JAN 6 PROTESTOR STRUCK 40 TIMES BY CAPITOL POLICE: Newly released video shows a Minnesota woman getting a beating, with a baton and fists, by a Capitol Hill Police officer. Her lawyer calls for a special prosecutor. I know lots of Capitol Hill Police officers who are dedicated, honorable professional law enforcement personnel. But there’s clearly some rotten apples.

‘FLABBERGASTING PARADOX:’ That’s what triple-dimension physics PhD Michael Guillen — and former Harvard professor and ABC News Science Editor — calls the Quantum Vacuum (QV) that is simultaneously nothing and potentially everything.

Guillen explains the role of the QV in his journey to writing “Believing is Seeing,” the one book you should read if you only read one in 2022. Be sure and buy it from Amazon, so Instapundit benefits. This excerpt on HillFaith should do the trick for all who love science and who love faith.

BUT APPARENTLY DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION CAN: At least walk away from responding to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and emails it receives on its Free Speech Hotline, according to Liberty Unyielding’s Hans Bader.

COLLEGE CAN’T JUST WALK AWAY FROM FREE SPEECH CASE: A federal district court judge in Atlanta said Gwinnett College can’t just pay $2 in nominal damages and be free of litigation in which officials were found to have violated students’ right to share their religious views on campus without prior permission.

‘BLIND, PITILESS INDIFFERENCE’ OR DESIGN: That’s how Dr. Stephen Meyer frames the debate in an excellent Prager U video between scientific atheists like Richard Dawkins and himself, an advocate for the Intelligent Design school.

NO, US IS NOT SPLIT ON MANDATES: Latest Issues & Insights/TIPP Poll finds surprising agreement across the ideological spectrum regarding mandates. But the one exception — Republicans aren’t so sure about vaccine mandates — points up a major failing of the Mainstream Media’s Covid reporting:

“That, among all parties and ideologies, there is majority agreement on the effectiveness of the policies that have been pursued so far to deal with the spread of COVID-19 and its growing number of genetic variants.

“The agreement varies only by degree. Significant numbers of people on the right and the center have reasonable objections to COVID policies, such as mandatory vaccines for children, that politicians would be wise to heed.

“Indeed, of all the political groupings tracked by I&I/TIPP, the only groups that show virtually no objection to the most draconian masking, vaccination, and lockdown policies are the Democrats and their ideological kin, the liberals.

“Ironically, those same groups were strongly anti-vaccination when President Trump made his big push in 2020, but today with both the White House and Congress controlled by liberal Democrats, are the strongest proponents of sweeping government anti-COVID measures, including lockdowns and vaccine mandates.

“Unfortunately, this overarching majority agreement is muted or ignored by the mainstream media, which from the beginning has politicized the government’s COVID-19 response.”

HERE’S WHAT THE MSM DIDN’T TELL YOU ABOUT BISHOP TUTU: Jeff Dunetz at The Lid exposes the virulent anti-semitism that darkens Tutu’s life and career and that nobody in the Mainstream Media has the guts to acknowledge.

FORMER PRINCETON HISTORIAN SAYS SCHOOL LEFT HIM TO ROT IN PRISON: An Iranian prison that is, according to Xiyue Wang, who was encouraged by the Ivy League school’s powers-that-be to study for his doctorate in Tehran. He did and things went seriously bad thereafter.

“In a lawsuit filed last month, Wang accuses Princeton of trying to keep his wife from publicizing his case following his arrest in order to protect its reputation and to maintain political ties in Iran,” reports the Washington Free Beacon’s Chuck Ross in the first media coverage anywhere of the litigation.

“Wang blasted Princeton and its Iran Center for heeding the advice of  “pro-regime activists and academics” before and after his arrest. Wang alleges that Princeton lawyers and administrators urged him not to seek refuge in the Swiss embassy in Tehran after he began to fear for his safety,” Ross writes.

BIFF DIDDLE’S YEAR-END REVIEW: You don’t want to miss this one!

ABOUT THAT CHEVY ‘HOLIDAY RIDE’ TEAR-JERKER: It certainly brought forth some tears for me. And I am pretty sure I am not alone in this crowd.

THE REALLY, REALLY BIG QUESTION: So why is there something rather than nothing? Dr. Stephen Meyer says there are three possible answers: Aliens brought life to Earth, we’re just one in the multiverses, or there’s a fine tuner. And you say?

CHRISTIANITY BIRTHED MODERN SCIENCE: Speaking of Stephen C. Meyer and the Webb telescope, he’s also up on a new Prager U video explaining how modern science was encouraged by Christianity and many of the most famous scientists, including those of the present era, were and are believers.

DID YOU KNOW NASA LAUNCHES A TELESCOPE TODAY THAT CAN SEE YESTERDAY? Stephen C. Meyer says the James Webb is bigger, more maneuverable and more powerful than the Hubble telescope, and it can detect infrared light emitted by stars formed shortly after (relatively speaking) the Big Bang.

But don’t expect to hear much about this in the Mainstream Media because the Webb telescope won’t do anything about the Omicron variant.

YES, THEY ARE LISTENING: Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) was speaking at the Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest in Arizona when suddenly, none other than Siri interrupted, reports Jeff Dunetz on The Lid. Cruz just happened to be speaking about the need to force Big Tech out of the censorship business.

POWERS BIG CAYMAN OOPS: Alana Goodman and Adam Kredo of the Washington Free Beacon dug into Samantha Powers’ financial disclosures as His Fraudulency’s USAID Administrator. And look what they found:

“Power lowballed the amount she held in a Cayman Islands-based investment fund by nearly $1 million. She said she held a stake in the fund valued between $50,000 and $100,000, according to a copy of her financial disclosure report filed in February ahead of her Senate confirmation and reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.

“But when she sold off the holding in June, as required by a federal ethics agreement, Power listed the sale as between $1,000,001 and $5,000,000—at least 10 times higher than the value four months before, according to the American Accountability Foundation watchdog group, which filed the ethics complaint.”

As chief of USAID, Powers has tremendous influence on the distribution of billions of dollars in U.S. aid, grants, program participation and training. What else might be found as investigators dig deeper?

CAN U.S. MILITARY DEFEND US? For decades, there was no doubt about the answer to that question, in our minds or those of our adversaries. Not so today, according to Paul Gilbert.

BET YOU DIDN’T KNOW: He “has been the topic of more songs, hymns and symphonies than any other figure in history. [His] followers innovated and changed the nature of music forever, and musicians and singers in every musical style continue to sing about him.”

And that’s just one of dozens of amazing facts about Jesus documented and compiled by J. Warner Wallace in his “Person of Interest.” It’s doubly amazing because, even in this most secular age ever, and no matter your particular opinion of Him, Jesus remains the single most influential individual who ever lived.

Just think: If you were writing a story about a guy you wanted to be remembered 2,000 years later, would you have his birth be to a couple of poor peasants in a backwater land of the greatest empire the world had ever seen and in a stall with a bunch of horses and cows? Merry Christmas to all of my Instapundit friends, critics, and skeptics. I treasure all of you.

BIDEN SHOVING CRT INTO HEALTHCARE: Hans Bader of Liberty Unyielding brings news  that doctors who agree to conduct a “clinic-wide review” of their “commitment to anti-racism will receive higher reimbursements from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) under a new proposed regulation by His Fraudulency’s minions.

“The Biden administration is essentially applying critical race theory to medicine, by treating racial disparities as having political causes — namely, being due to racism. The more extreme brands of critical race theory argue that all racial disparities are due to racism,” Bader points out.

ABOUT THOSE ROMAN ROADS: J. Warner Wallace explains how the roads Rome built to connect the far-flung corners of its empire paved the way for the birth of Jesus Christ and the spread of Christianity. Sometimes the unintended consequences of government policy can be positively world-changing.

DR. FAUX CHI HAS A WOMAN PROBLEM: To put it as precisely as possible, loads of women don’t trust him. Neither do a lot of other Americans, according to the latest Issues & Insights/TIPP Survey. Among much else, the survey found that 37 percent of women trust Faux Chi, while 45 percent don’t, a key portion of the overall responses that prompted the following observation:

“The data clearly indicate that Fauci has become a lightning rod of sorts for partisan public opinion. The high degree of distrust suggests public disappointment with the handling of the pandemic, which has created economic and social uncertainty and further widened America’s already-wide political divide.”

WILL COURTS SHUTTER PELOSI’S J6 SELECT COMMITTEE? Suits by Meadows, Eastman and four White House rally staffers all point to multiple ways House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the United States Capitol is violating its legislative authorization.

XFINITY BLOCKING CUSTOMER ACCESS TO EPOCH TIMES WEB SITE: The Epoch Times techies are telling the newsroom that Xfinity is blocking customers from opening the news web site, as well as the backend editing functions. Any Instapundit readers encountering this problem? If you are, please call Xfinity and RAISE HOLY HELL!

Update (from Steve): For what it’s worth, I’m on Xfinity and can’t get Epoch Times to load. But it loads just fine on cellular when I turn my phone’s wifi off.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): It’s working fine for me, on both Xfinity and Starlink.

UPDATE: Works for me if I go through Verizon via Hotspot.

UPDATE: Turns out it really does appear to be a Stackpath connectivity problem. Thanks to Instapundit reader Ron. I shared that info with Xfinity customer service and they then confirmed it. Stackpath doesn’t at this moment know the root cause.

UPDATE: Xfinity is again accessing the Epoch Times web site. Still no official word on what happened to block access for much of the afternoon and into the late evening.

YES, THERE IS ACTUAL EVIDENCE FOR THE VIRGIN BIRTH: Erik Manning lays it all out here on HillFaith today. Odds are, before the Christmas/New Year season is behind us, you will hear or read a skeptic deriding the Gospel of Matthew’s account of Jesus’ birth, so, if you aren’t sure, check it out, then make up your own mind after you hear both sides.

MASTER CLASS ON HILLARY IN ONE GRAPH: She, of all people, is teaching a “Master Class” on “the Power of Resilience.” Andrew Stiles of the Washington Free Beacon tells us what he learned under Hillary’s tutelage:

“You almost have to feel sorry for Hillary Clinton. Not really, but for the sake of argument. As recently as 2016, she was a multimillionaire feminist icon on the verge of making history. Now she’s just an irrelevant failure and ‘toxic white liberal’ who is despised or ignored by everyone outside the Acela corridor cocktail circuit. Her days of charging $225,500 to give a speech at the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries are long gone, yet she is either unable or unwilling to bow out gracefully. The Master Class gig seems like another step in Hillary’s inevitable evolution from failed politician to moderately successful self-help guru to extremely successful multilevel marketing executive to federal inmate.”

Pretty much captures it, don’t you think?

ARE RIGHT DONORS BEING FLEECED? American Majority’s Ned Ryun thinks so and he makes his case in this two-part sit-down with Michael Hartman, published by Capital Research Center.