The Patriot Post® · Friday Short Cuts

Insight: “Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.” —Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)

“Biden wants to pay illegal immigrants $450,000 for their hardship while breaking our laws. For perspective, if a service member is killed in action, their next of kin gets an insurance payment of $400,000. Let that sink in.” —Congressman Dan Crenshaw

“As whistleblowers continue to dump documents revealing internal Facebook discussions about controlling content, one thing is striking: The thousands of pages released so far contain zero signs of staff worries about (or even awareness of) left-wing hate speech and misinformation. Perhaps we’re only seeing part of the picture. But Facebook staffers' incessant drive to censor right-wing stories and sites suggests they really are blind to the often-outrageous speech from outlets on the other side of the spectrum.” —New York Post

“The international threat matrix does not take time out as our national security agencies become enthralled by critical race theory and pronoun etiquette. … Unfortunately, we can’t counter hypersonic missile launch with better pronoun usage. And a deeper understanding of white rage won’t rescue Americans stranded in Afghanistan. I’d argue that woke obsessions are the proper jurisdiction of faculty lounge Marxists, not our national security agencies. The politicization of our national security apparatus is utterly destructive.” —House Intelligence Ranking Member Devin Nunes

“Your regular reminder that batteries used for electric cars and buses are actually terrible for the environment.” —Katie Pavlich

Facepalm: “When you buy an electric vehicle … you go all the way across America on a single tank of gas, figuratively speaking. It’s not gas. You plug it in.” —Joe Biden

The BIG Lie I: “[The reconciliation bill] will not add to the deficit at all. It will actually reduce the deficit.” —Joe Biden

The BIG Lie II: “More people are working today than just before the pandemic started.” —Joe Biden

Demagogue: “Extremism can come in many forms. It can come in the rage of a mob … driven to assault the Capitol. It can come in a smile and a fleece vest.” —Joe Biden referring to Virginia gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin

Grand delusions: “Inflation is partly a good thing in the sense that it’s forcing employers to pay employees more money.” —Fox News co-host Geraldo Rivera

Nope: “These [parents at school board meetings] are not routine people incensed or angry. These are people who are acting out their feelings in a violent manner, over and over again. The same people we see on airplanes and other places, some of whom we saw here on January 6.” —Senator Dick Durbin

Gaslighting: “In recent months, debates over race and equity have roiled school districts across the country. More than 27 states have introduced legislation limiting how teachers can talk about race and racism in the classroom. But the enforcement of these measures will largely rest on parents, who’ve been newly deputized to ensure that teachers aren’t teaching ‘critical race theory’ (CRT), a vague catchall that has rapidly expanded to include almost anything that conservatives don’t like.” —The Nation contributor Jennifer C. Berkshire

Non compos mentis: “We’re never going to learn about how safe the vaccine is unless we start giving it [to kids]. That’s just the way it goes.” —Harvard professor Eric Rubin (Echoes of Nancy Pelosi’s infamous quote: “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.”)

Peddling speculation: “I believe if we had fully implemented the mask mandates, the reduction in indoor dining, the getting friends and family to understand the risk of gathering in private homes, and we had increased testing, that we probably could have decreased fatalities into the 30 percent less to 40 percent less range.” —Dr. Deborah Birx

Race bait: “I think that white people are committed to being villains in the aggregate. … White human beings thought, ‘There’s a world here and we own it.’ Prior to them, black and brown people had been sailing across oceans, interacting with each other for centuries without total subjugation, domination, and colonialism. … Their thinking is so morally and spiritually bankrupt about power that … they fear viscerally, existentially letting go of power because they cannot imagine that there’s another way to be. It is either that you dominate or you are dominated.” —Rutgers associate professor Dr. Brittney Cooper

And last… “Just as the welfare state changed the culture of out-of-wedlock births by incentivizing women to marry the government and men to abandon their financial and moral responsibility, free money and eviction moratoriums have changed the culture of work by reducing the stigma of not doing work.” —Larry Elder