Boy, has this been a week!

This edition of the 5QT won’t even comment on the pristine failure of the GOP caucus in the House, which contains some not-insignificant number of representatives whose contempt for Republican voters is as palpable as it is sincere, to elect Jim Jordan (or, for that matter, Steve Scalise) as its speaker. But it will comment on something else happening at the Capitol this week, namely the full-fledged insurrection by bona fide enemy agents who rallied, quite disagreeably and perhaps not even “mostly peacefully,” on behalf of a Muslim terrorist group currently holding Americans as hostages after murdering some number of our fellow citizens amid its slaughter of Israeli citizens.

It’s difficult, given standards set for us a little less than three years ago, not to have seen the Hamas Insurrection on Capitol Hill as an atrocity that stands up to 9/11 and Pearl Harbor. And to ask why its organizers and participants, some of whom, in the spirit of Enrique Tarrio, were not actually in the building during the insurrection, have not been apprehended and dragged into the D.C. gulag. That is, we’re given to understand, the fate of insurrectionists.

No?

Then let’s talk about Rashida Tlaib.

1. Forget Censure. Boot Her Out.

A primary instigator of the Hamas Insurrection at the Capitol was one Rashida Tlaib, a Democratic Socialists of America apparatchik serving as a congresswoman from Michigan, who spoke at a demonstration outside the building in tones very suggestive of incitement:

Rashida Tlaib spewed the same lie that Israel bombed a hospital in Gaza just before Hamas supporters stormed the Capitol complex.

Should she be arrested for inciting an insurrection? pic.twitter.com/utNm2NPpWV

— Congressman Troy E. Nehls (@RepTroyNehls) October 19, 2023

She’s repeating the blood libel of the week, which is that Israel bombed a hospital in Gaza and killed some 500 Palestinian civilians. This was a categorical lie, and by the time she put on that performance, it had already been exposed as such.

That led to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene bringing a resolution of censure against Tlaib, a courageous and laudable gesture that is utterly insufficient for the circumstances at hand.

Tlaib doesn’t need to be censured. She needs to be removed, or at minimum there ought to be a proceeding brought to that effect and the members of the House ought to be put to the question.

Especially this week, when Democrat after Democrat has attacked Jim Jordan as a traitor for having questioned the irregular conduct of the 2020 presidential election.

However spurious that charge might be, if Jordan isn’t fit to serve in any capacity, much less speaker, for expressing doubts about the deficiencies in electoral proceedings in 2020, then surely Rashida Tlaib must be drummed out of the House for spouting the propaganda of an enemy terrorist group that has murdered and kidnapped Americans in only the past several days, no?

Particularly when advocacy such as hers can be tied to the rampant mob violence against Americans and other Westerners as the blood libel about the hospital incited attacks on U.S. embassies and other sensitive targets.

What consequence should that engender? The slap on the wrist of a censure?

I think not. I think it’s time to hold the Left to its own standard. Rashida Tlaib must be removed from Congress by a vote of her peers — or, if she survives that vote, at least the American public will know among our elected representatives who stands with Hamas and its simps here in America.

2. The Legacy Corporate Media Must Now Be Destroyed

Or maybe Rashida Tlaib simply reads the New York Times.

Legacy corporate media coverage of the “hospital bombing,” which was actually a friendly-fire episode when a misfired Islamic Jihad rocket fell short and landed in the hospital parking lot, killing not 500 but more like a dozen, has been quite possibly the most obvious case of enemy propaganda disguised as objective reporting in American history. Mark Hemingway takes up the subject at the Federalist:

If only this kind of dishonest propagandizing from Hamas had been entirely predictable and news organizations could have known to watch out for it! On Oct. 11, six days before the rocket landed in the Gaza hospital parking lot, Adam Rubenstein, tweeted the following: “Also, worth keeping in mind that the ‘they-only-beheaded-some-of-the-babies’ crowd will be quick to cite the death toll of Gazans with no ‘verification’ other than from reports by the Gaza Health Ministry, an arm of Hamas.”

(For what it’s worth, I used to work with Rubenstein at The Weekly Standard, and after we worked together, Rubenstein went on to work on the editorial page of… The New York Times. That job didn’t last too long, at least not after Rubenstein found himself unfairly accused of publishing a perfectly rational op-ed that so offended the hard-left sensibilities of the rest of the paper’s staff they made the laughable claim that being exposed to a contrary opinion literally endangered their lives. At this point, I’m not sure someone like Rubenstein, who is not willing to surrender his rational faculties in order to spout left-wing talking points, is even allowed to work at the Times, no matter how much the paper could benefit from a sensible perspective.)

In any event, The New York Times, along with almost every other major corporate media organization, needs to be held accountable for what happened next:

These protests were not inconsequential. In several cities, angry crowds gathered at American embassies, leading to serious concerns that there would be another Benghazi-style attack. Then there were examples of random violence, such as this from Tunisia: “The synagogue [in Tunisia] attack came hours after false media reports claimed that the Israel Defense Forces had bombed the Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza. US and Israeli officials, along with independent intelligence analysts, have all concluded that the blast was due to an errant rocket launched by the Gaza-based Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist group,” reports The Algemeiner. I don’t know whether it’s fortunate or depressing to note that it was not a functioning synagogue, since any sizable Jewish community has long since been driven out of Muslim Tunisia.

We’re past the point of dismissing these brazen, never-ending, malificent campaigns of mendacity as mere par for the course. They are that, but the legacy press is now so consistently, purposefully dishonest as to put in jeopardy our republic.

As Thomas Jefferson said, “[W]herever the people are well informed they can be trusted with their own government; that whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights.”

But how can one have a well-informed public when the supposedly great institutions of public information spew lie after lie in an effort to misinform, all the while conspiring to censor differing opinions that ultimately prove more truthful?

This cannot continue. It is far easier to break and rebuild the legacy corporate media than it is to break and rebuild the republic, and so the former must be our project.

Those media organizations that consistently lie to the public must have their advertisers boycotted and their subscriber base stripped of all good-faith Americans. As a forest fire leads quickly to new growth in the forest, so will a destruction of these institutions bring about reform and truth.

3. The Street Money Rules

I have two Louisiana entries to follow, if you’ll forgive my spasm of provincialism. Both are, I think, instructive.

First, as readers of this column know, there was a conservative blowout in this past weekend’s elections in the Bayou State. Jeff Landry is our new governor-elect, and he’s the most conservative Republican politician ever to hold that seat. Landry is joined by practically an entire government full of his ideological brothers and sisters as the Left was turned out in numbers so definitive that this might as well have been Louisiana’s Second Reconstruction.

But in the aftermath, there is a great deal of wailing among the state’s Democrats over their awful performance, and one of the most specific complaints was this one. Speaking is Robert Collins, a political analyst at majority-black Dillard University in New Orleans:

“They did not have a get-out-the-vote operation,” he said. “They did not have any sort of structure to get their message out. They did not have any structure to transport voters to the polls. It’s just staggering.

“I think the Chair has to change, I think all of the executive officers have to change. I think you probably need some new members, maybe some younger members, within the Democratic state central committee.”

Collins is calling for the ouster of Katie Bernhardt, the rich white liberal who’s currently the state Democrat Party chair.

But did you pick up on what he said? Collins defines a get-out-the-vote operation as, essentially, Souls To The Polls.

He’s talking about street money in the black community.

It doesn’t take “structure” to get a political message out. Believe me, I know. The PAC I ran in these same elections made nearly 650,000 voter contacts via text message in more than 30 legislative races, and we spent just a little over $40,000 doing it. What was our structure? A bank account, a text vendor, and a guy to write all those text messages — which, to my insomniac glee, was me. Plus a few folks to bounce some of our messaging off of and polling we had done months before to gauge issues of importance to the voters.

And we made a definite and meaningful, if not decisive, impact on at least four of those races (our 39 endorsed candidates won 22 races, lost 10, and seven others are in runoffs with a good possibility we could sweep all of them), simply by texting conservative messages to conservative voters to get them out to vote.

So I don’t want to hear about a “structure,” because that’s code for an army of street-money pushers. And the dead giveaway is when Collins is talking about transporting voters to the polls.

If there was any Republican effort to transport voters to the polls anywhere in Louisiana, I don’t know about it.

What’s the lesson here? It’s that if the Democrats don’t have community organizers, street money, Souls To The Polls, and all the attendant shady vote-harvesting techniques that go with such efforts, their voters will not show up.

Now, they do have those things. They didn’t materialize in Louisiana, because the out-of-state funders opted not to belly up to the bar when they knew they couldn’t win.

So the challenge is to make the money, without which the Democrat machines can’t function, dry up.

I don’t have any smart ideas on how to do that. But I think it’s a subject people much more astute than me ought to be thinking about and plotting solutions for. Because there, friends, is the game — and it might be the most important lesson Louisiana’s elections have to teach the nation.

4. The Funniest Carjacking of All Time

It isn’t funny, and you certainly shouldn’t laugh, but on Monday, New Orleans’ Soros-funded district attorney Jason Williams, on whose watch the city has become a bottomless cesspool of crime, was carjacked as he attempted to drive his 78-year-old mother home.

Williams was safe following the incident, and so was his mother, so it’s … still not OK to laugh at the irony of the carjacking. Hey you, in the back. Stop that laughing, sharpish.

Oh, but then there was an arrest made in the case on Tuesday:

Less than 24 hours after the high-profile carjacking of New Orleans District Attorney Jason Williams and his 78-year-old mother, police arrested an 18-year-old in connection with the armed heist. Following his arrest late Tuesday afternoon, Raymond Rochon also was booked in three prior auto thefts for which arrest warrants had been issued.

Late Wednesday afternoon, a New Orleans magistrate found probable cause to hold Rochon on criminal charges and set his bond at $120,000.

Rochon’s attorney Michael Kennedy argued for a lower amount.

“Now obviously we all know what my client is actually accused of which perhaps was not the charge on the docket before the court today, but I’m sure there was no way that was not taken into consideration,” Kennedy said.

According to court documents, Rochon was picked up near his home in the 7600 block of Brevard Street on Tuesday, in the Little Woods neighborhood.

Police say they tracked a stolen Dodge pickup truck, allegedly used in the carjacking, to Rochon’s home.

Court documents indicate, as officers were reading Rochon his rights, he interrupted and said, “I know why y’all are here…y’all’s people had been got,” a reference to DA Williams.

Curiously, Rochon was booked with two charges, unauthorized use of a stolen vehicle and possession of a stolen vehicle. Those aren’t considered violent crimes, so even after carjacking the DA, he’s not being charged as a violent criminal. And he hasn’t, as of this writing, been charged with carjacking.

There were supposedly seven different arrest warrants out for this kid when he carjacked the DA. And the cops had zero trouble finding him to make an arrest after Williams’ ordeal.

That’s New Orleans for you. Ask yourself how much of this is incompetence and how much is corruption backfiring on the corrupt.

5. And This Is … PERFECT.

We can close with one of the greatest hits of all time from the Babylon Bee. Needs no introduction:

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