The Patriot Post® · Friday Short Cuts

Insight: “The battle for the world is the battle for definitions.” —Thomas Szasz (1920-2012)

Political futures: “Why do Democrats remain so fearful of Trump? Remember these numbers: 4, 6, 8 and 12. In 2008, when Barack Obama got elected, his Republican opponent received 4% of the Black vote. When Obama won reelection, the Republican got 6% of the Black presidential vote. When Trump ran in 2016, he received 8% of the Black vote. When Trump ran for reelection in 2020, Republicans received 12% of the Black vote, a 50% increase over the previous four years. Republicans haven’t reached that percentage of the Black vote since 1980, when President Ronald Reagan got 14%. Quite simply, this 4%, 6%, 8%, 12% trendline gives Democrats nightmares.” —Larry Elder

Observations: “Behind fancy slogans about not wasting crises, teachable moments and resets is the panic-porn reality that these initiatives are not popular in normal times because they defy common sense. If Americans tried Obama’s economics with their family budgets, they would go broke or go to jail after piling up unpaid debts. Only elites, with their private security guards and the money and influence to remain safe, talk of defunding the police. Few of the woke elites who fly their carbon-spewing jets into Davos ever fly economy class. … Many members of the left-wing elite became wealthy by monetizing their political careers through lucrative insider networking. A cynic might conclude they didn’t go full reset until they first got filthy rich — allowing them not to live like, think like or listen to the rest of us.” —Victor Davis Hanson

Food for thought: “Joe Biden was right about one thing Tuesday in his speech to mark the 100th anniversary of the 1921 attack on a Tulsa black community. Remembering this tragic event should have happened sooner. Why didn’t Barack Obama do it?” —Gary Bauer

Re: Race bait: “Biden said the U.S. intelligence community has concluded that white supremacy represents the greatest domestic threat to our homeland. If they really believe that they should be fired. This is one of the most racially diverse countries in the world. We are the only majority white country that has elected a black president. On the very day Biden engaged in his racial demagoguery, thousands of people of color crossed our border. Yet we are supposed to believe they are risking everything to come to a country of white supremacists? In Biden’s America it is still 1619. Or maybe it is 1850? Or is it the era of Jim Crow laws? There is no progress. No Martin Luther King. No civil rights movement. No integration. If Biden was right the whole country should take a knee when our national anthem is played.” —Gary Bauer


For the record I: “It’s fascinating to see leftists who destroyed their own lives for the past year due to the pandemic… not care about the fact that [Dr. Anthony] Fauci said in 2012 that gain-of-function experiments could lead to a pandemic & yet funded those experiments at the Wuhan lab anyway.” —Liz Wheeler

For the record II: “Based on all the new evidence unearthed in Fauci’s emails — it does make you wonder if the shutdowns were more about trying to kill the Trump presidency than stopping the China Virus.” —Todd Starnes

For the record III: “The same apparatus of suppression that insisted the lab leak theory was a ‘conspiracy theory’ have spent over a year shutting down honest debate about mask and lockdown effectiveness. Authoritarian censorship is a bad idea, even when some of its proponents wear lab coats.” —Buck Sexton

A trip down memory lane: “There is no question that there will be a challenge to the coming [Trump] administration in the arena of infectious diseases.” —Anthony Fauci, January 10, 2017

Leftist buzzkill: “As folks in Arizona know, I’ve long been a supporter of the filibuster because it is a tool that protects the democracy of our nation, rather than allowing our country to ricochet wildly every two to four years back and forth between policies.” —Senator Kyrsten Sinema

Inmates run the asylum: “If we want to reduce the number of people in our jails, the answer is to stop building more of them.” —Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (“I am going to stop buying scales. It’s the only real way to lose weight.” —David Harsanyi)

Non compos mentis: “There’s a teachable moment about maybe this whole deficit hawk thing of the federal government. Just being nervous about our debt 30 years from now, while millions of people are suffering — maybe that’s not a smart way to think about our economics.” —Barack Obama

Village idiot: “It’s simple and not hyperbole. If the Senate doesn’t pass voting rights, Democracy will die.” —Rob Reiner

And last… “Now that the layers of ‘science’ have been peeled back on Wuhan coronavirus, the same scrutiny should be applied to climate change and the government’s attempts to control your life over global temperature they can’t actually change.” —Katie Pavlich