“Fight Like Hell”

President Donald Trump incited the assault on the Capital Building last Wednesday—or so say Progressive-Democrats, the NLMSM, and the Left generally—with those words.

Here’s the definition of “fight,” per Merriam-Webster:

intransitive verb
1  a : to contend in battle or physical combat especially : to strive to overcome a person by blows or weapons
The soldiers fought bravely.
b : to engage in boxing
He will fight for the heavyweight title next month.
2 : to put forth a determined effort
They were fighting to stay awake.

transitive verb
1  a(1) : to contend against in or as if in battle or physical combat
fought the invaders of his homeland
was fighting a forest fire

(2) : to box against in the ring
fought several strong contenders
b(1) : to attempt to prevent the success or effectiveness of the company fought the takeover attempt
(2) : to oppose the passage or development of fight a bill in Congress
2 a : wage, carry on
fight a battle
   b : to take part in (a boxing match or similar contest)
3 : to struggle to endure or surmount
fight a cold
is fighting cancer

4 a : to gain by struggle
fights his way through
b : to resolve by struggle
fought out their differences in court
5 a : to manage (a ship) in a battle or storm
b : to cause to struggle or contend
c : to manage in an unnecessarily rough or awkward manner

Notice how many of these definitions have to do with physical combat and how many have to do with metaphorically and nonviolently carrying on the struggle.

Those Progressive-Democrats, the NLMSM, and the Left generally are projecting their own propensity for physical violence as the means of getting their way.

And they’re doing it while having downplayed the violence and destruction of the Left’s riots in Minneapolis, New York City, Chicago, Portland, and Seattle over the summer.

Never mind that the importance of the invasion of the Capital Building flows from its status as a symbol—and it’s a hugely important symbol. The damage done the Capital Building, however, is debris in the streets after those summer riots, which burned whole neighborhoods, destroyed businesses, crushed Americans’ ability to earn their living. And that destruction was aimed at minorities in particular. And that destruction was repeatedly billed as largely peaceful, a pent-up frustration being released, as reparations.

More Censorship

Mark Zuckerberg is at it again, this time blocking a President’s access to his Facebook, which he created explicitly to be a public forum. But only for those of whom he personally approves.

Never mind that President Donald Trump plainly has never intended to obstruct the peaceful transition of power, but merely to continue his fight to ensure only those votes legally cast and counted are counted. That he plainly expected that to demonstrate his reelection rather than confirm his loss is neither here nor there. And it certainly doesn’t compare in the slightest to the refusal to accept the outcome of the 2016 election, and the Left’s and Progressive-Democratic Party’s active and four-year-long attempts to overthrow the President duly elected that year. That was an effort Zuckerberg and his minions at Facebook not only whole heartedly approved, but they actively supported and participated in, going to the point of censoring the President’s speech.

Nor has anything Trump has said or tweeted condoned any part of the assault on the Capital Building.

This is just rank censorship. Which censorship—any censorship—is just the cowardice of those who are terrified of opposing opinions.

The clumsy or rude phrasing of those opinions is given artificially heightened importance solely to obscure the cowardice of the censors.

Update: It’s become a full-on assault on individual liberties, epitomized by the overt attack on our freedom of speech, but plainly won’t be limited to that.

We have Jack Dorsey banning all Trump speech from his Twitter, along with the speech of his supporters. We have Followers “disappearing” from other Conservatives who tweet.

We have Tim Cook openly attacking a rival to Twitter–and to Apple–with his ban of the Parler app from his app store.

We have Sundar Pichai joining the attack by barring the Parler app from his Google Android app store.

We have Jeff Bezos shutting down Parler altogether with his Amazon ban of Parler from his servers that were hosting the alternative to Dorsey’s Twitter. That shutdown, too, was done with advance notice deliberately too for Parler to withdraw its–and its users’–information from those servers.

We have Mark Zuckerberg, in addition to the above, banning #WalkAway from his Facebook, a hashtag that committed the speech crime of encouraging members of the Progressive-Democratic Party to leave Party while showing those disappointed and disaffected other places where their voices could be heard and taken seriously.

This a full-on attack by Big Tech, by a tiny few oligarchs grown too powerful and presuming to dictate to ordinary Americans what speech will be permitted in the public square, moving openly to prevent Conservatives from having any voice at all in the public square.

Hard to Tell the Difference

In the aftermath of Wednesday afternoon’s events, the Progressive-Democrats already are blaming their political opponents rather than the thugs who assaulted the Capital Building. And calling for Republican heads to roll.

Ex-HUD Secretary Julian Castro:

@tedcruz is guilty of treason and must resign from the United States Senate.

Here’s Carrie Lam, Hong Kong Chief Executive:

[T]he opposition’s goal of objecting to every policy initiative of the government may fall into the category of subverting state power.

Hard to tell the difference.

So much for Progressive-Democrats’ calls for unity.

Keep in mind, too, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’ (D, NY) wish (since realized) for Progressive-Democrat control of the Senate so that, with Progressive-Democrats controlling all of Congress and the White House, there’d be no need to negotiate with Republicans. To Progressive-Democrats, “unity” means “do it our way and be quiet about it.”

Who Has the Power?

The People’s Republic of China is reaching deep into Hong Kong to arrest—now more than 50—people who had the effrontery of running in opposition parties for the city’s legislative body or otherwise demurring from the city’s Chief Executive policies and those of the central government in Beijing.

Carrie Lam’s rationalization (paraphrased by The Wall Street Journal) of the arrests and of the law passed in order to effect the arrests is dispositive regarding the role of the people and of government in Hong Kong and in the PRC.

[T]he opposition’s goal of objecting to every policy initiative of the government may fall into the category of subverting state power.

Objecting to state policy is subverting state power.

Government’s role, says the PRC government, is to rule, and the people’s role is the subservient one: to obey.

Vaccination Shortfall

The Trump administration promised 20 million doses of the Wuhan Virus vaccine would be delivered to the States by the end of 2020. In fact, only 12-14 million doses were delivered. That’s a significant shortfall—or it would be were it not for a far more significant shortfall that renders the lacking 6-8 million doses wholly irrelevant.

…far fewer people than expected are being immunized against Covid-19, as the process moves slower than officials had projected and has been beset by confusion and disorganization in many states.

Of the more than 12 million doses of vaccines from Moderna Inc and Pfizer Inc with BioNTech SE that have been shipped, only 2.8 million have been administered, according to federal figures.

Never mind that the States had been told for months that vaccines would be available and that vaccine doses would be available in those millions by the end of the year.

The States chose not to act; their administrations chose to disbelieve the Federal administration, and so they sat on their hands. Claire Hannan, Association of Immunization Managers Executive Director, offered this excuse:

There may have been an expectation from Operation Warp Speed or others that we’d give everyone the vaccine overnight.…It was a logistics equation for them. If you’ve been in vaccines for a long time, you know that’s the easy part. Getting it into actual arms is the hard part.

Indeed. And yet, knowing these folks had the hard part—getting the syringes needed, getting folks trained to give the shots in order to fill staffing shortfalls that these folks had to have known would exist—they chose to do nothing. Because they chose to not believe the ability of American business and a Trump administration to work together to deliver vaccines—multiple vaccines—within the promised time frame.

And another typical excuse:

State and local jurisdictions have been asking the federal government for more funding to support vaccine distribution than the $340 million disbursed so far.

Never mind that the State and local distributions already have plenty of money—it’s just currently misallocated.

The list of State failures goes on, yet they’re all laid off to the Federal government—in particular the Trump administration—without any regard for the federal republic nature of our governance structure.  All the Feds can do, and the Trump administration down through the CDC did every bit of it, is jawbone the States on domestic matters. The CDC issued guidelines regarding the vaccines—it cannot issue rules—yet the States in many cases chose to do something entirely different.  The Federal government cannot dictate to the States’ their internal policies, particularly including how they prepare for reception of and deliver vaccination shots to their individual citizens.

2.8 million vaccinations injected out of 12 million doses delivered is unacceptable—and the States, Republican and Progressive-Democrat alike have no one to blame but their own disbelieving and inactive selves.

It would have been a no-lose situation, too. Say the States had scrambled to be ready to handle the promised 20 million doses and the vaccines would not have been produced and deliverable until the end of 2021 as so many so-called experts insisted was the earliest possible time frame. The States would have been ready in time to receive and inject, instead of being the failures they are presently.