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The ADVANCE, January 27, 2021 /Page 6A
(51?e Ahumtce
A free press is not a privilege but
organic necessity in a great society.
—Walter Lippmann
COMMENTARY
out of
CONTEXT
A compilation of quotations on a variety of
issues by national, state and regional writers,
well-known personalities, just plain everyday
people and from various publications
collected by the editors of THE ADVANCE.
Quotes for our Times:
"I will always fight for you. I will be watch
ing. I will be listening. And I will tell you that
the future of this country has never been
better. I wish the new administration great
luck and great success. I think they'll have
great success. They have the foundation to
do something really spectacular. Goodbye.
We love you. We'll be back in some form."
Have a good life."We will see you soon."
President Donald Trump
Final words as he boarded Air Force One
January 20, 2021
Leah Barkoukis, online features editor
at Townhall.com: (Tucker) Carlson explains
what message Dems are sending with the
militarization of DC.
"Instead, unmistakably, the Democratic
Party is using those troops to send the rest
of us a message about power: 'We're in
charge now. We run this nation, from Ho
nolulu to our colony in the Caribbean and
everywhere in between, very much includ
ing where you and your family live. Do not
question us men with guns. We control the
Pentagon.' And indeed, they do," he said.
... America will not return to normal
once Biden is sworn in — "something aw
ful has been unleashed on our country." If
nothing is done about it, something worse
will come, he said.
Brad Slager covers politics and the busi
ness side of the Hollywood industry at out
lets such as RedState, HotAir, Twitchy, and
The Federalist: Tim Cook and Apple may
be bringing unforeseen trouble to big tech
companies.
First conservative voices were criticized,
then they were scorned as they moved to
another arena, and once they became suc
cessful elsewhere, they had to be targeted
for removal. It is clear these monolithic cor
porations acted in tandem, and there is no
debate the intent is to silence those from
only one side of the political landscape.
Given that the other platforms are equally
culpable and share the same framework in
the laws for their content means that these
giants may have a reckoning coming their
way.
That it arrives at the behest of their own
actions would be the most agreeable form
of justice, should it ever play out.
Beth Baumann, Associate Editor for
Townhall: Why 'The Squad' wants congres
sional leaders to rethink increased security
around the Capitol.
Instead of continuing with increased se
curity, "The Squad" wants an investigation
into the Capitol riots, they want a full inves
tigation into the riots and all findings made
public.
They also want the "white nationalists
and QAnon groups" recognized as a na
tional security threat and adequately ad
dress their threats.
The letter is signed by Tlaib, Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez, llhan Omar, Earl Blumenau-
er, Pramila Jayapal, Mondaire Jones, Ro
Khanna, Barbara Lee and Ayanna Pressley.
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gmail.com (Subject Line: Letter to the Editor).
The Flight 93 Post-Election
President Donald Trump
finally did what the foremost
metaphor associated with his
political rise would have
suggested — he plowed his
plane into the ground.
That metaphor is Flight 93,
courtesy of Michael Anton,
author of a famous essay before
the 2016 election about how
Republicans had no option but
to get on board with Trump.
“Charge the cockpit or you die,”
Anton wrote.
“The Flight 93 Election”
became a signature statement of
Trumpism and remains
incredibly relevant today. Its
mood perfectly captures the
post-election period and
especially what happened at the
U.S. Capitol — fevered, dark
and apocalyptic.
Anton wrote as if the end of
the republic were upon us, and
there’s nothing like a rabble
storming a citadel of American
democracy to buttress this view.
Of course, it was the man
Anton believed could be our
savior who whipped up this
crowd. The mob didn’t charge
the cockpit metaphorically, but
charged the Capitol literally, in
the grip of a more extreme,
rough-hewn version of Anton’s
logic and narrative.
Anton is obsessed with a
coming Democratic tyranny or
coup. So, too, are Trump and his
most fanatical supporters, who
weren’t content simply to write
highfalutin essays about how to
resist the coup, or “Stop the
Steal.”
If the pen is mighty, only
baseball bats and projectiles can
really make Mike Pence and
Nancy Pelosi afraid.
Make no mistake: A Flight
93 mentality led to the Jan. 6
presidency, now defined not by
any of the good it accomplished
butbyahideous act of extremism
in its desperate, spittle-flecked
final days.
In Anton’s defense, he never
said he believed that Trump
knew how to fly a plane. In the
future, when hiring someone to
pilot the most advanced jetliner
on the planet, he might want to
add that to the job description,
and check a couple of references.
Anton wrote that “only in a
corrupt republic, in corrupt
time, could a Trump rise.” Rather
than concluding that this spoke
poorly of Trump, he made it into
a kind of virtue. “Yes, Trump is
worse than imperfect,” he wrote.
“So what?”
So what, indeed.
Trump was supposed to be a
winner when other Republicans,
Anton argued, were hopeless
losers.
In reality, Trump won a
fluky victory in 2016, with just
46.1% of the vote. Predictably,
he lost the House in 2018. He
then lost his re-election bid and
contributed to the loss of the
GOP Senate majority with his
outlandish claims of election
fraud.
In office, Trump didn’t win
saving-America-from-the-
apocalypse-type victories, as
one would have expected from
Anton’s hysterical advocacy.
Instead, they were the
achievements of a standard
Republican with a populist bent
— tax cuts with tariffs on top.
Trump threw away his
presidency in the end, though,
largely because of the character
flaws that Anton dismissed or
valorized.
In his essay, Anton attacked
his conservative enemies as
caring only about their careers
and money, while throwing in
with a rank egoist who fetishizes
his wealth and status, who didn’t
care enough abouthis supporters
or his own political cause to
work harder in office or
moderate his behavior, who led
his most committed supporters
into a box canyon of lies and
conspiracy theories after the
election because he couldn’t
admit that he lost.
What made Anton’s essay so
bracing was its undercurrent of
nihilism, a sense that character
and norms no longer matter, not
when we are engaged in an
existential struggle for power.
Trump has acted in keeping
with an exaggerated version of
this ethic, throwing aside truth
and the law in pursuit of a second
term to which he is not entitled.
We have seen that this path
isn’t suited to saving the republic,
but to tearing it apart and
embarrassing it before the world.
It can’t and shouldn’t work, and
produced an immediate backlash
and second impeachment.
This is not really fighting. It
is giving up.
Rich Lowry is editor of the
National Review.
(c) 2020 by King Features Synd.,
Inc.
GRITTY
It’s a Small World
During my early
teen years, I spent a
lot of time cooking
and preparing
hamburgers on the
grill in my daddy’s
cafe in Mt. Vernon,
GA. Many of my
friends started calling
me Hamburger
Patrick Palmer
Calhoun was one of them.
Pat was an old friend that I’ve written
about before and since many of the readers
of my columns remember Pat, I have a story
that I want to share. Last year, just a few
weeks before Christmas, my daughter Tara
called and asked if I ever knew a Pat Calhoun
Patrick Palmer Calhoun
from Mt. Vernon. I told her that I certainly
did know Pat Calhoun - he and I grew up
about a block from each other and were
boyhood friends. She then said that her
daughter Ann has a teacher that said her dad
was from Mt. Vernon and his name was Pat
Calhoun.
Her teacher’s name is Catherine
Douglas and it turns out that she is the
daughter of Pat Calhoun that I knew. I told
Tara that Pat was killed in Vietnam in 1965.
He was the pilot of a helicopter that flew
into battle zones to airlift wounded
American soldiers away from danger and to
get much needed medical help.
Please see Nitty page 9A
HI jpcf
COMMENTARY
Freedom
of Speech
Slipping Away
As the new
Biden-Harris
administration
assumes power,
the most basic
American
freedom of
speech and
expression is
By Star Parker under
unprecedented
threat.
For the first time ever, I am
concerned about my freedom to do
my work, to run a policy institute
addressing issues of culture, race and
poverty from a conservative
perspective.
Technology — the internet —
which was largely nonexistent just 25
years ago, now plays a huge role in
our lives as a tool of communication.
In a survey just published by the
Pew Research Center, 86% say they
“often” or “sometimes” get their news
from a digital device — smartphone,
tablet or computer. This compared
with 68% who say they “often” or
“sometimes” get their news from
television, 50% who get it from radio
and 32% who get it from print
publications.
According to Statista.com, the
United States has 223 million
Facebook users, almost the size of
the entire U.S. population over age
18. Per Pew, 22% of U.S. adults use
Twitter.
These developments have put
enormous power at the disposal of
technology firms over what we see
and read.
Power alone doesn’t worry me.
Exclusive power, power to control,
does.
The decision by Twitter to kick
the president of the United States off
of Twitter, disconnecting him from
the 89 million who follow him, is
mind-boggling.
President Trump has noted, with
total legitimacy, that he turned to
social media as his platform of
preference to communicate with the
country because of widespread bias
in the mainstream media.
What gives the technology
companies so much discretion over
communication, the oxygen of our
free country?
Please see Guest page 9A
