UPDATED: The Domestic War On "Terror"
No, I didn't watch or listen to Zhou Baiden last night--I knew others would do that for me. Others, for example, like Conrad Black:
All the welfare spending masquerading under the new code word of "infrastructure" will be up for grabs in Congress. Whether it passes--and in what form--is anyone's guess at this point. It's toward the end of his account, however, that Black gets to what I took to be the heart of Zhou's threatening message:
After the usual reassertion that everyone is created equal, Biden slipped in the need to ”root out systemic racism that plagues America… White supremacy is terrorism” and has “surpassed Jihadism” as a menace. He gave no hint of what he thinks of organizations that are constantly threatening to burn America down if they're not successful in extracting a full-body immersion in self-humiliation from the majority of Americans who despise all racism. Rarely in his rabidly bowdlerized summary of the nation's affairs does the president allow the truth to intrude. This made the opposition response by Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina particularly effective.
In sum, Biden’s address was cringe-worthy, fatuous, and deeply distressing. The State of the Union is almost at suicide watch.
As it happened, while Zhou was threatening the non-Prog majority of the nation in this way with a Domestic War On "Terror", I was reading an interesting article by John Whitehead:
The Global Deep State: A New World Order Brought to You by COVID-19
Whitehead's first few paragraphs do a good job of putting Zhou's threats into context:
For good or bad, COVID-19 has changed the way we navigate the world.
It is also redrawing the boundaries of our world (and our freedoms) and altering the playing field faster than we can keep up.
Owing in large part to the U.S. government’s deep-seated and, in many cases, top-secret alliances with foreign nations and global corporations, it has become increasingly obvious that we have entered into a new world order—a global world order—made up of international government agencies and corporations.
This powerful international cabal, let’s call it the Global Deep State, is just as real as the corporatized, militarized, industrialized American Deep State, and it poses just as great a threat to our rights as individuals under the U.S. Constitution, if not greater.
We’ve been inching closer to this global world order for the past several decades, but COVID-19, which has seen governmental and corporate interests become even more closely intertwined, has shifted this transformation into high gear.
Fascism has become a global menace.
In other words, while President Trump was attempting, against all odds, to restore our Constitutional Order, the Deep State--or "Interagency", as Comrade Vindman put it--had declared Jihad on the POTUS. With their goal within ultimate grasp, the Deep State wasn't about to allow Trump to spoil the game. That's the meaning of the Resistance--to include Team Mueller, the double impeachment, the election fraud, and all the rest of the Establishment war on Trump. It was a full court press.
As we've discussed over the last few days, the Deep State knows that they came within a whisker of defeat. That's the meaning of James Carville's warning to the Dems. Carville wants the Deep State and its Dem allies to return to something resembling the Clintonism of the 90s, but Zhou's speech made it clear that the Deep State and Globalist establishment sees itself in an existential war against--as Conrad Black puts it so well--America. The "infrastructure" plans may or may not get through Congress, but make no mistake about it: the Domestic War on "Terror" will go forward.
That's the meaning also of Judge Boasberg's appointment of Mary McCord to advise him at the FISC--McCord, an unreconstructed Russia Hoaxer and active participant in the greatest perversion of our national security apparatus into a weapon of political warfare in American history, so far. It's also the meaning of the search warrants against Rudy Giuliani and Victoria Toensing (targeting John Solomon in all likelihood). The message comes through loud and clear: The Zhou regime has an enemies list and they will be acting on it.
Thus the chilling effect of Zhou's words:
And, we won’t ignore what our own intelligence agencies have determined – the most lethal terrorist threat to the homeland today is from white supremacist terrorism.
This characterization of white supremacist terrorism was explicitly linked to the (mostly peaceful) January Sixth event. Just so nobody would be in any doubt that the target of the Domestic War on "Terror" will be anyone deemed an enemy of the Deep State.
Who will those enemies be, besides the obvious high profile Trump supporters like Giuliani? As Zachary Evans at NRO points out today, that will be hard to say--it's all very vague. It's one of those "we'll recognize it when we see it" kinda things. Evans dredges up the recent testimony of Chris Wray to give you a flavor:
Biden Says White Supremacists Have Replaced Jihadists as ‘Most Lethal Terrorist Threat’ to U.S.
Biden’s remarks echo comments by FBI director Christopher Wray in March congressional testimony.
“The problem of domestic terrorism has been metastasizing across the country for a long time now, and it’s not going away any time soon,” Wray said at the time. “We viewed it as such a critical threat that back in June 2019 we elevated racially and ethnically motivated violent extremism to our highest threat priority, on the same level as ISIS and homegrown violent extremists.”
However, Wray said that while the biggest part of the FBI’s domestic terrorism cases involve white supremacists, not all domestic terrorists could be classified as such.
“One of the things we struggle with in particular is that more and more, the ideologies , if you will, that are motivating these violent extremists are less and less coherent, less and less linear, less and less easy to pin down,” Wray said. “In some cases it seems like people coming up with their own customized belief system – a little bit of this, a little bit of that – and they put it together, maybe combined with some personal grievance that’s happened to them in their lives, and that drives them.”
A little bit of this and a little bit of that, and with the help of the Southern Poverty Law Center and BLM telling us what "racism" really means, with the help of the "community standards" of Twitter and Facebook and Youtube and the rest, your FBI will get to the bottom of this. Or at least will harass the living sh*t out of anyone deemed an enemy of the Deep State status quo. Note, however, that this Domestic War on "Terror" is not just a domestic political concern for Progs--although it is that. It is also a defensive action against the American First agenda of reining in the Military Industrial Complex's forever wars and the goal of merging American into a national security and surveillance state.
The importance of Trump's (and, let it be said, McConnell's) work on judicial appointments will be put to a severe test in the next year or so. Conservative legal groups are preparing for the fray:
but this war for America will be wide ranging. The Zhou regime has moved quickly to restore political surveillance as standard practice, and as long as Pelosi and Schumer control Congress that will be protected. Thus the overriding importance of Election 2022--as Dems well know.
On that front, fortunately, there is some good news. John Solomon continues the conversation that others have had with Trump pollster John McLaughlin. As James Carville made clear, Dems are very much aware of the dynamics that McLaughlin discusses:
Nearing 100-day milestone, Biden's low-50s job approval stuck far below historical norm
After running as moderate, president is governing as "Trojan horse for this radical left-wing agenda," said 2016 Trump pollster John McLaughlin .
...
"The fact he's only in the low 50s right now is a really bad sign for Joe Biden," says pollster John McLaughlin.
...
Pollsters and pundits alike will spin Biden's ratings in different directions, but McLaughlin says that based on his 3 1/2 decades in the industry, the president's numbers are a dark omen for his party's short-term success. During a recent interview on "Just the News AM," he said he doesn't "think there's any question" that Biden's mediocre numbers have set Republicans on track to reclaim not just the House of Representatives in 2022, but the Senate as well.
... "Republicans can't wait to get into election season and talk about some of the things that are in those bills ... expanding the welfare state, tax increases, basically open borders. That's not where the American people are right now."
...
Biden "is literally the Trojan horse for this radical left-wing agenda," said McLaughlin. "And despite what the national media and the Democrats may tell you, that's just not where the American people are right now."
McLaughlin cites Biden's eroding support among political independents as a key indicator of a changing national mood. While most independents, he says, have been leaning left over the last few years, data from the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll suggests that a significant shift is underway, as only 47% of independents now approve of the president's performance, and 45% say he is too liberal — a figure up from 21% one year ago.
... With a slim majority in the House, and a working majority in the Senate only by virtue of the vice president's tie-breaking vote, Biden is opting to push an aggressively left-wing agenda with limited political capital.
Independents "are leaning Republicans, and it's happening way quicker than it did during the Obama administration," said McLaughlin. "And we all know what happened during those midterm elections.
In the 2010 "wave" election, Republicans recaptured the House with a 63-seat pickup, gained seven Senate seats and 6 governorships, and made sweeping gains in state legislatures across the nation.
Recent polling on topics as seemingly diverse--but everything is connected--as gun control and cancel culture, on Blue Lives and more, tend to support this optimistic narrative. On the other hand, we know the Deep State plays for keeps.
UPDATE: Rasmussen Reports shows seriously sliding ratings for Zhou. Of particular note is the Approval Index, which shows Zhou at -11. 41% Strongly Disapprove versus only 30% Strongly Approve. That would appear to track with only 50% of CNN viewers liking what Zhou had to say last night.
The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Thursday shows that 48% of Likely U.S. Voters approve of President Biden’s job performance. Fifty percent (50%) disapprove.
The latest figures include 30% who Strongly Approve of the job Biden is doing and 41% who Strongly Disapprove. This gives him a Presidential Approval Index rating of -11. (see trends )
Approval of Biden's presidential performance peaked in mid-February, when his total approval reached 53% versus 43% total disapproval.