Left-wing violence chic

 

Left-wing violence chic

Victor Davis Hanson, Jewish World Review 

A transgender Tennessee mass shooter this week executed three adults and three nine-year-old children at a Nashville private Christian school.

Supposedly she left behind her a manifesto justifying her mass murdering. As of this writing, law enforcement officials have declined to make the document public.

Yet in about a nano-second after the news was disclosed, the left-wing activist machine kicked in, led by politicians, entertainers, and the media.

Three predictable themes surfaced.

The first was led by none other than President Joe Biden. He lectured that guns were the cause of the mass deaths, not the free will of a psychopathic killer.

Few noted that the shooter illegally purchased firearms by hiding her documented record of emotional disorders.

Second, America was told that it would serve no purpose to publish the shooter's manifesto. Apparently, this exception to the usual practice was due to fears her manifesto would hurt the transgender cause.

Third, some in the activist media claimed that, while such murdering was regrettable, it was also understandable – given supposed Christian, conservative America's intolerance of transgender people. In our sick society, the targeted victims became the political victimizers.

Did the transgender shooter anticipate that violence for her "correct" cause would be either contextualized or blamed on the weapon rather than she who used it?

Likewise, at about the same time, a transgender activist entered the Texas Legislature and physically fought with the sergeant-of-arms.

Just days after the Nashville shooting, a trans advocacy group decided neither to cancel, nor to change the name of, their long-planned "Trans Day of Vengeance" protest in front of the Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C.

It was recently disclosed that federal authorities did little or nothing last year when anti-abortion mobs traveled to the homes of conservative Supreme Court justices, yelling and disrupting their neighborhoods.

That mobbing was in clear violation of federal laws prohibiting protesters from swarming the homes of justices to influence their opinions. Yet, mysteriously, Attorney General Merrick Garland demurred from prosecuting the lawbreakers or beefing up security.

Amid this environment of general chaos, a would-be assassin of Justice Brett Kavanaugh turned up near the justice's home, but was convinced by his own sister to surrender.

In March 2020, then-Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., had all but called for violence against the justices, when he threatened two by name before an angry pro-abortion crowd protesting at the doors to the court:

"I want to tell you Gorsuch; I want to tell you Kavanaugh – you have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You won't know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions."

What did Schumer mean by "whirlwind," "pay the price" and "what hit you"?

On a recent episode of ABC's "The View," octogenarian actress Jane Fonda reentered controversy by boasting that women were not going to retreat on abortion rights. And if their marching and protesting were not enough, Fonda smirked, "Well, I've thought of murder."

Recently Wayne State Professor Steven Shaviro posted his views on free speech on campus: "Although I do not advocate violating federal and state criminal codes, I think it is far more admirable to kill a racist, homophobic, or transphobic speaker than it is to shout them down."

Shaviro apparently was referring to the mob at Stanford Law School that shouted down U.S. Fifth Circuit Judge Kyle Duncan, who had been invited to speak by the campus Federalist Society. Students prevented him from delivering his lecture, apparently for his past refusal to change the pronouns of a convicted pedophile.

Among the many obscene taunts that were leveled at the judge by Stanford's future lawyers, one law-school protester shouted that he hoped Duncan's daughters would be raped.

U.S. Senator Rand Paul, R-Ky., House Majority Leader Steven Scalise, R-La., and former Republican New York gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin have all been the target of vicious politically driven physical attacks.

Most Americans decried the illegal entry into the Capitol on January 6, 2021, by protesting Trump supporters. Over 1,000 have been charged, or are in prison, with hundreds more facing indictment.

Yet none in the Capitol were armed. And the only ones to die violently that day were among the protesters themselves.

No so in the summer 2020. Then the vast majority of the Black Lives Matter and Antifa-led violent protesters who rioted, burned, and looted for 120 days – injuring 1,500 police officers and causing over 35 deaths – were either not arrested or released.

For that matter, what do Johnny Depp, Snoop Dogg, Kathy Griffin, George Lopez, Moby, Rosie O'Donnell, Mickey Rourke, and Larry Wilmore all have in common? At one time or another they alluded to various ways of imagining former President Donald Trump's violent death.

What do Joe Biden, Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., and Robert De Niro have in common? They all bragged of their desire to physically assault or beat up Trump.

For the radical Left, ideology exempts its political violence. The result for everyone else is an open-season and the end of deterrence – and frightening days ahead.

Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in Residence in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution, a professor of classics emeritus at California State University at Fresno, and a nationally syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services.

Perverse World of Leftist Ideology

 

Transgender Shooter Reveals Perverse World of Leftist Ideology

Ben Shapiro, The Daily Signal 

The legacy media have a preset narrative machine when it comes to mass shootings. That narrative machine takes into account the identities of the shooter and the victims, and then churns out an explanation for the shooting. White shooter, black victims: systemic racism. Black shooter, white victims: alienation caused by systemic racism. Muslim shooter, gay victims: Christian homophobia.

On Monday, a self-identified 28-year-old trans man shot up a Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee, killing three children and three adults. The shooter left a manifesto, which police said reeked of “resentment.” And so this week, we are learning what pops up in the narrative machine when the inputs are “trans man” and “Christian schoolchildren.”

And here’s what pops up: America is systemically cruel to trans people, who apparently cannot be blamed for losing control and targeting small children at Christian schools. A hate crime by a trans-identifying person against a religious group is immediately transmuted into a generalized societal crime against the mass shooter herself.

Thus, NBC contributor Benjamin Ryan tweeted, “NBC has ID’d the Nashville school shooter… Nashville is home to the Daily Wire, a hub of anti-trans activity by @MattWalshBlog, @BenShapiro and @MichaelJKnowles.”

Newsweek tweeted a story titled, “Tennessee Republicans’ ban on drag shows criticized after mass shooting.”

ABC News correspondent Terry Moran stated that the shooter “identified herself as a transgender person. The State of Tennessee earlier this month passed and the governor signed a bill that banned transgender medical care for minors … “

In the perverse world of leftist victimology, this makes sense: If you are a member of a supposedly victimized group, you cannot be the victimizer; there must be another victimizer who has victimized you, turning you back into a victim.

But if we truly wish to prevent future acts of violence by unhinged lunatics, we ought to utilize a lens other than the lie of victimhood. Instead, we ought to consider the possibility that it is dangerous to promote the idea that mentally ill people ought to be celebrated as political groundbreakers by the legacy media for their symptoms, and simultaneously told that their suicidal ideations are caused by the intolerance of a broader society.

According to a recent 2022 study, “Transgender and gender-diverse youth emerge as the group at the highest risk of support for violent radicalization.”

Teaching trans-identifying people that their suffering is caused by a cruelly religious and patriarchal world, explaining that these forces put their very lives in danger—that, indeed, they are victims of a potential “genocide”—creates an incredibly dangerous ideological predicate for violent action.

But the legacy media, by and large, support that narrative. To admit the obvious—that men cannot be women and vice versa; that believing you were born “in the wrong body” is a mental disorder, not a weapon to be used in tearing down an unjust society; that high rates of depression and suicidal ideation among those who identify as transgender is not caused predominantly by societal intolerance but by the disorder itself—undermines the new civil rights crusade the Left has built, directed against traditional roles and institutions.

And so the new narrative must be maintained. A woman who shot to death six people, including three children, in cold blood must be recast as a victim of society. We must respect “his” pronouns even as we report “his” murders. We must blame those who truly cause pain in the world: those who disagree with the thought leaders in our legacy media, who know better than all the common sense, biology, and tradition in the world.

‘Arctic Air Force’

4 Nordic ‘NATO’ Countries To Create 250-Jet Joint ‘Arctic Air Force’

Paul Crespo, American Liberty

ANALYSIS – Even as Turkey and Hungary hold back Sweden's entry into NATO and Finland is still not formally admitted (but expected to join in weeks), both are joining an unprecedented new club with their Nordic brethren Denmark and Norway – the joint jet fighter force.

Their four air forces agreed to operate their roughly 250 jet fighters as one fleet based on NATO methodology and tactics.

And their focus will be protecting NATO's northern flank as well as the Arctic.

Together, said the commander of the Danish air force, Major General Jan Dam: “Our combined fleet can be compared to a large European country.”

Their air forces operate a mix of jet fighters, including Jas Gripens and F-16s and F-18s, as well as newer stealth F-35s.

Sweden will continue to maintain a fleet of new modernized Gripen E and C/D models.

Denmark will begin replacing its F-16s with F-35s this year, and Finland is slated to replace its F-18s with F-35s beginning in 2026.

Norway already operates F-35s but will add to that fleet by 2025.

Once admitted, adding Sweden and Finland's air forces to NATO more than doubles the number of fourth- and fifth-generation fighters currently planned to be fielded by the Nordic members of NATO.

A declaration of intent on March 16 by the Finnish and Danish forces was published Thursday and Friday, respectively, according to statements.

But it's not just a joint fighter force.

The intent is a fully unified Nordic air defense system aimed at countering the rising threat from Russia.

“We would like to see if we can integrate our airspace surveillance more, so we can use radar data from each other's surveillance systems and use them collectively,” Dam said. “We are not doing that today.”

“The ultimate goal is to be able to operate seamlessly together as one force by developing a Nordic concept for joint air operations based on already known NATO methodology,” Denmark's air force said.

Bloomberg reported that “The cooperation will encompass integrated command and control, operational planning and execution, flexible deployment of forces, joint airspace surveillance and training.”

This unprecedented development would not have been possible just one year ago before the Russian invasion of Ukraine in february 2022. That brutal attack spurred both Finland and Sweden into dropping their historic neutrality and applying to join NATO.

Then, as early as July 2022, talk began of creating a ‘Nordic air operations center.'

Maj. Gen. Rolf Folland, chief of the Royal Norwegian Air Force, said at the time that he had already begun thinking about opportunities for better integration with Sweden and Finland's air forces.

Folland added that a planned air operations center was just one of the plans to “explore with my foreign colleagues the most.”

Clearly, Norway and its Nordic partners took the idea and ran with it.

As Breaking Defense reported, Gen. Folland also said: “If we can plan to use this force in a holistic, joint, combined manner” under Headquarters Allied Air Command based at Ramstein Air Base in Germany “I think this would be a benefit for us, and it can be a benefit for NATO.”

The new joint Nordic air force will add tremendous capabilities in Europe's far north. In June, Finland decided to base the first new F-35 fighter jets at Rovaniemi Air Base located on the Arctic Circle and less than 250 miles from Russia's critical submarine bases on the Kola Peninsula.

Meanwhile, Sweden has an air base in Luleå, its northernmost region.

Norway, reports the Barents Observer, which already has received 34 of 52 F-35s, has its main airbase at Ørlandet in the south, but a few of the stealth planes are on Quick Reaction Alert (QRA) for NATO at Evenes air base north of the Arctic Circle.

https://paulcrespo.com/

Paul Crespo is Managing Editor of American Liberty Defense News. He served as a Marine Corps officer and as a military attaché with the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) at U.S. embassies worldwide. He brings decades of political and national security experience to cover the critical issues that threaten our American liberty – at home and abroad. For additional reportage on all things national security, subscribe to Paul's Substack here. 

House Passes Parents Bill of Rights Act

 

House Passes Parents Bill of Rights Act

Joseph Lord, The Epoch Times 

The U.S. House of Representatives on March 24 passed H.R. 5, the Parents Bill of Rights Act.

The bill passed the lower chamber in a 213–208 party-line vote.

Republicans easily defeated a Democrat measure to recommit the legislation to committee.

H.R. 5, the fulfillment of Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy’s (R-Calif.) long-promised “parental bill of rights,” would do several things, each with the overarching goal of ensuring that parents know what’s going on in their children’s classrooms.

The bill comes after COVID-19 restrictions led many parents to receive a better glimpse into their children’s education, as they were learning at home via their computers. Many parents learned in this setting about the far-left ideology being pushed in the classroom.

In turn, parents across the nation began showing up to school board meetings to protest the curriculum.

Later, Attorney General Merrick Garland was caught in an Oct. 4, 2021, memo offering federal resources and legal aid to states days after the ​National School Boards Association wrote a letter to President Joe Biden saying the country’s “public schools and its education leaders are under an immediate threat” from these parents and called verbal confrontations and other incidents at local school board meetings across the country “domestic terrorism and hate crimes.”

Since that memo came to light, McCarthy has vowed to deliver legislation to ensure that parents’ control over their children’s education is legally protected.

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, made the issue his campaign’s primary concern. Voters rewarded Youngkin by giving him a wide-margin victory over his Democrat rival in the blue-leaning Dominion State.

The main component of the bill would require schools to publicly disclose the contents of their curriculum and library materials to parents. Currently, many schools teaching radical ideology do so without the parents’ knowledge.

Additionally, the bill would establish the right of parents to see their kids’ schools’ expenditures.

“Public schools are paid for by taxpayer dollars,” Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) said of the measure during a House Rules Committee hearing on the bill. “Mothers and fathers deserve financial transparency and to see how their money is being used.”

The bill would also ensure that parents are notified of, and give consent to, any medical procedure performed on their child on school grounds.

A similar provision would require that parents be notified of any violent activity on school grounds.

Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) said that the bill would establish new “checks and balances” for parents over their children’s education.

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) called the bill “a basic concept but a powerful statement.”

During floor debate on the bill, Foxx accused education bureaucrats and school district employees of “pushing progressive politics in the classroom while keeping parents in the dark.”

“Parents will finally be empowered to examine classroom curricula and protect the safety and privacy of their children without fear of being targeted by the federal government.

Democrats spoke against the bill.

Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.), who led Democrat opposition to the bill, dismissed the legislation as the “Politics Over Parents Act.”

Scott said the bill was part of a GOP plot “to allow a vocal minority to impose their beliefs on all parents.”

Protecting Parents Who Speak Out

One of the Republicans’ key goals in crafting the bill was to ensure that parents who speak out against what is being taught to their children do not face retribution from local, state, or federal authorities.

“No longer will [parents] have their speech denied, or feel threatened for expressing their concerns at school board meetings,” Foxx said.

The comment was in reference to a late-2021 controversy in which Attorney General Merrick Garland offered federal resources and guidance to local law enforcement to target parents who attended school board meetings.

In 2021, the United States saw a deluge of concerned parents coming to school board meetings to speak out against left-wing ideology in the classroom.

Many parents came to their school board to speak out against critical race theory (CRT), a highly contentious left-wing theory that holds that white people are inherently “privileged” and that non-white people are inherently oppressed. Critics of CRT note that it has its origins in the political thought of Karl Marx, the ideological founder of communism; the theory has also been criticized as racist for its efforts to reduce the individual to a member of a group on the basis of their skin color.

In his remarks against the bill, Scott suggested that CRT was “an accurate recounting of our nation’s history,” and that the legislation would “punish librarians” who pushed CRT.

Other parents came to school board meetings to speak out against fringe left-wing notions of sex and gender. Many left-wing activists claim that gender is a social construct and that a person can change their gender based on their feelings.

One parent, Terry Newsome of Chicago, who spoke out against allowing “Gender Queer” in his kids’ school library in 2021, was later placed on a terror watch-list with no warning or further explanation.

In an Oct. 4, 2021, memo Garland sent to U.S. attorneys across the nation, the attorney general offered to help local law enforcers to round up and file charges against parents who spoke out.

Republicans took the memo as a sign that the administration was prepared to target parents for protected First Amendment activity. Since then, they have vowed to deliver a “parents’ bill of rights” to protect against such abuses if they took back the House.

During his questioning, Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) explicitly referenced the Oct. 4 memo as part of the reason for the bill’s existence.

‘Book Banning’

Allegations of “book banning” took up a large portion of the debates over the legislation.

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, a series of state legislatures and school districts have prohibited certain books with overtly sexual or racial themes from certain schools or age levels.

For instance, many school districts and states have barred the book “Gender Queer” by Maia Kobabe from school libraries. The book, delivered in the form of a graphic novel, recounts the experience of a minor female who believes she is male; during an especially graphic part of the story, the main character is depicted engaging in oral sex with another biological female who identifies as male.

Another such book, “Flamer” by Mike Curato, traces the homosexual experiences of a minor boy at summer camp with another minor boy.

Though these and other controversial works remain protected by the First Amendment and can be purchased in stores or online, they are inaccessible from many school libraries due to their highly-sexual content.

Nevertheless, Democrats have insisted that restricting children’s access to these and other books is tantamount to censorship.

“State Republicans are going on a book banning spree that would make the Chinese Communist Party blush,” House Rules Committee Ranking Member Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) said later.

Twenty-five states have passed such laws.

McGovern depicted this as “Republican legislators telling students what they are, and are not, allowed to learn.”

“That allows one racist or homophobic person to tell an entire class, an entire school, what they can and can’t read,” he added.

During later questioning at the Rules Committee hearing, Scott admitted that nothing in the bill would ban books. But he suggested that if libraries were forced to disclose their inventory, more books would be banned.

As part of the bill, school libraries would be required to publish the full list of books in their library, and to update those lists in a timely fashion when they purchase new materials.

Scott painted a portrait of right-wing organizations mounting crusades to have certain books removed from school libraries: “This bill will make the logistics of that easy.”

Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) responded to this argument later in the hearing, citing “Flamer.”

“If libraries have to publish their lists, yeah, some things might be removed,” Roy said. “[Flamer] should be removed. But it’ll be debated. It’ll be discussed.”

Realigning California Would Realign America

Realigning California Would Realign America

What is happening in California is not only a threat that cannot be ignored. It is an historic opportunity for the Right across America.

Edward Ring, American Greatness

The conventional wisdom on the Right in most of the rest of America is that California is a lost cause. Rather than fight inside California, where you are up against the most powerful and monolithic alliance of progressive special interests in the world, dedicate resources to flipping purple states, and keeping red states red. But to invert a popular quote attributed to Nietzsche, even if you do not gaze into the abyss, the abyss will still gaze back into you.

California’s role in influencing the future of the country is unparalleled. In addition to its economic and demographic weight, California remains the epicenter of America’s media and entertainment industry, as well as its high-tech industry. Even if several American states defy the momentum of California’s political class, laws governing California frequently end up becoming federal policy. The abyss is coming for us all, and its epicenter is in California.

It’s expensive to engage in public education in a state with a population of nearly 40 million, including 22 million registered voters. California’s political culture is almost completely dominated by social radicals and environmentalist extremists. But if the challenges to changing the political culture in California are daunting, the potential rewards are even greater.

There is an immediate financial incentive for the Right to take the fight into the belly of the beast, which is that whatever money California’s well-heeled public sector unions and progressive billionaires have to spend on defense in their own state is money that will not be used to swing close races in other states. The question then only becomes how to engage in asymmetric warfare to ensure that California’s progressives spend far more money on defense than their attackers spend on offense. In this manner, even if the political battle is lost, the money is well spent.

An example of this strategy is Proposition 32, waged in 2012 by reformers attempting to force government unions to obtain consent from their members before they could spend any of their dues on political campaigning. A lot was at stake for these public sector unions, which in California spend an estimated $600 million on political campaigning and lobbying each two-year election cycle. That’s a lot of money, even in California. Voters rejected Proposition 32, but proponents spent $10 million, whereas the union defenders spent over $108 million. That’s $98 million that did not flow into the other U.S. elections in the 2012 cycle.

In general, ballot initiatives are a good way to keep California’s progressive elites off balance and drain their treasuries. Qualifying a ballot initiative in California today will cost proponents between $5 and $10 million. But if it represents a serious threat to the environmentalist industrial complex, the woke tycoons, or the government unions, they will spend many times that amount to defeat it. And as proven as recently as November 2020, when eight of the nine state ballot propositions supported by unions were rejected by voters, California’s electorate should not be taken for granted.

California’s Electorate is Ready for a Change

The fact that voters sometimes can surprise the experts and completely flip the political script in a state or a nation is another reason for the Right to redouble efforts in California. Also unique to California is its demographic composition, which is likely to be mirrored in America within a generation. California’s population by ethnicity is roughly 40 percent Hispanic, 35 percent non-Hispanic white, 15 percent Asian, 5 percent black, and 5 percent multi-racial. Among Californians under 20 years of age, non-Hispanic whites are now less than 22 percent of the population.

Any effort to change political culture in California might benefit by first recognizing that the hardest bloc of big government supporters to convert are its diminishing cohort of white liberals. Living by the millions in inherited homes and thus not liable for either a mortgage or significant property taxes, they are exempt from the worst consequences of California’s failing institutions. For California’s financially secure white progressives, the rising cost of essentials is an inconvenience rather than an existential threat. They live in upscale neighborhoods where the public schools have better teachers and more resources, or, equally likely, they don’t have any school age children. And they are concentrated in areas where crime rates are low. California’s white voters support progressive Democrats because they don’t suffer the consequences of progressive Democratic policy failures. It’s much easier to believe the abstract Democratic mantras about climate change and systemic racism when more tangible challenges don’t exist. That’s the reality for millions of white progressives in California. Write them off.

When it comes to realigning California politics, white conservatives are already on board, and the white progressives are immovable fanatics. The future opportunity for the Right in California today are Asians and Hispanics who are increasingly receptive to three primary messages: 1) Policies that create scarcity and high prices are by design, and only benefit crony capitalists, 2) public education at all grade levels in California is failing, and 3) punishing crime deters crime. With respect to scarcity and the cost of living, and also with respect to rescuing public education, deregulation to encourage competition is the answer.

As for California’s crime problem—which like skyrocketing utility bills and lousy schools is disproportionately harming non-white communities—if criminal penalties were enhanced instead of being scrapped as per the progressive agenda, crime would be deterred. Eventually, fewer criminals would need to be incarcerated.

Two misconceptions have driven unsuccessful efforts to change the political culture in California. First, that the primary political concern of nonwhites, primarily Hispanics, are social issues such as pro-life sentiments, and second, that more generally, nonwhites favor bigger government. Neither of these assumptions is true. To be clear, California’s non-white residents care greatly about social issues, and are generally pro-life voters but there is more to them than this. And while their consistent support for Democrats might imply a big government bias, all it really indicates is that Democrats have made more alluring promises to nonwhites, while successfully stigmatizing Republicans as racist. Those promises have not been kept, and as the Democratic mantra of equity ascends into the stratosphere of absurdities, accusations of racism are wearing thin. The most urgent concerns for non-white voters in California, becoming more urgent all the time, are to live in a state with an affordable cost of living, good schools, and safe streets. Consequently, efforts to realign California should target Asians and Hispanics and should emphasize pro-abundance policies, school choice, and support for law enforcement.

When running the numbers, realigning California isn’t that far-fetched. Not generally acknowledged is the fact that more voters in California in 2020 supported Trump—over 6 million—than in any other state. More than Texas. More than Florida.

Also largely missed is the fact that for all their money, the Democratic machine in California still misfires. In November 2020, 17.8 million voters cast ballots in California. In November 2022, only 11.1 million ballots were cast. This is an astonishing statistic. It belies the notion that the Democrat vote-harvesting operation is consistently activated and effective. It also suggests that a Republican vote-harvesting operation, had it been activated in 2022, might have led to surprising victories for Republican candidates across the state. And it suggests that if California’s conservative populist base, 6 million strong, were to turn out and vote consistently, it would not take a significant shift in the voting patterns of Asians and Hispanics to flip California red.

Democrats in California are the party of big business, tech companies, environmentalist extremists, and government unions. Their self-serving policies have made the state unaffordable, punitively hostile to small businesses and independent contractors, with a public school system that’s a joke and huge swaths of its urban neighborhoods that are now crime-infested no-go zones. Nobody who is victimized by this reality is happy with it, and if they are offered credible alternatives, they will dump the Democratic incumbents who created this mess.

What is happening in California is not only a threat that cannot be ignored. It is an historic opportunity for conservatives across America. As goes California, so goes the nation.

Edward Ring is a senior fellow of the Center for American Greatness. He is also is a contributing editor and senior fellow with the California Policy Center, which he co-founded in 2013 and served as its first president. Ring is the author of Fixing California: Abundance, Pragmatism, Optimism (2021) and The Abundance Choice: Our Fight for More Water in California (2022). 

Millions of Suspicious Political Donations

Millions of Tiny, Suspicious Political Donations Questioned by Watchdog Group

Steven Kovac, The Epoch Times

An 80-year-old Midwestern woman from an affluent suburban area made nearly 9,000 small donations totaling more than $330,000 to political causes and candidates in four years, according to federal election records.

She says she didn’t.

“That would not slip by me,” she told The Epoch Times. “If I was losing money, I’d know it. It wasn’t my money.”

“I am a frequent and generous giver. I estimate I contribute about 50 times per year. I know every penny I donate.”

The woman, known as Donor C, was also surprised to learn that Federal Election Commission reports showed small donations appearing in her name after she stopped giving.

“There’s a hole somewhere that needs to be plugged and I’d like to see that done. I’d like to know if this is elder abuse,” she said.

Election Watch, a national election integrity watchdog group, is raising questions about more than 10,000 individual donors who are listed on the Federal Election Commission (FEC) database as having each contributed thousands of times in four years.

The data is raising eyebrows among investigators because surveys have shown that American political contributors donate far fewer times per year.

In the following examples taken directly from the FEC database, the donors’ identities will not be disclosed.

One of many examples cited by Election Watch is a 77-year-old Colorado woman referred to as “Donor A.” She contributed more than 59,000 times in separate donations totaling over $279,000 in the 2020 and 2022 election cycles.

Another contributor, Donor B, 74, a woman from Kansas, donated 65,489 times, giving over $223,000, over the same time period.

FEC’s Explanation

When asked by The Epoch Times about Donor C’s situation and the above comments, FEC spokesman Christian Hilland answered in an email, “I wouldn’t be able to speculate or comment on specific financial activity.

“However, duplicate contributions may appear in our database if they were earmarked through a conduit committee.

“The same contribution is reported by both the conduit committee and the recipient committee.

“It is the responsibility of a committee’s treasurer to monitor contributions to ensure that they comply with the legal limits and source prohibitions of federal campaign finance law and agency regulations.”

Christopher Gleason, an Election Watch computer analyst, responded to the FEC explanation, telling The Epoch Times, “We are not just seeing duplications. We are looking at thousands of transactions recorded in FEC reports showing individual donors making multiple small contributions dozens of times a day, week in and week out, to the same recipient.”

Repetitive Patterns

Another example from the Election Watch study is an individual referred to as Donor D.  The FEC database shows Donor D making more than 37,000 separate small contributions during the 2020 and 2022 election cycles, including a few in early 2023, totaling more than $139,000.

Most of those contributions went to a handful of political action committees in increments of three and five dollars each. The same PAC is listed as receiving 10 to 15 three and five-dollar donations in a single day from Donor D, day after day.

FEC records show that many of Donor D’s multiple daily contributions were made on consecutive days or there may be an interval of a few days in between. The pattern repeats itself again and again throughout the course of several years.

Effective ‘Fund-Raging’

Eighty-four years old and hard of hearing, Donor D told The Epoch Times that his donating 20 times a day is possible because “We have to get the GOP out!”

Donor D’s scenario may be a classic illustration of the internet fundraising phenomenon some pundits call “Fund-Raging.”

Fund-Raging is an online solicitation technique in which a single donor is emailed numerous politically or socially incendiary messages, followed by an urgent request for an immediate digital donation.

Donor D said of his online solicitors, “They love me.”

Donor D’s son told The Epoch Times in a phone interview, “I knew my dad was an active donor, but I had no idea it was that often and that much. He will click on anything.”

Multiple Versions of the Same Name 

The FEC database shows several instances of scores of donations being attributed to a name or address remarkably similar to Donor D’s personal information.

“When thousands of names are listed on official FEC records donating thousands of times per year that in itself raises questions. And so do the derivations that clearly stem from those original names,” said Gleason.

Derivations are other entirely separate contribution listings that appear with names and addresses that vary slightly from the main listing in spelling, the use of a middle initial, nickname, house number, street name spelling, or employer.

An individual contributor referred to as Donor E, 72, from Louisiana, is recorded by the FEC as donating 6,554 times in the 2020 and 2022 election cycles with contributions totaling $421,112.

Election Watch researchers discovered other contribution entries attributed to 24 different variations of Donor E’s personal identity information.

“The differences appear to be deliberate. These are not mistakes that are found and then corrected on next year’s report. They remain year after year.

“These permutations are recognized by the human eye as being slight variants of an original, but a computer reads and treats them as a completely different entry,” said Draza Smith, a licensed engineer and computer control specialist working on the Election Watch team.

“We are seeing the same pattern on the Florida voter registration rolls.”

Smith said she has not discovered any campaign contribution limit violations.

“Maybe name and address derivatives are a way of keeping donors under the limit?” she said.

Done by Computer?

Gleason said, “The frequency and sheer volume of the transactions over years makes me think the activity is not likely a little old man clicking his PC’s pay button 50,000 times.

“In my opinion, it is behaviorally impossible for thousands of Americans to each be making thousands of donations per year. It is so methodical and structured that it appears to be done by a computer program.

“The beauty of our study is it is based on the FEC’s own data. When I asked them for an explanation, I heard nothing. What can they say?”

Donors Profiled

Gleason said that he and the Election Watch team profiled hundreds of the most prolific donors around the country. The study found that most of them are “unemployed, elderly, white, flaming liberals that hate Trump,” and live in fairly affluent neighborhoods.

The five donors mentioned above come from areas with homes ranging in value from $240,000 to $800,000.

“They are good prospects for bad actors because these people may not be very computer-savvy or financially vigilant and already have an established record of making numerous online donations.”

Election Watch is encouraging individual donors and their family members to go to the FEC online database and check out their own listings. All listings are public information.

Digital Payments

“Some of the largest credit card processing services dealing with the collection and distribution of political contributions do not verify credit cards. And some charge a small fee per transaction,” said Election Watch investigator Peter Bernegger.

Two of the most successful of these organizations are ActBlue, a Democrat fundraising workhorse, and WinRed on the Republican side.

ActBlue did not respond to an email from The Epoch Times. WinRed could not be reached for comment.

Maryland attorney, CPA, and well-known election integrity crusader Walter Charlton told The Epoch Times he is hiring private investigators to contact his state’s most prolific and repetitive small donors to determine if their names are being used to make political contributions without their knowledge.

The rich are eating themselves

 

The rich are eating themselves

The oligarchs are playing a dangerous game by pouring trillions into woke causes.

Joel Kotkin, Spiked Online 

Beware of plutocrats bearing gifts. The annual clown show at Davos epitomises how today, the global elites have embraced an unholy trinity of ‘progressive’ doctrines: climate-change apocalypticism, a belief in systemic racism and racial ‘equity’, and radical gender ideology. The super-rich hope that by genuflecting to these causes, they can buy themselves political protection and fend off the activists lurking in the ranks of their own companies. Yet, in the long run, this could end up fuelling their demise.

But with the managerial revolution of the 1950s, the nature of executive elites changed. As sociologist Daniel Bell first identified half a century ago, business leaders were no longer upstarts and thus the natural opponents of state power. Instead, they reflected a new type of individualism, unmoored from religion and family, a worldview which transformed the foundations of middle-class culture. The goal of this new executive class, as Bell saw it, was not so much building great companies, but gaining accolades from their peers, the press and the public – a trend also set out in Alvin Toffler’s 1980 book, The Third Wave.

The rise of the socially conformist business executive was briefly obscured during the entrepreneurial boom of the 1980s, when Wall Street and tech leaders embraced Reaganite deregulation. The era of financier Mike Milken, Apple founder Steve Jobs, AMD founder Jerry Sanders and FedEx founder Frederick Smith seemed to reflect a resurgent ‘cowboy capitalism’. These entrepreneurs were too busy making money to care about controlling the lives of the common folk. So much so that in 2006, economist Carl Schramm argued that Joseph Schumpeter’s prediction of bureaucratic capitalist decline would be overcome by an ‘entrepreneurial America reborn’.

This era came crashing to an end with the 2008 financial crisis and the massive state bailouts of large banks. The banking sector became more concentrated, with the number of American banking institutions falling by a third between 2000 and 2020. By 2020, the five largest banks controlled over 45 per cent of all assets in the US, up from under 30 per cent 20 years earlier. Worldwide, the five largest investment banks now control roughly one-third of investment funds; the top 10 control an absolute majority. In Europe, such oligopolies are even more powerful, with the top three banks accounting for a majority of assets in most European countries.

It is the same story with the technology sector. Once the vaunted centre of grassroots entrepreneurialism, a lack of antitrust measures from both Republicans and Democrats has allowed technology companies to morph into quasi-monopolies. Google controls over 90 per cent of the search-engine market; Microsoft owns over 74 per cent of computer-operating-system software; Amazon has nearly half of the US online retail market share and a significant proportion of cloud computing; Google and Apple together account for 90 per cent of smartphone operating systems.

Such immense market power encourages executives not to take risks and innovate, but rather to consolidate their dominance by acquiring smaller competitors. Amazon, Meta and Google now account for two-thirds of all online-advertising revenues, which now represent the majority of all ad sales. These oligopolies also seem poised to dominate emerging technologies, from cloud services and underwater fibre-optic cables to AI.

Alongside this economic concentration, we see as well uniformity of viewpoints and growing control over the means of communication. Companies like Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple largely not only control the biggest platforms, but have also taken direct ownership of movie studios, newspapers and magazines. All these outlets, along with the AI models these firms produce, tend to reflect the worldview of the tech oligopoly.

Monopoly power leads naturally to ever-greater politicisation of corporations. No longer concerned primarily with potential entrepreneurial competitors, these firms have tended to embrace progressive causes as well, most notably in the adoption of ESG (environmental, social and governance) rules that often promote progressivism ahead of profit. Like the feudalism of old, with its concentration of power and knowledge in few hands, these oligarchical firms have become America’s ‘new corporate tyranny’, as author Michael Lind notes.

Of course, there’s nothing new about business magnates seeking control of information, but rarely in history have they shown such fealty to a common perspective. Today, outside of Rupert Murdoch’s news empire, upon which the sun will inevitably set, virtually all the leading oligarchs lean toward the Democratic Party (ironic, given that it was once the less receptive party to corporate power). Tech companies played a major role in the election of Joe Biden in 2020 and also helped finance the Democrats’ remarkably good showing in November’s Midterm elections. Though many of these donations are claimed to be earmarked for ‘non-partisan’ organisations – such as the $300million spent in 2020 by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife – post-election analysis has found that they were ‘distributed on a partisan basis that favoured Democrats’. In 2020, five of the top eight donors to Joe Biden came from tech firms.

The new corporate hierarchy is much younger than more conservative funders like Charles Koch, Rupert Murdoch, Oracle founder Larry Ellison or Irvine chairman Donald Bren, who are all well into their seventies or eighties. These ageing conservative elites are increasingly outspent by the more youthful ‘enlightened’ rich, who in recent years have consistently outraised and outspent the political right by a margin of nearly two-to-one.

The primary means for oligarchic control is not campaign contributions, however. Instead, many gain influence from funding non-profits, which espouse selfless rhetoric even as they push their funders’ own personal agendas and interests. In the US, non-profits’ assets have grown by a factor of 12 since 1980. In 2016, non-profits brought in $2.62 trillion in revenues, constituting over 5.7 per cent of the US economy.

As philanthropy has grown, it has changed in character. Although the rich have made a show of improving the lives of the hoi polloi since time immemorial – building cathedrals, libraries, arts venues and soup kitchens – in recent years, they increasingly have been bankrolling progressive and even far-left politics, as Heather Mac Donald demonstrated as long ago as 1996. The rise of the tech oligarchy has only accelerated this trend. And unlike their early 20th-century counterparts, today’s robber barons – with a few notable exceptions, like PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel – are decisively aligned with the left. This was most evident in their massive funding of Black Lives Matter and other radical groups in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder.

This marriage of big money and the left may yet have far to run. Alongside the grandees themselves, their ex-wives and offspring are also increasingly influential. Jeff Bezos’ former spouse, MacKenzie Scott, was worth an estimated $60 billion in 2019, and has since pledged a reported $14 billion in donations to progressive non-profits. Melinda Gates, ex-wife of the Microsoft founder, is worth at least $6.4 billion and is backing liberal organisations like the Clinton Foundation. The next generation of tech and finance heirs, such as the left-leaning offspring of the founders of Qualcomm, could prove even more radical. As the New York Times notes, these are ‘rich kids who want to tear down capitalism’, founding non-profits aimed explicitly at ‘challenging the system’. Born into the oligarchy rather than working their way to the top, these young trust-funders are not worried if their activities bother customers or even undermine the businesses that created their fortunes.

Nowhere is the power of the left-wing rich more evident than in their advocacy for draconian climate-change policies, such as the banning of gas stoves in homes. Tech moguls like Ted Turner, Michael Bloomberg and Richard Branson regularly make donations to environmental groups like the Sierra Club, often in amounts as high as $100million. In 2020, Jeff Bezos announced $10 billion in gifts aimed mostly for green non-profits. The current generation of Rockefellers, heirs to the Standard Oil fortune, now seek to punish corporations that follow the road to riches of their founders, while also funding sympathetic ‘climate reporters’ at the Associated Press and National Public Radio.

So while the media and activists like Bill McKibben like to warn gravely that conservative think-tanks and the dreaded ‘Koch interests’ are contributing to planetary doom, the big climate money actually goes to the greens. As energy commentator Robert Bryce has demonstrated, green non-profits – what he calls ‘the anti-industry industry’ – received well over four times as much as those promoting the use of nuclear energy or fossil fuels in 2021.

Tech oligarchs and woke Wall Streeters like to see themselves as what progressive writer David Callaghan calls a ‘benign plutocracy’. They contrast their success to those who built their fortunes on resource extraction, manufacturing and material consumption. Yet eventually they may well find that they have been financing people who threaten ‘their own rights and even their existence’, rather like the French aristocracy before the revolution, as Alexis de Tocqueville later noted.

This starts with their lockstep support for a Democratic Party in which more people support socialism than capitalism, a trend strongest among the young. It is doubtful that these zealous young activists will tolerate ultra-rich climatistas like Michael Bloomberg, John Kerry, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg for long, especially as their private jets emit vast amounts of greenhouse gases, reportedly almost 500 times what the average American emits in a year.

Ultimately, the oligarchs may find that the environmentalist left has little sympathy for the corporate leaders who fund them. Indeed, the red-green contingent typically agrees with the view of Barry Commoner, a founding father of modern environmentalism, that ‘capitalism is the Earth’s No1 enemy’. Bernie Sanders, after all, believes that ‘every billionaire is a policy failure’, a view also espoused by ‘Green New Deal’ architect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

For the oligarchs, kowtowing towards radical groups like Black Lives Matter or CRT prophets like Ibram X Kendi may prove no more effective. These racial activists similarly decry capitalism as the root of racist evil. Yet despite this, the oligarchs continue to fund woke initiatives on issues such as race, policing, education and gender that seek to replace merit and competition with the equity agenda of an ‘enlightened’ state regime.

An idle bourgeoisie supporting destructive ideologies has been a trend throughout modern history, one that Joseph Schumpeter predicted would lead to capitalism’s overthrow. In the 20th century, this manifested in members of Britain’s upper class embracing Communism and even working for the Soviet Union, the sworn enemy of Britain and the capitalist West. Stalinism may be out of style today, but obsessive zealotry is not. Yet, as spiked’s Brendan O’Neill notes, rather than embracing red authoritarianism, today’s green elites tend to embrace a ‘culture of misanthropic dread’ about the climate that strips hope from all other classes and the next generation.

Ultimately, the very forces funded by the oligarchs could turn out to be their undoing. Elon Musk, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen may see a universal basic income as the ‘social vaccine of the 21st century’. But once the idea of an expanded welfare state is proposed, some on the left logically see no reason to leave the ultra-rich untouched. Many hope to fund a work-free world powered by technology and financed by the oligarchs’ lucre. This leftist dystopia will certainly not herald a bright future for the masses, but for the witless billionaires encouraging it, it does have a ring of historic justice.

Joel Kotkin is a spiked columnist, the presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University and executive director of the Urban Reform Institute. His latest book, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism, is out now. Follow him on Twitter: @joelkotkin

The Parliamentary Motive Behind the J6 Fedsurrection

 

The Parliamentary Motive Behind the J6 Fedsurrection

'Regitiger', The Conservative Treehouse

The Ring of Truth – “I am too well accustomed to the taking of evidence not to detect the ring of truth.” 1908, Edith Wharton

Much has been made of the events of January 6, 2021, and with the latest broadcast of CCTV video from inside the Capitol Hill complex, more questions have been raised.

Within the questions: the FBI and government apparatus had advanced knowledge of the scale of the J6 mall assembly yet doing nothing?  Why were the Capitol Hill police never informed of the FBI concerns?  Why didn’t House Speaker Nancy Pelosi secure the Capitol Hill complex, and why did she deny the request by President Trump to call up the national guard for security support?  Why did the FBI have agent provocateurs in the crowd, seemingly stimulating rage within a peaceful crowd to enter the Capitol building?  There have always been these nagging questions around ‘why’?

Long time CTH reader “Regitiger” has spent a great deal of time reviewing the entire process, looking at the granular timeline and then overlaying the bigger picture of the constitutional and parliamentary process itself.  What follows below is a brilliant analysis of the federal government motive to create a J6 crisis that permitted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to trigger an emergency session and avoid the 2020 election certification challenges.

Those congressional floor challenges, known and anticipated well in advance of the morning of January 6, 2021, would have formed a legal and constitutional basis for ‘standing’ in judicial challenges that would have eventually reached the Supreme Court.  The certification during “emergency session” eliminated the problem for Washington DC.

Regitiger explains below, only edited by me for clarity and context:

I think most, not all, but a large number of people, are totally missing what happened; and why this happened on Jan 6th.  I am going to try my best to outline the events that day, blast past the commonly held assumptions and get right down to the core corruption.

I will present this as a series of questions and answers.

How Tucker Carlson exposed the Uniparty’s false J6 narrative

 

How Tucker Carlson exposed the Uniparty’s false J6 narrative

Frank Miele, Heartland Diary USA

In my last column, I compared Fox News host Tucker Carlson to the CBS journalist Edward R. Murrow, who used his reporting in the 1950s to change the course of history.

For that comparison, I apologize.

It is now apparent that Carlson far exceeds Murrow in his courage, his thoughtfulness, and his stubborn refusal to accede to pressure.

Let’s get this straight. Murrow was a brilliant journalist, but his reputation as a dedicated war correspondent during the Battle of Britain also made him a beloved figure to his fellow reporters and to the politicians whom he covered. Thus, when he stood up against the bullying tactics of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, Murrow knew he could count on the support of CBS, other journalists, and even senators who had been the target of McCarthy’s blind rage. In a very real sense, it was McCarthy’s own character flaws that brought him down, to the detriment of his anti-Communist crusade, which had accurately identified the very real threat of Soviet sympathizers who had infiltrated the federal government. Murrow was just the catalyst, and he was lauded for his efforts.

On the other hand, Tucker Carlson’s decision last week to air previously unseen video of the Jan. 6, 2021, confrontation between protesters and Capitol Police put his own career at risk and has made him the subject of bipartisan scorn. Some even speculate that he was silently punished by his bosses at Fox News, but Carlson doesn’t seem worried about being fired, and the condemnation he has received from both the majority leader and minority leader of the Senate has only emboldened him.

It will probably take years to fully understand the importance of Carlson’s challenge of the “official Washington” narrative of Jan. 6 as a “deadly insurrection,” but Carlson wasted no time last Monday in laying out the framework of his complete rejection of the “accepted truth” pushed by the Biden Department of Justice, the House Select Committee on January 6, and the mainstream media.

Only a tiny fraction of the thousands of hours of surveillance video released to Carlson by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was shown last week on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” but you only need a small pin to burst a large balloon, and by the time the week was over, all the president’s men couldn’t put the Humpty-Dumpty story of a “Trump-surrection” back together again.

“The images you will see were recorded 26 months ago today on January 6, 2021,” Carlson began. “Until now, politicians have kept this tape hidden from the public. There is no legitimate justification for that and there never has been.”

The powers that be would have you believe that Carlson had jeopardized national security by playing the tapes – probably 30 minutes out of the 41,000 hours. Now, it is true the tapes provided some interesting counterbalance to the non-stop harassment of Trump supporters that has taken place for the past two years, but if truth be told, the evidence on the tapes was much less significant than the reaction to them. What you really want to know now is, if 30 minutes of video has the Uniparty crowd so scared, what else are they hiding?

I think much more than the video, the Censorship-Industrial Complex (as journalist Matt Taibbi has accurately tabbed it) wants to shut down any information or even belief that goes counter to the official narrative, and that’s where Carlson got so deep under their skin that they were willing to rip themselves to shreds in an effort to get at him.

Everything Carlson said about Jan. 6 for three days last week was a threat to their power, and he knew it.

“The protesters were angry. They believed the election they had just voted in was unfairly conducted. They were right. In retrospect, it is clear the 2020 election was a grave betrayal of American democracy.”

He didn’t go beyond that in explaining the illegitimacy of the election, but he didn’t have to. The “it is clear” speaks volumes to those who haven’t bought into the official narrative that the 2020 election was “the most secure” in the nation’s history. Yeah, it was secure if you don’t believe the Supreme Courts of Pennsylvania and Wisconsin that election law was violated en masse in those states. It was secure if you don’t have any concern about billionaire Mark Zuckerberg spending hundreds of millions of dollars to gain access to voter rolls and ensure that likely Biden voters were goosed to get their butts out of the chair and their ballots in the drop boxes. It was secure if you don’t care about Twitter and Facebook colluding with the federal government to make sure that Hunter Biden’s incriminating laptop was falsely painted as Russian disinformation in the weeks leading up to the election.

Although Democrats and the rest of “official Washington” claim the election was secure, they spent zero hours proving that case. Instead, they seized on the disruptions on Jan. 6 as the real threat to democracy and gave their clients in the lapdog media the spectacle of the select committee’s show trial. What is most hurtful to the Democrats and RINOs who wrote the narrative is that their two years of work propping up the infrastructure of a “deadly insurrection” was undone in less than 60 minutes by Carlson, who didn’t deny that violence had been done on Jan. 6, but committed the unforgivable sin of putting it in perspective.

Thus, where the Jan. 6 committee saw the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War, Tucker Carlson showed pictures of protesters walking in the door of the Capitol and milling around, as he said, like sightseers. No matter how many times Carlson said he was not excusing any violence, the proponents of the “deadly insurrection” narrative claimed that showing non-violent protesters was an affront to their efforts to demonize Trump voters as terrorists. And, of course, they were right to worry.

But it wasn’t just the images by themselves that overturned the official narrative; it was the muscular words of Carlson as he held to account not just the select committee, but also congressional leaders, Capitol Police, and the Department of Justice. This was a rarely seen J’accuse moment in which the system’s irresponsible scapegoating of the Deplorables was held up to the light.

“Committee members lied about what they saw,” Carlson said, “and then hid the evidence from the public as well as from Jan. 6 criminal defendants and their lawyers. That is unforgivable.”

The most important video came in four specific batches, each of which puts a dent in the official story. As explained by Carlson, they were as follows:

– Shots of Jacob Chansley (the QAnon Shaman) being escorted through the Capitol by a number of police and never being arrested or prevented from moving about freely. As Carlson points out, the video raises questions about whether the Department of Justice violated Chansley’s rights to a fair trial because he was denied potentially exculpatory evidence. The video plainly raises questions about whether Chansley was an intruder or a guest in the Capitol. Carlson questioned whether similar footage could have assisted many others charged with Jan. 6 crimes by showing that the “deadly insurrection” was nothing of the kind.

– Shots of Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick apparently waving protesters out of the building, raising serious questions about the honesty of the many media and political figures who claimed Sicknick’s death was caused by the protesters. In the footage, Sicknick appears to be unharmed and wearing a helmet some time after he was reportedly murdered by having his head bashed in with a fire extinguisher. Sicknick died the next day as a result of a stroke caused by blood clots at the base of his brain. The medical examiner found no external or internal injuries and ruled that Sicknick died of natural causes.

– Shots of Ray Epps, the mysterious figure who urged protesters to “go IN to the Capitol” both the night before and the day of the mob scene. Epps testified before the Jan. 6 committee that he left the riot prior to texting his nephew that he had “orchestrated” the attack, but Carlson found footage of Epps a half hour later still in the middle of the mob, although suspiciously not following his own insistent advice to enter the Capitol. Carlson and others have questioned whether Epps was a federal agent or informant who was provoking the attack as part of a political scheme to create chaos. At the very least, it appears that Epps should be charged with lying to Congress, and if a serious investigation is ever done by anyone other than Tucker Carlson, we should try to find out why the man who said he “orchestrated” the Jan. 6 attack was never charged with any crime.

– Shots of Sen. Josh Hawley exiting the Capitol under the direction of the Capitol Police. In some ways, this footage is the most damning example of the purely partisan political nature of the Jan. 6 committee. Video of Hawley, who had been one of the leaders of the movement to challenge the 2020 election due to irregularities in six or more states, was shown to a national audience for comic effect as it appeared that the senator was being entirely selfish as he fled from the protesters. The effect of watching Hawley running across a Capitol hallway like a shooting gallery rabbit was so humorous that it was put on a loop for the national TV audience to get a good chuckle. Hawley was held up for ridicule by late-night comedians and cable TV “news” hosts. But when Carlson pulled the full video, he discovered that the Capitol Police had ushered dozens of senators and staff out of the building at high speed for their own protection. Hawley, as it turned out, was one of the last to leave, and not the coward he was portrayed to be. Nothing better illustrated the Jan. 6 select committee’s “narrative building” exercise than this attempt to humiliate a U.S. senator who made the mistake of “running” as a Republican.

 

As Carlson noted at one point, “By controlling the images you were allowed to view from January 6, they controlled how the public understood that day. They could lie about what happened and you would never know the difference. Those lies had a purpose. They created a pretext for a federal crackdown on opponents of the Uniparty in Washington.”

It is that crackdown which has occupied the Biden administration, the FBI, and much of Congress for the last two years. Can the heroic resistance of one TV journalist turn those efforts around and restore a sense of justice to the land of the free? I’ll believe it when I see it, but in the meantime it’s nice to have someone to root for.

Heartland Diary is solely operated by Frank Miele, the retired editor of the Daily Inter Lake in Kalispell, Montana. If you enjoy reading these daily essays, I hope you will SUBSCRIBE to www.HeartlandDiaryUSA.com by leaving your email address on the home page. Also please consider purchasing one of my books. They are available through the following Amazon links. My new book is “What Matters Most: God, Country, Family and Friends” and is a collection of personal essays that transcend politics. My earlier books include “How We Got Here: The Left’s Assault on the Constitution,” “The Media Matrix: What if everything you know is fake?” and the “Why We Needed Trump” trilogy. Part 1 is subtitled “Bush’s Global Failure: Half Right.” Part 2 is “Obama’s Fundamental Transformation: Far Left.” Part 3 is “Trump’s American Vision: Just Right.” As an Amazon Associate, I may earn referral fees for qualifying purchases through links on my website.

The Price of Eliminating Consequences

 

The Price of Eliminating Consequences

Victor Davis Hanson, The Blade of Perseus 

Recently there were some remarkable online videos of a Portland, Oregon good Samaritan confronting shoplifters and forcing them to dump loads of their pilfered goods.

More stunning, however, was the sheer outrage—of the thieves!

They pouted. They screamed. They resisted. How dare anyone stop them from stealing anything they wished.

The criminals entertained no fear of any consequences for walking out with bags of things that were not theirs. They had no care that mainstreaming their habits would undermine the entire fabric of society.

What is common to the pandemic of smash-and-grab, carjacking, fighting on airliners while in flight, and deadly Saturday night shoot-outs is this same apparent assurance there will be no consequences.

That expectation of exemption is why the Antifa thugs in Atlanta were so bold in their latest violent attacks on the police.

And why not, after the 120 days of rioting, looting, arson, and assault in summer 2020 which resulted in few Antifa indictments, fewer convictions, and almost no imprisonments.

The “broken windows” theory of policing in the 1990s and 2000s showed how the failure to punish even minor infractions soon leads to escalation to more violent crimes.

The homeless take for granted that ancient rules forbidding urination, defecation, fornication, and injection on the sidewalks do not apply to them. Is it any wonder that they increasingly are not victims of circumstance but victimizers of innocent passersbys?

Yet deterrence is not just eroded from the bottom up, but also from the top down—and by an elite who assume it will never be subject to the chaos it wrought.

Former FBI Director Andrew McCabe admittedly lied on four occasions to federal investigators, apparently with the prescient expectation he would never be prosecuted.

The same hubris was true of former CIA Director John Brennan who admittedly lied under oath to Congress—twice—with absolute impunity.

The former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper not only lied under oath to Congress, but crowed that he gave the “least untruthful” answer. He too faced zero consequences.

Could the FBI and the CIA recover their tarnished reputations if their directors knew in advance they would go to jail for lying under federal oath?

Sometimes the problem is not just the absence of sure punishment for criminal behavior, but the asymmetry of penalties.

Why are some violent criminals released from custody the very day they punch, club, or shoot innocents, while others committing lesser offenses are not?

Nations are no different from people. Without expectation of a severe reaction to their provocations, they only escalate their aggression.

Why are athletes who choose not to be vaccinated barred from competing in the United States, while 6-7 million illegal entrants were waved in without passports, vaccinations, or COVID tests?

And once those millions south of the border saw a few thousand illegally cross with impunity shortly after Joe Biden was inaugurated, then they followed en masse.

Why does the Mexican government shrug when the United States asks it not to greenlight illegal immigration?

Why does Mexico City tolerate factories inside Mexico producing lethal fentanyl pills for export northward that kill over 100,000 Americans a year?

What sort of deterrence would stop millions from illegally entering the United States or Mexican-manufactured fentanyl from killing more Americans in the last decade than all the dead in all our wars since World War II?

Should the United States tax the $60 billion in remittances sent back yearly to Mexico, mostly by those who are here illegally and so often subsidized by our own state and federal entitlements?

Should America declare cartels international terrorists, extradite them, and bar all their accomplices and abettors from the global banking system?

China knowingly sends Mexico the raw ingredients of fentanyl, believing it is a win-win strategy of enormous profits and lots of deaths of America’s youth.

What would deter China from its nonchalant aggression? Still more concessions? More ignoring the Wuhan origins of the COVID pandemic?

Or would the expulsion of 350,000 Chinese students from American universities stop their fentanyl exporting? Or prohibiting Chinese companies with ties to the Communist government from buying American farmland?

Apparently, the more technologically sophisticated and affluent, Americans became, the more their elites believed they could change ancient human nature that is fixed and predictable across time and space.

They redefined criminality as either a lifestyle choice or reimaged the criminal as one with legitimate grievances against the society he subverts.

The more the Biden Administration ignores those harming us abroad, the more they interpret it as American weakness, if not decadence to be further exploited.

The result is the predictably dangerous present.

When our state and federal governments allow criminals and foreign nations to injure with impunity their own law-abiding citizens, is it any wonder the civilized world we once knew has vanished—replaced by the Hobbesian rule of the wild?

The woke wrecking machine

 

The woke wrecking machine

Victor Davis Hanson, Jewish World Review 

Almost everything that has followed from the woke mass hysteria gripping the nation since 2020 has proved disastrous.

Wokeism destroys meritocracy in favor of forced equality of result — history's prescription for civilizational decline.

If we continue with the woke hiring of administrators, air traffic controllers, ground crews, pilots, and rail workers, there will be even more news of disasters and near-miss airline crashes.

Wokeness demands a McCarthyite suppression of free expression. No wonder a woke FBI recently hired out social media censors to suppress stories it deemed unhelpful.

Soviet-style, wokeism mandates strict ideological party-line narratives under the cover of "science." No wonder a woke government lied that requiring vaccines would prevent both infection and infectiousness.

Woke substitutes race for class in its eternal neo-Marxist quest to divide permanently the nation along racial lines, between victims and victimizers.

Yet wokeism recently has embarrassed itself as never before.

Take the COVID pandemic.

The Department of Energy has joined the FBI and is now attributing the origins of the pandemic to a leak of a likely engineered virus from the top-security virology lab in Wuhan, China.

Wokesters had long suppressed that reality, demonizing any who rejected its orthodox lies and spoke a larger truth: A dystopic China is not our global partner in greening the planet. Criticizing Stalinist China is not "racist." China is not building a progressive society that is a model for others.

The ongoing environmental catastrophe in East Palestine, Ohio, following the train derailment revealed more woke moral bankruptcy.

Ostensibly the ensuing toxic spill and noxious plume have poisoned a poor and working-class small town. It should have galvanized the old Democratic Party that once voiced loud support for all green causes and championed the lower American classes.

But woke ended all that — substituting racial chauvinism for class concerns and ideology for genuine worry over the environment.

Woke dogma mandates that pollution and poverty are no longer concerns — if they affect the white poor who are stereotyped collectively as privileged victimizers.

Wokesters insisted that California is the greatest casualty of "climate change" defined as permanent drought.

Purported climate change required radical new bureaucratic rules and antidemocratic mandates over irrigation supplies, ground water, and contracted water deliveries from public reservoirs.

But then it rained. And it snowed. And it became terribly cold in supposedly scorching California. Southern California is blanketed in snow.

Even so, for much of this cold, wet winter, state officials continued to claim the man-made drought was in full force. But finally, the most recent frigid, wet weather strangled the woke drought — and with it the credibility of our climate change Cassandras.

Americans sympathize with Ukraine's plight as Russian President Vladimir Putin seeks to destroy its autonomy. But woke brooked no deviation from the party line that Ukraine's Volodomyr Zelensky is a saint, while Russia is near bankrupt due to sanctions, and doomed to lose the war.

Accordingly, the United States was obligated to give Ukraine a veritable blank check given Kyiv's commitment to freedom. Zelensky's team now even talks of a victorious Ukrainian armored counteroffensive into Moscow's Red Square.

This week, however, we are learning the Russian economy is nearly as strong now as it was before the war. It has mobilized 700,000 troops to ensure that eastern Ukraine becomes a Verdun-like killing field where tens of thousands more will be ground up.

Ukraine bars dissidents and maintains a government media monopoly. And the more President Joe Biden promises another $2-3 billion in biweekly aid, the more Zelensky acts as if it is a pittance given what supposedly stingy Americans should be capable of supplying.

Meanwhile, at home, new woke protocols mandate race as essential rather than incidental to the human experience. Supposedly such fixations will heal racial wounds.

Under the new reparatory and compensatory diversity, equity, and inclusion rules, those deemed non-white were to be hired and admitted to colleges in greater numbers than their demographics. Even the old mandated proportional representation quotas were no longer enough.

But racial chauvinism, nonstop talk of reparations, and the new campus segregation have not resulted in better racial relations.

Polls show that there are greater racial tensions than ever before.

Data on interracial and hate crimes show even sharper racial disproportionalities. The incidence of both Black violent criminal perpetrators and Black crime victims are near historical highs.

Woke policies of no cash bail, downgrading felonies, and no jail time only spiked violent lawlessness.

Our elite universities are now fully woke. Almost weekly an embarrassing story further erodes their credibility and reputation.

Ridiculous lists of taboo words are issued on woke campuses, barring incendiary words like "American" and "immigrant."

Bragging of segregated dorms, graduations, and safe spaces recalls Jim Crow, not woke racial utopias.

Grades and standards are deemed counterrevolutionary, even as incompetent graduates increasingly fail to impress employers.

Someday wokeism will disappear because it is inherently nihilistic and cannibalistic.

But in the meantime, Americans should end it now before it ends America first.