 would drop more than 70% from current levels, yielding economic Armageddon.

The Biden Administration response is astonishing. As reported by the Department of Energy in September 2023, the National Security Council has issued an edict banning government employees from attending any international conference that promotes fossil fuel production, with limited exceptions.

Yet even at 68% market share for fossil fuels, global emissions will be cut significantly. By a factor of three, the most important lever of global greenhouse gas reduction is not growth in solar and renewables, but continuous private sector innovation in energy efficiency, reducing energy content per unit of output. 

Missing in climate change discussions is its inhumane logic. Global emission increases through 2050 are due to population growth and rising economic activity in China, India, and the rest of the developing world (i.e., non-U.S. and Europe). GDP growth raises living standards. Falling GDP and population reduction outside the developed nations are the true, but strategically hidden, moral epicenter of the climate change agenda. 

China, India, Asia, and Africa are not buying what world elites are selling as they self-righteously jet to exhilarating climate confabs. No one should. Demanding that 80% of the world, or some six billion humans, sacrifice their well-being, and their children, is an immorality never before articulated and rationalized. 

The hard truth is that no set of actions can remotely meet the arbitrary IPCC requirement for a 70% reduction in global Co2 by 2050, certainly not the puny contribution from electrified cars and indeed nothing short of a horrific determination to strangle the world whole.

By all means purchase a battery-powered vehicle if it pleases you. But do not imagine for a moment that it saves money or is doing anything that matters for climate change. 

We are ruled by liars, fools and demons, too often all three in one.

William Levin

The ongoing spate of antisemitism and anti-Israel protests sweeping the country following Hamas’s attacks on Israeli civilians last October are just the latest example of how the Democrat establishment has lost control of the radical left-wing activist class it has fostered and egged on for years. With a major election now less than a year away, the escalating extremism of these activists could cost Democrats big at the ballot box.

After Hamas’s terrorist attack left more than 1,200 innocent civilians dead, most elected Democrats – with notable exceptions like “Squad” members Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Ilhan Omar – condemned the violence and called for solidarity with Israel. But many of these same Democrats have since backed down from that stance amid fierce backlash from their far-left base, which has not only excused Hamas’s brutal actions, but even celebrated them.

While the mainstream media has been reluctant to report on it, this unrest stemming from the militant antisemitism on the left only seems to be increasing despite attempts by the Democrat establishment to quell it.

Biden Watching CNN

On January 6, for instance, as the press engaged in their annual campaign of smearing Donald Trump and conservatives as “insurrectionists,” anti-Israel leftists blocked a major interstate in Seattle, causing traffic to be backed up for six hours. The same day, another anti-Israel protest caused major gridlock on Chicago’s famous Lake Shore Drive.

A few days before those incidents, on January 3, left-wing protestors shut down the California General Assembly. Anti-Israel protestors also attempted to disrupt New Year’s Eve celebrations in New York City and Boston.

Elected Democrats have been largely powerless to stop or even discourage the alarming spike in antisemitism from their own supporters. On November 29, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer grudgingly acknowledged that the recent incidents of antisemitism were mostly coming from “people that most liberal Jewish Americans felt previously were their ideological fellow travelers.”

The backlash from the left against President Joe Biden, who has wavered in his support for Israel but also has not openly endorsed Hamas’s actions as his left-wing base wants him to do, has been severe. Polling evidence shows that young voters are abandoning Biden in droves over his refusal to demand Israel stop its war on Hamas. In perhaps the clearest evidence that Democrat leaders have lost control of their base, even young White House staffers are in open revolt against the president over his stance on the war.

While many Democrat leaders and corporate media pundits have expressed alarm over the anti-Jewish radicalism of the left-wing activist class – in between excusing leftists’ calls for genocide – the liberal establishment should hardly be surprised.

Back in 2020, following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Democrats and the legacy media openly encouraged the chaos that gripped American cities for weeks – violence that was far more widespread and deadly than the heinous antisemitic demonstrations on American streets today. Democrat leaders like Chuck Schumer, Kamala Harris, and Elizabeth Warren all marched in anti-police protests that later turned to riots, while the Democrat Party embraced the imagery and themes of the radical Black Lives Matter movement at their 2020 convention.

Despite the George Floyd riots causing more than $1 billion in property damage and leading to dozens of deaths, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wrote on X, “The whole point of protesting is to make people uncomfortable.” The Democrat establishment tacitly endorsed this sentiment, signaling to their activist base that violence was acceptable so long as it is in support of a left-wing cause.

In 2020, that cause was the “Defund the Police” movement and so-called “racial equity.” In that case, Democrats were able to largely escape the blame for the violence and destruction caused by their activists with help from their media allies.

But nearly four years later, it seems the radicalism of Democrats’ activist class has finally caught up to them and is costing the party big with everyday Americans. However, after years of telling fierce partisans that they are accountable to no one and nothing except the edicts of woke ideology, Democrats have created a major danger for themselves and the country that they are powerless to do anything about.

If liberal activists are indeed waking the rest of the country up to the growing extremism of the modern Democrat Party and setting the stage for an electoral wipeout this November, Democrats will have no one to blame but themselves.

Andrew Shirley