Update on the cultural war for America’s soul comes from the heart of California reported by Breitbart Bar Patrons Standing for National Anthem Sparks Outrage: ‘The Most Dangerous Situation’.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

At Rainbow Oaks Restaurant — just an hour outside of San Diego — a TikTok user shared that she had faced the most “dangerous” situation she had ever been in. At noon, while she was eating her stack of pancakes, about a dozen people stood up for the Star-Spangled Banner being played on the bar’s TVs.

As first reported by Fox News, the TikTok user who goes by the screen name @Paulinaappa_0 recorded the patriotic display and included the caption: “By far the most dangerous situation I’ve ever been in #godblessamerica #getout #illegal #whitepeoplethings.”

The Tik Tok video racked up 3.1 million views and over 19,000 comments with the vast majority affirming Paulina’s feelings of fear and disgust.

For the past six years, the restaurant has played the National Anthem every day at noon, according to the restaurant’s Facebook page.

Patriotism has suffered a steep decline in the last couple of decades. A March 2023 survey conducted by the Wall Street Journal found that 38 percent of respondents said patriotism was “very important” to them. When this same question was asked in 1998, 70 percent of people said it was “very important,” the newspaper reported.

This phobia towards the National Anthem or the American flag
is not a new phenomenon.

Two years ago, the New York Post reported that a California school teacher, Kristin Pitzen, removed the American flag from her classroom and put the LGBTQ pride flag in its place. Echoing the same cry of Paulina and her thousands of commenters, Pitzen said the American flag made her feel “uncomfortable.”

As for Hollywood actor and evangelist Kirk Cameron, neither the American flag nor the National Anthem strike fear into his eyes but rather hope in his heart. A viral video from February, shows Cameron leading a room full of children and parents in the National Anthem at a public library in Savannah, Georgia, in February. Cameron is on a 14-city book tour to combat the “wokeness” being pushed on children.

“We don’t want this woke garbage,” Cameron said in an interview with the Daily Signal. “It leads to brokenness and bondage and leads to misery. What we want is what our country was built on, which was the Bible and faith and family and love for country.”

Based on a non-fiction book of the same name by historian Cornelius Ryan, A Bridge Too Far is a 1977 epic war film depicting Operation Market Garden, a failed Allied operation using paratroopers to secure three bridges over three key rivers in Nazi-occupied Netherlands during World War II.  The phrase has come to mean “a long shot”, or an overly ambitious plan.

America’s institutions currently have been invaded increasingly by Progressive Jihadists, i.e. true believers in global socialist ideology under the guise of rainbow flags and DIE protocols.  So far, it has been a cultural warfare, with educational and governmental institutions surrendering with token, or no resistance.  However, since the Washington D.C. takeover by the prog regime (so-called Biden administration) more often firearms are involved, as symbolized by the military perimeter around the US Capital lest anyone object to the new governance.

Some of this move to kinetic warfare was evident in the 2020 Antifa insurrections in places like Portland and Seattle.  Guns are also used by criminals in blue cities like Chicago, NYC and SF.  As well the fentanyl trade at the Southern US border is empowered by guns. But a new bridge was just crossed in Nashville, Tennessee, when a transgender soldier fired 150 bullets inside a Christian school, murdering six innocents, including three children, two teachers and the principal.  That terrorist event followed Tennessee laws enacted in March protecting children against drag shows and from gender transition surgery and treatments.

Another bridge was crossed with the Trumped-up indictment of the former President in NYC.  It signifies that the Justice System has also been taken over and put into service of the prog ideology.  Like Sharia law imposed anywhere in the world that Islam prevails, now US Federal Justice distinguishes between true believers (the Ummah) who enjoy full citizenship rights, versus the infidels (Kafir) who, if allowed to co-exist at all, are an underclass with few privileges other than working in service of their overlords.  In Manhattan, as in other blue states,  people who are the right skin color, gender, or sexual preference are not prosecuted for felonies like stealing, vandalism, battery, or even murder, while the Kafir-in-Chief, Donald Trump (“Rich old white guy”–DA Bragg) is arrested on imaginary charges.

How far can they go with these perversions against American heritage and ideals?  One answer comes from Arkansas where Brandon Meeks writes Middle Americans at American Mind.  Go Brandon!  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

What might it actually look like to represent the real interests and values of most voters?

One reason I rarely venture into the realm of American politics is because I am not in the habit of going places I do not belong, much less where I am not wanted. And I am as out of place among both Republicans and Democrats as a country ham at a synagogue.

I see no value in hitching my wagon to an elephant with neither sense of direction nor recollection of where he came from. Neither do I welcome the prospect of hooking myself to an ass that can’t plow in a straight line and tries to bite me at every turn.

I’d wager that I’m not the only one who thinks this way. In fact, if there exist out there any politicians with the pie-eyed hope of unifying the country behind a saner program than what’s currently on offer, they might do well to think about how people like me see the world.

I can’t remember the last time I trusted a politician of any stripe. Most are so crooked that when they die, the undertaker will have to screw them into the ground with a torque wrench. Ninety-nine point nine percent of them, blue and red, should be handed a pink slip and told to get further and smell better.

One party prides itself on being “conservative,” while having nothing to conserve but the madness of five minutes ago. The other gloats about being “progressive,” which seems to mean careening off the edge of a cliff like a gaggle of over-eager lemmings. Neither sounds very appealing to me.

I was born into a family of traditionalist Southern Democrats—a breed of political animal that has gone the way of the Dodo Bird in my lifetime. I live in a red state that was once a blue state. But this is because the Democratic Party sold its soul to the Devil and now worships at the blackened altar of Molech. It certainly isn’t because the folks in Toad Suck, Arkansas finally got around to reading Hayek or started subscribing to National Review.

I know this isn’t true everywhere, but in some ways my state
still feels like it is peopled by that extinct species of Democrat.
But then again, I don’t live in America: I live in Arkansas.

When I was growing up, folks in our family went to church on Sundays, to work on Mondays, and to union meetings on Thursdays. They believed in the sacred nature of the traditional family, the supremacy of the Christian religion and its outworking in society, the inviolability of the First Amendment, and the necessity of the Second Amendment to protect all of that.

We were taught that honorable folks worked hard to earn a living and that the government should only help if and when they couldn’t. Republicans were encouraging everyone to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, but we understood that it’s mighty hard to do that when the straps rotted off months ago during a long hard winter. Even so, the business of government was to give those people a leg up—never a hand out.

In much of the South, the New Deal was viewed as a late answer to the Reconstruction question. At the time, half-measures laden with problems seemed better than none. Folks too poor to make it could at least get by on surplus commodities. Those too proud to stand in line at the courthouse or the national guard armory for peanut butter and cheese could slip over and get it from a relative with a little less shame.

While this describes many in general, it describes my great-grandmother in particular. “We weren’t really all that political,” she said, “but we were hungry, and Roosevelt was sending the bread.” “That’s not ‘conservative,’” some will say. Perhaps not. But if it hadn’t been for such measures, my family wouldn’t have been “conserved” at all.

Does this make me “fiscally liberal”? Not necessarily. I seem to be for less ludicrous spending than either major party. For instance, I am not in favor of bailing out banksters, funding sexual re-education seminars with public money at either the state or local level, or footing the bill for foreign wars. In other words: I don’t belong.

So for politicians or interest groups hoping to earn the allegiance of anyone like me: don’t ask me to do anything “for my party.” Tell me to do it for my family. Am I “patriotic”? Who knows. I figure my patriotism is like bursitis: it flares up a couple times a year, usually in hot weather. I love my home and try to love my neighbor, but if you’re asking if I think we need to spread the gospel of Exxon Mobil to the four corners of the world, then no. If that’s what patriotism really is then I’m the erstwhile Queen of the Hottentots.

I haven’t watched the news (except for the local weather) since 2020. If you put a gun to my head and said, “Name six popular political pundits or I’m pulling the trigger,” there’s a good chance I’d be conversing with St. Peter in a matter of minutes. Somehow I suspect that being under-informed after that fashion is preferable to being ill-informed by partisan hacks.

But there’s one thing about which I am certain—whatever it is that Washington is doing now isn’t working. Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans seem to know beans from apple butter about how to run a country, but both seem adept at being able to run one into the ground.

What few proposals I have to offer seem both simple and impossible.

Republicans should concern themselves with protecting our republic and the laws and lives which constitute it, rather than faceless corporations, technocracies, or some divinized notion of The Market. Democrats should heed once again the voices of all the people, eschewing exotic ideological experiments in order to embrace the totality of Americans from sea to shining sea.

Though I am not altogether sanguine about the future of party politics (at least the major parties as they exist at present), I haven’t yet stocked the basement with dry beans and powdered milk against an impending Armageddon. I still have faith in ordinary Americans. I am hoping against hope that common, workaday men and women will assert their right to live in reality and insist on a politics to match. For one thing, there are so many of us. For another thing, God loves us.

There is enough discontent and hunger at the local level to make me feel that a constituency exists to support a program of patriotism and virtue against the venal manias of our elite uniparty. Any national leader who can give that constituency the drive and direction they need will have my vote. If such a leader should prove himself, we have a fighting chance.

As it stands, I belong to neither the Democrats nor the Republicans. I belong to God, my family, and to the Arkansas dirt forever mingled with my own blood. But without any trace of irony, I think it is precisely that kind of sentiment that can make a person a decent American. By the grace of God, there might still be quite a lot of us out there.

 

Thomas Adamo and Josiah Joner report at Stanford Review Stanford’s Dark Hand in Twitter Censorship.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Matt Taibbi’s two latest “Twitter Files” drops revealed that Stanford played a direct role in this gross violation of online free speech. Emails revealed that the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) actively collaborated with Twitter to suppress information they knew was factually true. Taibbi’s investigation revealed that Stanford’s Virality Project “recommends that multiple platforms take action even against ‘stories of true vaccine side effects’ and ‘true posts which could fuel hesitancy.’”

The project succeeded in getting big tech companies to take down about 35% of the content they flagged. They reviewed content en masse from almost every major social media company: Twitter, Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Medium, TikTok, and Pinterest were all monitored by SIO. The questionable censorship decisions by the group all seemed to go in one direction—shutting down the now-vindicated Dr. Scott Atlas and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, while taking direct guidance from Anthony Fauci about the supposed falsehood of the lab leak theory.

In short, the Stanford Internet Observatory’s Virality Project had countless people—mostly Stanford students—reporting millions of Twitter posts that didn’t comply with their standards. Even posts that were factually true faced censorship if they didn’t conform to the subjective whims of SIO officials.

The evidence points to a para-governmental fusion of universities,
social media companies,and the federal government,
all working to censor free speech.

We at the Review take Stanford’s actions to suppress speech very seriously. Stanford cannot be allowed to sweep this gross violation of fundamental freedoms under the rug. The University must answer for their actions.

It appears Stanford’s Virality Project took issues with anyone who was an enemy of the state’s, and more explicitly Fauci’s, narrative about the coronavirus and subsequent vaccines. Any posts that brought up the “lab leak” theory (now the primary COVID origin thesis), were dubbed by SIO as “keen to foment distrust in Fauci’s expert guidance and in American public health officials and institutions.” People who dared question the Fauci-manufactured ‘status quo’ narrative were censored. SIO even branded “reports of vaccinated individuals contracting Covid-19 anyway” and “natural immunity,” as troublesome violations of ‘disinformation’ policies.

If this is truly what the term ‘disinformation’ means, perhaps we should no longer define it in terms of what is and isn’t true. Instead when we hear the word we should think of it as anything that isn’t in the federal government’s formal narrative: thought crime. The Virality Project stated that because the post-vaccine death of a Virginia woman named Drene Keyes inspired “anti-vaccine” comments, it became a “disinformation” event. They warned against people “asking questions,” alleging it was a tactic “commonly used by spreaders of misinformation.” Doubting, or even just examining, the prevailing narratives on COVID got citizens repressed by a para-governmental entity.

The Stanford Internet Observatory and Project Virality wanted to cover that up—not because it wasn’t true… it was and they knew it. They covered up the truth because they wanted to preserve their narrative. The truth would “exacerbate distrust in Dr. Fauci,” too much for SIO. When given the choice between truth and Fauci, Stanford chose Fauci.

Projects like SIO’s project Virality are deeply insidious and set
a dangerous precedent for the future of online discourse.

Stanford’s hand in them and the extent to which they censored important, relevant and true information is deeply disappointing and troubling. When an extra-governmental institution acts with impunity against the First Amendment rights of Americans and suppresses information that resulted in the deaths of American citizens, one might expect a dark and shady underground alliance of evil to be behind it. In 2023, it seems all roads lead to Palo Alto.

With free speech on campus recently under attack at the law school, the university censoring faculty that wouldn’t go along with the lockdown narrative, and now their role in censorship on social media, it is fair to question if the winds of freedom still blow at Stanford. It is up to the University to take concrete steps to reassert that freedom of speech is a bedrock principle.

When I emigrated decades ago from Boston and settled in Montreal, I learned many things. One surprise was discovering the underground railway that transported black slaves from southern US had some ending up in Montreal. It seems that some freemen got jobs as porters on the actual railroad linking New York with Montreal. They discovered that the prejudice was much less than in the US, and began to make their homes north of the border. Thus, a black community formed which became a base to welcome immigrants from Caribbean countries, as well as Africa itself and other places. So for more than a century, Montreal has had a vibrant black community with a wide mix of national origins, and of course additional generations born and bred here. Currently, our hero tennis player is Felix Auger-Aliassime, who does us proud every time he steps on the court.

Now, in 2023, we have a strange upside down transportation of illegal aliens (including not only latin americans, but chinese and drug mules, and God only knows who else. Because our fearless PM, Justin Trudeau, long ago decided that Canada is “post-national.” In other words, in true global socialist fashion, Canada is (in his mind) a place without borders, where anyone has the right to come in and take advantage of the social safety net and government largess.

The symbolic portal for this intrusion of aliens is Roxham Road, south of Montreal, where entry controls have been relaxed, similarly to the US border with Mexico. From CNN:

On a snowy March afternoon, a small convoy of taxis and hired cars rolled north along a New York country road that dead-ends at the Canadian border. Among those onboard: a Nigerian family of five, a Russian man traveling alone and a tearful South American woman named Giovanna.

“I also believe I’ll have a better quality of life in Canada, and I have some family there,” said Giovanna before walking up to the invisible line in the ice that’s guarded by Canadian authorities at a makeshift post. CNN is not using her last name because of threats she says were made against her in Colombia.

“Hello madam. How are you?” asked a Spanish-speaking Canadian officer on the other side. “You cannot enter Canada here,” he informed Giovanna. “If you do, we will arrest you. Understand? You decide.”

Giovanna responded by taking five steps into Canada where officers then informed her of her rights and processed her for unlawful entry, a process which usually ends with the defendant being released into Canada to petition for asylum.

The twist is, unwanted intruders in Texas are taken north to New York (among other places), and now New York buses them to Roxham Road. And so these arrivals begin their stay in Canada with the criminal act of crossing a border, even though the Feds refuse to enforce it. How likely is it that other criminal behavior will occur? How likely that Canadian traditions of lawful, tolerant and industrious behavior will be manifest in these newcomers? How long will proud Canadians accept to be a dumping ground for illegals by way of the US?

Additional context is provided by Brian Giesbrecht  in his article Most Canadians Don’t Think Canada Is a ‘Post-National State’.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

When newly elected Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told a bewildered Canada in 2015 that Canada was a “post-national state” not many of us knew what he was talking about.

Doesn’t “post-national” mean that Canada was once a nation, but no longer is one? Was he really saying that Canada was no longer a nation—that it had somehow graduated from nation status to some higher stage?

He didn’t explain, but perhaps what is happening now at Roxham Road can be at least partly explained by Trudeau’s unusual conception of what the country he is governing is all about.

At Roxham Road illegal immigrants simply walk into Canada with no permission to do so. Unlike the thousands of people waiting patiently in foreign refugee camps and poor villages who have filled out immigration forms, and complied with the many other requirements for formal admission to Canada, the Roxham Road crossers simply arrive on Canada’s doorstep with suitcases in hand—and walk in.

They are not refugees fleeing persecution. They are economic migrants residing in the United States. In many cases, their transportation to the border has been provided by American officials.

Don’t get me wrong. Most of the Roxham Road migrants are probably good folks, just trying to make a better life for themselves and their families. But the fact is that they are taking the place of those who have done everything right, and have been carefully vetted by immigration officials.

The Roxham Road people haven’t been vetted at all. We have no idea
what their qualifications—or criminal records—look like.

Past governments, Liberal and Conservative, insisted that potential immigrants must follow the rules. They also believed in borders.

So, why does the Trudeau government completely depart from past practices and allow these people to simply walk into the country? The only possible answer I can see is Trudeau’s truly strange belief that Canada is a “post-national state,” and no longer a nation.

Because a state that is no longer a nation no longer needs borders. To Trudeau, borders seem to be simply an anachronism; a vestige of more primitive times. If the world is evolving from nation-states to one big—what, I’m not quite sure—we no longer need outdated concepts like borders and border controls.

We now know that “borders are bad” is just one of the World Economic Forum (WEF) talking points that Trudeau subscribes to. “Fossil fuels are bad” is another. Trudeau is one of the junior “philosopher kings” of that organization and appears to fervently believe in everything they preach.

But something I’m pretty sure of is that most Canadians do not believe that Canada
is a “post-national state” that no longer needs border controls.

Most Canadians believe that our previous immigration policy was basically sound. We need immigrants, but applicants should be carefully vetted, and only those with the necessary qualifications should be admitted. People who don’t even bother to apply—who simply show up on our doorstep—should be refused entry.

Trudeau is perfectly aware that a policy of allowing anyone entry to Canada, no questions asked, is unacceptable to voters. Yet, he does it anyway. Is this the new method of governance by which “post-national states” will be governed from now on? An organization of philosopher kings who are not accountable to voters will make the rules—rules voters would never stand for. And “Manchurian Candidates,” like Trudeau, will slip their policies into place?

Is this how obviously problematic policies, like “Just Transition”
and “Carbon Zero” will get past voters?

Recent revelations about election interference and infiltration of our systems at all levels by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) make Trudeau’s view that Canada is a “post-national state, with no core identity” even more ominous.

Canadians know who we are and what we are. We are a proud nation. A nation with borders.