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Toxic Liberalism

Elizabeth Harrington • February 5, 2018 5:00 am
"Is there such a thing as nontoxic masculinity?"

That was the first question I was asked Friday evening at Black Cat in Washington, D.C., a music venue I found quite different from past experiences there watching Punk Rock Karaoke a couple of years ago. But times have changed.

If there is such a thing as "toxic masculinity," I couldn't find it among the crowd who paid $15 to hear "drunk TED Talks" on the subject of the "masculine swamp."

The room was packed for "Drunk Education," a series featuring writers and artists who "make slideshows about stuff they're really into." Past topics include the "horniness of St. Augustine" and the "history of mansplaining relayed through the plot of Love, Actually."

Friday's theme was the #MeToo movement, and I braced myself for two hours of Trump-bashing and man-hating from liberal crusaders donned in pink pussy hats.

But the night was a series of paradoxes and confusion, the embodiment of mangled liberalism in the age of identity politics on steroids. For instance, the lefty millennial crowd railed more against the sins of Democratic men than they did Trump, who, to my surprise, was hardly mentioned. During a game of Mad Libs, the first impulse of a woman in the audience listening to talks about empowering women was to yell out, "Sluts!"

The night started in safe enough territory for the left, hitting all the right marks: "Rampant oppression of women, sexism, and ‘American patriarchy.'"

"I want to do a very brief introduction to this where I talk about very obvious facts about how a lot of men are bad," said the host, Eric Thurm, whom an audience member quickly observed was a "classic white male." He was wearing a t-shirt that read, "The Future is Feelings." Not exactly Gary Cooper.

The first speaker, Marin Cogan, a writer, critiqued embarrassing excuses men have used against accusations of sexual misconduct. She started with simpler times, back when Anthony Weiner "had just leaked his own dick selfie" and blamed it on his account being hacked.

Cogan hit Mark Sanford, Al Franken, and Garrison Keillor, and spotlighted Harvey Weinstein as the worst example of attempts to excuse bad behavior.

"The worst thing about this is that he tried to invoke the NRA, as though saying that he was going to take on the NRA would somehow distract us from the horrible things he had done," Cogan said. "Harvey was engaging in this really unfortunate mistaken belief, which was that as a public figure you would be forgiven for treating women like shit privately, as long as people liked his politics publicly."

"And I don't know where he got that idea, but I think maybe it had something to do with this guy," she said, as a picture of Bill Clinton flashed across the screen.

"We need to have this conversation, right?" Cogan said, to applause and yells of "Yes!" from liberal hipsters.

The second presentation by Tonya Riley, a research associate for Future Tense, was a protest against the men of Silicon Valley. There was not a lot of love for Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos, or Mark Zuckerberg, who was mocked for his political aspirations and phony meetings with working-class Americans.

"But they're really dumb," Riley said. "They're not that different from the people we already have in D.C." Fair point.

The night couldn't be all Democrat bashing. The evening would not have been complete without the purveyors of sexual identity politics' favorite obsession: Mike Pence.

The natural follow up to railing against men in power who abuse their female subordinates is to lampoon a powerful politician for choosing to use discretion in how he interacts with women in the workplace. The obvious criticism to the "Pence Rule"—resisting temptation by not eating alone with women who are not your wife or getting drunk with them either—is to call Pence a lesbian.

"Mike I'm a Dyke" was the final presentation of the night, delivered by Jennifer Bendery, a senior politics reporter for the Huffington Post.

Bendery engaged in a mean-spirited criticism of a man who has not been accused of sexual impropriety. She blamed the Pence Rule for making it "impossible for women to advance or [be] taken seriously" at work and slammed it for being "unbearably straight."

The speech was peppered with crude sexual jokes, which we've learned are never acceptable for men to make about women in the workplace, but okay for lesbians to make about straight, white, religious, Republican men.

Bendery's jokes included imagining locking second lady Karen Pence inside a closet and dressing up Pence in drag.

"He wouldn't want to be called deepthroat," she said. "He'd probably go by, ‘Never before penetrated anus.'" Her question for Pence: "Why he always has this look on his face like he just sat on a lemon and his asshole is puckered."

But the toxicity of the night was only beginning.

"All gender is toxic," the stranger sitting next to me informed me. But maybe he had a point. The first dose of toxicity I encountered was waiting in line for the restroom. Neither was marked for male or female, making it a free for all with a woman using a toilet as two men used urinals just a few feet away.

"This used to be the women's bathroom [on the left], and the guys' bathroom [on the right], but they took down the signs … but are there urinals in there?" a puzzled woman in line asked. "Yeah, you can just do anything now."

"It used to be gender separated, but now it's like, whatever."

I opted to wait for the door on the left.

Things really turned poisonous once the presentations were over, and the audience had its turn to speak.

"How do you deal with male feminists?" "What was your first experience with a cat call?" "How do we stay sex positive?"

Next was a question about if any men had admitted to the panelists that they had engaged in coercive sex. The answer was no, prompting Thurm to reply, "I guess we have good taste in people."

"If you had good taste in people there would be people of color on the stage," an audience member sniped.

Awkward minutes went by before the audience member demanded the panel address the alleged lack of diversity.

"I need to take a second to pretend that I didn't drink that last Whiskey Ginger, so I can actually say something coherent and interesting," Thurm said awkwardly.

"That's not a good answer," someone shouted. "Or the women could talk," said another.

"What are we even talking about now?" asked Bendery, after Thurm attempted to appease the crowd, saying he is a one-man operation, but could do a better job booking.

"I've actually worked with speakers who have refused to be on panels if there is not a person of color on the panel, and I'm disappointed in myself that I did not think about that," Riley confessed.

"I got an email asking me to do this event for RAIIN, the Rape Abuse Incest International Network," said Cogan. "And I'm really happy to do it, but it is a good point that we should have thought more about it and tried to make a much more diverse panel."

Their guilt wasn't enough.

"These women are bad asses and we can all agree about that, BUT we need to have diversity perspectives, and I would encourage you that if you're ever having a show, don't do it unless you have a person of color," a white female audience member said.

Suddenly the message of the evening, though already full of contradictions, had evaporated. The opinions and arguments of the three women didn't matter, only the color of their skin.

Kind of toxic, if you ask me.

https://freebeacon.com/culture/toxic-liberalism/

“Speech is worth one coin, but silence is worth two,” states the Talmud, a central text of Jewish tradition. Perhaps Joe Biden should have favored us with his silence regarding the recent hostage-taking at a Texas synagogue.

Instead, he offered some remarks that didn’t make much sense.

Predictably, the president pushed more gun control, while also admitting this wouldn’t have stopped the synagogue hostage-taker. He made no clear attempt to reconcile this contradiction.

From there, Biden went on to speak disconnectedly about too many guns being purchased in recent times. He assured a journalist that he was working to solve this supposed problem—not crime or terrorism, but “so many guns” being sold.

Biden’s gun control rant came during a short press conference about the events of January 15 when British citizen Malik Faisal Akram took a Rabbi and three congregants hostage at Beth Israel Synagogue in Colleyville, Texas. The hostages survived the ordeal unharmed, while Akram was killed after a 10-hour standoff.

Taking questions about the incident, Biden said Akram had apparently purchased a gun “on the street.”

The president was then asked whether the terror incident would have “ramifications for the push to ensure that guns are not available”—an appalling question from the press, given the natural right of self-defense that the Second Amendment is meant to protect.

It would have been good to hear the president push back and clarify that America must never become a country in which “guns are not available.” Instead, here’s how his response began, according to the official White House transcript: “Well, no—well, it does but it also doesn’t,” he said. “The guns are—we should be . . .” At a loss for words, the president landed on a familiar trope: “The idea of background checks are critical.”

But even President Biden could see the contradiction with what he had said only moments ago. Akram had purchased his gun “on the street,” outside any system of background checks.

Biden admitted as much. “But you can’t stop something like this if someone is on the street buying something from somebody else on the street,” he acknowledged. The policies he had just called “critical” would have made no difference.

Stuck, the president seemed to go in a different direction: “Except that there’s too — there’s so many guns that have been sold of late; it’s just ridiculous.”

Biden is correct that Americans have been buying more guns; although that’s hardly ridiculous, given the crime and violence in America’s cities. Indeed, millions of Americans bought a gun for the first time in 2020, a trend that continued in 2021. The increase in gun ownership is clearly related to the nationwide riots of 2020, and continuing record rates of violent crime in 2021.

Biden never even bothered to connect his rambling complaint about “so many guns” being sold back to the synagogue attack. But it’s worth noting that Judaism itself has a robust tradition of acknowledging self-defense rights.

Armed guards, and even armed congregations, are becoming increasingly more common in synagogues throughout the country. What choice do Jews have, with anti-Semitism on the rise and politicians, including Biden himself, slow to acknowledge it. Jews must count on their own measures to protect themselves from incidents of hate.

Meanwhile, Biden — still on the “so many guns” theme — concluded his answer to the press by claiming this alleged oversupply is “because of the failure of us to focus as hard as we should and as consistent as we should on gun purchases, gun sales, ghost guns, and a whole range of things that I’m trying to do.”

Of course, none of this would have stopped Akram from buying a gun on the street, any more than “background checks” would have. But by this point, Biden seemed rather off-track from discussing the hostage-taking by the terrorist at the synagogue. Instead, he was content to complain about Americans buying too many guns, while assuring a journalist he means to do “a whole range of things” about that.

While Biden’s statements were misguided and wrong, they at least offered remarkable insight into the gun control mindset: whatever the problem, the answer is always to demonize guns and to disarm the People, however ineffective they are at stopping criminals. Only now, gun control advocates no longer bother to hold back from saying it out loud.

How long before Sleepy Joe becomes 25thd Joe? Can he last until the 2 year mark?

Lots of links to click in TFA:
https://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/president-bidens-own-comments-on-gun-control-laws-expose-how-futile-they-are/

The Real Cuban Missile Crisis

Everything you think you know about those 13 days is wrong.
By Benjamin Schwarz

Every sentence in the above paragraph describing the Cuban missile crisis is misleading or erroneous. But this was the rendition of events that the Kennedy administration fed to a credulous press; this was the history that the participants in Washington promulgated in their memoirs; and this is the story that has insinuated itself into the national memory—as the pundits’ commentaries and media coverage marking the 50th anniversary of the crisis attested.

Scholars, however, have long known a very different story: since 1997, they have had access to recordings that Kennedy secretly made of meetings with his top advisers, the Executive Committee of the National Security Council (the “ExComm”). Sheldon M. Stern—who was the historian at the John F. Kennedy Library for 23 years and the first scholar to evaluate the ExComm tapes—is among the numerous historians who have tried to set the record straight. His new book marshals irrefutable evidence to succinctly demolish the mythic version of the crisis. Although there’s little reason to believe his effort will be to any avail, it should nevertheless be applauded.

Reached through sober analysis, Stern’s conclusion that “John F. Kennedy and his administration, without question, bore a substantial share of the responsibility for the onset of the Cuban missile crisis” would have shocked the American people in 1962, for the simple reason that Kennedy’s administration had misled them about the military imbalance between the superpowers and had concealed its campaign of threats, assassination plots, and sabotage designed to overthrow the government in Cuba—an effort well known to Soviet and Cuban officials.

In the 1960 presidential election, Kennedy had cynically attacked Richard Nixon from the right, claiming that the Eisenhower-Nixon administration had allowed a dangerous “missile gap” to grow in the U.S.S.R.’s favor. But in fact, just as Eisenhower and Nixon had suggested—and just as the classified briefings that Kennedy received as a presidential candidate indicated—the missile gap, and the nuclear balance generally, was overwhelmingly to America’s advantage. At the time of the missile crisis, the Soviets had 36 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), 138 long-range bombers with 392 nuclear warheads, and 72 submarine-launched ballistic-missile warheads (SLBMs). These forces were arrayed against a vastly more powerful U.S. nuclear arsenal of 203 ICBMs, 1,306 long-range bombers with 3,104 nuclear warheads, and 144 SLBMs—all told, about nine times as many nuclear weapons as the U.S.S.R. Nikita Khrushchev was acutely aware of America’s huge advantage not just in the number of weapons but in their quality and deployment as well.
Kennedy and his civilian advisers understood that the missiles in Cuba did not alter the strategic nuclear balance.

Moreover, despite America’s overwhelming nuclear preponderance, JFK, in keeping with his avowed aim to pursue a foreign policy characterized by “vigor,” had ordered the largest peacetime expansion of America’s military power, and specifically the colossal growth of its strategic nuclear forces. This included deploying, beginning in 1961, intermediate-range “Jupiter” nuclear missiles in Italy and Turkey—adjacent to the Soviet Union. From there, the missiles could reach all of the western U.S.S.R., including Moscow and Leningrad (and that doesn’t count the nuclear-armed “Thor” missiles that the U.S. already had aimed at the Soviet Union from bases in Britain).

The Jupiter missiles were an exceptionally vexing component of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Because they sat aboveground, were immobile, and required a long time to prepare for launch, they were extremely vulnerable. Of no value as a deterrent, they appeared to be weapons meant for a disarming first strike—and thus greatly undermined deterrence, because they encouraged a preemptive Soviet strike against them. The Jupiters’ destabilizing effect was widely recognized among defense experts within and outside the U.S. government and even by congressional leaders. For instance, Senator Albert Gore Sr., an ally of the administration, told Secretary of State Dean Rusk that they were a “provocation” in a closed session of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in February 1961 (more than a year and a half before the missile crisis), adding, “I wonder what our attitude would be” if the Soviets deployed nuclear-armed missiles to Cuba. Senator Claiborne Pell raised an identical argument in a memo passed on to Kennedy in May 1961.

Given America’s powerful nuclear superiority, as well as the deployment of the Jupiter missiles, Moscow suspected that Washington viewed a nuclear first strike as an attractive option. They were right to be suspicious. The archives reveal that in fact the Kennedy administration had strongly considered this option during the Berlin crisis in 1961.

It’s little wonder, then, that, as Stern asserts—drawing on a plethora of scholarship including, most convincingly, the historian Philip Nash’s elegant 1997 study, The Other Missiles of October—Kennedy’s deployment of the Jupiter missiles “was a key reason for Khrushchev’s decision to send nuclear missiles to Cuba.” Khrushchev reportedly made that decision in May 1962, declaring to a confidant that the Americans “have surrounded us with bases on all sides” and that missiles in Cuba would help to counter an “intolerable provocation.” Keeping the deployment secret in order to present the U.S. with a fait accompli, Khrushchev may very well have assumed America’s response would be similar to his reaction to the Jupiter missiles—rhetorical denouncement but no threat or action to thwart the deployment with a military attack, nuclear or otherwise. (In retirement, Khrushchev explained his reasoning to the American journalist Strobe Talbott: Americans “would learn just what it feels like to have enemy missiles pointing at you; we’d be doing nothing more than giving them a little of their own medicine.”)

The rest of the article here: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/01/the-real-cuban-missile-crisis/309190/

The Ukraine crisis explained, in quite good detail, Sept 2015. 45 minute presentation, with ~1/2 hour of questions and answers following. If you don't want to click on it, fine. Regardless which side of the issue you sympathize or empathize with, you can see how the situation has developed, and how.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrMiSQAGOS4

https://www.mearsheimer.com

Yeah, it's 6 1/2 years old, but nothing of consequence has changed since Professor Mearsheimer's presentation.

UPDATE: Since I posted this journal entry, new allegations against aristarchus have been made public by the site staff. If these new allegations are true, then I can only say that I am very disappointed in aristarchus. I consider the alleged behavior unacceptable regardless of any possible justification.

I am leaving the original contents of my journal entry below (in the "spoiler" section), as the words reflect my views based on the information that was publicly available to me at the time I wrote them. I also want to restate my belief that mobbing someone by following the actions of your peers and downmodding comments based on the author rather than the content is unethical.

Radxa Preps a Compact Six-Core Answer to the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W: The Radxa Zero 2

Radxa Zero 2

I was going to wait until a CNX Software story popped up about this, but I guess they are waiting on more information.

Take the form factor of the Raspberry Pi Zero, and stuff in a 6-core that is faster than the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B:

Radxa Zero 2 is a low profile single board computer with a small form factor. Powered by Amlogic A311D SoC, it can run Android and selected Linux distributions.

Radxa Zero 2 features a hexa-core 64-bit ARM processor, 4GB 32bit LPDDR4 memory, HDMI output up to 4K60p, onboard Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity, USB 3.0, and 40-pin GPIO header. Additionally, the power port can also be used as a USB 2.0 OTG port to connect more peripheral.

GPU performance should be way up, going from Mali-G31 MP2 to Mali-G52 MP4. It also gains a 5 trillion operations per second (TOPS) NPU.

Both the S905Y2 and the A311D are Amlogic SoCs on a "12nm" process node, but you would wonder about heat issues from running 4x Cortex-A73 and 2x Cortex-A53.

I think the ROCK5 Model B with the RK3588 is more interesting than this constrained device which seems like a knee-jerk reaction to the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, but it's still funny to see what can be done at this small size.

Obligatory I can't buy this, it doesn't exist.

See also:

Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W vs Radxa Zero – Features and benchmarks comparison

A bunch of gameplay tests and other videos about the Radxa Zero

https://soylentnews.org/~takyon/journal/7718

A Philly committee spent 18 months examining the city’s gun violence crisis. Here’s what it found.

Half of the shootings in Philadelphia in recent years were sparked by arguments. Most of the guns used in crimes in the city were bought in Pennsylvania. And many suspected shooters and victims had previously been arrested or received mental health services from the city. The majority had also witnessed violence.

Meanwhile, as gun crimes have reached record heights in Philadelphia — a crisis that has overwhelmingly affected communities of color — thousands of cases remain unsolved, while gun-possession prosecutions increasingly fail in court.

Those were some of the findings outlined in a report released Thursday by a host of city officials in response to Philadelphia’s gun violence epidemic. The 194-page study, commissioned in 2020 by City Councilmember Curtis Jones Jr., was designed to provide a variety of perspectives on the issue, and it includes data and insights from police, prosecutors, public defenders, public health workers, and city officials.

“What is special ... is not just the findings and recommendations that you’re going to have in this report — it is the level of collaboration between departments,” Jones said at a news conference at City Hall.

Vast in scope, the report touches on topics including arrests, bail, sentencing, and the need for trauma services, victim assistance, and neighborhood investments. An executive summary included 35 recommendations, almost none of which came with concrete price tags or plans for implementation. Jones acknowledged in the report’s opening pages that the document was not designed to be a solution but rather to offer “a view of the same issue through a variety of different lenses.”

Prime takeaway: It's time to stop incarcerating the city's black people for exercising rights that white people all over the state exercise routinely.

Second takeaway: Cops solve few gun crimes, fatal or nonfatal. Most convictions are for simple possession.

Third takeaway: This Democrat run city is dysfunctional, at best. The cops fail to solve crimes, cops fail to make arrests, and the DA fails to win convictions when an arrest is made. They simply cannot suppress the population!

Maybe it's time to stop focusing on "gun crimes", and focus on "criminals"?

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/a-philly-committee-spent-18-months-examining-the-city-s-gun-violence-crisis-here-s-what-it-found/ar-AATd7tx

https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndtx/pr/man-who-sold-pistol-used-synagogue-hostage-crisis-federally-charged

Man Who Sold Pistol Used in Synagogue Hostage Crisis Federally Charged

The man who sold Malik Faisal Akram the gun he used to kidnap hostages in a Texas synagogue earlier this month has been charged with a federal firearm crime, announced United States Attorney for the Northern District of Texas Chad E. Meacham.

Henry “Michael” Dwight Williams, 32, was charged Tuesday via criminal complaint with being a felon in possession of a firearm. He made his initial appearance before U.S. Magistrate Judge Renée H. Toliver in the Northern District of Texas Wednesday afternoon. A detention hearing has been set for Monday, Jan. 31.

“Federal firearm laws are designed to keep guns from falling into dangerous hands. As a convicted felon, Mr. Williams was prohibited from carrying, acquiring, or selling firearms. Whether or not he knew of his buyer’s nefarious intent is largely irrelevant — felons cannot have guns, period, and the Justice Department is committed to prosecuting those who do,” said U.S. Attorney Chad E. Meacham. “We are grateful to the many officers and agents who sprang into action as soon as the synagogue hostage crisis began, and who worked tirelessly to track the weapon from Mr. Akram to Mr. Williams. The freed hostages, the Beth Israel congregation, and indeed the entire Jewish community deserve that support.”

“The Dallas FBI Field Office and our partners have worked around the clock since January 15, 2022 to determine how Malik Faisal Akram acquired the weapon he used to terrorize worshipers at Colleyville’s Congregation Beth Israel synagogue," said Dallas FBI Special Agent in Charge Matthew DeSarno. "Along with our federal, state and local law enforcement partners we pledge to continue our efforts to protect our communities from violence."

According to the complaint, Mr. Williams – a felon previously convicted of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and attempted possession of a controlled substance – allegedly sold Mr. Akram a semiautomatic Taurus G2C pistol on Jan. 13. Two days later, on Jan. 15, agents recovered the pistol from Colleyville’s Congregation Beth Israel synagogue, where Mr. Akram had held four individuals hostage for several hours before he was fatally shot by federal law enforcement.

As part of its intensive investigation into the hostage taking, the FBI tied Mr. Williams to Mr. Akram through an analysis of Mr. Akram’s cellphone records, which showed the pair exchanged a series of calls from Jan. 11 through Jan. 13.

When agents first interviewed Mr. Williams on Jan. 16, Mr. Williams stated that he recalled meeting a man with a British accent, but that he could not recall the man’s name. (Mr. Akram was a British citizen.) Agents interviewed the defendant again on Jan. 24, after he was arrested on an outstanding state warrant. After viewing a photo of Mr. Akram, Mr. Williams confirmed he sold Mr. Akram the handgun at an intersection in South Dallas. Analysis of both men’s cellphone records showed that the two phones were in close proximity on Jan. 13.

Mr. Williams allegedly admitted to officers that Mr. Akram told him the gun was going to be used for “intimidation” to get money from someone with an outstanding debt.

A criminal complaint is merely an allegation of criminal conduct, not evidence. Like all defendants, Mr. Williams is presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Dallas Field Office conducted the investigation with the assistance of the Dallas Police Department, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms & Explosives’ Dallas Field Division, Homeland Security Investigations’ Dallas Field Division, and the Colleyville Police Department. Assistant U.S. Attorney Joe Magliolo is prosecuting the case with the support of Assistant U.S. Attorneys Errin Martin, Jay Weimer, Alex Lewis, Lindsey Beran, Nicole Dana, and P.J. Meitl, along with Trial Attorneys David Smith and Michael Dittoe of the Justice Department’s National Security Division.

Why do I have to have a background check, when criminals from G̶r̶e̶e̶c̶e̶ the UK don't need them?

Solving VR’s ‘infinite walking’ problem with moon boots

Ever wonder how it’s possible to create a convincing VR scenario that lets you, say, trek through the Sahara Desert without the painful, immersion-breaking experience of colliding with a wall in your apartment? Ekto VR believes it has the answer: Slip on a pair of the company’s simulator boots over your regular shoes, don a VR headset, and you’re able to experience walking through virtual environments that are far, far larger than the physical space you’re contained within.

Ekto VR’s boots work by using an array of motorized wheels on their underside, which spin counter to the speed that the user is walking in. In order to avoid motion sickness, the boots allow the wearer to initially take several steps forward. This is done to provide the necessary vestibular inner-ear cues to tell their bodies that they are accelerating forward. However, after a few steps, the boots automatically glide the wearer back to the center of the room so that they appear to be walking on the spot, as if on a treadmill. Meanwhile, the user believes they are continuing to make forward progress — and, based on the VR scene they’re experiencing, they are.

But can I double jump?

https://www.cnsnews.com/commentary/ken-blackwell/biden-its-not-who-can-vote-who-gets-count-vote

Biden: It’s Not Who Can Vote, But Who Gets to Count the Vote

It is a shocking statement that could easily be attributed to a third-world dictator. When asked about election legislation earlier in January, the president of the United States of America stated, “It’s no longer about who gets to vote; it’s about making it harder to vote. It’s about who gets to count the vote and whether your vote counts at all."

The definition of a political gaffe is when a politician accidentally tells you what they really think. And even though he was commenting on Republican legislation in Georgia, what President Biden really thinks is that the feds should take over elections, stripping states of their election responsibilities as designated by the U.S. Constitution. The Democrats want to control who counts the votes.

The Democrats' latest attempt to take over elections was the John Lewis Voting Rights Adavancement Act — also called the “Freedom to Vote Act.” It was aptly renamed the “Freedom to Cheat Act” by many. While they may not get it through the Senate, they will likely try to sneak language into other bills that will continue to steal power from the states and give it to unelected federal bureaucrats.

Democrats want the federal government to have complete control over the election process and many haven’t tried to hide the fact that they think this is the only way they can win in 2022 and beyond. They plan to irrevocably change the very fundamental principles, practices, and ideals upon which this country was founded and under which it has successfully stayed free for nearly 250 years…for one reason. Power.

Why the urgent call to give the power of elections to unelected federal bureaucrats? Where are these civil rights violations that the Democrats now reference?

These are the same Democrats who have forcefully told us that there were no patterns of irregularities or unconstitutional actions in the last election. They have told us for over a year that to question the results of an election is an act of subversion. They have told us that to protest possible voting irregularities and potential fraud could be construed as an attempt to overthrow the government. If you question any election practices, they will label you a conspiracy theorist.

The Democrats are seeking to institutionalize and nationalize every change they made to elections under the guise of protecting people from COVID. Eradicating voter identification. Weakening absentee ballot protections. Making it easier for fraudsters to steal ballots from vulnerable voters.

Do not be fooled. If they don’t get this done through the John Lewis bill, they will not give up.

The American Constitutional Rights Union (ACRU) has been working on election integrity for more than a dozen years. We have a vote fraud hotline that was fully operational and advertised in all demographic areas — red and blue. We received hundreds of tips during the 2020 election and 2021 Georgia runoff and almost every complaint we received was related to an incident that was made WORSE by leftist changes to election laws.

Mass absentee ballot mailing, advocated by the Left, created conditions for fraud, with unrequested ballots being sent out to the last known address of those who had died, or moved. Voter identification laws, weakened by Democrats, made it easier for bad actors to impersonate legal voters. We received complaints by people who went to vote on Election Day only to find that someone had already voted on their behalf during early voting.

The ACRU hotline received tips that leftist activist organizations were taking completed ballots from nursing homes with a promise that they would make it to the election office. This completely insecure process was a prescription for fraud.

Most disturbing of all were complaints that nursing home workers, many unionized, were filling out ballots for residents and sometimes threatening residents that if they did not fill out the ballot “right” (meaning for Biden) that they would not get their food or meds.

Our Protect Vulnerable Voters Project works to protect the real victims of leftist efforts to subvert election integrity measures, such as those being investigated in Wisconsin.

The Left has broadcast its plans to: eradicate voter identification, end signature matching on absentee ballots, allow strangers to collect and turn in ballots, place ballot boxes in insecure locations, and mass mail ballots to people who did not request them. And if all of that doesn’t get them the win, they are ready to make sure that unelected federal bureaucrats upend state election integrity laws and determine who counts the ballots where you live.

Americans care about election integrity and a large majority agree with common sense measures like requiring voter identification. It is time to unite to protect the vote against leftist power grabs…before our election system looks like that of a third world country.

At the moment, it already looks like a country in which the Babylon Bee’s satire reveals seems more honest than any mainstream media news — Democrats warn that Republicans may steal the election by blocking democrat efforts to steal the election.

But, of course, Dem attempts at voter fraud are not 'significant', and we shouldn't make a fuss about them.