EVERYTHING THEY TOLD YOU ABOUT JANUARY 6 WAS FALSE: Between liberal journo Glenn Greenwald’s nuking of the New York Times’ “beaten to death with a fire extinguisher” fairy tale and this damning editorial from Issues & Insights, how can anybody ever again believe what they read in the mainstream media?

RETURN OF THE ‘BLAME AMERICA FIRST’ CROWD: Daily Caller News Foundation’s Chuck Morris reports that  Jeffrey Sachs, the Columbia University economics professor who formed and runs the Lancet COVID-19 Commission to investigate the pandemic, thinks America is a “divisive” force on the world stage, unlike those ever-peace-loving guys running the dictatorship known as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

And in other Lancet-related news, the august medical group’s commission to study the impact of Donald Trump on everybody’s else’s health concluded thusly: “Trump exploited low and middle-income white people’s anger over their deteriorating life prospects to mobilise racial animus and xenophobia and enlist their support for policies that benefit high-income people and corporations and threaten health.”

This apparently is an illustration of that to which The Lancet is entirely devoted, “The best science for better lives: A manifesto for social change.” Uh, huh. If you have the stomach for it, the study can be read in its suffocating completeness here.

FORGET FIXING AMERICA, LET’S KEEP TRUMP OUT OF ARLINGTON CEMETERY: That’s the mindset of the 13 House Democrats co-sponsoring H.R. 484, the “No Glory for Hate Act of 2021” that bars former President Donald Trump from being buried at Arlington National Cemetary.

IMPERMANENCE OF THE PAST: “Fully recovered lawyer” Mark Pulliam, writing at Law & Liberty, cogitates about how quickly freedom can be lost when parents don’t pass along to their off-spring knowledge of and appreciation for the facts of the nation’s history.

But the passage is made doubly difficult by systematic and sustained efforts to erase the heritage and its memory. Pulliam’s observations about the campaign led by Texas Land Commissioner George P. Bush to “reimagine” the Alamo, the remarkable shrine of Texas liberty, are thus especially on point:

“Alamo defenders, adamant that the shrine to Texas valor needed no ‘reimagining,’ ultimately thwarted Bush’s plans after an extended fight — at least for now. Revisionist historians risibly demonize the Alamo as a ‘symbol of whiteness’ and even ‘the largest statue to the Confederacy in this country.’ The battle is not over.”

BIDEN’S $1.9 TRILLION ‘STIMULUS’ WILL SHRINK THE ECONOMY: Hans Bader notes that even the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) agrees that in the long run, the Biden plan will shrink the economy.

WHAT WOULD YOU SAY? IS AMERICA RACIST? I doubt that there is a more tolerant nation anywhere on the globe or in history, but that fact doesn’t stop the Hate America Crowd from constantly telling us we are all a bunch of bigots.

Having endlessly heard that accusation for so long, my temptation is increasingly just to tell the accusers to bugger off. Here, however, the Colson Center’s Ryan Bomberger offers four more diplomatic responses to proponents of Critical Race Theory.

WAIT A MINUTE, TRUMP ‘LAUNCHED’ THE GOP CIVIL WAR? To hear an unidentified Washington Examiner headline writer tell it, that’s exactly what former President Donald Trump did by responding to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell denunciation on the Senate floor shortly after the second acquittal of the impeached 45th Chief Executive. “Trump Launches Republican Civil War With Attack on ‘Hack’ McConnell” is how the headline read.

Examiner White House Reporter, Rob Crilly, who wrote the news story thus headlined, put the issue slightly more deftly, saying in his lead that Trump merely “threatened” a civil war with his vintage OrangeManBad verbal stomping on McConnell.

So, to apply these two standards, we would have to rewrite the history books to say, for example, that President Abraham Lincoln either launched the Civil War or threatened to do so by re-supplying Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. The bloody four-year conflict that followed was not the started by the Confederates who first fired on the freshened facility, as we were all taught many years ago.

LET THE PARENT REVOLT BEGIN: David Catron at The American Spectator sees a revolt coming from parents who are sick and tired of hearing from teachers about why they can’t come back to work due to Covid.

My view is the long-extended sickout justified by Covid fears is the best thing to happen to American education in decades because it finally exposed the teachers unions for the frauds they are. And home-schooling has gotten a huge boost. So when do Republicans in Congress start talking up an opt-out on education taxes for parents whose kids do not attend public schools?

PELOSI LEARNS TO LOVE THOSE ‘STORM TROOPERS:’ The razor-wire barrier, military vehicles blocking streets and National Guardsmen manning checkpoints are going to remain in place at least until the Fall, Tristan Justice of The Federalist notes.

So, remember last summer when Antifa and Black Lives Matter were burning down cities, assaulting a federal courthouse, destroying police precinct headquarters and beating Trump supporters on the streets of the nation’s capital?

That was when Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi accused National Guardsmen dispatched to protect the courthouse in Portland, Oregon, of acting like “storm troopers.”

But that was then and everything changed on January 6. Now, the Capitol looks like an armed camp. Madama Speaker will only give up those guardsmen when, to paraphrase Charleton Heston, they are pried from her cold, dead fingers (speaking metaphorically, of course).

SOME THOUGHTS ON MUSIC AND MIND: I know, I know, it sounds like I’m off in the clouds, again. Still, I dare you to spend a couple of undistracted hours listening to Mark Knopfler, Phil Coulter and Braveheart’s “End Credits,” as I was wonderfully able to do last night.

Then just try to tell me it didn’t set you to thinking about God, who, let us never forget, is the author of all our rights and liberties, according to the preamble of Mr. Jefferson’s Declaration. Knopfler, by the way, just might be the best guitarist/songwriter ever.

COMING SOON TO OBAMACARE: Looks like Brits with learning disabilities who contract Covid are just plain out of luck because the National Health Service — Britain’s forerunner of Obamacare — has decreed resuscitation will not be available to them. This is called “rationing healthcare.”

14 ‘RED-DISTRICT DEMOCRATS’ WHO MAY BE DREADING VOTING FOR HR1: Trump either carried their district twice or at least once, and HR1 is stuffed to the gun-whales with voter registration and election procedure “reforms” that cast a permanent pall on the 2020 election. And much more that advances the progressive federalization of everything.

CONSPIRACIES HERE! CONSPIRACIES THERE! CONSPIRACIES EVERYWHERE! Want to know why so many folks across the ideological spectrum turn to conspiracies, just scan the political coverage bylines in the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, USAT, etc. etc. When you keep telling people your highly slanted half of the story, don’t be surprised when people turn to alternative explanations.

CAN’T GET THE COVID VACCINE? THIS MAY BE WHY: The Lid’s Jeff Dunetz brings together multiple reports of foreigners crossing the Southern border with Mexico to obtain the Covid vaccine shots.

“Texas only vaccinates Texans. California immunizes anyone with a pulse: residents, illegal aliens, vaccine tourists, even governors who believe the COVID rules he sets don’t apply to him,” Dunetz observes.

ABOUT MITCH MCCONNELL’S SATURDAY SPEECH: Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s angry speech on the Senate floor following President Donald Trump’s second acquittal on impeachment charges wasn’t really about Trump, it was about all of us outside the old corporate Republican Establishment, according to Christopher Bedford at The Federalist. It won’t soon be forgotten.

HERE COMES THE END OF PRIVACY, POLITICAL SPEECH AND RELIGIOUS FREEDOM: But other than that, there really is nothing at all wrong with the Equality Act President Joe Biden and the Democrats on Capitol Hill are preparing to shove down America’s throat.

JUST ANOTHER LIE ABOUT BIDEN’S COVID AID PACKAGE: New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and a bunch of other Blue State officials were at the White House last week begging for bailouts. But as Issues & Insights points out, why do they have their begging cups in hand when state tax revenues are headed upward?

SOONER OR LATER PELOSI MUST ANSWER: Four ranking GOPers on House committees concerned with Capitol Complex security are demanding answers from Speaker Pelosi on her role in the January 6 failure.

NOTICE THE DEAFENING SILENCE ON WOMEN LEAVING THE WORKFORCE? Michael Hartman of the Capital Research Center did, and in fact he predicted last summer that it would happen, thanks to the teachers unions.

NO, MR. RASKIN, WE DIDN’T GIVE YOU OUR SOVEREIGN POWERS: James Bovard, writing for the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), points to something Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) said during one of his numerous Senate impeachment trial of President Donald Trump:

“In his final pitch to senators on Thursday, Raskin included the usual hackneyed references to Abraham Lincoln and the Declaration of Independence. Then Raskin recited the first ‘We the People’ sentence of the preamble of the Constitution and declared: ‘You see what just happened? The sovereign power of the people … flowed right into Congress.’”

Maybe Raskin missed class that day at Harvard Law when the concepts of sovereignty and public servant were covered.

THE LIGHT AT THE END OF THE COVID TUNNEL: American Commitment’s Phil Kerpen tells Bill Walton there are multiple reasons to think the worst of the Covid crisis is behind us. For one thing, the decline in the present wave of “new cases” is happening across the country, not just in sections.

BTW, if you appreciate informal, substantive and intelligent conversations about the most important issues of the day, “The Bill Walton Show” will delight you. Like this one with Kerpen, Walton’s conversations are lengthy at just under 50 minutes, but in my experience always well-worth the invested time. And, no, this is not the former NBA star Bill Walton, but the Bill Walton who built Allied Capital.

ABOUT THAT IMPEACHMENT TRIAL: John Daniel Davidson points in The Federalist to a fundamental weakness in the Democrats’ case against Trump: To be guilty of incitement, Trump had to clearly and without a doubt instruct his supporters to go to the Capitol and riot.

And that in turn means there must be rioters who did so because they thought that’s exactly what Trump told them to do. But no rioters saying that were produced as witnesses during the House impeachment debate or the Senate trial so far, so the Democrats use carefully edited video to prompt emotional responses that cultivate the assumption that’s what they thought. Well, no, says Davidson:

“But here’s the thing: it doesn’t matter if they thought they were carrying out Trump’s orders. It’s not Trump’s fault these people are idiots. And unless Democrats can produce some evidence that Trump gave the rioters instructions to attack the Capitol, we’ll have to rely on what we know Trump said, which was to encourage the protesters to march ‘peacefully.’” Davidson’s entire critique is arguably devastating.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Related: Ann Althouse: “The question I think should be at the core of the impeachment trial but is not: Did Trump intend that the crowd break into the Capitol and terrorize the members of Congress? . . . I want to be pointed to the part of the trial that addresses the question: Did Trump intend that the crowd break into the Capitol and terrorize the members of Congress?”

Well, they can’t point to that because he didn’t. That’s why they’re blowing smoke and peddling doctored videos for emotional impact.

PRESSURE GROWS TO END FORTRESS PELOSI: Lots of senators and representatives declined to comment, but the disgust with the razor-wire barrier, thousands of National Guardsmen manning checkpoints, and metal detectors barring entry to carrying members is obvious and growing.

IF FRANCE WORRIES ABOUT OUR LEFT-WARD LUNGE: Boy, things must be even worse than we perpetual pessimists think they are.

BIDEN’S CIA PICK IS CHINA’S BFF: The Lid’s Jeff Dunetz notes that William J. Burns comes from a think tank that has close ties to the Chinese military, and including significant funding from a well-connected Chinese business tycoon. In any other age, such relationships would be disqualifying for the nation’s chief spook. But c’mon man, China is our friend now, right? Right?