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Sherlock

Best of the Web: The youth of China were the enforcers of Mao's cultural revolution

maoists
"Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart," wrote James Baldwin, "for his purity, by definition, is unassailable." This observation has been confirmed many times throughout history. However, China's Cultural Revolution offers perhaps the starkest illustration of just how dangerous the "pure in heart" can be. The ideological justification for the revolution was to purge the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and the nation more broadly, of impure elements hidden in its midst: capitalists, counter-revolutionaries, and "representatives of the bourgeoisie." To that end, Mao Zedong activated China's youth โ€” unblemished and uncorrupted in heart and mind โ€” to lead the struggle for purity. Christened the "Red Guards," they were placed at the vanguard of a revolution that was, in truth, a cynical effort by Mao to reassert his waning power in the Party. Nevertheless, it set in motion a self-destructive force of almost unimaginable depravity.

The Cultural Revolution commenced in spirit when Mao published a letter indicting a number of Party leaders on May 16, 1966. But it was a seemingly minor event nine days later that ignited the revolution in effect: a young philosophy professor at Peking University named Nie Yuanzi placed a "big-character poster" (a handwritten propaganda sheet featuring large Chinese characters) on a public bulletin board denouncing the university president and others in the administration as bourgeois revisionists. Mao immediately endorsed her protest, which set off a chain reaction of student revolt that swept through China.

Bullseye

Best of the Web: 'Community policing' is a trick - new enforcers for the same oppressors, not a dismantling of tyranny

protesters
© AFP / Stephen Maturen
As the massive anti-police-brutality protests sweeping the US are diverted into calls to "defund the police" and to replace them with community-based enforcers, Americans would be wise to keep an eye on "who benefits."

There's no question US police departments have become too militarized, too much like occupying armies, when the cities they patrol truly need engagement and accountability. Police in some areas pose more of a threat to residents than criminals, seizing a bigger chunk of Americans' assets via civil asset forfeiture in 2014 than were stolen by burglars that same year. Certainly outfitting cops with military surplus equipment, sending them to Israel to learn chokeholds like the one that killed George Floyd, and then deploying them in American schools to keep the kids safe is not a workable model.

Most people concerned with the police brutality problem would support demilitarizing the cops, retraining them, even holding them accountable to the many laws already on the books. Derek Chauvin, the officer who killed George Floyd, had already racked up a number of brutality complaints and been involved in several shootings. In a functioning system, he would not have been on the street on Memorial Day.

Fire

Best of the Web: 'People are just f***ing lawless right now' - Chicago's aldermen plead with mayor to protect their communities from bands of armed looters

riots Chicago May 2020
© (Hugo Balta / WTTW News)A chaotic scene in Chicago on Saturday, May 30, 2020.
As unrest swept the city Sunday, aldermen pleaded with Mayor Lori Lightfoot to help them protect their communities from roving bands of criminals clashing with police and looting businesses.

WTTW News obtained a recording of an online conference call held by the mayor's office to brief all 50 aldermen on the city's response to the unrest touched off by the death of George Floyd in the custody of Minneapolis police.

While one alderman wept, others grew angry with the mayor, demanding to know what her strategy was to stop the violence that began in earnest late Saturday.

The call provides a snapshot into the city's response as of midday on Sunday to the most widespread and damaging unrest since the uprising after the murder of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the police riots after the Democratic National Convention in 1968.

The recording begins with Ald. Michelle Harris (8th Ward) wondering how she could convince businesses like Walmart and CVS to rebuild on the South Side after the destruction.

"It's like, what are we going to have left in our community?" Harris asks her colleagues before answering herself. "Nothing."

Comment:


Ambulance

Best of the Web: As woke world protests 'systemic racism' in the USA, Black-on-Black murders break 60-year-old record in Chicago

"We've never seen anything like it, at all," said Max Kapustin, the senior research director at the University of Chicago Crime Lab.
murders chicago
© Chicago Sun-Times
A hardworking father killed just before 1 a.m.

A West Side high school student murdered two hours later.

A man killed amid South Side looting at a cellphone store at 12:30 p.m.

A college freshman who hoped to become a correctional officer, gunned down at 4:25 p.m. after getting into an argument in Englewood.

While Chicago was roiled by another day of protests and looting in the wake of George Floyd's murder, 18 people were killed Sunday, May 31, making it the single most violent day in Chicago in six decades, according to the University of Chicago Crime Lab. The lab's data doesn't go back further than 1961.

Comment: And that was after the deadliest ever Memorial Weekend in Chicago, just the weekend before this record deadly weekend.

It's as if the riots/woke outrage empowered Blacks to kill more Blacks?

In any event, mayhem is spreading/intensifying from Democrat-controlled plantations/cities.


Che Guevara

Best of the Web: Tucker Carlson: Black Lives Matter demand to 'defund the police' is a power grab

TuckerCarlson
© Fox News
The Black Lives Matter movement is insane, AND it has now become a political party, perhaps the most powerful political party in the United States. The effect this movement and its supporters have had on an already weakened and dispirited American populace is dangerous, despite the polled prevalence of common sense.

The "Defund the Police" drive is really a drive to replace the present police force with a new one, one that has partisan alignment, much as such forces in Third World nations have. Tucker analyzes all of this. This report is particularly good because all of the relevant information is in one place.


Blue Pill

Best of the Web: UCLA professor fired 'for not being lenient with Black students grades' because they were 'traumatized by Floyd killing'

Protest BLM
© Reuters/Patrick T. FallonA demonstrator holds a placard depicting George Floyd during a protest in Los Angeles, California, June 3, 2020.
A UCLA professor has been placed on leave after refusing to give black students preferential grades in the aftermath of George Floyd's killing. The college said his Martin Luther King-inspired attitude to race was "troubling."

Floyd's death in Minneapolis and the two weeks of civil unrest that followed have given American activists a fresh platform to air all manner of ethnic grievances, from demanding that whites renounce their supposed "privilege," to calling for multi-trillion dollar reparation payments for slavery.

For one group of students at the University of California Los Angeles' Anderson School of Management, it was an opportunity to dodge an end-of-year examination. Last week, a group of minority students emailed Professor Gordon Klein, asking him to let black students sit out this week's exams in light of recent events.

Comment: It seems anyone with common sense and values, that predate the current fixated mindset, is in potential jeopardy. The 'wokers' have no idea where this will lead, the destruction they cause, nor the consequences of living in constant reaction. Stuck in this rut, what else is going on around them that remains unnoticed?


Che Guevara

Best of the Web: Investigative reporter Lara Logan uncovers Antifa 'revolutionary cells' behind BLM riots

mitt romney BLM protest
Establishment power move: Swamp creature Mitt Romney at a BLM protest
Veteran correspondent Lara Logan, who has done extensive reporting on the Antifa movement, warned that the far-left extremist group is going all out to capitalize on national unrest, as Attorney General Bill Barr confirmed Antifa's role in instigating recent violence and destruction.

"There's a difference between hijacking something and exploiting it and fueling it, and that's really the concern here," said Logan on Fox and Friends on Friday.

"They've been planning this not just for a few months but for decades, and this is sort of the culmination," she argued. "It's almost like this is the super bowl of their efforts."

Barr said on Thursday that there is evidence that Antifa and other groups are exacerbating violent riots that have erupted in American cities in the aftermath of the police-involved death of George Floyd last week in Minneapolis.

"We have evidence that [A]ntifa and other similar extremist groups, as well as actors of a variety of different political persuasions have been involved in instigating and participating in the violent activity," Barr said at a Justice Department news conference.


Comment: Logan's video reports appear to be unavailable for viewing outside the US, but we have a couple of segments of her interviews with Fox News over the last week. In the first two, she shares her observations of the tactics and organizing of the far-left militias on the ground during the riots:



In this third interview, she goes into more detail about Antifa's organization and ideology (her response begins at 01:05):

Ms. Logan's work is complemented by Millie Weaver, who has shown here that climate change activists are networked with Black Lives Matter activists and other far-left revolutionary activists.

Without suggesting that either of these reporters have an agenda, it should be noted that their 'law enforcement and intelligence sources' - who have provided them with such evidence as video footage of Zoom conversations held between activists coordinating the riots/protests - likely know much more than they are telling them.

Specifically, that these groups and this 'revolutionary movement' are backed by US intelligence. What the 'deep state' has exported abroad for so long - color revolution - is now being applied 'back home'.

The Establishment undoubtedly believes that they have these useful idiots agitating to 'destroy America and start anew' on a leash, and can reign them in once November's presidential election 'goes right' for them.

But they are likely in for a surprise or two...


NPC

Best of the Web: In brave new America, leaders kneel and looters are saluted. What will the Democrats conjure up next?

senators kneeling congress
'Hail Satan'
Events are now in the saddle and riding Americans. In most cases, the authors of those events - from harsh anti-Covid measures, to rioting and lawlessness - derive from the liberal left. How far are they prepared to go?

It would be difficult to name a more action-packed six months than the first half of 2020. From Russiagate to riots, Americans feel like blindfolded passengers on a roller-coaster ride, totally unprepared for the corkscrew curves and dizzying dives ahead. All they can do is scream and hold on for dear life.

The worst part of this amusement-park hellscape, however, is not the news per se, but how US leaders - specifically Democrat leaders - are responding to it. Consider, for example, the lockdown measures implemented in response to Covid-19. While most people begrudgingly accepted the need for quarantine, masks and social distancing, Democratic leaders piled on additional pain that did nothing to stop the spread of the coronavirus. In fact, the measures seemed tailor-made - like a form-fitting straitjacket - to drive their imprisoned constituents crazy. How else to explain the ban on mowing lawns, swimming in the ocean, and using a motorboat on an empty lake?

Eye 1

Best of the Web: The Politically Driven Cult of Mass Hypnosis Has Just Accelerated

mass hypnosis
Over the past several decades Americans have viewed regularly televised dramatic episodes of political theater. The use of the word "episode" is especially appropriate because the dramatic scenes are sequential and continuously broadcasted onto electronic screens. The drama is designed to elicit emotion, foment anger, and unite or divide the nation in order to, ultimately, affect change.

The societal cataclysms we're experiencing now could be naturally occurring - as the result of certain trends like demographics, technology, modernization, education, centralization, economic inequality, political platforms, or even systemic corruption and civilizational decay. On the other hand, it could be the upheavals are directed in consonance with scripts written by an inner circle of powerful people; and in accordance to the Hegelian Dialectic. How citizens view the changes realized by the United States over the last few decades, in particular, will depend upon their interpretations of probabilities and outcomes; or, rather, to the extent they believe in coincidence or conspiracy.

Many believe grand conspiracies are implausible because ambitious schemes so often fail and it's inconceivable that scrupulous whistleblowers would refuse to expose the plans of powerful conspirators. And these objections have a ring of truth... unless, of course, the powerful few have only advanced those who've demonstrated allegiance while shunning, banishing, imprisoning, or "expiring" those who won't fall in line. Perhaps this would explain why the likes of Brennen, Clapper, Comey, and McCabe continue about their book tours as Assange, Manafort, and Stone remain under lock and key.

Attention

Best of the Web: WHO does a 180, now says asymptomatic spread of coronavirus 'very rare'

Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove WHO
The corrupt World Health Organization did a complete 180 on Monday.

The WHO is now admitting that asymptomatic spread of the Coronavirus is "very rare."

For months, the world was told to stay home and if you dare go out in public, wear a mask and stay 6 feet away from each other.

For months, the world was told that the Coronavirus would kill millions in the US alone because the virus would be difficult to contain due to asymptomatic transmission and infections.

Now WHO officials are saying asymptomatic spread of COVID-19 is "very rare."

Comment: See also: "It's All Bullsh*t" - Three Official Leaks That Sink The Covid Narrative