NEW: Texas State Troopers pulled over a semi truck near Laredo today that was crammed full of 105 migrants who were being smuggled into the United States. The driver, Michael Warren McCoy, was arrested for human smuggling and was booked into Webb County jail. @FoxNews pic.twitter.com/Dumve76Nv4

— Bill Melugin (@BillMelugin_) July 19, 2021

The Doomed Return of Mask Mandates

Noah Rothman:

“…Amid a comparatively modest new surge of COVID infections, and without the accompanying rates of hospitalization and death that typified such deluges before the advent of COVID vaccines, Los Angeles has reimposed a city-wide indoor masking mandate without regard for individual vaccination status (a move Joe Biden’s surgeon general applauded). Las Vegas followed suit, strongly recommending the resumption of indoor mask mandates. And while outgoing New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has rejected a new mask mandate, other powerful city officials, such as the chair of the city council’s health committee, Mark Levine, are calling for a reversion to the status quo ante. But a cursory overview of how renewed mask mandates are being received in Los Angeles, as well as the application of a little common sense, suggests this strategy is doomed to failure.

The reintroduction of mask mandates in Los Angeles seems to be a welcome development only among those who are already highly educated and affluent; in other words, those who are most likely to have already been vaccinated. Surveying the landscape, the New York Times compiled a variety of anecdotes among those tasked with enforcing these mandates, and most accounts suggest the project is not being warmly received. “I’m too scared to tell people to put them on,” one art gallery staffer told the Times. “They will scream at you.” Another entirely shirked any responsibility to enforce masking at all. “I’m not the mask police,” he said. The patrons of these local establishments who spoke with Times reporters, many of whom were either vaccinated or had contracted COVID and recovered, didn’t understand what the masking mandate was intended to accomplish. The days of masking as a self-reinforcing social norm are long behind us.

And if masking is not a self-perpetuating social norm, it’s is certainly not a matter for police. Los Angeles County’s sheriff has already said he will devote no resources to enforcing the new masking ordinance. Compliance will be voluntary, he continued, adding that the city should instead pursue “mandates that are both achievable and supported by science.” Outside of LA’s poshest enclaves, you would be hard-pressed to find anyone obeying the mask mandate at all. Another Times dispatch datelined Beverly Hills outlined the “challenge of reinforcing the masking mandate” even in establishments as amenable to such interventions as “cafes, patisseries, and brunch spots.” Meanwhile, at Marci’s Sports Bar & Grill in the more conservative Santa Clarita, no one even bothered to observe the city’s burdensome new mandates, much less to police violations of the new edict.

This isn’t just a predictable response to mitigation measures that contradict the best practices advocated by both Sacramento and the Biden administration’s public health bureaucracy. It’s intuitive.

Polling routinely indicates that the unvaccinated are far less concerned about the prospect of COVID infection than the fully immunized, which makes sense given the lack of risk-aversion inherent in refusing immunization. And reimposing mask mandates only confirms the wisdom of their decision to abstain from vaccination. For them, there are few incentives to get vaccinated beyond their own health and the wellbeing of their family and neighbors—inducements that haven’t proven compelling enough to force them to abandon their skepticism yet. Indeed, the only logic that justifies the reimposition of mask mandates seems to be the psychological comfort it affords the already vaccinated…”

Antifa (Which Is Just Plain Fa) Literally Fights Against Women’s Rights

Jim Treacher:

“…This has nothing to do with accepting people who are different. This is about abusing women under the guise of wokeness. This is about using force and intimidation to push a political agenda. This is about “anti-fascists” who are too stupid and/or dishonest to admit they’re just plain fascists.

As I noted the first time this happened a couple of weeks ago, the mental gymnastics are amazing: Men are evil, unless they identify as women, in which case their rights supersede those of genetic females, who are bigots for wanting to go to the spa without seeing naked men, who are evil, unless they identify as women, in which case…

These are not good people. These are not sane people. You don’t have to do what they demand, no matter how loudly they scream at you…”

https://youtu.be/8hl9XLTtuKU

This is the perfect example of the Democrat Party to show your children

– illegally leaves state to cheat when they don’t get their way

– preaches climate change – takes private jet.

– pushes masks 24/7 – they don’t wear them.

Biggest hypocrites in the world. pic.twitter.com/YMnJNBwzwW

— Catturd ™ (@catturd2) July 18, 2021

Biden Warns Cubans Not To Come Here For Freedom As He Is Getting Rid Of That https://t.co/7wNcrkC9rd

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) July 18, 2021

NEW: Press release from @VoterGA says the group has obtained new evidence that the election discrepancies in other Georgia counties may be worse than those it uncovered in Fulton County. pic.twitter.com/6RyZoBXF9S

— Election Wizard (@ElectionWiz) July 19, 2021

Related:

https://twitter.com/Grahmptri/status/1416560776517664771

And a related reminder about what Democrats said in 2018:

Here are Democrats in 2018 saying everything Mike Lindell says about voting machines pic.twitter.com/IFZ2sEhmZ9

— Jack Poso 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) July 19, 2021

The Panic Pandemic

John Tierney:

“…Fearmongering from journalists, scientists, and politicians did more harm than the virus.

The United States suffered through two lethal waves of contagion in the past year and a half. The first was a viral pandemic that killed about one in 500 Americans—typically, a person over 75 suffering from other serious conditions. The second, and far more catastrophic, was a moral panic that swept the nation’s guiding institutions.

Instead of keeping calm and carrying on, the American elite flouted the norms of governance, journalism, academic freedom—and, worst of all, science. They misled the public about the origins of the virus and the true risk that it posed. Ignoring their own carefully prepared plans for a pandemic, they claimed unprecedented powers to impose untested strategies, with terrible collateral damage. As evidence of their mistakes mounted, they stifled debate by vilifying dissenters, censoring criticism, and suppressing scientific research.

If, as seems increasingly plausible, the coronavirus that causes Covid-19 leaked out of a laboratory in Wuhan, it is the costliest blunder ever committed by scientists. Whatever the pandemic’s origin, the response to it is the worst mistake in the history of the public-health profession. We still have no convincing evidence that the lockdowns saved lives, but lots of evidence that they have already cost lives and will prove deadlier in the long run than the virus itself.

One in three people worldwide lost a job or a business during the lockdowns, and half saw their earnings drop, according to a Gallup poll. Children, never at risk from the virus, in many places essentially lost a year of school. The economic and health consequences were felt most acutely among the less affluent in America and in the rest of the world, where the World Bank estimates that more than 100 million have been pushed into extreme poverty.

The leaders responsible for these disasters continue to pretend that their policies worked and assume that they can keep fooling the public. They’ve promised to deploy these strategies again in the future, and they might even succeed in doing so—unless we begin to understand what went wrong.

The panic was started, as usual, by journalists…”

The American Descent into Madness

America went from the freest country in the world in December 2019 to a repressive and frightening place by July 2021. How did that happen?

“…Nations have often gone mad in a matter of months. The French abandoned their supposedly idealistic revolutionary project and turned it into a monstrous hell for a year between July 1793 and 1794. After the election of November 1860, in a matter of weeks, Americans went from thinking secession was taboo to visions of killing the greatest number of their fellow citizens on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. Mao’s China went from a failed communist state to the ninth circle of Dante’s Inferno, when he unleashed the Cultural Revolution in 1966.

In the last six months, we have seen absurdities never quite witnessed in modern America. Madness, not politics, defines it. There are three characteristics of all these upheavals. One, the events are unsustainable. They will either cease or they will destroy the nation, at least as we know it. Two, the law has largely been rendered meaningless. Three, left-wing political agendas justify any means necessary to achieve them…”

Click over for the whole thing.

New poll shows 64% of Americans not confident Kamala Harris is ready to be president

Scientists Warn That Within 6 Months Humanity Will Run Out Of Things To Call Racist https://t.co/4bxH4H5Z2w

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) July 18, 2021

Portland ranked among 10 best cities in the U.S. after year of riots, homeless spike

Just more garbage

Related:

Ron DeSantis: Texas, Florida ‘will enforce the law’ at border amid Biden neglect of ‘duty’

Related:

The First Rule of Censorship Club

“The first rule of Fight Club is: you do not talk about Fight Club.”

Something very similar is at work in the operations of Big Tech, acting as a political arms of the Biden administration. Using the pretext of suppressing “misinformation,” Facebook and other platforms are identifying and silencing the administration’s opponents and, even though this is happening in full view of anyone paying attention, you’re not going to know anything about it if you get your news from CNN, MSNBC or one of the broadcast network troika of NBC/ABC/CBS.

In fact, the liberal media are engaged in “fact-checking” that labels reporting about this censorship as (you guessed it) “misinformation.”

Politico reported last week that the Democratic National Committee is going to “work with SMS carriers to dispel misinformation about vaccines that is sent over social media and text messages.”

Repeat: “text messages.”

The DNC is going to censor your text messages?…

…Why is that “smart” people, like Jen Psaki, believe that they are capable of discerning the difference between facts and “misinformation,” yet they believe the rest of the country is full of people too stupid to tell the difference? Like, “We need to censor Facebook or otherwise your grandmother is going to die from drinking bleach.”

What is at the heart of the White House crusade to suppress “misinformation” about COVID-19 is not an issue of fact, as to the safety and efficacy of vaccines, but rather an issue of power — the Biden administration seeks the authority to control what people are allowed to publish on social media platforms, not just about COVID-19 vaccines, but about anything it might deem to be dangerous in some way. The issue is not about the specific content of any particular message on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc., but instead whether these companies are going to be taking orders from the White House. Saagar Enjeti nailed it:

All of this goes back to 2016. These people believe in their bones that Trump was only elected because of “misinformation”. Their solution is to rig the platforms instead of ask why so many millions lost trust in all our institutions in the first place https://t.co/2HMudG7EN3

— Saagar Enjeti (@esaagar) July 16, 2021

Good luck with that! Chicago mental health professionals will be dispatched on 911 calls instead of cops following defund the police protests – as gang members now outnumber officers ten to one

Related:

Will the mental health professionals have bullet proof vests? Sidearms? How will they defend themselves?

 

Joe Biden’s big lie

“…Did you know that black people are not going to be allowed to vote in America anymore? At least in states controlled by Republicans. Sounds a bit unlikely, but that’s a conclusion you might have come to if you took seriously what President Joe Biden was saying in Philadelphia Tuesday.

Biden decried Republicans’ proposed changes in election laws as “the 21st-century Jim Crow assault” that tries “to suppress and subvert the right to vote in fair and free elections, an assault on democracy.”

This is, to be polite, unhinged nonsense.

Biden is old enough to remember what real Jim Crow voter suppression was like. It meant zero black people voting in places such as Mississippi. It meant threats and violence against black people who tried to register to vote. It meant the unfair application of literacy tests and poll taxes.

Requiring voters to present picture ID is nothing like this: Large majorities think it’s reasonable. Measures such as reducing the number of pre-election voting days in Georgia (there are zero in Biden’s Delaware) or ending pandemic-inspired measures such as drive-thru voting in Harris County, Texas, are not the same. Not even close.

Early in his speech, Biden denounced “the Big Lie,” a reference to Donald Trump’s claims that he actually won the 2020 election. But Biden’s Jim Crow charge is an even clearer instance of the Big Lie — and a more dangerous one since it’s unlikely to be fact-checked by most media. If you want people to condemn a Big Lie, don’t tell one yourself.

In his criticism of Trump, Biden invoked a long-standing norm of American politics. “In America, if you lose, you accept the results. You follow the Constitution. You try again. You don’t call the facts ‘fake’ and then try to bring down the American experiment just because you’re unhappy.”

He spoke these words, apparently unaware that they could be applied to him and his own party.

You might not understand this if your only news sources were the New York Times or CNN. But if you try to look at it, as Darryl Cooper does in the leftist Glenn Greenwald’s Substack, you might recall that Hillary Clinton and other Democrats did not accept the results of the 2016 election and spent months advancing the Russia collusion hoax to delegitimize and end the Trump presidency.

“We now know,” Cooper writes, “that the FBI and other intelligence agencies conducted covert surveillance against members of the Trump campaign based on evidence manufactured by political operatives working for the Clinton campaign, both before and after the election.”

He goes on: “We know that those involved with the investigation knew that accusations of collusion were part of a campaign ‘approved by Hillary Clinton … to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security service.'”

As Cooper notes, for months, many Trump supporters worried that there might be substance to the Russia collusion charges. Democrats insisted there was. News media such as the New York Times and CNN ignored or ridiculed efforts by the likes of House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes to show there was nothing there.

Nunes was right, as became apparent when special counsel Robert Mueller admitted in his report and in his pathetic performance on Capitol Hill, that he had no evidence of collusion. But the New York Times and other papers didn’t return the Pulitzers they won for their Russia collusion stories.

New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet acknowledged in an angry newsroom meeting, “The day Bob Mueller walked off the witness stand … [o]ur readers who want Donald Trump to go away suddenly thought, ‘Holy s***, Bob Mueller is not going to do it.’” As a result, “We’re a little tiny bit flat-footed. I mean, that’s what happens when a story looks a certain way for two years.” “A little tiny bit flat-footed,” translated into English, means “dead wrong.”

Have Baquet or other news media leaders confessed error for their misjudgments? Have any Democrats who pursued the Russia collusion hoax like Inspector Javert confessed error? Not that I’ve seen…”