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Kamala Harris Is Priming Democrats for Violent Resistance If Trump Wins


By: John Daniel Davidson | October 17, 2024

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2024/10/17/kamala-harris-is-priming-democrats-for-violent-resistance-if-trump-wins/

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By now it’s commonplace to note that Kamala Harris often seems out of her depth, like she’s unsure what to say about policy, or how to explain her past positions, or why she hasn’t already done the things she’s promised to do if she’s elected given that she’s the current vice president.

But on one particular subject she’s been consistent and forceful throughout her campaign. She’s adamant that Donald Trump will destroy America if he’s reelected. And not “destroy” in the sense of enact bad policies, but that he’ll round people up with the military and put them in camps. She talks about this all the time now. At one point during her Wednesday evening interview with Bret Baier on Fox News, she became visibly upset after Baier played a clip of former President Donald Trump calling out the weaponization of government and the endless investigations and lawfare he’s been subjected to.

The vice president, her voice rising in outrage, jabbed her finger at Baier and said, “You and I both know that he has talked about turning the American military on the American people. He has talked about going after people who are engaged in peaceful protest. He has talked about locking people up because they disagree with him.”

At a campaign rally in Pennsylvania this week she told the crowd that former President Donald Trump considers anyone who doesn’t support him to be an enemy of the United States. “He is saying he would use the military to go after them.”

Earlier this week, during an audio town hall with Charlamagne Tha God, Harris claimed without a hint of irony that if Trump is elected, he’ll use the Department of Justice “as a weapon against his political enemies,” adding, “You know who does that? Dictators do that.” At one point during the show, she agreed with a caller who said Trump will lock “anyone who doesn’t look white into camps,” replying, “You’ve hit on a really important point and expressed it I think so well.”

That’s just a sampling from this week, but there are many other recent examples. In the waning weeks of the presidential election, Harris has been deploying increasingly extreme rhetoric about Trump and the dangers he poses to the country. Even before Harris seized the Democratic nomination from President Joe Biden, the idea that Trump is an existential threat to American democracy was the refrain of the Biden campaign. Harris has taken that theme and run with it. The purpose of it isn’t just to scare voters into casting their ballot against the former president, or to provoke some unstable would-be assassin into taking a shot at Trump (although some Democrats no doubt see that as a happy by-product of this Trump-as-dictator rhetoric). Its main purpose is to prime Democrat voters for violent resistance should Trump win in November.

Consider the lopsidedness of the rhetoric between the Trump and Harris campaigns. Trump often makes sweeping (and mostly true) statements about the deep state, about the border and illegal immigration, about crime, about how Harris and the Democrats are destroying the country. But when he uses the phrase “destroying the country,” he’s talking about things like crime, homelessness, drug addiction, rampant inflation and the cost of groceries. These things, he says, are the result of policies Democrats have put in place. If you’re looking for someone to blame, he says, blame Biden and Harris, because all these problems are their fault.

But that’s not what Harris and the Democrats are doing with their rhetoric. They’re not making a case that crime and inflation will be worse under Trump because of his policies. Democrats aren’t really interested in policy. What they’re doing is pushing a narrative that Trump is going to be a fascist dictator if he wins office and use the powers of the presidency to go after ordinary Americans. That’s an extreme and frankly unhinged position with no basis in reality. You don’t say things like that unless you’re hoping to provoke a strong reaction, and the reaction Democrats are hoping to provoke is violent resistance to a second Trump term.

After all, if you really thought that Trump would order the military and the Justice Department to round up you and your family, wouldn’t you do anything to stop him? Wouldn’t you take to the streets to save your country and thwart the rise of a fascist dictatorship? At least two would-be assassins have taken the Democrats’ anti-Trump rhetoric seriously. Harris is hoping that many more people will do so between now and Election Day and respond by rejecting a second Trump term — in the streets, if they must.

There’s a precedent for this that Democrats set four years ago. During the BLM riots in the summer of 2020, Harris herself was out in front egging on the rioters, infamously working to raise bail money for those who had been arrested. Of the protests, she said this in a June 2020 interview with Stephen Colbert: “Everyone beware. They’re not gonna stop before Election Day in November, and they’re not gonna stop after Election Day … They’re not gonna let up, and they should not.”

Harris and her fellow Democrats knew that the civic unrest unleashed by BLM and Antifa rioters would damage Trump’s reelection campaign, and they did their utmost to amplify the violence and also justify it by claiming the moral high ground. The protesters and rioters were only reacting to systemic injustice, after all, and as Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “A riot is the language of the unheard.”

All of this only makes sense if you understand that Harris isn’t just a bumbling politician but a left-wing radical, and left-wing radicals have no qualms about using violence as a political weapon. If your goal is to seize and wield political power as part of a revolutionary program to transform America, then who cares if a couple neighborhoods here there get burned to the ground in race riots? Who cares if some young women get raped and killed by illegal immigrants, or a handful of apartment complexes get taken over by criminal alien gangs? Those things on their own might be unpleasant or disturbing, but they’re all in the service of a greater goal, which is the re-shaping of American society. So, it’s all justified.

What Harris and the Democrats are doing with this line about Trump rounding up Americans and putting them in camps is preparing the ground for massive civic unrest in the event of a Trump victory. The purpose of the unrest would be to cripple Trump’s administration before he even takes office, and to disrupt normal life for so many Americans that they will rue the day they ever voted for Trump.

It’s the hecklers veto on steroids, and it’s exactly what Harris is planning for and hoping to provoke if Trump wins.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.

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Inside Liz Cheney’s Coordinated Effort to Prevent Troop Deployment Before Jan. 6


BY: TRISTAN JUSTICE | AUGUST 02, 2022

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/08/02/inside-liz-cheneys-coordinated-effort-to-prevent-troop-deployment-before-jan-6/

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Days before the Capitol riot provoked a years-long effort to impeach, prosecute, and politically malign former President Donald Trump, Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney coordinated efforts to deter the very actions she now claims haunt the former president.

Cheney has blamed Trump for not ordering the National Guard to defend the Capitol complex, even though multiple sources confirm that he authorized their deployment days prior to the Jan. 6 rally at the White House and riot at the Capitol. Security officials in charge of the Capitol declined to call up troops to protect it, government records show. Yet Cheney herself seems to have orchestrated opposition to use of the military to quell election-related unrest, allegedly organizing a Washington Post op-ed on Jan. 3, 2021, signed by every living former defense secretary.

“All 10 living former defense secretaries: Involving the military in election disputes would cross into dangerous territory,” the headline read. It went on to threaten any military official who thought any use of the military might be a good idea. “Civilian and military officials who direct or carry out such measures would be accountable, including potentially facing criminal penalties, for the grave consequences of their actions on our republic,” the op-ed warned.

The op-ed was allegedly organized by Cheney, whose father was secretary of defense under President George H.W. Bush before serving as President George W. Bush’s vice president. Eric Edelman, a national security adviser to Dick Cheney, told the New Yorker the Wyoming lawmaker “was the one who generated” the piece for the Post.

Now Rep. Cheney has adopted Trump’s supposed inaction on the National Guard as a primary line of attack. On “Fox News Sunday,” Cheney again depicted Trump as an apathetic leader who dismissed pleas to deploy the National Guard while the Capitol was under siege.

“There are several witnesses who say they met with President Trump on January 4th,” said Bret Baier, “and he offered some 20,000 National Guardsmen to protect the Capitol building on January 6th but the offer was rejected. Is that true?”

“His own acting secretary of defense says that’s not true,” Cheney said, highlighting committee testimony from former Acting Secretary Christopher Miller who told the panel Trump made no order to deploy the National Guard. “So, the notion that somehow he issued an order is not consistent with the facts.”

Except the president did issue authorization for D.C. leaders to call up the National Guard for pre-emptive reinforcements days before the Capitol riot. While Mayor Muriel Bowser took limited advantage of the extra troops, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s sergeant at arms rejected or stonewalled the offer six times, according to former Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund. Pelosi’s office was reportedly concerned the guard’s deployment was bad “optics” after having spent the prior summer decrying the use of federal law enforcement to put down left-wing insurrections.

When Trump sent reinforcements to secure federal buildings under attack in Portland, Pelosi condemned the extra law enforcement as “stormtroopers.” After days of sustained riots wreaked havoc across Washington D.C., Pelosi called the sight of uniformed troops protecting the Lincoln Memorial “stunning” and “scary.”

The campaign to fight any use of troops to restore order during the left’s widespread and coordinated summer of rage was so effective that Gen. Mark Milley issued an abject apology for merely appearing in uniform at a site that had been ravaged by leftist arsonists.

“My presence in that moment, and in that environment, created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics,” Milley said about appearing in front of a historic church across the street from the White House. The night before, left-wing arsonists had targeted the church as part of a riot that besieged the White House and led to the injuring of dozens of Park Police and Secret Service officers.

Bowser’s use of guard troops on Jan. 6 extended to unarmed troops restricted to traffic control and removed from protests.

“[N]o DCNG personnel shall be armed during this mission, and at no time, will DCNG personnel or assets be engaged in domestic surveillance, searches, or seizures of [U.S.] persons,” she directed to law enforcement.

Although Cheney and her colleagues with the Select Committee have sought to indict Trump as responsible for a slow response from the National Guard on Jan. 6, the panel’s own findings have undermined the probe’s point. In December, the committee released a trove of private communications from former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, who pledged the National Guard would be ready to maintain order.

“Mr. Meadows sent an email to an individual about the events on January 6 and said that the National Guard would be present to ‘protect pro Trump people’ and that many more would be available on standby,” the committee wrote, as if revealing some grand scandal to help their case.

In June, Miller and former Chief of Staff of the Department of Defense Kash Patel went on Sean Hannity’s program to dispel committee accusations that the president was indifferent to the National Guard.

“Mr. Trump unequivocally authorized up to 20,000 National Guardsmen and women for us to utilize,” Patel said.

Miller, whom Cheney cited as evidence of Trump’s negligence, corroborated Patel’s testimony on air.

“To be clear,” Miller said, “the president was doing exactly what I expect the commander in chief to do, any commander in chief to do. He was looking at the broad threats against the United States and he brought this up on his own. We did not bring it up.”

Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com.

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Fox Host Bret Baier Reports On A Story With A Happy Ending


Reported by Jack Davis | May 19, 2017 at 3:18pm

URL of the original posting site: http://www.westernjournalism.com/fox-host-brett-baier-reports-story-happy-ending/

Fox News host Bret Baier had a story to share Friday that really mattered as he reported on the outcome of an operation undergone by his son, Paul, who was born with multiple congenital heart defects.

“Thank you for all of the thoughts & prayers. Paul’s procedure went great! Now he’s on the mend thanks to the Docs & nurses at @childrensnational,” Baier wrote on his Facebook page, sharing the message on other social media platforms as well.

“Paul is heading in soon,” he had posted on social media just prior to the surgery. “This is his 9th angioplasty plus 3 open (heart) surgeries & a stomach surgery. Paul’s 9 1/2 yrs old. He’s a total trooper & in great spirits w/ his fidget spinner.”

Paul’s life has been a battle from the start.

“A doctor told us Paul’s heart was extremely complex.” Amy Baier told NBC’s Today in 2014. “Blood was flowing the wrong way, there were two holes in Paul’s walnut-sized heart, and he had three other congenital defects. If Paul didn’t have complex surgery to restructure his heart, he wouldn’t make it.”

“I’ll be honest with you: It’s daunting, and nothing like you’ve ever experienced as a parent, having to explain to your son why this is happening and assuring him that it’s going to be OK,” Baier said, recalling that in one instance, he held Paul as his son was being prepped for surgery.

“So he was in my arms as they were putting the anesthesia over his mouth, and that’s pretty tough. I’m really not sure how to prepare when it comes,” he said.

Baier made it clear he is grateful for the surgeries that have allowed his son to live a mostly normal life.

“If you looked at the playground, you would never be able to point at him as the kid who has had … open-heart surgeries and  angioplasties,” he said.

“For parents of healthy kids, every day is such a blessing. Sometimes when the kid throws the cereal on the wall or is being a real stinker, the experience we went through gives us a whole new perspective on how precious moments are. Taking the small things, the little laughter every day, right now kind of gets us through to the next stop,” he said.

Baier said Pauls life also gives him context as he deals with the news of the day.

“This whole thing has also given me perspective about my job, going through policy and politics in Washington, D.C., to see the bigger picture. It does give me perspective on what’s more important,” he said.

Congenital heart disease affects one in 120 babies, although most cases are not as severe as Paul Baier’s condition.

 

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