Joe Biden takes a page from the playbook of the world's tinpot dictators May 3, 2021
By Monica Showalter
If you want a sense of why COVID with its mask and lockdown requirements is so very, very, important to the Biden administration, take a look at some of its curiously repressive actions in just this past week:
A well known veterans' POW/MIA group called AMVETS was denied a parking permit from the wokester Pentagon for its 34th annual Memorial Day motorcycle rally called "Rolling to Remember," on COVID concerns — after a delaying any response at all to the group for nearly a year. The parking denial left the group, which has leased the Pentagon parking space for decades, less than 30 days to secure another one somewhere else. They'd obtained the complicated permits for other parts of the event from six other local, state, and federal government agencies, so too bad about that.
The state of South Dakota was denied a fireworks permit in the vicinity of Mount Rushmore for Independence Day, once again on COVID concerns. That follows a failed promise from the Biden administration to "circle back" on an already-established Memorandum of Agreement about how to do the event COVID-safely, and then not doing it. After that, they issued the flat-out rejection, because COVID. South Dakota's governor, Kristi Noem, is suing.
What do these two denials of permits have in common? They are old dictator tricks. They're a passive-aggressive device to stop big rallies that tend to attract Trump-supporters and are popular. President Trump loved the biker groups and even visited them when he was in office, and they loved him back. Meanwhile, Mount Rushmore was the site of one of President Trump's most memorable fresh-air outdoor rallies, one which resulted in no COVID outbreak, according to the Associated Press. The rally capped off with a celebration with fireworks. Now, under Biden, no more fireworks. COVID concerns, see, nothing to do with politics.
It's bee ess — both of these events are striking in their large, visible numbers, and vivid Trump support. Already they've attempted to smear President Trump's huge Jan. 6 rally as an "insurrection" based on the trespassing at the Capitol of a few mostly non-voting losers at the fringe.
Now they're trying to suppress rallies. COVID, see, is so convenient for that. Never mind that COVID cases are way down, and states are opening up. Nope, COVID is now permanent, and the government can stop any opposition rally it wants.
Biden can't attract a crowd of any size to his rallies, which certainly is convenient.
Biden's Democrat coevals also are doing the third-world suppression act by kicking conservative candidates off the ballots in New York City on technicalities, as Ace of Spades notes, just as dictators do. All the Biden administration needs to do now, to complete the circle, as Jen Psaki might say, is to deny conservative outlets access to newsprint, the classic passive-aggressive dictator's trick. Oh, wait: nobody uses print. Their political allies in the tech oligarchies have suppressed full platforms and websites of conservatives, on "insurrection" concerns, the exact equivalent of denying access to newsprint.
COVID. Insurrection. Whatever floats the boat to keep the left's power. Don't think for a minute that all of these strange, outlying acts aren't about suppressing conservatives.
It comes just as the FBI is engaging in a lot of abuses targeted at conservatives, too — illegally getting into Rudy Giuliani's iCloud without a warrant, for instance, which violated his attorney-client privilege, in a selective prosecution of FARA violations that somehow exempts Hunter Biden, and busting down the door of an Alaska couple who'd attended the Jan. 6 rally in the Capitol, tying them up for three hours, and accusing them of stealing Nancy Pelosi's laptop, in a case of "mistaken" ID. Message: We're watching you, we can do it amazingly intrusively, and we can do the same with anyone else who attends a Trump rally. Kill the monkey, scare the chicken, as the Chinese like to say. (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt, Instapundit.)
It's getting bad out there. Biden knows that Trump draws big crowds to rallies. And Trump is talking up restarting them again, which coincides with the timing of these sudden shutdowns of pre-Trump crowd gatherings on phony COVID concerns. Sure, you can have a rally, see, you just can't have permits. What a convenience for Biden.
The message to the right is that you're outlaws, you're like the opposition in Venezuela with its avalanchas, and we're not going to put up the bad optics for Biden that Hugo Chávez put up with in those giant crowds against him. We're going to stop you. Putin in Russia plays this game, too, as do the Chicoms over in Hong Kong and the Chinese interior. Erdo an in Turkey plays this game, as does Lukashenko in Belarus. COVID, it seems, is the perfect all-purpose weapon for suppressing anyone coming out to express his political feelings in public. But only a certain politics — Antifa and Black Lives Matters with their violent mayhem don't even need permits. They get praise and a pass from Biden.
Tin-pot dictatorships, it seems, are the playbook, not the warning to the Bidenites in their suppressions.
Garbage like this has never happened, not once anywhere in American history. Biden is the change agent for that. That is going to be his legacy. But it's time for conservatives to push back on this Lukashenko stuff if we really want to have a country.