Tuesday Morning Breakfast For The Brain

Good morning Deplorables! The bad news is that the holiday weekend is over, the good news is that it’s already Tuesday.

Is this Soros Linked Group Plotting a “Color Revolution” Against President Trump? 

Via Revolver News

In our previous report on Never Trump State Department official George Kent, Revolver News drew attention to the ominous similarities between the strategies and tactics the United States government employs in so-called “Color Revolutions” and the coordinated efforts of government bureaucrats, NGOs, and the media to oust President Trump.

This follow-up report will focus specifically on how the “contested election scenario” we are hearing so much about plays into the Color Revolution framework — indeed, sowing doubt about the democratic legitimacy of the target and coupling it with calls for massive “mostly peaceful” demonstrations comes straight out of the Color Revolution playbook. And this is precisely the messaging we’ve seen from by those same key players in media, government, and the Democrat Party machine, most prominently from a shadowy George Soros-linked group known as the Transition Integrity Project — more about them soon.

First, a quick note on Color Revolutions. A “Color Revolution” in this context refers to a specific type of coordinated attack that the United States government has been known to deploy against foreign regimes, particularly in Eastern Europe deemed to be “authoritarian” and hostile to American interests. Rather than using a direct military intervention to effect regime change as in Iraq, Color Revolutions attack a foreign regime by contesting its electoral legitimacy, organizing mass protests and acts of civil disobedience, and leveraging media contacts to ensure favorable coverage to their agenda in the Western press.

It would be disturbing enough to note a coordinated effort to use these exact same strategies and tactics domestically to undermine or overthrow President Trump. The ominous nature of what we see unfolding before us only truly hits home when one realizes that the people who specialize in these Color Revolution regime change operations overseas are, literally, the very same people attempting to overthrow Trump by using the very same playbook. Given that the most famous Color Revolution was the “Orange Revolution” in the Ukraine, and that Black Lives Matter is being used as a key component of the domestic Color Revolution against Trump, we can encapsulate our thesis at Revolver with the simple remark that “Black is the New Orange.”

Transition Integrity Project:

So what is the Transition Integrity Project, and what does it have to do with the Color Revolution against Trump? Here is how friendly media outlets represent the Transition Integrity Project and its agenda:

A bipartisan group of about 80 political operatives and academics has been involved in discussions about what could happen if President Donald Trump were to lose the November election and then contest the results, potentially refusing to leave the White House.

The Boston Globe first reported on Sunday that the group of Democrats and Republicans (all of whom oppose the president) convened an online meeting to hash out scenarios as part of what has been called the Transition Integrity Project in June. [Newsweek]

Of course, what they do not say about this ostensibly “bipartisan” group is that its founder, Rosa Brooks, is a long-time close associate of George Soros and his Open Society Foundation. She served both as special counsel to the President at George Soros’ Open Society Foundation and as a Board Member of the Open Society Foundation.

In 2006-2007, Brooks was Special Counsel to the President at the Open Society Institute in New York. Brooks has also served as a consultant for Human Rights Watch… She currently serves on the advisory board of the Open Society Foundation’s US Programs, the advisory board of National Security Action and the board of the Harper’s Magazine Foundation. [Georgetown Law]

Media outlets such as the National Pulse have drawn attention Rosa Brooks’ Soros connections as well as some interesting connections to Democrat Presidential candidate Joe Biden. It is certainly suspicious that the head of a group claiming to be bipartisan, which runs war games that reinforce the dangerous new talking point that President Trump won’t concede the election, just happens to be linked to George Soros and Joe Biden. To top it all off, Never Trump Russiagate fanatics Bill Kristol and David Frum participated in the study as well. In fact, the entire project appears to be a collaboration between establishment Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans. Shockingly, when anti-Trump Republicans pretended to be him in a simulation, they had him do a bunch of illegal and unconstitutional acts! Wow, what an incredibly revealing simulation!

On the one hand it is tempting to look at this as just another case of Democrat operatives falsely representing themselves as bi-partisan and getting away with it due to a compliant media. There is of course some truth to this, but in a deeper sense this interpretation misses the plot completely. The domestic Color Revolution framework hints at something far more dangerous and sinister. George Soros and his Open Society Foundation have played key roles in the Color Revolutions in Eastern Europe, including the famous Orange Revolution and Euromaidan Revolution in the Ukraine, in which mass demonstrations and acts of civil disobedience were organized in order to overthrow the target regime helmed by Russia-aligned Yanukovich. Setting aside the question of whether the overthrow of Yanukovich was justified or in American interests, what is crucial here is the similarity not only in method but even in vocabulary. Mass demonstrations are part of the Color Revolution playbook, especially when they can incite crackdowns that can then be used as further pretext to escalate demonstrations against the target regime.

Read the entire article HERE.

Attempts to Drive a Wedge Between Trump and the Military Should Rattle All Americans

Via PJ Media

Waking up to a news cycle trying to convince you that President Trump does not respect members of the military, or dismisses their sacrifice, should not be viewed as just another poorly sourced hit piece. Even though, according to witnesses, that is precisely what The Atlantic story is. It is the intent of the anonymous sources that should rattle you.

While researching Ukraine around the time of Trump’s impeachment, I came across a bit of research that bothered me. The research was from academic and diplomat Michael McFaul. McFaul served as ambassador to Russia under President Barack Obama and was the architect of the Russian “reset.”

In the early 2000s, he studied the so-called color revolutions in the former states of the Soviet Union. McFaul identified the seven elements of successful revolutions in these countries. Reporting from The Atlantic and The New York Times fits into step number seven. Both publications have run stories highlighting racial, gender, and sexual orientation divisions in the military in the past week.

To understand why this matters, we will go through McFaul’s seven steps one by one. We have seen these steps used during the Arab Spring and the Maidan Revolution in Ukraine. They were weaponized and taught overseas by the State Department under Hillary Clinton in a program called Tech Camps. This program taught activists how to build movements using technology.

The groups were then activated around an invigorating event. Clearly, the event being leveraged now is the 2020 election.

Trump Is ‘Literally Hitler’
The first element of a successful color revolution, according to McFaul, is a semi-autocratic rather than fully-autocratic regime. This narrative about President Trump has been pervasive in the media and echoed by prominent Democrats since before he was elected. Despite all evidence to the contrary, the president is consistently painted as walking the line between constitutional order and authoritarianism. Sometimes he is accused of crossing it.

In the last month, Democrats and the corporate media have resurfaced the narrative that President Trump will not accept the election results if Biden wins. They assert that he will refuse to concede and will have to be forced out of the White House if he loses the election.

The administration’s actions to protect the federal courthouse in Portland were also framed as evidence of Trump’s authoritarian tendencies. Speaker Nancy Pelosi called federal law enforcement officers the president’s stormtroopers. Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan declared it a dress rehearsal for martial law.

Trump’s move to reduce federal funding to cities that fail to protect their citizens and defund police departments is also being framed as beyond his constitutional power. As if the federal government using funding as a carrot and a stick to get states to implement their preferred programs hasn’t been the norm for decades.

None of this is based in reality, and it does not ring true to anyone following politics closely. Those voters are not the target. These narratives are aimed at the Democrat base and persuadable voters.

The Role of Never Trump

According to McFaul, the second requirement is an unpopular incumbent. Where to begin? The constant reminders that the president did not win the popular vote may be a good start. The implication is, and always was, that large swaths of voters nationwide did not like the president. In reality, most of Hillary Clinton’s popular vote surplus came from deep-blue California.

Democrats and the media use disaffected former Republicans as further proof Trump is unpopular within his own party. The DNC highlighted these supporters during their convention. These are the same people who are often on CNN and other networks to represent the typical Republican point of view.

The left also uses identity politics to try and make President Trump unpopular with specific constituencies. Note that Biden still uses the “very fine people” Charlottesville hoax in speeches. The media has also fawned over former Trump associates who have negative things to say about the president, like Michael Cohen, and even family members like Trump’s niece Mary.

Recent Peaceful Protests™ are also to demonstrate there are hordes of citizens who oppose President Trump. The media and Democrats try to frame this unrest as “Trump’s America,” despite all the evidence these riots have been supported by Democrats in power and even financially supported by members of the Biden campaign.

The Role of the Resistance

A third requirement, according to McFaul, is a united and organized opposition. The complete convergence of our institutions in opposing this president is breathtaking. It is so thorough that the Media Research Center has no problem creating extensive montages of media figures pushing Democrat focus-group-tested talking points. Entertainment is full of anti-Trump messaging, and even professional sports are now in the game. Add academia and even portions of the federal bureaucracy, and it is easy to control the narrative.

Read the entire article HERE.

The Deeply Pessimistic Intellectual Roots of Black Lives Matter, the ‘1619 Project’ and Much Else in Woke America

Via Real Clear Politics

If much of the dire rhetoric behind America’s moment of racial reckoning seems from an oppressive world of a half-century ago, that’s because it comes from “critical race theory,” a decades-old philosophy deeply skeptical about the possibility of racial progress.

It turns up in the best-selling book, “White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism,” in which readers are told that “white identity is inherently racist” and that “the white collective fundamentally hates blackness.”

The New York Times’ historically revisionist 1619 Project, published last year and distributed to more than 3,500 K-12 classrooms, similarly instructs that “anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country.”

In Durham, N.C., a racial task force last month issued a 68-page report to city leaders stating that all social structures were designed to subjugate blacks, to privilege “the health of white bodies” and “to indoctrinate all students with the internalized belief that the white race is superior.”

So-called “equity teams” of students and faculty at some high schools in North Carolina’s capital region are reading a primer, “Critical Race Theory: An Introduction,” which says African Americans aren’t only subjugated through hate and terror but also kept down through supposedly white cultural mechanisms of individualism, objectivity, neutrality, meritocracy and color-blindness.

These are just a few of the examples of how contemporary culture is being shaped by critical race theory, a movement born in law schools in the 1970s, influenced by Marxists, French post-modernists, the Black Power cause, radical feminists and other disaffected leftist scholars. It quickly spread to throughout the humanities and social sciences, shaping a generation of students who now hold positions of influence in academia, public school systems, corporate HR departments, publishing, the media, and, of course, Black Lives Matter — the latter prominent in current street protests against police abuses and racism.

Initially dismissed as an academic sideshow, critical race theory’s assumptions and precepts are now espoused as self-evident, often without awareness that this uprising has a name, a history, a literature and ambitions to advance ever-new theories of discrimination and demands for reparations. The vocabulary and concepts of the theory have been disseminated through corporate diversity workshops, social media and mass media, higher education and secondary education, best-selling books and local church discussion groups. Even the conservative Southern Baptist Convention declared last year that evangelical theologians rely on critical race theory to understand American social dynamics.

Some of its ideas – on hate speech, white privilege and implicit bias – are already widely accepted in education and in workplaces. Other concepts – the rejection of a color-blind society, standardized testing and urban policing cultures – are making headway. Meanwhile, new critical race theory ideas are in the pipeline to expand the boundaries of racism and render customs and practices accepted today as problematic in the future.

How to explain the ideology’s rise?

“I’ve always laid it at the doorstep of the millennials, who were by and large highly receptive to our message, and maybe, as well, Trump for the opposite reason — because he’s so crude and awful,” said University of Alabama law professor Richard Delgado, one of the founders of the theory and co-author, with his wife, Jean Stefancic, of “Critical Race Theory: An Introduction,” the primer read by the North Carolina equity teams.

“Is it society that has come around to us?” Delgado, who identifies as Chicano, said in a phone interview. “Because the world is so terrible, that they’ve hit upon us and our ways of describing it? Because it rings true?”

Angela Onwuachi-Willig, dean and professor at the Boston University Law School and the daughter of Nigerian immigrant parents, says the country is in the midst of a “generational shift” among students who have grown up in “pervasive segregation in their residential lives.” She said she is continually surprised by her students’ fluency in the argot of critical race theory.

“You’ve got this open generation that grew up exposed to this language in middle school, high school and certainly in college,” said Onwuachi-Willig, who identifies as black and specializes in critical race theory, gender matters, race and law, and related issues. “It’s not called critical race theory — it’s just something you know.”

Critical race theory’s foundational precept is the centrality and permanence in society of racism against blacks, rejecting the idea of significant racial progress. Moreover, CRT is an activist enterprise pragmatically focused on outcomes. It takes “systemic racism” as a given, with racism enmeshed into social institutions and social relations, so that all racial disparities – in life spans, incarceration rates, household wealth and education levels – serve as proof that the system is rigged. Thus, critical race theory is a renunciation of America’s hyper-competitive, technocratic, capitalistic society, whose lopsided economic outcomes are treated as natural and incontestable by society’s winners as was the divine right of kings in its own day.

CRT has long been denounced as simplistic, dogmatic, fatalistic, and toxic – a cult of victimhood that embraces racial conflict as inevitable. As black Harvard University law professor Randall Kennedy wrote in an early critique in 1989, chief among CRT’s “baneful notions is the belief that race is destiny,” which leads adherents to play up their racial oppression as a coveted badge of moral authority.

Read the entire article HERE.

The Media Are Lying About The Election Again

Via The Federalist

Election 2020 is shaping up to be déjà vu all over again for the news media. In an effort to help push Joe Biden over the finish line, the Washington establishment is going all-in on the easily refuted idea that there has been no change in the presidential race over the last three weeks.

“With Two Months To Go, a Steady Presidential Race,” writes Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report.

“The Latest Polls, the Great Non-Tightening: This Week in the 2020 Race,” write Astead W. Herndon and Annie Karni of The New York Times.

“In a time of disruption and unrest, the presidential race has changed little,” writes Dan Balz of the Washington Post.

After having botched the entire news coverage of the 2016 election, where all the “experts” repeatedly told the American public that Donald Trump had little to no chance of being the Republican nominee and even less a chance of being elected president, corporate media are back at it again, insisting all is well with the Biden campaign and the Democrats are safely on cruise control to take the White House and the Senate. Here’s the truth they are not telling you.

Biden has little enthusiasm for his candidacy. He is taking on an incumbent president with significant first-term accomplishments who has extremely energized supporters, to put it mildly. He had two major opportunities in August to generate some real excitement for his ticket and collect voters in must-win states for Democrats who had abandoned the ticket for Trump in 2016. Think Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

Biden whiffed on both counts, picking a far-left California senator who has the farthest-left voting record of her colleagues, then hosting a convention and giving an acceptance speech where he did nothing to take on the ascending left that potential voters he needs to win have serious concerns and doubts about.

By contrast, Trump and Republicans aggressively went after traditionally Democratic Party voters among minorities, particularly African-Americans. Night after night of their convention, the Republicans made repeated heartfelt pleas from black politicians, celebrities, and everyday beneficiaries of Republican Party policies.

Republicans threw everything they had, from sound policy arguments (about recent successes Republicans have had with criminal justice reform and policies that improve job and wage growth) to emotionally compelling stories about how unchecked riots in Democratic cities harm African Americans and how Democrat control of the black vote has not been reciprocated with policy achievements that benefit their loyalty. The convention did likewise with other key voting groups that Republicans would like to draw more support from.

Since the race truly began a few weeks ago, around the time Kamala Harris was selected as Democrat nominee for vice president, it’s worth looking at some of the movement shown in markets.

On August 1, Biden had a 25-point edge in the betting odds. By September 1, Trump had completely made up that deficit and the race was even among the betting public.

In Florida, a state the Trump campaign must win, Biden’s lead of 8.4 points in the RealClearPolitics average at the end of July sits now at 1.8, with the latest poll showing President Trump with a three-point lead. Quinnipiac, a pollster that is not perceived as Trump-friendly, shows Biden’s lead plummeting 10 points, from 13 to just three.

In Pennsylvania, an absolute must-win state for the Biden campaign, Biden’s lead of 8.5 in the RealClearPolitics average near the end of July has been cut in half to 4.2. Monmouth University, again another pollster not viewed as friendly to Trump, shows Biden’s lead falling eight points, from 11 to three points.

In Michigan, Wisconsin, and North Carolina, Biden’s lead from the end of July to the end of August has been cut significantly, according to the Real Clear Politics average. Arizona is the only state where Biden’s lead has grown in the RealClearPolitics average. It should be noted that Arizona’s RCP average was significantly affected by a single outlying FOX News poll that claims Trump is down nine points in the state, which he won in 2016. CNBC, by contrast, has Biden up by only two points.

Incredibly, both NBC News and the Cook Political Report continue to rate Florida as “Lean Democrat” according to their “experts.” No offense, but do they think people are stupid?

Read the entire article HERE.

Governor Newsom Claims Rolling Blackouts Are To Show Support For Black Lives Matter

Via The Babylon Bee (Satire)

SACRAMENTO, CA—In a powerful statement to support the BLM movement, Governor Gavin Newsom has ordered rolling blackouts across the state. The beautiful, powerful message will turn the entire state black: a political statement that can be seen from space.

While many thought the blackouts were due to poor planning and unrealistic green energy requirements, Newsom clarified that he ordered the blackouts as a powerful display supporting BLM.

“Some people post black squares on their Instagram accounts — we’re taking it a step further and turning the whole state completely black,” Newsom said of the rolling blackouts hitting the state. “If you don’t turn off power to your citizens on the hottest day of the year, do you really care about social justice?” Silence ensued. There wasn’t a dry eye in the place as the gathered journalists contemplated their internalized white supremacy. “I didn’t think so.”

Newsom clarified that his own house and winery will remain lit so as to be a “shining beacon in the darkness, a reminder that we can all aspire to do better.”

Check out all of the Bee’s takes on politics and culture HERE.

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